Biodiversity and the Human Factor – The Need to Overcome Humankind’s Addiction to Growth

Abstract

It is often believed that biodiversity loss is principally due to poor environmental management or the failure to preserve critical ecosystems. Although these factors are critical, the greatest threat to biodiversity conservation is unquestionably humankind’s addiction to growth. Economies are subsystems of the larger ecosphere and dissipative structures in the sense that they must continuously digest low-entropy resources and excrete high-entropy wastes to maintain their physical order (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971; Perrings, 1986; O’Connor, 1991; Daly, 1996; Common & Stagl, 2005). Because of thermodynamic limits to both materials recycling and the technical efficiency of production (Ayres & Miller, 1980), the continued growth of economic systems requires an ever-rising rate of resource throughput that must eventually exceed the ecosphere’s regenerative and waste assimilative capacities. Whether we like it or not, all attempts to continuously grow our economic systems must inevitably deplete the natural capital that supports them as well as the critical ecosystems that contain much of the planet’s biodiversity (Jansson et al., 1994; Lawn, 2000, 2007; Victor, 2008). The increase in the rate of throughput, as the global economy expands, and its degenerative impact on natural capital and biodiversity can be represented by way of a comparison between the Earth’s biocapacity and humankind’s ecological footprint (see Figure 1). The global ecological footprint constitutes the area of land required to service humankind’s production and consumption desires, whereas the Earth’s biocapacity constitutes the area of land that is available to service them (Wackernagel et al., 1999). Between 1965 and 2005, humankind’s ecological footprint continuously rose. Worse still, humankind’s ecological footprint began to exceed the Earth’s biocapacity in the mid-1980s (Global Footprint Network, 2008). That is, humankind’s demands on the biosphere eventually surpassed the Earth’s capacity to support them on a long-term sustainable basis. In effect, since the mid1980s, humankind’s ability to meet its production and consumption desires has only been possible by running down stocks of natural capital and, in the process, eroding the Earth’s biodiversity.1