Ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University have sent a letter to President-elect Obama outlining their 7 Necessary Steps needed to avoid destroying our civilization. Here’s the first three:
1) Put births on a par with deaths. …As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living — including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multi-generational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations’ retaining a happy, sustainable life style.
To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies.
2) Put conserving on a par with consuming. At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie. One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets.
3) Transform the consumption of education. Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” — something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others — and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament — the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations.
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