lørdag 10. mars 2012

Climate change post 12: Exponential growth

We have only one home – planet Earth – and this planet has a finite amount of resources, a fixed boundary that cannot be crossed.

Humans seem totally oblivious to this fundamental limitation, however, and we have created for ourselves a society that is completely dependent and totally addicted to exponential growth. I'm sure you have learnt about the fate of this kind of society in high-school biology when you grew a bacteria culture in a little Petri dish…

The bacterial growth curve has four main stages: a lag phase, an exponential growth phase, a stationary phase and a death phase.

We are certainly not respecting the boundaries of our little planet Earth even though all the evidence suggests that we should have slowed down years ago. Seemingly oblivious, we simply to consume resources and excrete wastes at an ever increasing rate.

If you look at the human population growth history, we are now at the start of the stationary phase. You know what comes next…