From Earth to Oblivion: The Passing of Humankind

By Ross E. Goodrich and PhD

An account that describes “the ultimate human predicament” and exposes its inevitable outcome. In From Earth to Oblivion: The Passing of Humankind, Dr. Ross E. Goodrich, a geographer, describes the ultimate human predicament: our population is growing, our living space is overcrowded, and life support sources are rapidly vanishing. He explains why we cannot control the size of our population, and that we cannot abolish poverty, achieve world peace, or establish a sustainable existence. He asserts that our predicament is preparing our population for a crash that is likely to begin the extinction of humanity. The author discusses the very nature of humans’ expectation of survival—our belief that we have the ingenuity or the exalted position in the eyes of Mother Nature or a Divine Creator to be the one species who will avoid the inevitable. But this treatise provides a clear roadmap and several predictions that illustrate the path and events that are propelling our species to oblivion. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9780988255913

Book preview

6/29/2003

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My greatest debt of gratitude is to my wife, Lois, for her patience, understanding, and help during the long ordeal of writing this book. Thanks also to my family for their interest and support, and to my friend Bernard M. Zavada, a valuable sounding board for many of the concepts presented in this book, for graciously providing permission to use his poems Tiger by the Tail and For Briefest Time. I am deeply grateful to the professors who guided and inspired me: Alden D. Cutshall at the University of Illinois in Chicago; Clarence T. Caldwell at Northern Illinois University; Clarence F. Jones at Northwestern University; and Karel Bayer, Canute VanDermeer, and David H. Miller at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I am especially grateful to Norman L. Stewart at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, whose kindness and intellect gave me the guidance I needed to finish this book.

TABLES

Table 1 - ESTIMATES OF EARTH’S HUMAN POPULATION SIZE 10,000 BC–2050 AD

Table 2 - ELEVATIONS OF AGGLOMERATIONS

Table 3 - LATITUDES OF AGGLOMERATIONS

Table 4 - CLIMATES OF AGGLOMERATIONS

Table 5 - FAILED STATES CLASSIFICATION RESULTS FOR 2009

GRAPHS

Graph 1 - WORLD POPULATIONS 10,000 BC–2050 AD

Graph 2 - POPULATIONS OF SIX AGGLOMERATIONS 1950–2010

Graph 3 - NUMBER OF AGGLOMERATIONS—WORLD 1950–2010

Graph 4 - POPULATIONS OF SEVEN NATIONS 1950– 2010

Graph 5 - POPULATIONS OF SIX WORLD REGIONS 1950–2010

Graph 6 - WORLD URBAN POPULATION 1950–2010

Graph 7 - WORLD RURAL POPULATION 1950–2010

Graph 8 - WORLD POPULATION 1950–2010

Graph 9 - PROJECTED WORLD URBAN POPULATION 2010–2050

Graph 10 - PROJECTED WORLD POPULATIONS 2010– 2050 THREE VARIANTS

Graph 11 - HABITABLE ACRES PER CAPITA—WORLD 10,000 BC–2050 AD

Graph 12 - WORLD OVERPOPULATION PROSPECT AND AFTERMATH

INTRODUCTION:

The Predicament of Humankind

The time when life first appeared on Earth remains a mystery. Nonetheless, scientists generally agree that it was about 3.5 billion years ago, about one billion years after the planet’s formation. Scientists also agree that during the Cambrian Period, about five hundred million years ago, the number of species on Earth exploded. Paleontologists David Raup and Jack Stepkowski (1982) have found that at least five mass extinctions and numerous smaller ones have occurred since then. The largest extinction ever to have occurred was about 250 million years ago. About sixty-five million years ago, the well-known dinosaur genus hastily became extinct after enduring for some 160 million years. Scientists call the worldwide decline in biodiversity now in progress the Holocene extinction (because we are in the Holocene epoch). They estimate that well over 90 percent of species ever to have lived now are extinct. Clearly, all species must go the way of the dinosaurs— to oblivion.

We have seen extinction in historic times with the passing of numerous species such as the Japanese Sea Lion and Passenger Pigeon. Currently the Northern Right whale and the African Baobab tree, and numerous other animals and plants, appear to be near to their extinction. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (2013) reported that there were 2,097 US and foreign plant and animal species threatened with or near to extinction. At the same time, Endangered Species International (2013) has 16,938 threatened species on their current list. The pageant of extinctions is relentless, and participation is mandatory. The eventual extinction of the human species is in perfect order with the conduct of the cosmos.

