Society & Culture - Posted by Bjorn Carey-Stanford on Tuesday, January 15, 2013 11:04 - 2 Comments 
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Civilization survives if women have equal rights
A team of biologists suggests that the single best step toward avoiding a global collapse of civilization is to give total equality to women around the world. "This will allow us to include more of their brainpower to help solve these problems," says Paul Ehrlich. (Credit: Michael Foley/Flickr)
STANFORD (US) — The collapse of civilization can be avoided by reducing consumption and expanding women’s role in society, biologists report.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
Throughout history, every great human civilization has experienced a significant crisis. And although the outcomes of these crises have varied from total eradication (the Classic Maya) to depression and eventual recovery (China), each collapse has been regional in scale.
Now, a variety of problems have combined to move the global civilization toward a collapse. The key drivers of collapse, according to Stanford University scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, are overpopulation and overconsumption by the wealthy.
The side effects of the very practices that have allowed humans to prosper have combined to put incredible strain on the planet’s natural systems—and to threaten future generations.
Despite this grim outlook, the biologists offer a roadmap for avoiding society’s total collapse, emphasizing that giving women equal rights worldwide is a critical first step. Their findings are published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Consumption gone wild
Studies of the planet’s ecological footprint suggest that sustaining today’s 7 billion people at current standards will require roughly an additional half planet of resources (or, four to five more Earths if all citizens of the planet were to consume at the level of the United States).
The human population is projected to reach 9.6 billion by the middle of this century. Such growth compounds the consumption problem, because each person added to the planet requires a greater allotment of natural resources than the person who came before.
This non-linear trend traces to the start of human civilization: as populations grew from soil-rich river valleys, humans were forced to farm more marginal land, and required more resources—land, fertilizer, energy, etc.—to produce the same quantities of food.
“The next 2.5 billion people will do much more damage than the 2.5 billion added since the 1970s,” says Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, “because people use the richest, most easily extracted resources first.”
Women and contraception
There are hopeful signs that technological efforts—such as improving agricultural practices, replacing fossil fuels with innovative energy solutions, and reducing greenhouse emissions—could meet the demands of future generations, Ehrlich says, “but you can’t save the world on hope alone.”
Rather than working to make the planet hospitable for 9.6 billion people, the authors suggest that scientists focus on how to humanely lower birth rates far enough to reduce that number to 8.6 billion, and then moderating consumption to fit within Earth’s carrying capacity.
“Anything less is threatening the lives of our grandchildren,” Ehrlich says.
The single best step toward avoiding a collapse, Ehrlich says, is to give total equality to women around the world. “This will allow us to include more of their brainpower to help solve these problems,” he says.
“And studies have shown that when women are given full rights, they have fewer children, which will help slow birth rates. We also need to give every sexually active human free access to modern contraception and emergency abortion.”
Modern society has shown some ability to deal with issues that threaten future generations—minimizing the risks of nuclear conflict, for instance—but it will require natural and social scientist, activists and especially politicians to coordinate an international effort to get people to adopt change.
“One of the saddest things is that the scientific community has described, in detail, the environmental factors leading to the collapse for quite some time, but society has not reacted,” Ehrlich says.
“After all, the US just had a presidential election in which the crucial issues facing society were not debated. Instead the focus was on financial problems easily solved by negotiation among people. You can’t negotiate with nature.”
Source: Stanford University
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2 Comments
Joe
Chris Madfdigan
I thought the world stopped taking Ehrlich seriously decades ago, His progonstications have been proved wrong time and time again, That has never stopped him repeating his failed predictions – just pushing the date of doomsday further into the futureas his earlier deadlines sail past and the world grows richer and the poor and hungry fewer.
Now he attempts to tart up his message by forging an artificial connection to women’s rights. It is true that birth rates decline as womens rights and education improve. What he ignores is that improvement in womens rights and education is dependedent in a growth in wealth.
Womens rights in the west didn’t improve because all of a sudden we had a change of heart. They improved because they became feasible. They improved because we had the wealth and technology to enable society to function in a world where women were equal. I am not just talking about reproductive technology like the pill. Far more important has been the mechanisation of production making manual strength less important and vastly improved productivity of what might be called domestic labor through clothes washers, dishwashers, and the outsourcing of most food production to industrial scale production (sauces, frozen food ready to cook etc -just look at a supermarket at all the things that once had to be made in the home). In addition widespread access by women to high quality education requires an economic surplus that is only availlable in wealthy societies.
The wealth that Ehrlich condemns is the prerequisite for women’s equality – not its cause.
Though it may be based on scientific facts, the conclusions and recommendations are somewhat shallow and place very little faith the our ability as humans to develop breakthroughs and change. A hundred years ago, “scientists” like these would have suggested a cap at much less than our current population, yet we have survived and flourished. We should be more responsible, but simply saying birth control is the solution and calling it science is a shame.