Global Footprint Stress Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow 1-3), Low (white <1)
Last month I wrote an article
suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e.
the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned
and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what
Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven
aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their
population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains
that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population
of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the
ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when
opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated
a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by
multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate,
and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country.
As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress
index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and
demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has
as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now
computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above,
which is computed as follows:
- First, I calculated the Resource Use Index
by taking the aggregate Ecological Footprint (EF) of each country in
hectares (the per capita footprint from sources such as the Living Planet Report, times the country's population), and dividing it by the number of habitable
hectares of land in the country (I used as a proxy for this the lesser
of 80% of total land area and 200% of Oxford's 'arable land area'
data). This very useful number indicates the number of times over each
country's citizens are using the renewable and sustainable resources
available to them. A Resource Use index of 1.0 is sustainable. An index
of, say, 5, indicates that to restore the country to sustainability, it
needs to do some combination of reducing population and reducing
per-capita resource consumption, by a combined 80%. The table below
shows some sample Resource Use indices I computed.
- Then I multiplied this Resource Use Index by the estimated
annual growth rate of the country's aggregate Ecological Footprint. For
this, I started with the annual population growth rate as a proxy (the
EF studies suggest aggregate footprint and population are growing at
roughly the same rate), and then substituted more precise EF growth
rate numbers when I could find them online (China's EF is growing much
faster than its population, for example).
Resource Use Index: Sample Countries
80 Japan
60 S.Korea
40 Israel, Palestine
35 Switzerland
25 Netherlands, Belgium, UK
16 Germany
13 Ireland, France, Italy, Venezuela
11 US, Columbia, Chile, Sweden
|
9 China, Philippines
8 Congo
6 World Overall
6 S.Africa, New Zealand
5 Brasil, Iran, Mexico
3 Canada, India, Iraq, Russia
2 Australia, Argentina
1 A few equatorial African nations |
Footprint Stress Index: Sample Countries
40+ Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait
30 China
18 Congo
12 Venezuela, Columbia
10 US
8 Chile
6 India, Netherlands, Belgium, Iraq
4.5 World Overall
|
4.0 Mexico, Iran, UK
3.0 New Zealand, Sweden
2.0 Brasil, Argentina, Japan, France
1.5 Canada, Australia
1.0 S.Korea, Switzerland
0.5 Germany, Italy
0.0 S.Africa, Russia
|
The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern
nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries
embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China
where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that
are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming
vastly more resources than what they have available domestically, their
populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning
they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed
the soaring need.
Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource
Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and
because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not
increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they all
depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries' natural
resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting
countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these nations'
unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that
will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these scarcities
become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress Index.
What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies are using resources at more than ten times
the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find
the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are not
available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of
the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of this
article and you'll get the idea. We're talking about a world war for
increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right
side of that table then become invasion targets.
We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources to
finance the development of technologies that conserve or don't require
natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources, that
pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies,
so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate deficit
spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of
economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives
for having no children, or maybe one.
Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The
corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness
that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for
the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal
force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep
civilization's engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won't occur fast enough to stave off disaster.
Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into
collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from
the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If
the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine
three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth,
global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in
innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a
social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great
Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of
huge, collective intervention. That's what we need now. The 'market'
isn't going to fix this mess.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
