People love to read editorials and blogs that rant cleverly, emotionally and articulately, and blame other people for what’s wrong. Pointing the finger at others exonerates us, takes the heat off, makes us feel better about ourselves. What’s the root cause, and who’s to blame?

And then I came back in and read some more of The Truth About Stories, the book I blogged about on Sunday so enthusiastically. And at the end of the book I found my story, perhaps our story, and all the rage I had focused outside was refocused inward, because this story is, at its root, a story of personal failure, cowardice and fear.

Here is what I read:

Our stories are lies. We know they are, but we keep telling them to ourselves and to each other. We keep living them and living in them. Thomas King acknowledges that this, The Truth about Stories, is in itself not a very satisfying story. “No plot. No neat ending. No clever turns of phrase.” (The remaining stories in this book have all three, and are remarkable).

We don’t want to hear the other stories out there in the real world — the stories of what goes on inside the walls of abusive homes, factory farms, prisons, workplaces, schools, laboratories and institutions, and which are overtly played out in inner city streets and throw-away third world countries, the endless litany of violence, physical and psychological, personal and institutional, that occurs millions of times per minute throughout our world. These other stories detract from our ‘comfort and pleasure’. They threaten to crack open the lies in our own story. That we cannot bear.

So the ‘root cause’ I was seeking during my walk with Chelsea is the subversion of our culture, this modern culture of negativism, acquisition, paternalism and scarcity whose ubiquitous, tyrannical story leaves everything in the hands of fate, or god, and absolves us of our responsibility and our sins, and fills us with the constant and consuming terror of not having enough. And we know who’s to blame: The Man in the Mirror (that song was written, ironically, by a woman).

Our story is unfinished. We could change the ending if we want. Create a better ending. It’s all up to us.

[My novel-in-progress will be an attempt to create a new ending, and perhaps a completely new story. I still hope to have it finished by the end of June.]

Back in 1990 when the pundits were predicting US population would peak at 295 million (it passed that level last year and is now expected to peak at between 550 million and 1.2 billion, if it peaks at all), they were saying global population would peak at around 9-11 billion in 2100. But for that to happen with a US population of, say, 900 million instead of 300 million, would mean average third world family size would be much smaller than average US family size. The UN projections, for example, assume annual average growth rate for Africa, Asia and Latin America of 0.5% in the latter half of this century, compared to a current growth rate in those areas (even including China with its already-low birth rate) of 2.1%, and compared to a current US growth rate of 0.9%, which is trending back up to a projected 1.3% rate for most of the current century, thanks to immigration.

So the 9-11 billion global peak population just doesn’t add up. While it doesn’t make sense to get Malthusian and project population will grow indefinitely at current rates (1.3%, i.e. a doubling every 50 years to 24 billion by 2100), it’s equally illogical and irresponsible to suggest that the whole world will start immediately radically reducing its fertility rate to achieve in just two generations the low fertility rate that Europe took one hundred generations to reach. If you assume that the levels of immigration now projected by the US Census Bureau will prevail throughout the developed world, that first- and second-generation citizens of developed countries will continue to have considerably larger-than-replacement level families in their new adopted countries, that the prevailing pro-fertility population dogmas of organized world religions will not suddenly be changed, that population pressure in the third world will be eased somewhat by immigration and that modest drops in family size in those countries will be largely offset by longer life expectancy, as has been observably the case in almost every third world country except China, then instead of the 9-11 billion peak the UN is currently talking about, you end up with population soaring past 14 billion in 2100, with no end in sight (left chart above).

The curved red line shows the carrying capacity of Earth, assuming a modest annual increase in productivity from the current 30 billion acres (productive-capacity adjusted), assuming average footprint per capita continues to increase by a modest 1% per year, and assuming no land on the planet is reserved for wilderness or natural space for the rest of Earth’s creatures. It shows in 2000 that the world could sustain 5 billion humans at the then-prevailing level of consumption. That’s a billion humans less than actually inhabited the planet then, possible only by depriving much of the world of a subsistence level of resources, and by taking more from the Earth (in non-renewable resources) than we replaced, essentially stealing the excess from future generations. At the expected global level of per-capita consumption in 2100 (still well below today’s North American consumption levels), carrying capacity drops to 2 billion humans. That number is substantiated by a recent Cornell study that says the choice in 2100 is between 2 billion people living a comfortable but not lavish life (achieved by a drastic population reduction) or 12 billion “struggling in misery”. And if you want to allow 50% of the planet’s surface for other life forms, you need to achieve double that reduction (green line), to one billion people, the level both Jim Merkel and Bill McKibben think we should strive for. That’s only achievable, short of coercion, by an average one child family worldwide for the next century.

The right chart shows that the increasing average footprint, driven both by North American excess and the surging resource use of China’s billion plus people, will drive the aggregate human footprint up even more sharply than aggregate population, from 37 billion acres today (20% more than Earth’s carrying capacity) to 210 billion acres in 2100 (six times Earth’s carrying capacity). Now remember, these assumptions are much closer to the wildly optimistic assumptions of population levelling that the UN and other global agencies optimistically hope for, than to the Malthusian no-change projections that would see nearly double these numbers. Nevertheless, train wreck ahead.

We simply have no choice. We must immediately and aggressively reduce our family sizes worldwide, and we must immediately and aggressively reduce per-capita resource consumption, waste and footprint. That means we must confront religions that don’t actively encourage birth control and small families, and show those religions to be socially irresponsible. That means, too, we need to introduce ecological taxation measures to make excessive resource consumption and waste prohibitively expensive, and reward those who tread lightly on the Earth.

