@e_flux wrote:
In The Guardian, Damian Carrington interviews biologist Paul Ehrlich, who fifty years ago published The Population Bomb, a book that predicted dire ecological consequences if the human population of the earth was not reduced and consumption drastically curbed. He is no more optimistic today, suggesting that we are mere decades away from civilizational collapse. Read an excerpt from the interview below, or the full text here.
Ehrlich has been at Stanford University since 1959 and is also president of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, which works “to reduce the threat of a shattering collapse of civilisation”.
“It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems,” he says. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.”
It is the combination of high population and high consumption by the rich that is destroying the natural world, he says. Research published by Ehrlich and colleagues in 2017 concluded that this is driving a sixth mass extinction of biodiversity, upon which civilisation depends for clean air, water and food.
Image of plastic pollution via The Guardian.
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