THE SECOND STORY: THE GREAT UNRAVELING
In 2010 polls for both CBS8 and Fox News9 showed that a majority believed the conditions for the next generation would be worse than for people living today. Two years earlier, an international poll of more than 61,600 people in sixty countries yielded similar results.10 With so many people losing confidence that things will be okay, a very different account of events is emerging. Since it involves a perception that our world is in serious decline, we take a term used by social thinker David Korten and call this story the Great Unraveling.11
In our work with people addressing their concerns about the world, we’re struck by how many issues are triggering alarm. The list in Box 1.2 identifies five common areas of concern, and most likely you have some others you would add to this list. Facing these problems can feel uncomfortable, even overwhelming, but in order to get to where we want to go, we need to start from where we are. The story of the Great Unraveling offers a disturbing picture of where that is.
Box 1.2. The Great Unraveling of the Early Twenty-First Century
• Economic decline
• Resource depletion
• Climate change
• Social division and war
• Mass extinction of species
Economic Decline
The economic crisis that erupted in 2008 saw not only the collapse of financial institutions but also rising prices, unemployment, home foreclosures, and food riots in many parts of our world. Just a few years earlier, at the beginning of 2005, the global economy was thought of as booming. With house prices rising fast in the United States, property was considered a “safe” investment. There was money to be made in the mortgage business, and loans were freely given, even to those with poor credit ratings. But this boom grew into a bubble that eventually burst. An economist might view this as part of a boom-and-bust cycle. Another phrase we’d use to describe what happened is overshoot and collapse. Here’s why.
When something moves beyond the point at which it can be sustained, we call this overshoot. To restore balance, we need to notice and correct such overextension. If we don’t, and the system keeps pushing for more and more, that system can only go so far before reaching a point of breakdown and collapse. The housing market couldn’t keep growing indefinitely; neither can the economy.
After years of unsustainable growth, the bubble eventually burst in the US housing market, and in 2006 and 2007 property prices collapsed. Since so many financial institutions were invested in the mortgage industry, the crisis affected the entire economy. Like a row of dominoes, financial giants fell one after the other. Governments borrowed huge amounts of money to prop up ailing institutions that had gone first into overshoot and then into collapse. But what if the whole economic system is in overshoot mode and is now unraveling as a consequence?
The bubble of continuing economic growth depends on an ever-increasing input of resources and generates ever-higher levels of toxic waste. The more we push beyond sustainable limits for both of these, the more the unraveling occurs.
Resource Depletion
In 1859, when the first of the US oil fields was discovered in Pennsylvania, the world’s population stood at just over a billion people. By 1930 it had doubled, and by 1974, with increased food production from oil-powered agriculture, it doubled again to 4 billion. We are already well on the way to another doubling, with global population passing the 7 billion mark in 2011. It isn’t just population that’s growing; the spread of modern lifestyles, as discussed above, has amplified our appetites, especially for energy.
In the twentieth century, global consumption of fossil fuels increased twentyfold. Oil has been our dominant fuel, and we are now consuming more than 80 million barrels a day. If we continue at this rate, we will use up available supplies within a few decades.12 Problems start long before we run out; as oil fields become depleted, the remaining reserves become more difficult and costly to extract. The same is true of the world’s supply as a whole. As a result, fuel prices are rising and the age of cheap oil is already behind us.
Each big rise in the price of oil over the last thirty-five years has been followed by a recession, with the price of oil doubling in just twelve months prior to the economic downturn of 2008.13 When oil production levels move past their peak and into decline (the point referred to as “peak oil”), the inability to meet demand will push prices through the roof.
We’re unlikely to be rescued by new oil source discoveries; for the last three decades more oil has been consumed each year than has been found in new reserves. By 2006 that deficit had grown to four barrels used up for every new barrel discovered.14 What’s more, the new reserves are either difficult to reach, as is the case with the deep-water wells over a mile beneath the ocean’s surface, or are of much poorer quality, as is the case with the tar sands in Canada. Our collective oil consumption cannot be sustained. If we don’t address this issue, we will be heading for a crash.
Even more crucial to life on our planet, the availability of freshwater is also in decline. A recent United Nations report warns that within twenty years, as much as two-thirds of the world’s population could be at risk of water shortages.15 Industrialization, irrigation, population growth, and modern lifestyles have dramatically increased our water consumption, with water use increasing sixfold during the twentieth century.16 Climate change has also been a factor, with more rain in some parts of the world but much less in others. Since 1970 severe droughts have increased, and the proportion of the Earth’s land surface suffering very dry conditions has grown from 15 to 30 percent.17
Climate Change
When more people consume more things, we not only deplete resources, but we also produce more waste. The rubbish generated each year in the United States could fill a convoy of garbage trucks long enough to go round the world six times.18 Not all our waste is so visible: each year, the average European puts out 8.1 tons of carbon dioxide; the average American more than double this.19 While this greenhouse gas is invisible, its effects are not. Climate change is no longer only a distant threat for future generations: it has arrived in measurable and destructive form.
At the time, the 1980s was the warmest decade ever recorded. The 1990s were even warmer, and the decade starting in 2000 warmer still.20 Linked to this warming, weather-related disasters (including floods, droughts, and major hurricanes) have increased dramatically: on average, three hundred events were recorded every year in the 1980s, 480 events every year in the 1990s, and 620 events every year in the decade up to 2008. In 2007 there were 874 weather-related disasters worldwide.21
As warming