1. Our ecological footprint (EF) is modestly higher than the North American average. This is due primarily to the fact we live in a larger-than-average house (the average North American home size is 1700 s.f., up from about 1300 s.f. a generation ago), and, as Canadians, we use a lot more BTUs for heating than the average North American.
2. We actually buy less ‘stuff’ than the average North American, by a considerable margin. This is because we tend to save until we can afford better, more expensive, more durable products, so we ‘turn over’ what we own only half as often as the average North American, who disposes of clothing on average every 4 years, computers and small appliances every 3 years, major appliances every 8 years, and furniture every 10 years. This is a staggering amount of waste, and shows the false economy that our consumer culture and the Wal-Mart Dilemma push many people into.
3. Thanks to our progressive community, that recycles paper, plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum, and organics (‘green box’ program), we produce much less unrecycled garbage than the average North American (who adds 3/4 of a ton per year into landfills). I am aghast at the lack of progress in both municipal and business recycling in many parts of the continent.
4. As Merkel’s book progresses, it moves from very simple, logical, sensible steps that can lower your EF, to steps that only a die-hard and exceptionally devoted environmentalist would take. I’m not interested in growing most of my own food, living in a 100 s.f./person home and making my own clothes — that’s way beyond responsible living, even beyond austerity. Even I’m not that idealistic. After going through the workbook sections, I’ve concluded that our EF is less than I thought it would be, and a reasonable ‘zero sacrifice’ target for reducing our EF is more than I thought it would be. So while at first blush I’d pledged to reduce our EF by 80%, I’m lowering that pledge to 50%. That’s still a worthwhile, and not terribly difficult, goal, which will reduce our EF to about 60% of the North American average. But it still leaves our EF at three times the current global sustainable per-capita level. In other words, if everyone in the world lived at our proposed lower EF level, it would take three Earths, and zero population growth starting immediately, to sustain us all, and that would leave no room for all the rest of the life species in the world. Merkel, like McKibben, urges us to pursue an average one-child family strategy to reduce and sustain human population at a billion people, which would allow us all to live at my target EF level (i.e. very comfortably) and still allow half the planet to be left in natural state for other life species.
5. The methods I propose to use to halve our EF are not rocket science:
• Make our home much more energy efficient. Either build a new, exceptionally energy- and space-efficient home on a lot that would be left 90% in its natural state. Or alternatively, as some readers have suggested, do a radical energy retrofit and functional redesign of our existing home, and close off or lease out half of it. Our existing lot is only 50% in natural state, so much of our lawn would have to be returned to forest.
• Change jobs to substantially home-based businesses, and sell one of our two cars — an end to wage slavery.
• Learn to cook (though probably not as well as my wife) so we can become more vegetarian, and eat less processed and packaged foods.
• Learn to be more self-sufficient and self-efficient (fixing things instead of tossing them out).
6. Not only would these changes halve our EF, they would have a comparable impact on our utilities, maintenance, household, transportation, and other costs, allowing us to retire in seven years (if we want to) instead of the projected twenty.
7. The book also talks a lot about overcoming fears — of striking out on your own, of being viewed as ‘weird’, of wilderness, of doing without the possessions that sometimes come to own us, of not having ‘enough’. This is important because Radical Simplicity is about culture change, and while I’m convinced our lower-EF end-state will be idyllic, it’s the journey, the ‘letting go’ that’s difficult, and ultimately, in some ways, a leap of faith.

I still recommend the book, but you’ll need to look past some of the more over-the-top rhetoric and the more extreme and impractical reductions in EF, and adapt the ideas to your own circumstances and standards.

Postscript December 29 — please read Kevin Cameron’s comments in the thread to this post. He addresses, much better than either I or Merkel have, the issues that make many people skeptical about the concept and practicality of Radical Simplicity. Kevin also makes some important points that Merkel and I both missed.

More an apologetic and qualified plea than a prescription for change, the book argues that changes to human lifestyle alone are not enough to curtail ecological disaster in the next century, that even by the most optimistic current forecasts human population will peak at catastrophic numbers, and that voluntarily reducing one’s family size in the West has a vastly greater impact than a similar family-size reduction in developing countries where ecological footprint per person is much less.

McKibben is strongly opposed to coercive fertility reduction programs like China’s, and to attempts to make people who opt for larger families feel guilty. He candidly admits the erroneous predictions of  ‘population bomb’ Malthusians. He dispels the myths that ‘only children’ are lonely, deprived or anti-social, but acknowledges that life for ‘singletons’ is in some ways more challenging than life with siblings. He argues that setting limits on immigration (though they need not be severe) can also help to reduce the impact of an exploding population. He explains why getting people to reduce their per-capita consumption is so much more difficult than getting them to reduce their family size (though both are necessary, he argues).  He discusses the reasons for people’s reluctance to adopt instead of having a second child themselves. He acknowledges that smaller family sizes will soon put a new burden on healthy economies as the baby boom reaches retirement, and that even smaller family sizes will prolong that period of extra burden. And then he lays out his proposition in a single sentence, and asks us to think and talk carefully and frequently about it:

No decision any of us makes will have more effect on the world (and on our lives) than whether to bear another child.

That’s it. If you want to hear more about why he belives that discussion and education on this one proposition is so important to the future of the world, E: The Environmental Magazine has a lengthy online interview with McKibben.