Unless you’re brave enough to consider the reality of our global environmental situation, don’t read this. Confronting it is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic, but of being realistic—of assessing what we’re doing on our planet, what we want to avoid, what we want to accomplish, and what we can do both collectively and individually to have a more promising future. In one more year we will have reached a quarter of the way to 2100, and we are well on our way to creating conditions that we will either applaud or bemoan.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Welcome to 2024Tag Archives: Overpopulation
The Quadra Project: Polycrisis
A new word, “polycrisis”, has entered the vocabulary of ecologists, particularly those scientists who are monitoring the health of the entire planet. Some of these scientists are uncomfortable with the word, arguing that it is an alarmist term. They believe that we have various crises, in the plural, but they are not indicative of the widespread description that is implicit in such a cataclysmic term as polycrisis. Some historians say that what we are experiencing “is just history happening.”
Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the relationship between ecology and human behaviour, argues that such a term as polycrisis is an apt description of what is actually happening on our planet, and it is the result of multiple factors. The word, he says, was first coined in the 1990s at the World Economic Forum to describe the “tangled mess of problems” that seemed to be occurring—“pandemic, war, climate extremes, energy shortages, inflation, rising authoritarianism, and the like.” The term, however, proved useful.
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The Quadra Project: Overshoot – Part 2
The essence of the proposition that Professor William Rees presents in The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable, is that human population, consumption and pollution have combined to exceed the ability of our planet’s limited ecological systems to sustain it. This situation is not unusual. It has commonly happened in the past with other civilizations, and is a frequent and natural occurrence in all biological systems. Overshoot, then, is just the inability of species to be supported by their environment if they exceed its carrying capacity. This, Professor Rees suggests, is now the condition in which humanity finds itself. Earth is not big enough, rich enough, or regenerative enough to deal with the impact of more than 8 billion people who are hungry, materialistic, wasteful and unrestrained. The result, he suggests, will be a major “population correction” by the end of this century.
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A UBC Professor Explains What To Look For At COP 28 & Why He Does Not Believe In Overshoot
With the COP 28 only a little more than a week away, the University of British Columbia held a press conference about key issues. In the breakout session, Cortes Currents asked Dr Simon Donner a former COP delegate and professor from the Department of Geography and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, two questions.
- Many people on Cortes and Quadra Islands believe in the Overshoot theory. What do you say to people who believe that Climate Change is a symptom of a much larger problem: there are too many of us living on a planet with rapidly diminishing resources?
The Quadra Project: Overshoot
A fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada is an honour that is not bestowed lightly, so readers can assume that Dr. William Rees, a 79 year-old retired professor from the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning has credibility. Age, experience and scholarship have given authority to his opinions. So his peer-reviewed publication in the August 2023 edition of the academic journal, MDPI, deserves attention.
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major Population Correction Is Inevitable is a sobering analysis of the trajectory of human civilization as it continues to expand, as more and more people consume increasing amounts of the world’s finite resources, and as the resulting waste overwhelms the disposal capabilities of the ecosphere.
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