My little world (and yours, too)

Your share of the world

Posted by Michael Tobis (Guest Contributor) at 12:16 PM on 30 Apr 2007

Read more about: ecological footprint | climate | energy

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that everyone on the planet had the same share of the world's resources. It turns out your share is about six acres (2.5 hectares) of dry land.

Now imagine if that were your whole world. How would you treat it?

Thinking in small numbers

It's difficult to think in extremely large numbers. Suppose, for instance, the U.S. government spends around $100 million on climate models per year. (I believe this is about right.) That sounds like a big number! Much too big, perhaps? Well, if you are an average American, it's 33 cents out of your pocket every year. Is that a good deal? Too much? Too little? The pentagon spends $450 billion per year. Is that a lot? That's about $1,500 per American. Expressing numbers in per-capita terms puts them into perspective.

I have been thinking about this in the context of the big question of our time, which as Jeffrey Sachs points out, is not about terrorism or islamo-fascism or even oil or climate. It is about whether all of us can fit comfortably on this planet. It is a big population and a big planet, so thinking quantitatively is daunting.

Fortunately, per-capita thinking can put matters into a more familiar perspective, make them more palpable and less mathematical.

The little prince to the rescue

Consider the world of The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery.

The Little Prince of the story is a child living alone on a small spherical asteroid, his only companion a single flower. He consoles himself by the fact that it is always a short walk to a sunrise or a sunset.

Let's tell a slightly different story, with a similar asteroid, a per-capita world. Instead of being one of six billion people on a big planet, let's suppose you were alone on a comparable asteroid. We'll give you your six-billionth share of the surface area, your six-billionth share of each of the major landmasses and biomes, your own six-billionth scale Africa, your own little Australia. In other words, you will have exactly the average resource ownership of everyone else on earth.

Image by kind permission of the artist, Oleg Pikhurko.

Your little asteroid has a six-billionth of the earth's total surface area. It is a sphere with a radius of 82 meters, and with a surface area of about 85,000 square meters. That, depending on how you prefer to think about it, is almost exactly 21 acres, or 8.5 hectares. In more urban terms, that is 19 American football fields, or about 12 English football (professional soccer) fields.

Just over 70 percent of your 21 acres is covered by salt water. If it were to freeze over, you could walk from any point to any other point at a leisurely pace in under ten minutes. Since the ocean covers fifteen acres, the land surface covers the remaining six acres.

A vast variety of soils and climates are arrayed about your 6 dry acres. According to the CIA, the area under cultivation is a bit under 5 percent of the total land area, or a bit over a third of an acre. If you push matters to less valuable soil, you might be able to grow things on as much as an acre, but most of your 6 acres are desert or tundra. You even have some substantial ice sheets on your land. There is also the problem that you have built your house, your workshop, your garage, your driveway and many of your industrial outbuildings on the best farmland.

About a third of your land under cultivation is irrigated, much of it using depletable groundwater. Some of the groundwater is being contaminated by some of your industrial processes. To a lesser extent, your soils are also being contaminated, but a bigger problem is that as you till them for food they erode much faster than the natural rate of replenishment.

You also like to eat fish, but most of your ocean does not naturally support large fish. From the few areas that do, you have been eating the fish faster than they reproduce. This would astonish your great-grandparents, but of course they lived on a larger world. (Their per capita share was bigger with a smaller population.)

Still, you live much better than your great-grandparents, because you have found ways to dig up fossil fuels and use them to power heavy machinery to do your bidding. Some of your machines are quite advanced, but some of them are crude and nasty. All your raw materials are dug out of the ground and refined. You produce a fair amount of industrial waste along with household waste, but you do not attend to it very carefully.

You currently use a bit over a ton of fuel per year, producing 4 tons of CO2. (This is based on world average; note that the typical North American emits about five times this much!) It seems from direct measurement that about half of this (two tons per year) stays in the atmosphere, with the rest ending up in the ocean and the soil. While this is a fairly small fraction of your atmosphere's total mass of 880,000 tons, you are wondering whether this has anything to do with a certain slushiness you are starting to see in your ice sheets.

Thinking about your asteroid

Your little world is a model of the sustainability problem. In some ways it is a fantasy, but the scales and constraints are real, expressed not as huge global numbers but as per capita quantities.

You are using fuels that are not replaceable. We can come up with some numbers for groundwater reserves and fuel reserves on the same basis. Your world is smaller than your ancestors'; your use of resources is more intensive and accelerating.

There is no replacing your six acres, no frontier. No amount of human ingenuity will make your world's surface bigger.

Is your little world big enough to sustain you indefinitely? Are you past the point of permanent damage from which no amount of future cleverness can recover?

You may be considering resolving your problems by increasing energy intensiveness. Indeed, some of these problems can be solved with more power. You can desalinate sea water, for instance. However, more energy use puts demands on other parts of the system, causing other problems.

