Why is Overpopulation Ignored by the Media? The Reasons of a Historical Failure

Some people think there exists a conspiracy that prevents the media from ever mentioning the charged word, "overpopulation." Conspiracies do exist but, in this case, my impression is that population is such a charged issue simply because it has to do with the fact that we are all humans and discussing about reducing population touches some inner mechanisms of our psyche that we feel uncomfortable about.

But there is more to that: the real problem with overpopulation is that most decision makers lack the concept of "overshoot,"  a view that didn't exist in the study of social systems until Jay Forrester introduced it in the 1960s.If you don't understand overshoot, at best you can understand that there are limits to population, but you can't understand that population could exceed the limits and crash down ruinously with the deterioration of the agricultural system that feeds it.

The lack of a the concept of overshoot may well be what leads the concerned and the unconcerned to minimize the problem. Many people seem to think that the "demographic transition," the reduction in fertility observed in most rich nations of the world, will spread over all humankind and stabilize the world's population at a sustainable level without any need for governments to intervene to force lower birth rates.

Almost certainly, it is too late for that: we should have started decades ago. But only China implemented a serious policy birth control -- for the rest of the world it was a historical failure.

In the discussion, below, Bernard Gilland discusses the problems we will face in the attempt of stabilizing the human population mainly in terms of the degradation of the agricultural system in its dependence on non-sustainable resources. It is not the only problem, with climate change potentially able to do even more damage to agriculture. At the same time, the many young people in poor countries will push population onto a still growing trajectory. If these two tendencies, population growth and agricultural decline, crash against each other, the result might well be a Seneca Cliff for the world's human population.

A sustainable global population -and why we cannot achieve it

Guest Post by Bernard Gilland


In the period 1975 – 2018, world population increased at an average of 83 million per year, and reached 7.6 billion in 2018. The increase in 2017 was the difference between approximately 145 million births and 62 million deaths. Despite population growth, the global average daily food supply per person rose from 2440 kilocalories in 1975 to 2940 kilocalories in 2015 (1). However, over 800 million people are undernourished and 300 million adults are obese.

Cereals are the most important crops for food and feed; globally, 45 percent of the cereal production is consumed by humans, and 35 percent by livestock. The remainder is used for industrial purposes, including ethanol, beer, whisky and vodka. The rise in world cereal production since the 1960s is mainly due to two technological advances. The first was Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis, in which atmospheric nitrogen is fixed as ammonia (containing 82 percent nitrogen) which plants utilize for protein formation. Production of Haber-Bosch ammonia began in 1913, but did not begin to rise rapidly until the 1960s. The second advance was the Green Revolution that began in the mid-1960s, after agronomist Norman Borlaug had bred varieties of dwarf wheat that give higher yields in response to heavier applications of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation. The breeding and use of semi-dwarf rice and hybrid maize paralleled that of wheat.

The most striking achievement of chemical agriculture is the maize yield in the U.S., which rose from 2.5 tonnes per hectare (40 bushels per acre) in 1950 to 11.0 tonnes per hectare (175 bushels per acre) in 2016. The global cereal yield rose from 2.81 tonnes per hectare in 1992-96 to 3.91 tonnes in 2012-16 (2). Linear extrapolation of the 1992 - 2016 yield trend (52.3 kg per hectare per year) gives a yield of 5.73 tonnes per hectare in 2050. If the population in 2050 is taken as 9.85 billion (3), and the harvested cereal area remains 718 million hectares (as in 2016), production per person in 2050 would be 420 kg, 10 percent above the 2016 level of 382 kg; the uncertainty is about 10 percent either way. Assuming that the global average cereal yield without using nitrogen fertilizer is 1.6 tonnes per hectare, and that fertilizer increases grain yield by 30 kg per kg nitrogen applied, the global average nitrogen application on cereal crops, 80 kg per hectare in 2015, would be approximately 140 kg per hectare. If the incremental yield-nitrogen ratio rises to 35 by 2050, the nitrogen application would be 120 kg per hectare.

