Journalist and author Andrew Revkin writes the Dot Earth blog for the New York Times, and he's a senior fellow at the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies at Pace University in New York. EarthSky spoke to him shortly before Earth Day on April 22, 2011. He reminded us that--by the end of 2011--the number of people on Earth is expected to reach 7 billion. That's nearly twice as many people as there were in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. Andrew Revkin spoke more about our human population, energy, and Earth Day 2011 with EarthSky's Jorge Salazar.
What are your thoughts on Earth Day 2011?
It really is the best of times and the worst of times. Despite the recent turbulence, the overarching trajectories for human affairs right now are pretty good. There are fewer children dying prematurely of avoidable disease. There are longer lifespans. There is a reasonable amount of biodiversity still left to lose, which is both good and bad.
But, if you looked at us like bacteria plunked down on this Earth, we're approaching the edge of the "petri dish." We've been growing at a blazing pace. Now there really are signs of fundamental limits on things, including the capacity of the atmosphere and ecosystems in the oceans to absorb greenhouse gases. There are biological systems that are hurting.
Earth Day was inspired in part by a response to a 1969 oil spill in California. Bring us forward to today, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 and the partial meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Has much changed in terms of energy and the environment?
In looking at those particular environmental and energy calamities, a common element was an underplaying of the importance of worst-case risk. That's something that I've written a lot about on Dot Earth. I wrote just the other day about ancient stones, some of them not so ancient, that are along the northeastern coast of Japan. The stones warn about the risk of tsunamis: "don't build below this stone." Most of them were completely disregarded in just a couple of generations. The standards for building the nuclear power plants in Japan didn't even require considering tsunami risk until 2006, even though there was an enormous tsunami on that same coast--though a different part of it--in 1933 and in 1896.
The common thread is not taking seriously the prospect of these really serious and not-hard-to-predict calamities. In fact, they seem almost inevitable, if you look at at them in hindsight.
The questions are, what do we need? How much energy use can we avoid through behavior change, lifestyle change? That is versus how much are we going to need fundamentally as we head toward having two billion or three billion more people all seeking decent lives.
If we were all vegan monks, this wouldn't be such an issue. But we're not. There's very little sign of the burgeoning global middle class wanting to give up the modern conveniences.
What did you mean by saying that we're not all vegan monks?
Well, we're not. As people become less poor and become a little more wealthy--moving through middle class lives toward upper income lives--we develop appetites. The amount of meat we eat goes up, and it's usually working your way up the food chain toward the most energy intense, water intense, land intense sources of food--beef, at the top of the chain, or bluefin tuna at the top of the ocean chain. And that's unfortunate, because again, you can probably fit a billion reasonably wealthy people on the planet consuming at the top of the food chain. But as everyone moves toward that middle class zone, you really do get a sense that something has to give.
And there are even some resource optimists such as Vaclav Smil at the University of Manitoba--who is one of the Yodas of this field, one of the absolute go-to people--who says that, in the end, he sees even the wealthy having modulated diets away from the habit of eating whatever we can eat, just because we can afford it.
In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, there were 3.7 billion people on Earth. Now there are nearly 7 billion people. H