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No really, how sustainable are we?
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Paul Chefurka - http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html
Ever since the writing of Thomas Malthus
in the early 1800s, and especially since Paul Ehrlich’s publication of “The
Population Bomb” in 1968, there has been a lot of learned
skull-scratching over what the sustainable human population of Planet Earth
might “really” be over the long haul.
This question is intrinsically tied to the issue of
ecological overshoot so ably described by William R.
Catton Jr. in his 1980 book “Overshoot:The Ecological Basis
of Revolutionary Change”. How much have we already pushed our
population and consumption levels above the long-term carrying capacity of
the planet?
This article outlines my current thoughts on carrying capacity
and overshoot, and presents six estimates for the size of a sustainable human
population.
Carrying
Capacity
“Carrying capacity”
is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive
meaning: “The maximum population size of a species that the
environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and
other necessities available in the environment."
Unfortunately that definition becomes more nebulous and
controversial the closer you look at it, especially when we are talking about
the planetary carrying capacity for human beings. Ecologists will claim
that our numbers have already well surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity,
while others (notably economists and politicians...) claim we are nowhere
near it yet!
This confusion may arise because we tend to confuse two
very different understandings of the phrase “carrying capacity”. For
this discussion I will call these the “subjective” view and the “objective”
views of carrying capacity.
The subjective view is carrying capacity
as seen by a member of the species in question. Rather than coming from a
rational, analytical assessment of the overall situation, it is an
experiential judgment. As such it tends to be limited to the population
of one's own species, as well as having a short time horizon – the current
situation counts a lot more than some future possibility. The main
thing that matters in this view is how many of one’s own species will be able
to survive to reproduce. As long as that number continues to rise, we assume
all is well – that we have not yet reached the carrying capacity of our
environment.
From this subjective point of view humanity has not even
reached, let alone surpassed the Earth’s overall carrying capacity – after all,
our population is still growing. It's tempting to ascribe this view
mainly to neoclassical economists and politicians, but truthfully most of us
tend to see things this way. In fact, all species,
including humans, have this orientation, whether it is conscious or not.
Species tend to keep growing until outside factors such as
disease, predators, food or other resource scarcity – or climate change –
intervene. These factors define the “objective” carrying capacity of
the environment. This objective view of carrying capacity is the view
of an observer who adopts a position outside the species in question.It’s the
typical viewpoint of an ecologist looking at the reindeer on St. Matthew
Island, or at the impact of humanity on other species and its own resource
base.
This is the view that is usually assumed by ecologists
when they use the naked phrase “carrying capacity”, and it is an assessment
that can only be arrived at through analysis and deductive reasoning.
It’s the view I hold, and its implications for our future are anything but
comforting.
When a species bumps up against the limits posed by the
environment’s objective carrying capacity,its population begins to decline.
Humanity is now at the uncomfortable point when objective observers have detected
our overshoot condition, but the population as a whole has not recognized it
yet. As we push harder against the limits of the planet’s objective carrying
capacity, things are beginning to go wrong. More and more ordinary
people are recognizing the problem as its symptoms become more obvious to
casual onlookers.The problem is, of course, that we've already been above the
planet’s carrying capacity for quite a while.
One typical rejoinder to
this line of argument is that humans have “expanded our carrying capacity”
through technological innovation. “Look at the Green Revolution!
Malthus was just plain wrong. There are no limits to human
ingenuity!” When we say things like this, we are of course speaking
from a subjective viewpoint. From this experiential, human-centric point
of view, we have indeed made it possible for our environment to support ever
more of us. This is the only view that matters at the biological,
evolutionary level, so it is hardly surprising that most of our fellow
species-members are content with it.
The problem with that view is that every objective
indicator of overshoot is flashing red. From the climate change and
ocean acidification that flows from our smokestacks and tailpipes, through
the deforestation and desertification that accompany our expansion of human
agriculture and living space, to the extinctions of non-human species happening
in the natural world, the planet is urgently signaling an overload condition.
Humans have an underlying urge towards growth, an immense
intellectual capacity for innovation, and a biological inability to step
outside our chauvinistic, anthropocentric perspective. This combination
has made it inevitable that we would land ourselves and the rest of the
biosphere in the current insoluble global ecological predicament.
