f 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. How has people's thinking about Earth Day changed?
There has been a shift in thinking from the first Earth Day to now. Back then, Paul Ehrlich's description of the population bomb was perceived as a global threat that would cause mass mortality and suffering. And, in fact, what has played out has been much more like what I wrote about on the Dot Earth blog several years ago. That is, population cluster bombs have been exploding. Little bomblets, here and there. Some not so little.
Population cluster bombs are in areas where you have persistent high fertility rates and deep poverty, such as many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south Asia. You have high mortality rates--for example, a woman with 15 kids, half of whom will die before they reach their teens. In the same places, you have no real energy choices. The energy poverty, combined with high population locally, can impact ecosystems. People are out scouring for firewood, for example. And firewood is a very inefficient and destructive form of cooking fuel. There are so many options that are cheap and better for you than firewood.
So the difference between 1970 and now is that the population problems around the world are a hugely uneven map. You have exploders, as Jesse Ausubel at Rockerfeller University describes it. And you have imploders, where population is declining steeply, like Russia. And Japan, by the way, is probably going to have half as many people as it has now, later in the century. So the world is very imbalanced. And that kind of situation, with local pressures, creates another thrust, which is more pressure to immigrate or move. That's another whole issue.
In addition to migration across national boundaries, the majority of people on Earth today live in cities versus rural settings, the countryside. Your thoughts?
Cities are hugely important. They will make or break this century, in many ways. In other words, if you have functioning cities that are resilient--that can provide basic living standards for people who come there looking for w