The success of the Green Revolution created three major ecological problems:

1. Globally, about half the applied nitrogen is taken up by the crop plants; the remainder volatilizes in the form of ammonia and nitrous oxide (a powerful greenhouse gas) or leaches to groundwater, resulting in eutrophication (the formation of algae) in rivers, lakes and coastal waters; this creates “dead zones” in which fish cannot live.

2. Applying nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizer to crops changes the balance between these nutrients and those needed in small or trace amounts; the latter include calcium, sulphur, magnesium, iron, manganese, copper, zinc, cobalt, boron and selenium.

3. Approximately 40 percent of global irrigation water is obtained by pumping groundwater from tube wells; this has resulted in the depletion of aquifers and the lowering of groundwater levels, thereby contributing 0.4 mm to the global sea level rise of 3.4 mm per year (4).

As population growth increases the need for fertilizer, it follows that population reduction would ultimately solve the ecological problems. Unfortunately, human nature is such that global population reduction is not feasible. The reasons for this are given in the following.

In 1950, France had a population of 42 million and 20 million hectares of arable land, i.e. 2 persons per arable hectare. The nitrogen fertilizer application on cereals was negligible, and cereal production per person was about 400 kg per year, slightly higher than the present world average. If the ratio of population to arable land were 2 persons per hectare on the world’s 1.6 billion arable hectares, world population would be 3.2 billion. Reducing world population to this size would mean reducing the global average fertility rate (currently 2.5 children per woman) to 1.5 by 2050 and holding it at that level until 2200. The proportion of the population in the 65+ age-group would rise to 35 percent. Such a drastic change in the age distribution would mean raising the pensionable age to 70 years or more.

Adopting and enforcing a population limit for each country would be an insurmountable obstacle, as Charles Galton Darwin pointed out in 1952 (5). To lower the global average to 2 inhabitants per arable hectare, countries such as Canada, Russia, Australia and Argentina would not be required to reduce their populations, but would not be permitted to reach 2 inhabitants per arable hectare; they would be obliged to have a grain surplus for export to countries that need grain imports. China and India would each have to reduce its population to roughly 300 million; the combined population of the two countries would then be 20 percent of the world population instead of the present 35 percent (6). The relative population reductions in Japan and Egypt, which have 30 and 33 inhabitants per arable hectare respectively, would be much greater (6).

The population of China is projected to peak at 1.45 billion around 2030 and decline to one billion by 2100. This is partly a result of the so-called one-child policy launched in 1979 (in reality a 1.5-child policy). It was replaced by a two-child limit in 2016, but the fertility rate remains 1.6. Japan has a population of 126 million and a fertility rate of 1.4; the population is projected to decline to 102 million in 2050 and 60 million in 2100. These projected long-term declines are likely to be halted by pro-natalist policies based on the advice of growth-obsessed economists who believe that population decline results in a shortage of labour. A world population peak of at least 10 billion is almost inevitable, and this would make 70 percent of the world’s population dependent on Haber-Bosch ammonia. This is not sustainable, but there is no solution in sight. As a sustainable population cannot be attained by fertility decline alone, a mortality rise is highly probable. We can only guess when.


Bernard Gillan is an independent researcher with a degree in Engineering, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of several papers on demography and population



NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. FAOSTAT data.

2. World Bank data.

3. Population Reference Bureau. World population data sheet 2018.

4. Konikov, L.F. 2011. Contribution of global groundwater depletion since 1900 to sea-level rise. Geophysical Research Letters, 38; L17401.

5. Darwin, C.G. 1952. The next million years. Hart-Davis, London.

6. Lionos, T.P., A. Pseiridis. 2016. Sustainable welfare and optimum population size. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 18(6), 1679 - 1699. According to the authors, the optimum population of the world is 3.1 billion, and the populations (in millions) of the ten most populous countries are:

China 253, India 341, United States 326, Indonesia 88, Brazil 156, Pakistan 43, Nigeria 79, Bangladesh 17, Russia 249, Japan 9.2. The figure for Egypt is 7.4.

