With as busy as my life is these days, I find I have much less time to read than I used to many years ago. That makes me long for those bygone days when life was not so crazy and I actually had time to sit down and read a book in the evenings. So now reading comes in much shorter snippets and I am much more selective in what I spend my valuable reading time on. At home we subscribe to a great magazine called New Scientist, which is kind of a synopsis of new findings in many different science fields. Several weeks ago I read an article in that magazine that really shook me. I have not been able to stop thinking about it, which means it is one of those things that is most likely impact my world view in a powerful way.
The article was about the environmental impacts of this perpetual cycle of increasing consumption that we are mired in…. a subject that begins to bother me excessively every year around this time. For me the most disturbing thing that came to me out of that article was a relatively simple equation. I rarely have an emotional reaction to an equation, but this one has continued to haunt me so I recognize that it has major significance.
The equation was originally proposed by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren in the early 1970s. It has since become known as the Ehrlich equation and is represented simply as: I=PAT where
I= The impact of human activity
P= Population
A= The level of affluence associated with the population
T= A technology factor, which is an impact on the planet of each dollar we spend
I once again watch the holiday madness in this country, including hearing that a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death the day after Thanksgiving in people’s mad rush to get into the store. I realize that with our exponentially increasing population (P) and the great deal of affluence associated with it (A), we are also using a tremendous amount of resources to produce the things we just have to have (T). Most people don’t want to talk about the population problem and they defend the necessity of having children. It is strange the odd responses and looks I get from people when I say I deliberately chose not to have children because of the world’s population and resource consumption problems.
If our population continues to increase at its current exponential rate, and a much greater segment of the world aspires to live a life of technological advancement and affluence that we enjoy in this country, we are headed for a catastrophe of major proportions. We simply can’t sustain that kind of impact. Changing light bulbs and lowering our personal carbon footprint is important, but will pale in comparison to the impact of all these people continuing to buy, buy, buy… With our current economic crisis we are all being told how important it is to return to healthy economic growth, but nobody seems to be talking about the giant elephant in the room. There is actually no such thing as sustainable growth. There will come a time before long that continual growth will cause a catastrophic economic, environmental and sociological collapse… Troubling thoughts for the holiday season, but I can’t continue to just look away because of this unpleasantness…