Overshoot
When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a
condition known as overshoot. Because the carrying capacity
is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely,
overshoot must by definition be temporary. Populations always decline
to (or below) the carrying capacity. How long they stay in overshoot
depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated
numbers. Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that
helps maintain their numbers. For humans one of the primary resources
is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind,
biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.). A
species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but
exhaustible stock of a resource. Like fossil fuels, for
instance...
Population growth in the animal kingdom tends to follow a logistic
curve. This is an S-shaped curve that starts off low when the species
is first introduced to an ecosystem, at some later point rises very fast as
the population becomes established, and then finally levels off as the
population saturates its niche.
Humans have been pushing the
envelope of our logistic curve for much of our history. Our population rose
very slowly over the last couple of hundred thousand years, as we gradually
developed the skills we needed in order to deal with our varied and
changeable environment,particularly language, writing and arithmetic. As we
developed and disseminated those skills our ability to modify our environment
grew, and so did our growth rate.
If we had not discovered the
stored energy stocks of fossil fuels, our logistic growth curve would
probably have flattened out some time ago, and we would be well on our way to
achieving a balance with the energy flows in the world around us, much like
all other species do. Our numbers would have settled down to oscillate
around a much lower level than today, similar to what they probably did with
hunter-gatherer populations tens of thousands of years ago.
Unfortunately, our discovery of the energy potential of coal
created what mathematicians and systems theorists call a “bifurcation point”
or what is better known in some cases as a tipping point. This is a point at
which a system diverges from one path onto another because of some influence
on events. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that bifurcation
points are generally irreversible. Once past such a point, the system
can’t go back to a point before it.
Given the impact that fossil fuels had on the development of
world civilization, their discovery was clearly such a fork in the road.
Rather than flattening out politely as other species' growth curves
tend to do, ours kept on rising. And rising, and rising.
What is a
sustainable population level?
Now we come to the heart of the matter. Okay, we all
accept that the human race is in overshoot. But how deep into overshoot
are we? What is the carrying capacity of our planet? The
answers to these questions,after all, define a sustainable population.
Not surprisingly, the answers are quite hard to tease
out. Various numbers have been put forward, each with its set of stated
and unstated assumptions –not the least of which is the assumed standard of
living (or consumption profile) of the average person. For those
familiar with Ehrlich and Holdren’s I=PAT equation,
if “I” represents the environmental impact of a sustainable
population, then for any population value “P” there is a corresponding
value for “AT”, the level of Activity and Technology that can be
sustained for that population level. In other words, the higher our
standard of living climbs, the lower our population level must fall in order
to be sustainable. This is discussed further in an earlier article on Thermodynamic Footprints.
To get some feel for the enormous range of uncertainty in
sustainability estimates we’ll look at six assessments, each of which leads
to a very different outcome. We’ll start with the most optimistic one,
and work our way down the scale.
The Ecological
Footprint Assessment
The concept of the Ecological Footprint
was developed in 1992 by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the
University of British Columbia in Canada.
The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the
Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural
capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to
regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea
area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to
assimilate associated waste. As it is usually published, the value is an
estimate of how many planet Earths it would take to support humanity with
everyone following their current lifestyle.
It has a number of fairly glaring flaws that cause it to be
hyper-optimistic. The "ecological footprint" is basically for
renewable resources only. It includes a theoretical but underestimated factor
for non-renewable resources. It does not take into account the
unfolding effects of climate change, ocean acidification or biodiversity loss
(i.e. species extinctions). It is intuitively clear that no number of
“extra planets” would compensate for such degradation.
Still, the estimate as of the end of 2012 is that our overall
ecological footprint is about “1.7 planets”. In other words, there is
at least 1.7 times too much human activity for the long-term health of this
single, lonely planet. To put it yet another way, we are 70% into
overshoot.
It would probably be fair to say that by this accounting
method the sustainable population would be (7 / 1.7) or about four billion
people at our current average level of affluence. As you will see,
other assessments make this estimate seem like a happy fantasy.
The Fossil Fuel
Assessment
The main accelerator of human activity over the last 150 to
200 years has been our exploitation of the planet's stocks of fossil
fuel. Before 1800 there was very little fossil fuel in general use,
with most energy being derived from the flows represented by wood, wind,
water, animal and human power. The following graph demonstrates the
precipitous rise in fossil fuel use since then, and especially since 1950.
