Let's help all of us and ... Stop Conspicuous Consumption

One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future
Paul Ehrlich Anne Ehrlich
Reviewed by Shamick Gaworski

Six centuries before the birth of Christ, the great capital city of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh was surrounded by rich irrigated farmlands and supported population of 120,000 people. Civilizations disappeared throughout humanity while others appeared elsewhere on earth. If our civilization consumes its entire natural global earth base, where will we go? The scale of human enterprise is now so gigantic that people are significantly altering even the gaseous composition of the atmosphere and changing the climate.

Biggest problems: 1) Deforestation. 2) Water: Overdrawn and underappreciated. In developing regions more than 2 billion people survive on inadequate supply of water for household use. 3) Oceanic Resources. We are depleting our natural capital for short-term gains with help of our inadequate accounting system.

Is humanity a planet-wide poison? After the invention of agriculture population growth accelerated. From 5 million or so people when farming first started, the world’s population rose to perhaps 250 million by the time of the Roman Empire. While overall population growth slowed to 1.2 percent, the world population will reach 9 billion in 2050.

While population of Europe and other developed countries slowed, the dense population of Rwanda is dependent almost exclusively on the resources and ecosystems of that small, desperately poor country’s own territory whereas the even more dense population of the wealthy Netherlanders is able to draw resources form all over the world.

Paul & Anne Ehrlich points out the major culprit of human predicament: not just number of people but their conspicuous consumption. Of course our accounting system does not record those costs.

We need to develop sustainable agriculture and sustainable living that does not deplete the nutritive capacity of the soil or the biodiversity of natural habitats. Nation’s gross national product (GNP) fails to account for lose of natural base. Humans are incapable of thinking globally. Most people are still focused on the classic social, political and economic problems. Few people realize that we’re living in what agricultural economist Lester Brown has called an “environmental bubble economy,” an economy in which “output is artificially inflated by over-consumption of the earth’s natural assets.”

In summary, humans and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources.

I liked the book and how Paul & Anne Ehrlich tie all together painting gloomy picture based on past civilizations, overused and under appreciated natural base of today. I particularly liked their pragmatic solutions, be it difficult to implement, often almost Utopian. The one aspect I dislike was a bit disorganized material and some aspects such as overpopulation repeated over and over again throughout the book.

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