The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [9]
The twentieth century saw similar extraordinary growth in American consumption of iron, nickel, diamonds, water, softwood, salmon, you name it. To varying degrees, this rapid escalation of resource consumption has either happened or is now happening in the rest of the world.
So we see that resource consumption, much like our global population, grew ridiculously fast in a single century. But while the two certainly feed off one another, rising resource demand has less to do with population growth per se than with modernization. My UCLA colleague Jared Diamond illustrates this by considering an individual’s “consumption factor.”25 For the average person living in North America, Western Europe, Japan, or Australia, his or her consumption factor is 32.
If your consumption factor, like mine, is 32, that means you and I each consume thirty-two times more resources and produce thirty-two times more waste than the average citizen of Kenya, for example, with a consumption factor of 1. Put another way, in under two years we plow through more stuff than the average Kenyan does in his entire life. Of the 6.8+ billion of us alive on Earth now, only about a billion—15%—enjoy this lavish lifestyle. The vast majority of the human race lives in developing countries with consumption factors much lower than 32, mostly down toward 1.
Places with a consumption factor of 1 are among the most impoverished, dangerous, and depressing on Earth. Regardless of what country we live in, we all want to see these conditions improve—for security as well as humanitarian reasons. Many charitable people and organizations are working toward this goal, from central governments and NGOs to the United Nations to local churches and individual donors. Most developing countries, too, are striving mightily to industrialize and improve their lot. Organizations large and small, from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the Grameen Bank and other microlenders, are providing loans to help. Who among us does not want to see such efforts succeed? Who does not want the world’s lingering poverty, hunger, and disease brought to an end?
But therein lies a dilemma. What if you could play God and do the noble, ethically fair thing by converting the entire developing world’s level of material consumption to that now carried out by North Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese, and Australians today. By merely snapping your fingers you could eliminate this misery. Would you?
I sure hope not. The world you just created would be frightening. Global consumption would rise elevenfold. It would be as if the world’s population suddenly went from under 7 billion today to 72 billion. Where would all that meat, fish, water, energy, plastic, metal, and wood come from?
Now let us suppose that this transformation were to happen not instantly but gradually, over the next forty years. Demographers estimate that total world population might level off at around 9.2 billion by 2050. Therefore, if the end goal is for everyone on Earth to live as Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese, and Australians do today, then the natural world must step up to provide enough stuff to support the equivalent of 105 billion people today.
Viewed in this light, lifestyle is an even more potent multiplier of human pressure on the world resource base than is total population itself. Global modernization and prosperity—an eminently laudable and desirable goal—are thus raising our demands upon the natural world now more than ever.
The third global force is globalization. A big word spanning many things, it most commonly refers to increasingly international trade and capital flows but also has political, cultural, and ideological dimensions.26 Frankly, there are about as many definitions for globalization as there are experts who study it. For our purposes here let us simply think of “globalization” very broadly as a set of economic, social, and technological processes that are making the world more interconnected and interdependent.
Most people were aware of how interconnected