We must plan a survival strategy for our species

…Earlier this month, I attended a week-long blue-chip scientific workshop on measuring sustainability, organised by the Ernst Strungmann Forum in Frankfurt, Germany. Some of the best boffins in the business were there to discuss how sustainably we use, or could use, water, land, energy and materials – what you might call the four horsemen of our environmental apocalypse.

But no-one could agree. Nobody even knew how we could measure whether we are moving backwards or forwards. It sounded at times like a gruesome postscript to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, on how civilizations fail. Because maybe that is what it was.

Take something simple. What is the stock of the world’s metals and others materials we dig from the ground? One group said we had five thousand years’ worth at least. Another said they could be effectively gone in 50 years. What they were mainly arguing about was definitions of availability, like the cost in cash and energy of extracting and processing them.

But that’s the question really. What can we “sustainably extract”? No-one has an answer.

Or take land. Some said we should all be living in densely packed cities, and grow our food on high-intensity, high-tech farms, so the rest of the land could be saved for nature. Others said this was completely wrong. We should spread out and develop in ways that allows us to live with nature. Organic farming and urban parks. Which is most sustainable? In Frankfurt they hadn’t a clue.

New Scientist