Coda

John L. Brooke

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139050814.017

Coda

A Rough Journey into an Uncertain Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014

John L. Brooke

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John L. Brooke: Affiliation:
Ohio State University

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Summary

The emergence of the modern economy has made humanity an agent in abrupt climate change and, more broadly, abrupt planetary change. In a flash of either geological or human evolutionary time, human populations have doubled and redoubled to more than 7 billion, twenty-four times the number inhabiting the earth 1,000 years ago; six times the number two centuries ago. In just the past sixty years, human populations have more than doubled, and in a great burst of creative energy and economic and technological transformation, our role in building greenhouse gases has tripled, and we have begun to disrupt the natural systems and services that have sustained us for millions of years. Projections put global population in the year 2100 at 10 billion, long since seen as the outer carrying capacity of the earth. We now stand facing an uncertain future, and hope that our wits, which brought us to a precarious place, will suffice to ensure the sustainability of future generations.

Behind the trajectories that have suddenly launched us out of premodernity lies a tangled paradox of human numbers, prosperity, and earth system stability. On one hand, the evidence of the demographic transition is clear and unequivocal: economic development and a general improvement of human well-being slows population growth by reducing fertility. The decline in fertility that marks the closing of the demographic transition, long completed in the developed world, is advancing significantly in the developing world. But the achieving this goal will require massive resources and energy production – inevitably producing massive quantities of greenhouse gases and further contributing to global warming. The prospect of an irreversible tipping point to a new regime of planetary ecology taking us into a very hostile future lies just over the horizon. Resolving this paradox while we forestall this tipping point, if it can be done, will take all the intellectual, political, and material resources that we can bring to bear.

Type: Chapter
Information: Climate Change and the Course of Global History
A Rough Journey
, pp. 559 - 580

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139050814.017 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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Coda

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