Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

The February episode of Nature Bats Last featured a conversation with Professor Paul Ehrlich where we discussed his recent bomb shell paper titled “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future” co-written with two former guests on the show Corey Bradshaw and Geraldo Ceballos et al.
The episode is embedded here:

“We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.”
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

Guy mentioned the following paper also co-written by Professor’s Ehrlich and Ceballos:
Abstract:
“The ongoing sixth mass species extinction is the result of the destruction of component populations leading to eventual extirpation of entire species. Populations and species extinctions have severe implications for society through the degradation of ecosystem services. Here we assess the extinction crisis from a different perspective. We examine 29,400 species of terrestrial vertebrates, and determine which are on the brink of extinction because they have fewer than 1,000 individuals.”
Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction

The issue of collapse and extinction is becoming more mainstream by the day. Check out the article below from the L.A. Times”
“It’s not hard to find the “collapseology” studies they are talking about. In a report for the sustainability group Future Earth, a survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, freshwater shortages and the broad degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems “have the potential to impact and amplify one another in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse.” A 2019 report from the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, a think tank in Australia, projected that a rapidly warming world of depleted resources and mounting pollution would lead to “a largely uninhabitable Earth” and a “breakdown of nations and the international order.” Analysts in the U.S. and British military over the past two years have issued similar warnings of climate- and environment-driven chaos”. Op-Ed: Collapseologists are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable

At the beginning of the interview I asked Paul how he was recovering from the Australian bush fires that wiped out 20% of Australia’s forest in one fire season: ‘Unprecedented’ globally: more than 20% of Australia’s forests burnt in bushfires

About Kevin Hester

I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.