What will it take to save the world?

By Roger Diamond

Well, let’s just first check that the world needs saving: is this a valid question and one that we should be asking? Let’s each do this ourselves and not just take my word for it. Take a look around you. To do this, you may have to open your eyes wider than usual and look further than is physically possible. You may also need to look back upon the past and try and project into the future.

So, let’s look around. Chances are, you are sitting in a building and probably also inside a city. With these assumptions, let’s see what problems are actually under your feet, so to speak. Firstly, buildings take up resources to build. Bricks, stones, cement, wood, metal and so on, all of which have been cut, dug, mined, smelted and then transported from one place to where they are now in your building. Secondly, none of these things last forever. Maintenance is something I don’t need to introduce to any keen or reluctant home owner. The keen bean will be at it painting and stripping regularly, whilst the reluctant oke will wait ’til it’s falling down and then have to replace and renovate to a larger degree. It’s arguable as to which uses up more resources, but probably the latter. Either way, lots more resources are being poured into your building. Finally, buildings need energy, water and other resources to make them useful. No point living in a house where the refrigerator is never on, the telephone doesn’t work and the lights are always out. So, more resources to make your building functional.

The bad news is, the impacts of your building just start there. What used to be there before? A field, an old garden if your house is on a subdivided plot, or a patch of natural vegetation. Originally though, it would have been natural land, perhaps even a wetland or part of a river floodplain. So, not only is your house consuming resources to build, maintain and operate, but it’s also reducing natural resource availability simply through the land that it’s taking up. There are also other nasty effects such as changing the earth’s albedo — if you have a light-coloured roof it will be reflecting lots more heat than natural vegetation. Or if a forest used to be there, you will be reducing the amount of rain that gets stored in trees and released later, slowly. Over vast areas this could affect rainfall. Having a roof and other paved or covered areas may, depending on what you do with the rain that runs off, contribute to a huge stormwater problem. Cities mostly have altered the hydrological regime to such an extent that even if the rivers were not bulldozed, they would still suffer big rainy-season runoff peaks and generally be lower flow in the dry season. In some cases, frogs and fish, living in fresh water, get washed out to sea and die in the deep and salty water. In total, buildings in a city combine to produce effects that truly prove the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, all the impacts of each building added up, do not reveal the combined impacts that occur when all those buildings are close together.

OK, hopefully you will now realise that cities may seem convenient places for abstract things like jobs and socialising, but in hard resources, they consume a lot and remove the possibility of many others. A bit like the fat boy at the table who not only guzzles all the food, but is so fat you can’t even get close.

Now to look beyond your nose. Chances are your city is big. Maybe even so big that you couldn’t walk across it in a day. And I’m not even going into the barriers like freeways, crime-ridden slums or industrial zones, but simply talking about the vast size of these places. There’s a lot of land being lost under the pavement. The consumption of resources in these places is also exponentially increasing relative to the linear population growth. In a village, your house will consume the same resources as it will in a city. But with a million houses, you need cars to get from one place to the other and cars need freeways, gas stations and oil refineries. Government then needs planning, emergency services, helicopters and hospitals. And so the services that a city needs spiral out of proportion to the population. A small city for instance, may have one small freeway with simple on and off ramps that can be build by the same road engineers who built the freeway. A big city with intersecting freeways will need traffic engineers to understand the flyover requirements and then civil engineers to design them and specialist construction companies to build them. By adding more people, you require more services, which then require infrastructure, which then requires more and different services. Each time, the degree of complexity increases and the services required become a notch more esoteric. In order to synchronise traffic lights, you need clever people with lots of statistics and electronics at their disposal. Not quite the same as the stop sign at the junction of Church and Main in your favourite small town.

Now to look further afield, truly beyond the horizon, to realise that there are hundreds, maybe even over a thousand cities on earth. And they are all, without exception, growing. We can therefore conclude that the consumption of resources is also growing, and exponentially. And as these cities grow, remember that they prevent other resources that were available, from ever coming into existence.

So, now for one final assumption. We may need to assume that the earth is indeed round and that it’s not flat and doesn’t go on forever. Well, fortunately that has been figured out a long time ago and so that is not the assumption. The assumption is then that there isn’t another earth hiding behind the moon, one with fields of animals waiting to be shot and plains of crops waiting to be harvested. Hmmm. I think that’s also been shown to be a bad rumour. Actually, there is no assumption here. Only hard facts. The earth is singular and finite. I made the silly jokes (I hope you had a good laugh — the humour isn’t exactly pouring out on this topic is it?) just to show how stupid all those economists and political leaders are when they just refuse to accept that we have our backs up against the wall. I mean, who are they trying to kid? There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There isn’t even an end to the rainbow and that’s maybe an indication of how foolish they are.

So, our resource consumption is ever increasing and our resource base is finite. Well, actually it’s shrinking as was shown in the above critique of cities. Never mind the rest of the world and the problems agriculture, recreation, war and other human activities have on the rest of the planet. These all, too, have their negative impacts on the environment and the resources that could be available to us. So, let’s be clear. The earth needs saving if we are to save ourselves.