Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat

Ryan Kenney

Pearce, F. Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat. Yale E360(2009). Available at: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/consumption_dwarfs_population_as_main_environmental_threat/2140/. (Accessed: 22nd January 2018)

1. Before reading this article, I had some prior understanding of the potential consequences concerning overpopulation. Put simply, the exponential increase of the human population will cause a plethora of geographic and humanitarian issues regarding adequate food and water availability, disease spread, quality of life, etc. In addition, I know from this course that consumption is an emerging issue especially with regards to us as Americans.

2. After reading the piece, I had a profoundly new understanding of the issues at hand.  Author Fred Pearce opens with his theory that overconsumption, not population growth, that is the true problem facing humanity. As we talked about in class, the amount of goods that are consumed by individuals in developed countries like United States results in an extreme disproportionate in regards to per capita impact on the environment. In fact, this extreme resource consumption is so high that the world’s richest half billion people are responsible for 50% of total CO₂ emissions (Pearce). I also found it troubling that one American produces as much CO₂  as “four Chinese, 20 Indians, or 250 Ethiopians” (Pearce). While the rise in overall global population is certainly going to cause a plethora of issues in the coming future, I feel this statistic effectively summarizes Pearce’s thesis. In addition, it is the United States who is dubbed the world’s largest consumer. Beyond just emissions, the U.S. is the largest consumer of most of the world’s commodities, including corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, and oil/natural gas (Pearce).

3. I feel this is directly relevant to the issues of sustainability we cover in this course. The concept of sustainable consumption habits and resource usage is one that will be extremely important in coming years as humans continue to impact the environment more severely. With the United States as the world’s largest consumer, it is crucial that environmental science students understand the magnitude of our current unsustainable consumption rate.

4. I thought Pearce’s explanation of environmental scientist Garret Hardin’s concept of “lifeboat ethics”. In a resource constrained world, “Each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in” (Pearce). With resources as the so-called lifeboat  only possible to support a finite amount of people, the rich people are already “in the boat”. Interesting to think about and effectively explains the issue.