The Hubbert Game - Teaching the Science of Collapse

My students playing the "Hubbert Game." It is a simple operational game illustrating the exploitation of a non-renewable resource and the phenomenon of overshoot and collapse. 

In my presentation at the recent Summer Academy of the Club of Rome, I stressed the point that the major stumbling block we face in managing the ongoing crisis is that most people, and in particular policymakers, lack the concept of "overshoot." As a consequence, they also lack the concepts of peaking and collapsing (also in the form of the "Seneca Cliff"). It is not surprising: the idea of overshoot and collapse is a new development in the science of complex systems. It goes back to a little more than 50 years ago when it was proposed first by Jay Forrester. Earlier on, it simply didn't exist.

So, most people think of the exploitation of natural resources in linear terms, assuming that we can continue extracting oil (a physical thing) as long as we have money (a non-physical thing) to pay for it. When depletion is taken into account, it is done only on the basis of oversimplified and misleading models such as the "resources to production ratio." It is something I have termed "Tiffany's fallacy" (the mineral pie is shrinking and most of what's left is in the sky).

The recent summer academy of the Club of Rome in Florence brought back to my attention the need of exposing people to the basic concepts of the dynamics of real bioeconomic systems. Young people who care about the survival of humankind and of the earth's ecosystem know a lot of things, but I noted that they too often miss the concept of overshoot and collapse. That's something that I had already noted years ago and it had led me to develop an operational game called "The Hubbert Game."

The Hubbert game is a simple boardgame that needs no computers and no special equipment except some black and white counters used to mark oil fields. It is designed to be run in a few hours at most and to provide to players a "hands-on" experience of what means to run a company that exploits non-renewable resources. Players take the role of oil companies which compete in exploiting the gradually dwindling oil resources. The game is competitive and some versions involve strategic choices; the game surely tends to capture the attention of the players. The final result is always the same, the pattern of oil production, in the game as in the real world, tend to look like the "bell shaped" Hubbert curve.  You can see the curve below, hand drawn from the results of a game session

The Hubbert game is described in detail in a paper that I presented at the 2016 conference of the System Dynamics Society in Delft, Holland. There is also an earlier version which I uploaded on the "academia.edu" site. As I keep experimenting, new versions may appear.

In the meantime, the game seems to be enjoying a certain popularity, at least in Italy. It has been used by my colleague Luca Pardi for his class in environmental economics at the University of Florence. It was played in a high school and it is planned for the "night of the researchers" to be held this Sep 29 in Trento. You see here a snapshot of the flyer of the game for that occasion (h/t Luciano Celi and Luca Pardi).

Will this game have some positive effects? Well, in an earlier post I said that we need something like "a new axial age" to develop the tools we need to manage the earth's ecosystem (which includes humankind as an element). So, it is hard to think that a boardgame will save the world. But it is a step in the right direction and, after all, it is fun!

Reducing inequality: does it still make sense in a world of more than seven billion people? Kate Pickett's talk at the Summer Academy of the Club of Rome in Florence

Kate Pickett spoke at the Summer Academy of the Club of Rome, in Florence, on Sep 9, 2017. (the picture above is from another meeting)

Inequality is a subject rarely touched in the mainstream debate. Is probably safe to assume that the general public doesn't know that inequality not only exists, but it is rapidly growing. When the subject appears, such as when you read about Bill Gates and his ilk, the issue is normally dismissed by noting that "today, the poor have cell phones and flat-screen TVs" or maybe that "life expectancy keeps increasing."

Yet, things are not so simple and inequality is not just a question of which toys people have access to. It is also well known that the rich live longer than the poor. Inequality is a relative phenomenon and it is correlated to the perception of one's status in society. Perceiving oneself as being part of a lower stratum of society has negative effects on people's health, self esteem, social skills, and more. Kate Pickett correctly noted these issues in her talk in Florence and she built up an impressive series of data showing how inequality is bad for society as a whole. It was a point that deeply resonated with her audience. 

