| The Titanic had 2,223 people on board for its fateful
maiden voyage. Its maximum capacity was 3,547, but of course,
that carrying capacity would have been much smaller had all its passengers
been traveling first class. Similarly, the carrying capacity
of the Earth itself is a function both of the number of people alive
and the standard of living those people enjoy. As such the
earth might support one billion people rather well, two billion
not entirely terribly, and seven billion quite poorly.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, its carrying capacity - i.e.,
the number of people it could keep alive - dropped to the capacity
of the lifeboats: 1,178. That was one seat for every two passengers,
and one for every three potential passengers - the result of a handwavey
insistence that there was no need to prepare for a calamity that
was never going to happen.
Similarly, the ability of the earth to support human life is far
from fixed. Technology improves the planet's carrying capacity;
environmental degradation, in the form of deforestation, depletion
of natural resources, changes to the atmosphere, and so forth, reduces
it. There is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that, with
rising temperatures decreasing the amount of arable land, and fossil
fuels both contributing to that problem and becoming more and more
difficult to obtain, the earth's already overstretched carrying
capacity will drop as well. We're luckier than the passengers
of the Titanic: they had less than two hours to adapt to their change
of circumstances. We have a generation or two. We have
the luxury of being able to deal with our future conditions in pleasant
ways of our own choosing. We could, for example, tamp down
the excesses of the rich and work toward a sustainable society.
But of course we're not going to. When times get tough, people
don't reduce their appetites. They eat their seed corn.
There weren't 1,178 survivors of the Titanic. There were
706. The main reason for the disparity is that the first-class
passengers weren't willing to evacuate. There didn't seem
to be anything wrong with the ship, and the A Deck Lounge was so
comfortable! It was warm, the band was playing some jaunty
ragtime numbers, waiters were bringing drinks around... why not
wait out the false alarm in style instead of shivering in a rickety
little tub? And so the first several lifeboats were launched
less than half full, the carrying capacity of the Titanic dropping
all the time.
Similarly, the earth's carrying capacity may dip only a small amount
if humankind is willing to adjust. But if we, say, respond
to the end of cheap oil by switching to tar sands and coal and continuing
to live exorbitant lifestyles, that loss of capacity is going to
accelerate. And everything will seem fine, and people will
spend their days fulminating against "nazi communists"
and gossiping about another celebrity's mistresses, and then one
summer the crops will fail and a loaf of bread will cost fifty dollars.
And most people won't sit patiently and starve to death until the
numbers fall back into line, they will fight back. The risk
of ignoring environmental issues is not that polar bears will drown,
it's that food riots will spiral into global war.
And here we're not as lucky as the passengers on the Titanic.
The earth is a bubble of luxury in an ocean far colder and far vaster
than the Atlantic. At present there are no lifeboats.
And of those still aboard the Titanic when it finally went under
- of the 1,523 who didn't make it onto the lifeboats - only six
survived the mad scramble that marked the final sinking. For
the rest of us that might actually turn out to be a pretty good
ratio.
But consider this. When the Titanic sank, the first class
cabins went to the bottom just as quickly as steerage.
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