Increasing wealth won't make your asteroid any bigger; indeed, it seems only to create more byproducts you have to put somewhere. Meanwhile, the little asteroid keeps shrinking (representing your declining average share of the land as the real world's population increases).

Whether by design or by circumstance, sooner or later you will run up against limits. It is hard to argue that you can avoid big changes forever, all the while becoming wealthier.

The global village

As you contemplate your little asteroid, keep in mind that the intensiveness described there is a worldwide average, including many poor people who have much smaller impact than almost everyone who will read this. Most of the world's population aspires to at least a European standard of living.

Whether we have enough resources for that goal is limited by factors not conventionally dominant in economic thinking. Economists will dislike the lonely asteroid model, since economics has been totally factored out. In some ways, I think this is a good approach. There is an economics-free view of sustainability that the tiny asteroid brings into focus. No matter how clever our advances, we will never have more than an acre to feed us. (I was actually rather surprised, in composing this article, to find out how small my fair share is.)

Economics only complicates matters and seems to be a constant distraction from the baseline question: can we continue to provide, indefinitely? The fact that the planet is finite can't be treated as a minor factor in this crucial question: how well can we sustain ourselves, meaning a modern society of six to ten billion people?

Optimists argue that progress will prevail. Pessimists argue that progress is an illusion. I think progress is possible, but not automatic. When I contemplate my asteroid, I suspect I can manage, but I don't think I can afford overconfidence.

I think we can prevail, but we will have to be clever about how we do it, and can't rely entirely on individuals acting from self-interest without careful collective attention to how we set up the reward structure.

Like the Little Prince, we find ourselves rather lonely imagining this solitary little world. Our relationships to each other are crucial to our circumstances, and in the end, economics and politics are crucial components of our strategy.

In a future essay I will consider a different way of scaling the problem, to the village level rather than the individual level. We will reconsider everything scaled to a village of six thousand people on a larger asteroid. We will have to deal with rather larger numbers, but will be able to consider human relationships as part of the model.

For story: My little world (and yours, too)
16 Comments | Post a Comment

sunlight

You will need, in average climate, 20 m² of thermal solar collectors for power and heat. Five times that for North Americans.

by sunflower at 12:42 PM on 30 Apr 2007

A good wind generator

will let you reduce the size of those solar collectors.

by Gar Lipow at 1:53 PM on 30 Apr 2007

Excellent Question

In short, I would try to preserve as much of the natural integrity of the local ecosystem as possible. Plants grown for food and medicine would have to be integrated into the landscape and take advantage of as many ecosystem services as possible -- to reduce labor required for producing food, fiber, and shelter. I would also try to preserve the genetic diversity of what I have. Every bug and plant species would have to be preserved. One never knows what might be useful. But at the same time, I would have to work harder to eliminate exotic organisms -- monocultures of honeysuckle, thistle, buckthorn, et cetera -- and replace them with a variety of native plants.

As far as minerals and fossil fuels are concerned, I would have to use them very sparingly. I certainly wouldn't just discard them or burn them like there was no tomorrow, but would "invest" them in building infrastructure that might protect and sustain my family and my tiny Eden long after such resources are consumed. Though I doubt I would ever just throw away mineral resources... I would have to recycle everything.

Anyway... that's my quick response.

The question is very thought provoking. It would be a good exercise for everyone, from children to corporate executives. It really puts things in perspective.

by wiscidea at 1:54 PM on 30 Apr 2007

The Negative Aspect

It also occurred to me that I would want to conserve water, but this exposes the dark side of the issue. I would feel compelled to save every drop that lands on my six acres, which would mean absolutely no runoff to feed local streams, wetlands, and lakes. But I guess there would not be any streams, wetlands, or lakes. All of us would have the same amount of water landing on our bit of Earth... no need to share. And I assume there woud be no organisms dependent on large bodies of water. In fact, there would be no natural commons. There would be no specialization. Every person would have to be a jack of all trades. No engineers. No doctors. No trade. This would certainly reduce the very need for resources. I suppose we would all be gardeners and philosophers. I can't decide whether that is a good thing.

by wiscidea at 2:04 PM on 30 Apr 2007

Incidentally, when it comes to food

According the United Nations Food and Agriculture Outlook

We had a bit over 3.4 billion hectares in pasture. (Pasture land mostly is not suitable for row crops.) If we convert that to acres and divide among 10 billions people, that comes out to another ~.85 acres per person in pasture. You can raise about 140 pounds of beef on that percent of an acre. (Though you would need a very small cow--one reason the village will work better as metaphor), a bit more in sheep or cattle, a bit more still in chickens. (Chickens need concentrated protein though; they can get this from insects. Basically you would have them follow the ruminants.)