Of course, it is unlikely that we'll ever be able to eliminate social inequality and surely Kate Pickett doesn't propose to turn our society into some kind of Marxist paradise. But, by all means, she is right when she says that it makes sense to reduce inequality or, at least, to stop its growing trends. The problem is how. Here, Pickett's talk was weak. 

Mainly, Pickett seems to propose a return to the progressive taxes of some decades ago, but a reform in this direction seems to go against the grain of everything that's happening in our world. If the rich are in control of society (and they are) how can we convince them to tax themselves more? That underlies a bigger and unsolved problem: what are the origins of the "Great U-Turn" in the early 1980s that changed the trend from diminishing to growing inuquality? We are dealing with a poorly understood phenomenon and we don't know how to act on it. 

But there is an even bigger problem with the idea of reducing inequality: it is the size of the human population. In the 1960s, the Club of Rome had started its existence on the basis of concerns for social inequality rather than those for which it would become better known later on, the limits to growth. At that time, there were less than four billion people on the Earth. But, today, the number of people has doubled to 7.5 billion and it keeps growing. The stress on the remaining natural resources has increased, just as the problem of pollution in the form of global warming and the associated climate catastrophe. 

In these conditions, how to reduce inequality? Increasing the consumption levels of the poor implies further increasing the burden on the natural system. Maybe that could be compensated by forcing the rich to reduce their consumption levels. Unlikely, to say the least, but, even if that were possible, it wouldn't change the trend of increasing exploitation of the already overexploited natural resources. Redistribute consumption is not enough, we need to drastically reduce it if we want to avoid the Seneca Cliff awaiting our civilization. 

We should have done that 50 years ago, when it was still possible and when Aurelio Peccei and other founders of the Club of Rome were proposing it. Now, it may be too late. This apparently unsolvable dilemma was examined by Jacopo Simonetta in a post that appeared on "Cassandra's Legacy" last year, reproduced below. (see also a comment by Diego Mantilla)

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Social Equality and the Destruction of the Planet

Cassandra's Legacy, Thursday, June 16, 2016

by Jacopo Simonetta

Exaggerated inequality is surely a major problem in today's societies, and it keeps increasing. I, too, certainly believe that this scandal must end, but the topic of the article is another one: is it true that redistribution of wealth would have a good effect on the Earth health? Many very influential people believe this, but I am not so sure.

Evidently, affluent people consume much more than poor people do, but how much? As far as I know, there are no studies correlating the environmental impact and social classes but, as starting point, we could compare how CO2 emissions change with income. (data Word Bank and Wikipedia respectively).  

  

Social equity and consumption: Comparison between per capita income (in blue) and CO2 emissions (in red). 


It is clear that CO2 emissions increase with income, but less than proportionally in the central part of the curve. In fact, in very low incomes, the increase in emissions is very fast against modest increases. Then they go up rather slowly, to return to peak with the very, very rich people. Important local fluctuations are also correlated to climate, geography, local traditions, social organisation and so on. 

Now, as a mental exercise, we can take for good the statement that 1% of the global population appropriates 50% of world income. This means that about 75 million people earn an average income of 500,000 $ per capita per year. So, let us imagine that we can distribute all this wealth among the remaining 99% of the world population (let's call it "Operation Robin Hood"). This means more or less 5,000$ per capita. Even for a large part of the western middle class, this would be a big help. For the majority of people this would drastically change one's life. Billions of people would finally eat to satiety, dress decently, live inside houses, send their children to school, heal the sick and much more. People a little higher in the income ladder could get a new car, go on holidays, and so on. 

Very good, but what would be consequences for the planet? 

Let's try to analyze the question. As a rough approximation, we can start classifying humanity in four meta-categories: the very rich (let us presume they are 1%, so about 75 millions); the affluent (let us presume 1 billion people); the Middle class (according to "The Economist", about 3 billion people); the poor (may be 2 billion), and the very poor (according to FAO, about 1 billion). 

