Below is their menu for a livable planet. What’s on your menu?
From the letter to the president-elect from Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University:
1) Put births on a par with deaths. …As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living — including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multi-generational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations’ retaining a happy, sustainable life style.
To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies.
2) Put conserving on a par with consuming. At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie. One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets.
3) Transform the consumption of education. Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” — something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others — and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament — the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations.
4) Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.
5) Rapidly expand our empathy. We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups…. People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time — not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future.
6) Decide what kind of world we all want. What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?
7) Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability. …In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival.
All seven of the steps could be written of as an exercise in Pollyannaism. “Totally impractical,” people will say, “not gonna happen.” Well, I tend to agree. But there is nothing more impractical than letting our global civilization go down the drain, with billions of people dying. Pundits seem to think we have choices, but they are wrong. If we don’t change our ways, they’ll be changed for us.
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