This information was the basis for my earlier Thermodynamic Footprint
analysis. That article investigated the influence of technological
energy (87% of which comes from fossil fuel stocks) on human
planetary impact, in terms of how much it multiplies the effect of each
“naked ape”. The following graph illustrates the multiplier at different
points in history:
Fossil fuels have powered the increase in all aspects of
civilization, including population growth. The “Green Revolution”
in agriculture that was kicked off by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug in the
late 1940s was largely a fossil fuel phenomenon, relying on
mechanization,powered irrigation and synthetic fertilizers derived from
fossil fuels. This enormous increase in food production supported a swift
rise in population numbers, in a classic ecological feedback loop: more food
(supply) => more people (demand) => more food => more people etc…
Over the core decades of the Green Revolution from 1950 to
1980 the world population almost doubled, from fewer than 2.5 billion to over
4.5 billion. The average population growth over those three decades was
2% per year. Compare that to 0.5% from 1800 to 1900; 1.00% from 1900 to
1950; and 1.5% from 1980 until now:
This analysis makes it tempting to conclude that a sustainable
population might look similar to the situation in 1800, before the Green
Revolution, and before the global adoption of fossil fuels: about 1
billion people living on about 5% of today’s global average energy
consumption, all of it derived from renewable energy flows.
It’s tempting (largely because it seems vaguely achievable),
but unfortunately that number may still be too high. Even in 1800 the
signs of human overshoot were clear, if not well recognized: there was
already widespread deforestation through Europe and the Middle East; and
desertification had set into the previously lush agricultural zones of North
Africa and the Middle East.
Not to mention that if we did start over with “just” one
billion people, an annual growth rate of a mere 0.5% would put the population
back over seven billion in just 400 years. Unless the growth rate can
be kept down very close to zero, such a situation is decidedly unsustainable.
The Population
Density Assessment
There is another way to approach the question. If we
assume that the human species was sustainable at some point in the
past, what point might we choose and what conditions contributed to our
apparent sustainability at that time?
I use a very strict definition of sustainability. It
reads something like this: "Sustainability is the ability of a
species to survive in perpetuity without damaging the planetary
ecosystem in the process." This principle applies only to a
species' own actions, rather than uncontrollable external forces like Milankovitch cycles,
asteroid impacts, plate tectonics, etc.
In order to find a population that I was fairly confident met
my definition of sustainability, I had to look well back in history - in fact
back into Paleolithic times. The sustainability conditions I chose
were: a very low population density and very low energy use, with both
maintained over multiple thousands of years. I also assumed the populace
would each use about as much energy as a typical hunter-gatherer: about twice
the daily amount of energy a person obtains from the food they eat.
There are about 150 million square
kilometers, or 60 million square miles of land on Planet
Earth. However, two thirds of that area is covered by snow, mountains
or deserts, or has little or no topsoil. This leaves about 50
million square kilometers (20 million square miles) that is
habitable by humans without high levels of technology.
A typical population density for a non-energy-assisted
society of hunter-forager-gardeners is between 1 person per square mile and
1 person per square kilometer. Because humans living this way had settled the
entire planet by the time agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, this
number pegs a reasonable upper boundary for a sustainable
world population in the range of 20 to 50 million people.
I settled on the average of these two numbers, 35 million
people. That was because it matches known hunter-forager population
densities, and because those densities were maintained with virtually zero
population growth (less than 0.01% per year)during the 67,000 years from the
time of the Toba super-volcano eruption in 75,000 BC until 8,000 BC
(Agriculture Day on Planet Earth).
If we were to spread our current population of 7 billion
evenly over 50 million square kilometers, we would have an average density of
150 per square kilometer. Based just on that number, and without even
considering our modern energy-driven activities, our current population is at
least 250 times too big to be sustainable. To put it another way, we are
now 25,000%into overshoot based on our raw population numbers
alone.
As I said above, we also need to take the population’s standard
of living into account. Our use of technological energy gives each of us
the average planetary impact of about 20 hunter-foragers. What would
the sustainable population be if each person kept their current lifestyle,
which is given as an average current Thermodynamic Footprint (TF) of 20?
We
can find the sustainable world population number for any level
of human activity by using the I = PAT equation mentioned above.