Comparing per-capita income and emissions in different countries, and assuming that there are all the social classes in each country, we can argue that the very rich produce about 20 tons of CO2 each per year. The affluent 10 tons each; the middle 6 tons each, the poor 2 tons each, and the very poor 0,1 tons each. For a total amount of about 36 billion tons of CO2. “Operation Robin Hood" would lead to disappearance of the lower class and a perceptible improvement in the life style of the poor and the middle class. At the same time, also the super-rich would disappear, while nothing would change for the affluent people. 

And what would that mean in terms of total CO2 emissions? Well, we just multiply the per capita emissions by the total number of people per category. The result is a grand total of about 55 billions tons, that is a 50% increment with respect to the present emissions. Social equality doesn't seem to be so good for the planet.

But there is more: Operation Robin Hood would produce a sensible reduction in mortality, and probably an increment in natality too, among low wage people. So a sharp population increase, at least for one or two generations.

Evidently, that's just an example, not a realistic simulation. But the core conclusion, that a better life for the majority of people would be disastrous for the planet, is consistent with more sophisticated models available. In the 2004 edition (Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update), the Meadows group published a scenario where they supposed that since 2002 the birth rate is 2 children per woman and industrial production is equally distributed to everybody at a level 10% more than the global mean in the year 2000. It means much less for rich people and much more for the poor.

Word3 scenario with birth control and equal distribution of goods.(From Meadows et al. 2004)


Skipping the details, we can see that in this scenario there is a period of abundance that lasts some 20 years more than it does in the basic scenario (Business as Usual). But later the system collapses in a very similar way. And note that none of the people asking today for a more equal wealth distribution don't want any sort of birth rate control. We have no published scenario of what the outcome of these hypotheses wold be, but is not hard to argue that with a growing population andntemporary wealth distribution the system would collapse very quickly. 

Another model that's relevant to our topic is "HANDY, From a scientific perspective this model, derived from an ultra-famous one by Lotka and Volterra, is too simplified to represent a system as complex as an advanced society. In particular, it neglects feedbacks existing between hierarchy, social complexity, specialization and the capability of the societal system to absorb low entropy from the outside. Unfortunately, this is one of the core feedbacks which shape the evolution of human societies. This largely reduces the viability of the model and explains the absurdity of some of the scenarios proposed. Anyway, "HANDY" has the merit of being the first model to try to introduce the social element inside a dynamic model. Here are some of the results of the model.

The above result is rather absurd since it implies that the elites keep growing even after the commoners have collapse. However, on the whole, the results of this model can be seen at least as the indication that a low level of inequality tends to shape more stable and resilient societies. In my opinion, a cursory glance at history seems to confirm this hypothesis. It is consistent also with what we have said before and with Word 3. A low level of inequality produces a more cohesive society and a highly legitimate leadership which tends to lower and to extend the peak phase of a society.

But, and this is the point, social equality is not sufficient to avoid systemic collapse if society is based on non-renewable resources.

After all, we have already seen all of this in the real world. Please observe the curves of USA and China CO2 emissions from 1990 and 2010.

The US economy trudged along with a low GDP increase completely concentrated in the top class, with a deterioration of the life level in the middle and low classes. The result has been a modest reduction in emissions.

In the same time, in China the life of the large majority of people improved and emissions skyrocketed. Because of that, the population too increased, in spite of a low birthrate. Just imagine to duplicate the China experiment: do you really believe that the Planet will survive?

Conclusions 

It is true that billionaires are rich and I am not; this makes it possible that they are greater experts than me about money and power. But, nevertheless, it seems to me that, historically, smart leadership have always managed to redistribute a part of their revenue in ways useful to consolidate their legitimacy and hence their political power. It means that a partial redistribution of incomes would be to the advantage, first of all, of the top class people. But this is a lesson that the present day élite, largely consisting of pirates and sociopaths, has apparently forgotten.