Hominids have likely been in existence for several million years—a minor event in the timeline of life on Earth. Of course, we humans do not consider our existence as a minor event in Earth history. Indeed it is daunting for us to contemplate the absolute end of our existence. Mention of the prospect of our demise is discomforting for some individuals, others consider an an examination of the concept as a pursuit of the negative, and still others treat the subject with derision.

On the other hand, some of us find it challenging to contemplate that extinction could befall humans, a truly gifted and unique species. As observed in the poetry of Bernard M. Zavada (1999), ours is a species through which the universe can contemplate itself. Why would Mother Nature extinguish such a marvelous species? It is because she is infallibly dispassionate and objective. The term Mother Nature is the personification of nature in its broadest sense. It is a collective term summing the forces and processes that brought the Earth into being, and that control all conditions on Earth as well as the course of evolution. Indisputably Mother Nature is in charge of everything.

Over the millennia, Mother Nature has been directing a parade of species through their habitats in a common pattern: adaptation, population growth, a population collapse, and eventually extinction. She does not value the passing of a species as good or evil, right or wrong, nor does she consider it a positive or a negative event. She does not extinguish a species as punishment for malevolent behavior or preserve it as a reward for having some outstanding characteristics. She sends a species to oblivion only because it has failed to remain adapted to the conditions of her challenge to survive.

Currently our species, Homo sapiens (the shorter form of the scientific term Homo sapiens sapiens), is about to enter a state of population decline. In ecological terms, our population is currently in the process of drawdown, in which its consumption of the habitat’s resources is greater than the replacement capacities of its ecosystems, and in the stage of overshoot, in which population size is too large for the habitat’s carrying capacity to sustain. Portentously, according to ecologists, being in these stages assures the economic collapse of our population beyond recovery, and, thus, its advance to a third ecological stage of sudden steep decline called a crash. At its present rate of drawdown and in its present stage of overshoot, it is reasonable to predict that our population will crash in the mid-twenty-first century. Finally, our species will become extinct in the last stage, aptly called die-off. A particularly resilient species, such as ours, could linger at the end of a debilitating crash and perhaps regenerate—imaginably, a horrendous experience. However, the momentum of evolution is, conceivably, the most powerful process in nature and will eventually carry the die-off of our species to completion.

It is difficult to believe that our species is so far along on the declining side of the evolutionary curve. The formative years for us have been successful because of our gifts from Mother Nature. She has given us the highest stratum of cognition and ingenuity of all the species on Earth. She has provided us with a self-renewing habitat, the will to live, the instinct to survive, and the capacity to procreate. And we are confident that we have responded well. During the thousands of years that we have existed, we have remained adjusted to the conditions of a changing environment, survived environmental and human-caused disasters, and adapted to living in a wide range of climates. We have worked to acquire and maintain our physical needs by making the habitat’s life support (living space and resources) more easily available. Furthermore, we have maintained a social organization, as attested by our creation of vast economic, governmental, and religious institutions.

It is easy for us to believe that Mother Nature’s gifts are her promise that we are equipped to comply with her challenge, and that we are capable of achieving the state of enduring peace and comfort that we desire. Having journeyed from naked biped to semi-space traveler, we believe that we are satisfying her challenge and thus deserve to see prosperity. Why then, when it appears to be thriving, is our society near to a population crash and advancing toward the ecological stage of die-off?

Indeed, there is an abundance of information in ancient ruins and in our modern libraries telling us that we are crowding onto the land, exploiting its resources, and damaging our environment, and that these developments are inexorable. Is this information correct? The task of identifying what information is accurate amid the rapidly growing morass of certainties, partial certainties, falsities, and irrelevancies that comprise so much of the information we have collected can be time consuming. Nonetheless, our vast sources of information have much to offer. Careful searches and selections of sources of information, double-checking and crosschecking the information, and numerous other tests to verify its veracity, for those willing and able to seek them out, can reveal many truths about the predicament of humankind.