. We decided above that the maximum
hunter-forager population we could accept as sustainable would be 35 million
people, each with a Thermodynamic Footprint of 1.
. First, we set I (the
allowable total impact for our sustainable population) to 35, representing
those 35 million hunter-foragers.
. Next, we set AT to be
the TF representing the desired average lifestyle for our population.
In this case that number is 20.
. We can now solve the equation
for P. Using simple algebra, we know that I = P x AT is
equivalent to P = I / AT. Using that form of the equation we
substitute in our values, and we find that P = 35 / 20. In this
case P = 1.75.
This number tells us that if we want to keep the average level
of per-capita consumption we enjoy in in today’s world, we would enter an
overshoot situation above a global population of about 1.75 million people.
By this measure our current population of 7 billion is about 4,000 times too
big and active for long-term sustainability. In other words, by this measure
we are we are now 400,000% into overshoot.
Using the same
technique we can calculate that achieving a sustainable population with an
American lifestyle (TF = 78) would permit a world population of only 650,000 people
– clearly not enough to sustain a modern global civilization.
For the
sake of comparison, it is estimated that the historical world population
just after the dawn of agriculture in 8,000 BC was about five million, and in
Year 1 was about 200 million. We crossed the upper threshold of
planetary sustainability in about 2000 BC, and have been in deepening
overshoot for the last 4,000 years.
The Ecological
Assessments
As a species, human beings share much in common with other
large mammals. We breathe, eat, move around to find food and mates,
socialize, reproduce and die like all other mammalian species. Our intellect
and culture, those qualities that make us uniquely human, are recent
additions to our essential primate nature, at least in evolutionary terms.
Consequently it makes sense to compare our species’
performance to that of other, similar species – species that we know for sure
are sustainable. I was fortunate to find the work of American marine
biologist Dr. Charles W. Fowler, who has a deep interest in sustainability
and the ecological conundrum posed by human beings. The following three
assessments are drawn from Dr. Fowler’s work.
First assessment
In 2003, Dr. Fowler and Larry Hobbs co-wrote a paper titled, “Is humanity sustainable?”
that was published by the Royal Society. In it, they compared
a variety of ecological measures across 31 species including humans. The
measures included biomass consumption, energy consumption, CO2 production,
geographical range size, and population size.
It should come as no great surprise that in most of the
comparisons humans had far greater impact than other species, even to a 99%
confidence level. When it came to population size, Fowler and Hobbs
found that there are over two orders of magnitude more humans than one would
expect based on a comparison to other species – 190 times more, in
fact. Similarly, our CO2 emissions outdid other species by a factor of
215.
Based on this research, Dr. Fowler concluded that there are
about 200 times too many humans on the planet. This brings up an
estimate for a sustainable population of 35 million people.
This is the same as the upper bound established above by
examining hunter-gatherer population densities. The similarity of the
results is not too surprising, since the hunter-gatherers of 50,000 years ago
were about as close to “naked apes” as humans have been in recent history.
Second assessment
In 2008, five years after the publication cited above, Dr.
Fowler wrote another paper entitled “Maximizing biodiversity,
information and sustainability." In this paper
he examined the sustainability question from the point of view of maximizing
biodiversity. In other words, what is the largest human population that
would not reduce planetary biodiversity?
This is, of course, a very stringent test, and one that we
probably failed early in our history by extirpating mega-fauna in the wake of
our migrations across a number of continents.
In this paper, Dr. Fowler compared 96 different
species, and again analyzed them in terms of population, CO2 emissions and
consumption patterns.
This time, when the strict test of biodiversity retention was
applied, the results were truly shocking, even to me. According to this
measure, humans have overpopulated the Earth by almost 700 times.
In order to preserve maximum biodiversity on Earth, the human population may
be no more than 10 million people – each with the consumption of a
Paleolithic hunter-forager.
Addendum: Third assessment
After this article was initially written, Dr. Fowler forwarded
me a copy of an appendix to his 2009 book, "Systemic Management:
Sustainable Human Interactions with Ecosystems and the Biosphere",
published by Oxford University Press. In it he describes yet one more
technique for comparing humans with other mammalian species, this time in
terms of observed population densities, total population sizes and ranges.