Secondly, such action surely would improve the life of the poor, but just for a short time because, if done worldwide, the experiment would end in an unimaginable global catastrophe. Does this mean we have to be thankful to our kleptocrats? I don't believe so. It means that the reduction of inequalities must be done by reducing the income of the very rich and not by improving the commoners' wages. But this perspective is refused by everyone: right and left, south and north, up and down.

The "Seneca Cliff", how the concept evolved

An image taken at a recent meeting in Barcelona. You can see the evolution of the concept of "collapse", from Malthus to Forrester. The latter can be seen as the true originator of the concept that I call the "Seneca Cliff" or the "Seneca Effect" 

Malthus (1766 - 1834) is supposed to be the catastrophist in chief, the prophet of doom whose prophecies never came to pass. And yet, if you read what he wrote (not everyone does), you see that he never mentioned the concept, familiar to us, of "civilization collapse". Malthus was perfectly able to imagine pestilences, wars, and famines; all common occurrences at his time. But he wasn't aware of the idea that population could grow well above the "Malthusian limit" and then crash.

The idea of a cyclical pattern of growth and decline came much after Malthus, you find its origins in biological studies, with Lotka and Volterra being perhaps the first to propose it in the form of a mathematical model in the 1920s and 1930s. Later on, in the 1950s, Marion King Hubbert proposed his "bell-shaped" curve for the cycle of production of crude oil in a specific region. For us, it is a relatively well known story even though most people seem to remain convinced that - somehow - growth can go on forever.

Finally, the idea that the bell shaped curve is asymmetric was explicitly expressed in terms of a mathematical model by Jay Forrester, in the 1960s, Even though Lucius Annaeus Seneca had already proposed it in qualitative terms long before, Forrester can be seen as the true originator of the concept of "Seneca Cliff."

Over more than a century of work, humankind has developed tools that make us able to face the future. We only have a little problem: we are not using them; our current leaders don't even know that such tools exist. And so, our destiny is to slide down, blindfolded, along the Seneca Cliff.

The causes of overshoot finally explained in detail

- The more I cut, the more the GdP goes up.

- I say: jobs, not branches!!

 - I can't stop cutting, but I can capture sawdust and sequester it into the tree hollow.

 - Do you really believe in this story of 'gravity'? I am not convinced at all.

- I am not a woodsman, but I say this: if this branch was supposed to fall, why do we see so many branches, up there? 

- The models of the branch mechanical properties are still too uncertain.

 - Such a small cut in this big branch, why should I be worried?

- I have been cutting this branch for quite a while and nothing has happened. Why should anything happen?

- Branches fall all the time; it is a natural phenomenon.

- It is just an engineering problem. They'll find something to keep the branch up.

- If we stop cutting, it will cost us more than the hospital bill for the fractures caused by the fall.

- The Pope? What does the Pope know about trees? He should stick to theology!

- .......................................

Overshoot

The many comments appearing all over the Web for the death of William Catton , the author of "Oversoot", show how deep the impact of this book was on many of us. 

"Overshoot" was part of that wave of books and studies of the 1960s and 1970s which tried to come to terms to the consequences of the unavoidable limitation of the natural resources available to humankind. The initiator of the trend was, perhaps, Garrett Hardin with his 1968 "The Tragedy of the Commons." Earlier on, in 1956, Marion King Hubbert had proposed the concept of "peaking" of oil production, a remarkable first in a field in which the term "depletion" was all but banned. But Hubbert remained within the conventional paradigm that saw technology as able to solve all problems and he believed that nuclear energy would come to the rescue. Hardin, and later Catton and others, instead, saw the root of the problem in humankind's behavior: the tendency to overexploit natural resources; to use today what should be left for tomorrow. The basic message of "Overshoot" is that overexploitation is a basic consequence of the way human beings behave in the ecosystem. It is not something that can be solved by technological wizardry.