Sticking with cattle, this comes out to six ounces of meat per person per day -- which actually could give you all the protein you need. If some of that third acre remaining is used to grow legumes from which protein is extracted you could support one of those stupid low carb diets super high protein diets (though overloading protein is not really healthy). At any rate if the cattle were raised completely on grassland, with managed intensive rotational grazing you would not have the soil erosion of conventional cattle. In fact you would build the soil. Most of the pollution cattle produce comes from fertilizers used to grow their food. So that portion would be eliminated. A lot of the remaining comes from overly concentrated manure. In contrast with manure dispersed over pasture land, most of the nitrogen would be used, and most of the rotting would be aerobic, without methane production. So compared to conventional cattle ranching greenhouse emissions would be lowered, and the methane produced via cow burbs and farts would be balanced by soil building. Most LCA's show that this type of cattle raising is slightly GHG negative. Again other animals are probably ecologically sounder than cattle - various types of bison and buffalo, sheep, goats among the ruminants, chickens among the fowl.

by Gar Lipow at 2:45 PM on 30 Apr 2007

Thank you

This is one of the best imaginative exercises that I have read in a long time. It isn't necessarily hopeful, since it is likely that during my lifetime the surface area each person is entitled will be down to under 4 acres.

by Grevangelical at 3:23 PM on 30 Apr 2007

Thanks to the folks with numbers

Special thanks to the folks who have contributed asteroid scale numbers for their own specialties and interests!

Anyone else care to chip in?

More news, good or bad, about the asteroid in small, per-capita numbers would be very welcome.

mt

by Michael Tobis at 4:51 PM on 30 Apr 2007

This page deserves it's own dedicated blog.....

This is the best most concise explanation of the need for environmentalism since "The man who planted trees."

Speaking of trees that one acre of land that grows food has to be very carefully managed. If you grew legumes, greens and wheat on the best of it you could set aside a small corner, say 10 meters sq. for your trees. Those trees will provide you all of your lumber, fuel, rubber, spices, medicines and nuts. Choose carefully.

As is your little world will just support you alone. Should you have more than one child that child gets a smaller worldshare. I think this analogy would work better for most people if it was expressed as a 2 person or 4 person world.

Only in the US do we imagine that we are in our own 1-person universe seperate from the consequences of any other person. Also a 4 person world clearly outlines the problem of replacement populations being stressed by the inceased old age of their parents.

I bow to your superior expression of a critical concept.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_man_who_planted_trees

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 5:17 PM on 30 Apr 2007

The comment about the wind turbine ...

does not take into account that with a radius of 82 m, total insolation 29 MW, the very low-efficiency heat engine that creates the wind for that turbine ... well, maybe it's not too little.

The very low escape velocity for a 184-m rock makes it hard not to think, what's the driveway for, if not for a space vehicle with which to visit other, as yet untenanted rocks, and use materials from them to make outbuildings a few tens or hundreds of metres from the world's surface. (12.7 million tonnes of rock and iron can be a lot more useful it is isn't in the compactest possible spherical lump.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

by GRLCowan at 6:48 PM on 30 Apr 2007

sharing the world

brilliant job, michael!

this is an amazing way to visualize the issues without getting lost in scale. while obviously there are specifics to be considered in your analogy, i think it's important to remember that it's an analogy and not get too lost in the minutiae. the Earth is only so big. we can only expect so much from it.

personally, as awful as some of my neighbors behave, i'm glad i'm sharing the planet. cooperation will be key to the effective use of our limited resources.

now if only we could get everyone to behave responsibly!

by zackk at 6:56 PM on 30 Apr 2007

Average American per capita agricultural use

I've looked around a bit and it seems that the American lifestyle requires at least 1.4 acres of productive arable space (as of 1997).* Almost 50% more than our little space can produce, but a low-meat organic diet could easily produce what we need to live. Even enough to be luxurious if we use a biointensive farming method. I just wish it were really that easy and that even.

* http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/farmland.html

by Grevangelical at 7:30 PM on 30 Apr 2007

difficult experiment

It is hard for me to know quite what to do with this. The unreal circumstances of the hypothetical situation fill me with horror, and my mind is unable to think of anything but the excellent observation of WiscIdea:
<<
There would be no specialization. Every person would have to be a jack of all trades. No engineers. No doctors. No trade. This would certainly reduce the very need for resources. I suppose we would all be gardeners and philosophers. I can't decide whether that is a good thing.
>>

I cannot imagine doing anything other than to curl up and die.

And that seems to be the point of Saint-Exupery's parable, surely one of the greatest stories of the last century, which is about loneliness, finding friendship, and losing one's heart to another out of love.