After carefully comparing us to various species of both
herbivores and carnivores of similar body size, he draws this devastating
conclusion: the human population is about 1000 times larger than expected.
This is in line with the second assessment above, though about 50% more
pessimistic. It puts a sustainable human population at about 7
million.
Urk!
Conclusions
As you can see, the estimates for a sustainable human
population vary widely – by a factor of 500 from the highest to the lowest.
The Ecological Footprint doesn't really seem intended
as a measure of sustainability. Its main value is to give people with
no exposure to ecology some sense that we are indeed over-exploiting our
planet. (It also has the psychological advantage of feeling achievable
with just a little work.) As a measure of sustainability, it is not
helpful.
As I said above, the number suggested by the Thermodynamic
Footprint or Fossil Fuel analysis isn't very helpful either – even a
population of one billion people without fossil fuels had already gone into
overshoot.
That leaves us with four estimates: two at 35 million, one of
10 million, and one of 7 million.
The central number of 35 million people is confirmed by
two analyses using different data and assumptions. My conclusion is
that this is probably the absolutely largest human population that could be
considered sustainable. The realistic but similarly unachievable number
is probably more in line with the bottom two estimates, somewhere below 10
million.
I think the lowest two estimates (Fowler 2008, and Fowler
2009) are as unrealistically high as all the others in this case, primarily
because human intelligence and problem-solving ability makes our destructive
impact on biodiversity a foregone conclusion. After all, we drove other
species to extinction 40,000 years ago, when our total population was
estimated to be under 1 million.
So, what can we do with this information? It’s obvious
that we will not (and probably cannot) voluntarily reduce our population by
99.5% to 99.9%. Even an involuntary reduction of this magnitude would
involve enormous suffering and a very uncertain outcome. It’s close
enough to zero that if Mother Nature blinked, we’d be gone.
In fact, the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens is an
inherently unsustainable species. This outcome seems virtually
guaranteed by our neocortex, by the very intelligence that has enabled our
rise to unprecedented dominance over our planet’s biosphere. Is
intelligence an evolutionary blind alley? From the singular perspective
of our own species, it quite probably is. If we are to find some greater
meaning or deeper future for intelligence in the universe, we may be forced
to look beyond ourselves and adopt a cosmic, rather than a human,
perspective.
Discussion
How do we get out of this jam?
How might we get from where we are today to a sustainable
world population of 35 million or so? We should probably discard the
notion of "managing" such a population decline. If we can’t
even get our population to simply stop growing, an outright reduction of over
99% is simply not in the cards. People seem virtually incapable of
taking these kinds of decisions in large social groups. We can decide
to stop reproducing, but only as individuals or (perhaps) small
groups. Without the essential broad social support, such personal
choices will make precious little difference to the final outcome.
Politicians will by and large not even propose an idea like "managed population
decline" - not if they want to gain or remain in power, at any
rate. China's brave experiment with one-child families notwithstanding,
any global population decline will be purely involuntary.
Crash?
A world population decline would (will) be triggered and fed
by our civilization's encounter with limits. These limits may show up
in any area: accelerating climate change, weather extremes,shrinking food
supplies, fresh water depletion, shrinking energy supplies,pandemic diseases,
breakdowns in the social fabric due to excessive complexity,supply chain
breakdowns, electrical grid failures, a breakdown of the international
financial system, international hostilities - the list of candidates is
endless, and their interactions are far too complex to predict.
In 2007,
shortly after I grasped the concept and implications of Peak Oil, I wrote my
first web article on population decline: Population: The Elephant in
the Room. In it I sketched out the picture of a
monolithic population collapse: a straight-line decline from today's seven
billion people to just one billion by the end of this century.
As time has passed I've become less confident in this
particular dystopian vision. It now seems to me that human beings may
be just a bit tougher than that. We would fight like demons to stop the
slide, though we would potentially do a lot more damage to the environment in
the process. We would try with all our might to cling to civilization
and rebuild our former glory. Different physical, environmental and
social situations around the world would result in a great diversity in
regional outcomes. To put it plainly, a simple "slide to
oblivion" is not in the cards for any species that could recover from
the giant Toba volcanic
eruption in just 75,000 years.
Or Tumble?
