Consumerism: Humans are 'eating the future'

We're often a gloomy lot, with many of us insisting that there's nothing we can do personally about global warming, or that the human race is over-running the planet like a plague.

Unfortunately, according to leading ecologists speaking this week in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, few of us realise that the main cause of the current environmental crisis is 'human nature' and our own activities.

More specifically, all we're doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, selfishly expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available.

Like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all food sources and nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.

Earth dead by 2025
One speaker in Albuquerque, epidemiologist Warren Hern of the University of Colorado at Boulder, even likened the expansion of human cities to the growth and spread of cancer, predicting "death" of the Earth in about 2025.

He points out that like the accelerated growth of a cancer, the human population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, and at this rate will reach a size in 2025 that leads to global collapse and catastrophe.

Juggernaut mentality
What's worse, is that not only are we simply doing what all creatures do: we're doing it better on an industrial scale. In recent times we're doing it even faster because of changes in society that encourage and celebrate conspicuous and excessive consumption, with a Juggernaut mentality.

Fill and consume Habitat
"Biologists have shown that it's a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources," says William Rees of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

"That's what underlies Darwinian evolution, and species that do it best are the ones that survive, but we do it better than any other species," he told me prior to the conference.
Spreading humans

Domination and Expansion
Although we like to think of ourselves as civilised thinkers, we're subconsciously still driven by an impulse for survival, domination and expansion. This is an impulse which now finds expression in the idea that inexorable economic growth is the answer to everything, and, given time, will redress all the world's existing inequalities.

Finite Resources
The problem with that, according to Rees and Hern, is that it fails to recognise that the physical resources to fuel this growth are finite. "We're still driven by growing and expanding, so we will use up all the oil, we will use up all the coal, and we will keep going till we fill the Petri dish and pollute ourselves out of existence," he says.