The most prominent truths appear a number of times in this book: that world population is growing, that we lack the capacity to stop the growth, and that the habitat’s space and resources are limited. The logical consequences of these truths, such as the inundation of living space with the human population, the worsening of worldwide shortages of ecosystem services such as food, water, and energy, and the pervasiveness of social conflict over the growing shortages of this life support, also emerge as truths from among the information. In addition are the truths that deterioration of the environment is on the increase from our exploitation of land and resources, and we are not capable of controlling the negative feedback from it, even with our best applications of technology.

As one sifts through information on past societies, it is possible to draw some truths across the horizons of time, which help us understand where we have been and where we are going. We can see that societies of the past advanced through the stages of prosperity and population growth, and of economic and social collapses, and finally they vanished. The sum of truths from both past and present societies is that instead of profiting from an accumulated wealth of information, we have not used it to move into a position of sustainability; instead, the entire human society has been advancing through the familiar steps that contribute to evolving out of existence.

Apropos of these truths, systems engineer and Director of the Institute of Energy and Man Richard Duncan (2007) wrote, The terminal decline of industrial civilization . . . is imminent. Indeed, the truths indicate that human society is proceeding toward worldwide economic and social collapses and a population crash during the current century. Paul Thompson (2004), author of The Twilight of the Modern World, believes our society will collapse in the last half of the twenty-first century.

The Club of Rome is an organization composed of members selected from all regions of the world across many different cultures. All are highly competent and well-respected professionals. According to a Briefing Note (The Club of Rome, May 2008), its members are from different fields of science and public policy and from academia, civil society, and the corporate sector. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this elite group became an important source of opinion and guidance on the world problematique, with its initial report published in The Limits to Growth (1972). At that time, Earth’s population was about 3.7 billion. It was obvious to the Club of Rome then that the demand for resources, by a population of the size it was then, was causing worldwide social, environmental, and resource supply problems. Clearly, in its opinion, world population growth, that would intensify demand, was of great concern as a threat to the well-being of humanity. It stated:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

Since this report, world population has almost doubled, and its size is a far greater threat to humanity now than it was in 1972. Because of our population’s current size and its continued growth, the unfavorable trends in industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion have continued, and have become even more threatening to the world community.

Why are these truths not more widely known and more often discussed? It is because the pending collapses of our economic and social institutions, the population crash that will follow, and the die-off of our species are unpopular topics in our worlds of commerce, government, and religion, and in our halls of learning. Instead, we apply ourselves to fortifying population growth and thereby help move our population deeper into the ecological stages of drawdown and overshoot.

The prospect of us reaching a state of enduring peace and comfort is an illusion. Mother Nature has made the sustainability of our society impossible. She simply imposes limits on our living space and life-supporting resources. Then, as this book will point out, she denies us the capacity to control our population size so that it grows out of proportion with the space and resource parameters of our habitat. She does not intend to keep what we understand as her promise of a peaceful and comfortable life, but only a life with no promises, aside from certain death. She is not challenging our species to survive, but is preparing us for the journey to oblivion.

Three simple facts plainly outline the predicament of humankind: (1) our population is growing, and we lack the capacity to stop the growth; (2) our habitat has limited living space, and it is becoming inadequate for our needs; and (3) our habitat has a limited supply of life-supporting resources, and we are diminishing and destroying them. These facts are the three pillars supporting the argument that humanity is bound to experience economic and social collapses, and a population crash that will weaken it for die-off. This book is committed to that argument.

Population growth is dynamic and inexorable, and it is the greatest threat to the well-being of humankind. Because of population growth, the limitations of our living space and resources are looming as a serious problem. For example, while the demand for food is increasing, the world’s best agricultural land is in full use, nearing its peak of productivity, and soon will become inadequate for our needs. At the same time, urban settlement is growing, encroaching on agricultural land and removing it from production. While the progressive decline in resources per capita is warning us of food, water, and energy shortages ahead, our relentless exploitation of resources is degrading and destroying the ecosystems that provide this life support. Moreover, we are adding unhealthful substances to the atmosphere, and expanding the contamination of our habitat’s land and fresh water by increasing accumulations of garbage, trash, and industrial and radioactive waste.

Population growth is making it more and more difficult for us to manage our society. The worldwide decline in the availability of living space and resources per capita is fortifying poverty, increasing competition for survival, and thereby intensifying social conflict. Because of the ever-growing number of individuals, our economic, governmental, and religious institutions are becoming more complex, and finding it increasingly difficult to control constituencies, keep up with infrastructures, and efficiently deploy services. With growth our institutions are encountering a greater variety of problems, more multifaceted problems, and problems that they are unable to solve, such as resource shortages, government budget shortfalls, social terrorism, and environmental pollution.