Still, there are those physical limits I
mentioned above. They are looming ever closer, and it seems a foregone
conclusion that we will begin to encounter them for real within the next
decade or two. In order to draw a slightly more realistic picture of what
might happen at that point, I created the following thought experiment on
involuntary population decline. It's based on the idea that our population
will not simply crash, but will oscillate (tumble) down a series of
stair-steps: first dropping as we puncture the limits to growth; then falling
below them; then partially recovering; only to fall again; partially recover;
fall; recover...
I started the scenario with a world population of 8
billion people in 2030. I assumed each full cycle of decline and partial
recovery would take six generations, or 200 years. It would take three
generations (100 years) to complete each decline and then three more in
recovery, for a total cycle time of 200 years. I assumed each decline would
take out 60% of the existing population over its hundred years, while each
subsequent rise would add back only half of the lost population.
In
ten full cycles - 2,000 years - we would be back to a sustainable population
of about 40-50 million. The biggest drop would be in the first 100 years,
from 2030 to 2130 when we would lose a net 53 million people per year. Even
that is only a loss of 0.9% pa, compared to our net growth today of 1.1%,
that's easily within the realm of the conceivable,and not necessarily
catastrophic - at least to begin with.
As a scenario it seems a lot
more likely than a single monolithic crash from here to under a billion
people. Here's what it looks like:
It's important to remember that this scenario is not
a prediction. It's an attempt to portray a potential path down the
population hill that seems a bit more probable than a simple, "Crash!
Everybody dies."
It's also important to remember that the decline will probably
not happen anything like this, either. With climate change getting ready
to push humanity down the stairs, and the strong possibility that the overall
global temperature will rise by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius even before the end of
that first decline cycle, our prospects do not look even this
"good" from where I stand.
Rest assured, I'm not trying to present 35 million people as
some kind of "population target". It's just part of my attempt
to frame what we're doing to the planet, in terms of what some of us see as
the planetary ecosphere’s level of tolerance for our abuse.
The other
potential implicit in this analysis is that if we did drop from 8 to under 1
billion, we could then enter a population free-fall. As a result, we might
keep falling until we hit the bottom of Olduvai Gorge again. My numbers are
an attempt to define how many people might stagger away from such a crash
landing. Some people seem to believe that such an event could be
manageable. I don't share that belief for a moment. These
calculations are my way of getting that message out.
I figure if I'm going
to draw a line in the sand, I'm going to do it on behalf of all life,
not just our way of life.
What can we do?
To be absolutely clear, after ten years of investigating what
I affectionately call "The Global Clusterfuck", I do not think it
can be prevented, mitigated or managed in any way. If and when
it happens, it will follow its own dynamic, and the force of events could
easily make the Japanese and Andaman tsunamis seem like pleasant days at the
beach.
The most effective preparations that we can make will all be
done by individuals and small groups. It will be up to each of us to
decide what our skills, resources and motivations call us to do. It
will be different for each of us - even for people in the same neighborhood,
let alone people on opposite sides of the world.
I've been saying for a
couple of years that each of us will each do whatever we think is appropriate
to the circumstances, in whatever part of the world we can influence. The
outcome of our actions is ultimately unforeseeable, because it depends on how
the efforts of all 7 billion of us converge, co-operate and compete.
The end result will be quite different from place to place - climate change
impacts will vary, resources vary, social structures vary, values and belief
systems are different all over the world.The best we can do is to do our
best.
Here is my advice:
. Stay awake to what's happening
around us.
. Don't get hung up by other
people’s "shoulds and shouldn'ts".
. Occasionally re-examine our
personal values. If they aren't in alignment with what we think the
world needs, change them.
. Stop blaming people. Others are
as much victims of the times as we are - even the CEOs and politicians.
. Blame, anger and outrage is
pointless. It wastes precious energy that we will need for more useful
work.
. Laugh a lot, at everything -
including ourselves.
. Hold all the world's various
beliefs and "isms" lightly, including our own.
. Forgive others. Forgive
ourselves. For everything.
. Love everything just as deeply as
you can.
That's what I think might be helpful. If we get all that
personal stuff right, then doing the physical stuff about food, water,
housing,transportation, energy, politics and the rest of it will come easy –
or at least a bit easier. And we will have a lot more fun doing it.
I wish
you all the best of luck!
Bodhi Paul Chefurka
May 16, 2013
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