I just came across this yesterday. It’s a terrifying stat to confront. And given that it included the Covid years and we’ve rebounded with a vengeance post that, we’ve likely breached the entire century’s consumption now inside a decade by a fair margin.
Abhishek Jain of CEEW recently asserted in a discussion that the energy problem we faced would essentially have to be solved in materials. And then, Nate Hagens made a similar point about the correlation between those as well as the GDP.
Our idea of progress, what we see as prosperity, our civilizational wins, our stock markets, our comfort & convenience — all are deeply and intrinsically linked to an ever increasing array of goods and services we produce using materials of all sorts ever faster. Indeed, the planetary boundary we’ve transgressed the most is that of novel entities — a fancy scientific reference to the myriad, ever more complex materials we have mined the earth for and keep churning out.
Our sense of wellbeing — ironically for something causing the level of harm it is already — is dependent on more consumption of more materials. We cannot enjoy slow, less and the natural world itself anymore — we need and value only the human created trinkets produced from it.
Materials are energy. They are also waste. And we neither think about the impacts on the energy side nor the end of life impacts on soil, water, air and our health and that of ecosystems we depend on. There’s emissions, and biodiversity loss resulting from these at a scale that our minds cannot really grapple with — but the first fact above gives a little peek into.
Given the huge lock into the dependence — physical, psychological, economic, social and political — on this crazy destruction at the scale it has gotten to, I cannot but feel very pessimistic about the prospects of recovering from it.
Of course we have to give it a shot. But the change needed is of everything — not just energy sources and production systems, but our imaginations, ideas of value and prosperity and social, economic, political beliefs. And all of this needs to happen rapidly, almost all at once.
I’m sorry, kids, that we did not start doing this much, much earlier. I’m sorry that we’ve not really started on this journey earnestly even now. And while I promise to try whatever I can in my own little ways, I would not want to delude you into believing that we’ll actually manage to make the deep changes we need to.
I hope you guys do, and behave, a lot, lot better.