We may compare "Overshoot" to another book that carried a similar message: "The Limits to Growth" of 1972. Conceived at about the same time (even though "Overshoot" was published only in 1980), these two books can be seen as opposite in terms of public relation strategies. Overshoot never was a best-seller, nor it was translated in any language (except, recently, in Russian and Spanish). Instead, "The Limits to Growth" was sold in millions of copies and translated into almost every language which appears in print. But, as a consequence, "The Limits to Growth" was the target of a strong demonization campaign which turned into an obligatory laughing stock for anyone who dared to mention it in public. "Overshoot", instead, escaped the attention of the powers that be and never received the same treatment. So, it has been quietly influencing an entire generation of people who have understood the root causes of our problems (see, e.g. this comment by John Michael Greer).

Re-examined more than 40 years after its conception, "Overshoot" appears dated in many details but not in its basic message. Its strength remains having posed so openly and so clearly the essence of the problem: human beings are part of the ecosystem and they tend to behave accordingly; trying to expand as much as possible and to appropriate as many resources as they can. It is normal: we are gradually discovering how the laws of physics and biology apply to the economy (Hardin was a biologist, after all). Unfortunately, if humans behave as just one of the species of the ecosystem, they tend to appropriate as many resources as they can, and as fast as possible. Then, the result is the phenomenon called "overshoot," with the associated suffering, destruction, and assorted disasters at least for that subsystem of the ecosystem we call "humankind". Can we avoid that? So far, it doesn't seem so: we even refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists.

On the other hand, if overshoot is part of the way the ecosystem works, we have to accept it; no matter how bad its consequences can be, at least from our viewpoint of human beings. One of the rules of the ecosystem is that in order for something new to be born, something old has to die. That is how the ecosystem has been working for billions of years; it will keep working in the same way for the future; with or without human beings. 

Italy: overshooting the bear

A poster in favor of the bear named Daniza, under threat of capture or suppression in Italy. It says "Leave alone Daniza and her cubs, otherwise I'll never come back to Trentino" (Trentino is the Northern region of Italy where the story is unfolding). Killing and destroying everything which is not under direct human control is the origin of the disaster called "overshoot". As long as people will not realize that there are limits to the human appropriation of resources on this planet, nothing will change.

If you like to show your support for Daniza and her cubs put your "like" on the Facebook page titled "Io sto con Daniza" (I am with Daniza)



The recent story of the bear called "Daniza" is typical of many stories of this kind. A few days ago, someone went looking for mushrooms in the woods of the Trentino region in Italy and stumbled onto this female bear and her two cubs. He wasn't smart enough to leave the place at the fastest possible speed, as he himself reported later. The alarmed bear decided to teach him a little lesson which, fortunately, left him almost unscathed, rather than consigning him to the records of the Darwin awards. Mother Daniza, apparently, limited herself to chasing the intruder away rather than using all her force against him, as she could have decided to do.

The result: cries of "shoot the bear!". Immediately after the incident, local politicians and local newspapers all seemed to agree on the need of killing Daniza. After a considerable reaction against this idea on the Web, the local government limited the proposed action to capturing the bear; which would probably condemn to death her two cubs. As I am writing, they are still trying to capture Daniza but, so far, she has managed to remain free with her cubs.

Despite the number of people expressing themselves in favor of Daniza and her two cubs, there remains the fact of this immediate and commonplace reaction: wilderness is a problem, wild animals are dangerous. Let's eliminate them and everything will be fine. Which is, after all, the way we tend to try to solve most problems: shoot or bomb the source of the trouble until (hopefully) the problem will disappear.

This attitude is widespread and it is, after all, the main reason for the phenomenon we call overshoot. Recognizing no limits to their action, humans want to appropriate every possible resource of the planetary ecosystem. Whatever opposes this action is ruthlessly eliminated. They don't realize that they are dependent on the ecosystem, rather than the reverse. So, the over-appropriation of the natural resources depletes them to the point that they can't reform fast enough to replace the losses. The result has a name: collapse. Killing Daniza the bear and her cub won't cause the world's economy to collapse, but it is an indication of an attitude which is leading us exactly there.

Here is a telling graph by xkcd showing how little wilderness has remained in the world. And we keep destroying it.