Global Emergency — economic and social instability

An emergency is a specific condition in a system, whether that system is an organism, a community, an ecology, or all communities and ecologies taken together. This condition signifies that the system is unstable and is not sustainable as it is; it either changes or breaks down. Societies exhibit economic and social instabilities, and nature manifests ecological instabilities. Global instability is the product of the instabilities of particular societies and their environments.

A global emergency is an indication that the set of the human and natural systems of the planet have become unstable and in their present form unsustainable. This emergency is not a catastrophe in itself; it’s an indication that action must be taken to avert a catastrophe.

Economic and social instabilities. The instability of contemporary societies is due to their widespread segmentation, polarization, and incoherence. The gap between the rich and poor, and the powerful and the marginalized is large and still growing. Wealth and income differences have reached staggering proportions. Eighty percent of the global domestic product belongs to one billion people, and the remaining twenty percent needs to be shared by almost six billion. The combined wealth of the world’s less than a thousand billionaires equals the income of nearly half the world’s population.

Poverty depresses not only the quality of life of large populations, but their very chances of survival. It is growing in absolute numbers. The World Bank estimates that of the total human population—currently nearly seven billion—1.4 billion live on less than 1.25 dollars a day and an additional 1.6 billion on less than 2.50 dollars. In the poorest countries seventy-eight percent of the urban population subsists under life-threatening circumstances: one in three urban dwellers lives in slums, shantytowns, and urban ghettoes, and more than 900 million are classified as slum-dwellers.

The socioeconomic gap shows up in food and energy consumption, and in the load placed by humans on natural resources. People in North America, Western Europe, and Japan consume 140 percent of their daily caloric requirement, and populations in countries such as Madagascar, Guyana, and Laos live on 70 percent. The average amount of commercial electrical energy consumed by Africans is half a kilowatt-hour (kWh) per person; the corresponding average for Asians and Latin Americans is 2 to 3 kWh, and for Americans, Europeans, Australians, and Japanese it’s 8 kWh. The average American burns five tons of fossil fuel per year, in contrast with the 2.9 tons of the average German. The American places twice the environmental load of the Swede on the planet, three times that of the Italian, thirteen times the Brazilian, thirty-five times the Indian, and two hundred and eighty times the poorest people in countries such as Haiti, Niger, Burkina-Faso, and Bangladesh.

In the specifically economical area, the instability of society appears in the relationship between human resource demand and planetary supply. In its original sense economics meant the science or practice of the management and use of resources (from the classical Greek oikonomia, where oikos is household, and nemein is to manage). The global economy has become unstable and in its present form unsustainable because for a number of essential resources the rising curve of human demand exceeds the descending curve of planetary supply.

In the seven decades since World War II more of the planet’s resources have been consumed than in all of history prior to that. Global consumption is nearing, and in some cases has already surpassed, the maximum the planet can provide. For example, the amount of land that can support human demand on a sustainable basis is about 4.2 acres. But the people of the rich countries are using on average the resources of up to 25 acres. The depletion of the planet’s resources is slowed only by the fact that people in the poorest countries subsist on the resources of less than an acre and a half. On the global level, human consumption exceeds the sustainable planetary quota by more than a third.

The unsustainability of the global economy is matched and mirrored in the unsustainability of the structures of societies. In the industrialized countries job security is disappearing, competition is intensifying, and family life is suffering. In the U.S. the rate for first marriages ending in divorce is fifty percent, and about forty percent of children grow up in single-parent families for at least part of their childhood. More and more men and women find satisfaction and companionship outside rather than within the home.

In poor countries the struggle for physical survival destroys the traditional extended family. Women are obliged to leave the home in search of work; they are extensively exploited, given menial jobs for low pay. Fewer women than ever have remunerated jobs and more are forced to make ends meet in the “informal sector.” Children, for the most part in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are often employed for a pittance in factories, mines, and on the land. Many more are forced to venture into the streets as beggars. In some areas destitute children are recruited as soldiers or are forced into prostitution.

The unstable and unsustainable condition of contemporary societies has created a global emergency. If not remedied, this global emergency will degenerate into a global catastrophe.

Tagged as: energy, extreme poverty, unpreparedness, unsustainable, World Bank