The Little Prince was in fact a good conservator of his asteroid. He had a couple of volcanoes, which can be seen in Oleg Pikhurko's illustration; and he would clean them out regularly, with a kind of feather-duster, "parce qu'avec les volcans, on ne sait jamais" -- with volcanoes, one never knows. He had a talking Rose, whom he tended carefully, and kept under a glass dome. But she was cold, and never thanked him, and pretended to be independent. She would show off her single thorn, and say, "Let the tigers come, with their claws!" And so, out of loneliness, he leaves.

It is interesting that the Little Prince's experiences on Earth involve companionship with animals. When he first encounters the narrator, he asks him to draw him a sheep. Later, there is the remarkable little story of the taming of the fox. Finally, there is the mysterious understanding with the venomous serpent.

In that connexion, when we consider Jeffrey Sachs's "big question," "whether all of us can fit comfortably on this planet," I hope we acknowledge that "us" refers -- or ought to refer -- to all the Earth's biodiversity, including of course a full complement of human beings, but by no means only them.

We need companionship, friendship, society. Without those things, there can be no life. Michael Tobis understands this, as he makes clear toward the end. I look forward to his village parable.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 2:45 AM on 01 May 2007

missing an important component

Your thought experiment is missing an important component. Here on planet earth everyone can interact with their neighbor, in your scenario there is no such interaction. If the asteroids were such that a person could easily go from one to another I would think this would be a better simulation.

In the case where people can move from one asteroid to another and communicate with each other you could organize raiding parties, and take over and exploit other asteroids. The strongest and best organized groups would take over many asteroids and have mighty kingdoms capturing all unfortunate asteroids that come near. Resources from conquered asteroids would be used to enhance the asteroids of the strongest.

This is more realistic to what happens on planet earth. I can't think of much interest in maintaining a sustainable asteroid in this case, you would be working away making a very nice asteroid when a raiding party from the asteroid empire of Gruffendumb arrives throws you out into space takes all the fish from the small ocean, the crops from the land, all the oil, etc. then casts your asteroid away in the trash.

by GtoeOne at 8:10 AM on 01 May 2007

The analogy goes only so far

The reason to think about the analogy is to think about the spatial limits that the world and its present population put upon us.

Obviously it is not a good model either for physics or for behavior. The idea here is to make it palpable how much space we each have to put all of our impacts, visible or otherwise. It's a way to think about the earth's surface and humanity's impact on it.

Please don't think about how you would feel or what the escape velocity would be, any more thna you think about how the Little Prince got his clothes or learned to speak French.

By being alone on the asteroid, you represent the entirety of humanity, not an individual.

When you think about the asteroid, think about what you and the systems that serve you as an individual pull out of the earth, and where you put the detritus. The asteroid will tell you what the world would look like if your behavior was typical.

A similar model, scaled up to the village, will allow us to think about ourselves. How we treat our six billion fellow humans is hard to think about. When we scale it to six thousand neighbors it comes into sharper focus, and will feel less strange. Both scales have something to tell us.

mt

by Michael Tobis at 1:51 PM on 01 May 2007

I understand the purpose

We are over the sustainability limits of our resources now. No laws or regulations are going to change the fact that we can not sustain the current population without fossil fuels and nuclear power.

So here are our choices:

Enforce draconian measures to reduce the world population. Set targets for a population/energy balance in line with fossil fuel and nuclear energy limits. Then try to keep a stable population in line with sustainable practices.
Use fossil fuels until they depleted then let the law of jungle determine who lives and who dies.

The problem is that we won't do choice 1. So we are stuck with choice 2, hence my story about raiding parties and the ugly future. We can talk about sustainable practices and everyone sacrificing together to live a simple lifestyle thinking about future generation and sharing with each other and living in harmony with nature. We can also talk about how the magic fairies will come and give us infinite energy resources. Both discussions lead to the same end.

That is why your thought experiment is meaningless to me. It does not address the central issue, which is: How do we get to a sustainable population and get there before non-renewable energy runs out? Our asteroids need to bigger.

by GtoeOne at 12:37 PM on 02 May 2007

Maybe, but even so...

I think GtoeOne overstates the problem a bit but I agree that those stark statements are at least partially ture. I don't deny that the analogy does not solve the problem GO describes.

The analogy is intended to make the problem more clear to those who don't see it yet.

I am a committed optimist. I think there's a best path out of any situation and I try to find it. Even if GO's sad analysis is completely correct, we will do better in getting out of it if more people understand it.

That understanding is the purpose of the analogy. Anyone who already gets it is welcome to move on.

Thinking about it this way changed the way I myslef look at the situation. For me, the sustainability problem is going to be modeled as "six acres and shrinking" from now on.

On the other hand, the solar numbers somebody posted seem about right, (I checked) which certainly leaves some room for optimism.

mt

by Michael Tobis at 3:33 PM on 02 May 2007

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