University Times

The world — and particularly the United States — has its head in the sand when it comes to the dangers of destroying the ecosystems that sustain life, a prominent scientist said here last week.

“When you hear a politician say, “We have a tough economic situation now, what we have to do is work on the economy. We can’t bring up developing alternative energy sources. We can’t bring up what is going to kill us” — when you hear politicians say that, you know they’re a special breed of moron, because the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environmental systems of the planet, the ecosystem services that mean our survival,” said Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies in Stanford University’s Department of Biology.

“The survival of humanity is not pre-ordained. Those systems control the quality of the atmosphere, they generate the soils that are essential to forestry and agriculture, they control the natural pests for our crops. In short, they control our survival,” said Ehrlich, who also is president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Studies and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Ehrlich spoke Oct. 27 on “The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment,” summarizing some of his latest book of the same name, written with his wife, Anna H. Ehrlich. The lecture was part of the American Experience Distinguished Lecture Series, which is sponsored by the University Honors College.

Almost nothing covered in “The Dominant Animal” was discussed in the recent election campaign discourse, he said. “That’s sad. It’s really critical to know where our dominance came from and where it’s taking us.”

There are a number of factors in human evolution that helped make humans the dominant animal on Earth, Ehrlich said. One was the development of digits and the opposable thumb rather than claws during the stage when human ancestors evolved into hunters and gatherers.

A second, more important factor was that humans became “visual animals” instead of relying on smell and hearing.

“The key thing in our evolution is that we developed language and syntax,” Ehrlich said. “If we didn’t have language and syntax we wouldn’t have developed our vast array of cultural information. Our cultural information, our non-genetic information, vastly out-swamps our genetic information, and is almost equally imbedded.

“If we didn’t have language and syntax we wouldn’t have ethics, because ethics are agreed upon standards of behavior,” he said.

“Humans are the only animals with ethics, yet it’s something we all take for granted and our power to do things to each other and to our environment has not kept up with our ethics,” Ehrlich added.

“We have had this incredible cultural evolution, as well as one in our technology. It’s absolutely mind-boggling,” he said.

But the consequences of new technologies are not always positive, he noted.

“We’ve paved about 3 percent of the world’s [land] surface; we’ve practiced crop agriculture on about 12 percent; we have about 25 percent in areas exploited for grazing, and what’s left is about 30 percent exploited forest and 30 percent is rock under water or ice,” Ehrlich said.

“So we’ve changed the entire surface of the planet. We have polluted the atmosphere with a mixture of gases, causing the potential climate disruption. We now have exploited almost 50 percent of the net primary productivity, which is the basic food supply of all animals. There’s no question, we’re on the cusp of disaster.”

Moreover, the U.S. and other governments have ignored the dire warnings of the world’s top scientists, Ehrlich maintained. A 1993 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, called for fundamental change to address environmental issues, a clarion call that in essence was ignored by the world’s superpowers, which are mostly responsible for the problems.

To analyze the situation, Ehrlich offered the acronym IPCT: Impact equals population times consumption times technology.

“The environmental impact is summarized by three factors: population, consumption and mode of delivery, or technology,” he said.

“It’s crystal clear to everybody that the more people you have, the more greenhouses gases you have. There’s no way around that. So [the formula is] how many people you have, what their patterns of consumption are and then what kind of technology you use to achieve the aggregate. For instance, if you’re looking at transportation and you’re measuring it in wearing out shoe leather, it’s not the same environmental damage as when everybody’s riding in an SUV. That’s not rocket science.”

In Europe, recent population growth rates are way down, said Ehrlich, who co-founded the Zero Population Growth movement of the 1960s. “The population situation has improved around much of the world. One overpopulated nation that is not paying attention: the United States. We have over 300 million people, more than twice as many people as anybody has ever come up with a sane reason to have alive at one time, and we’re super consumers,” Ehrlich said, noting that Americans consume 25 percent of the world’s resources.

“The basic way of reducing the size of human population is to educate women about the ability to control reproduction. Where that’s been done, birth rates are way down,” he said.