Only an end to population growth would stop the congestion of our living space and relieve the growing inadequacy of our resources, the pressure on our governments to provide needed infrastructure and services, and the damage to our environment. However, the capacity to control our population size humanely is not among our gifts from Mother Nature. Therefore, we are guaranteed an overpopulated habitat—one without sufficient space or resources for every individual—charged with economic and social chaos. Indeed, we are in a lethal predicament from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

This is a common predicament for a species. A quote by demographer Harold F. Dorn (1969) could have come directly from Mother Nature’s handbook: No species has ever been able to multiply without limit. In the history of life on Earth, countless species have failed because their populations outgrew the provisions of their habitats. Relatively recent case histories show that a species’ society, including the human society, can experience overpopulation—insufficient life support for every individual—and a population crash.

An example of how population growth can cause overpopulation and a population crash is the account by David Klein (1968), with the Alaska Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit of the University of Alaska College. He tells of a colony of twenty-nine reindeer that in 1944 the US Coast Guard placed on St. Matthew Island, a land mass of 128 square miles in the north central Bering Sea. With plenty of high quality pasture, the reindeer responded by increasing their population to six thousand by the summer of 1963. During the hard winter of that year, the population crashed by starvation to fifty individuals. Indeed, the depletion of pasturage from overgrazing by too many reindeer had depleted the pasture so that it could not carry the growing herd through a winter. The island had been the entire world for the reindeer—a supportive world—but only for nineteen years.

Clive Ponting (1993), a senior academic at the University of Wales and the author of The Lessons of Easter Island, which appeared in the book A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, described a similar event for a human society on Easter Island. His description illustrates that a human community is just as subject to devastation from overpopulation as is a community of any other species. About 400 AD, an estimated twenty to thirty individuals believed to be Polynesians settled on Easter Island, isolated in the south Pacific Ocean about two thousand miles west of South America. By 1550 AD, or so, the population had grown to about seven thousand individuals. Archaeological evidence indicates that a prosperous and highly developed society prevailed on the island for about one thousand years. However, about 1600 AD, the society began to deteriorate and the number of individuals began to decline. The inhabitants had cut all the island’s trees and pressed the ecosystem for food and water to beyond its capacity to support them. This loss of life-supporting resources led to the economic and social collapses of the population. Ponting wrote:

The Dutch Admiral Roggeveen, onboard the Arena, was the first European to visit the island on Easter Sunday 1722 AD. He found a society in a primitive state with about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meager food supplies available on the island.

The reindeer and the Easter Islanders each had overpopulated their living space and suffered a population crash. These crashes provide a model for the future of human society in the twenty-first century when our population size overcomes our living space or the supply of a vital resource. However, in the global model, the crash will occur for all of humanity.

All along, we have been interpreting our technological achievements at building a formidable society as success at survival. We have been regarding the build-up of economic, social, and environmental problems as merely the price of success, problems we can manage. Ironically, they also represent a heightening intensity of the predicament of humankind that will conclude with the worldwide spread of overpopulation, economic and social collapses, a population crash, and the eventual die-off of our species.

Because our population growth is what generates our predicament, it is discussed in Chapter 1. The nature of our living space, the second element of the predicament, is the subject of Chapter 2. It is a discussion of some characteristics of our living space, its capacity to accommodate us, and our problems of adjusting to it. Chapter 3 is a discussion of our supply of vital resources, which comprises the third element of our predicament. It provides an overview of our most vital resources, including their limitations.

Our gifts as a species and a suitable habitat will not save us from demise. Chapters 4 through 6 are devoted to a comprehensive discussion of why we are unable to prevent our demise. They show why we are not even in the game for determining our finale, except that Mother Nature has given us the capacity to contribute to our journey to oblivion. These chapters address why we are unable to prevent a population crash and the eventual die-off of our species. They will show that we are deluded about our ability to direct the course of our journey, we lack the capacity to control the size of our population, we rely upon self-serving misconceptions as bases for survival, and our social institutions forge ahead without direction and increasingly are unable to solve our