“If we’re able to slow our birth rate down, we could probably top out [worldwide] at about 8 billion by 2100. We don’t want to do it too fast, and we don’t know yet if 8 billion can be sustainable by 2100.”

The biggest problem caused by over-population is that each additional person has a negative impact on the environment, “because as homo sapiens, we’re so good at consuming. Every person you add, you’ve got to farm more land, you’ve got to purify more water, you’ve got to dig your wells deeper, all of which uses more energy.”

Ehrlich said the consumption problem is the bigger problem because most politicians think the solution to every economic problem is to consume more.

“They’re asking: Where should we drill? The answer should be: nowhere,” he said. “Why do people want you to buy more SUVs? To help the economy. So idiotic politicians think there’s a problem with too little consumption in a country of super consumers, and, by the way, we’re consuming a lot of crap.”

How do we deal with over-consumption?

“It’s all about choices. If you have $30 million bucks you can spend it on a cheap executive jet or a small Van Gogh. There it’s obvious: If you want to preserve the environment, buying the small Van Gogh is the superior, environmentally sound choice.” But most such choices are not as clear, especially in a global economy, meaning that an international discussion should be initiated to identify worldwide priorities, he added.

“We haven’t even started on the consumption problem in a way we did in the last 30 years or so on the population problem. What worries people the most is the agricultural situation — the food supply — and what fossil fuels are doing to the atmosphere,” Ehrlich said.

Regarding the latter issue, most people think the biggest worry is the rising sea level, which is a concern in coastal areas, he said.

“A bigger problem is precipitation changes. For instance, in South Asia and part of China, 1.4 billion people are dependent on the so-called Himalaya Water Tower, which is disappearing. California depends on the snow pack in the Sierras and the Rockies.

“It isn’t the amount of water you get total in a year, it’s the water you want preserved for when it’s needed. Mostly that’s the snow packs, which are now disappearing,” Ehrlich said.

In addition, the ability to grow a number of staple crops such as wheat and corn are threatened by the rise in global temperature.

“While we’re spending billions of dollars trying to get oil from Iraq, we’re not spending the millions of dollars on agricultural research. You might find ways to lower the temperature, so that you won’t have, for example, 1.4 billion nuclear-armed people starving,” he said.

Perhaps even more dangerous is the unbridled use of toxins, Ehrlich said.

“We have about 100,000 totally untested compounds that are biologically active that have been released into the environment. We don’t know any of the impacts on people or on ecosystems. We know nothing about the interactions between toxins,” he said. “Let’s suppose some of these chemicals combine and drop the human sperm count down to zero. There’s no solution for that.”

What should be done?

“There is no single solution, but there are things we ought to do: For one, try to intervene more in the birth rate, particularly in countries like the United States that are over-consuming,” Ehrlich said. “One thing we have to do is get the hell away from our fossil fuel economy. There’s just no question about it.”

There also should be much more regulation regarding which chemicals are released into the atmosphere, he said.

“If you have a new chemical that will save 1 million babies a year, okay, if some of it gets into the environment, we’ll take a chance; if you have a chemical that makes eyelash glue a little stickier, then, no,” Ehrlich said.

“We have to change our educational system almost entirely: In kindergarten we shouldn’t start with ‘See Spot run,’ we should start with “See the plant grow in the summer,’” he said.

“We also have to spread out our empathy a lot further. We discount too much by distance and time. We don’t care very much, for instance, about people starving in Africa.

“If you don’t believe something should be done about that ethically, you just are not understanding that the more immune-compromised people that are hungry, the greater chances of a novel disease jumping into the human population.”

Despite all the gloom and doom, Ehrlich doesn’t think the situation is hopeless. “It boils down to: We have to decide how we want to live. In my lifetime, things have changed very rapidly,” he said, citing the elimination of the common practice of lynching African Americans and the impact of the feminist movement in increasing opportunities for women.

“The clearest example is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which nobody predicted,” he said. “When the time is ripe, we can turn things around very rapidly and I think the time is ripe. It’s incumbent on people like us to ripen the time and we need to find ways to do that.”

—Peter Hart