The Last Fight, 1: No decision

Much of what we do depends on some decision, made by us individually, or by other people applying their decision to us. Decision is the source of action – we have no other way. Now who makes decisions for Mankind? No-one: its fate depends on a very large number of micro-decisions, largely uncoordinated. Now is the time when Mankind faces the final question: Do You Wish to Survive? If Yes, please act accordingly. This question has no target now: no-one can speak for all of us, no researcher is even able to offer a (new) political system that would allow such question to be asked and answered. Then again, we would not have the action relays to implement whatever decision made.

Survival of this civilization never was a technical subject, nor was it political or financial: we always had the means to change our ways, to reduce our CO2 emissions in large proportions, to reduce our impact on the environment, all of it without reverting to middle-age like life. We always could do it, only we never decided to do it. This, is the reason. And as there is no sign of any change in the political structure of humanity, there is no reason to believe that 7,5 billion people will suddenly veer off to a better heading. Our ill-fated future only depends on that: we just cannot decide.

You know nothing, Jon Snow.

The Last Fight, 2: Excessive demography

Excessive demography works twofold. First is the multiplying effect, to feed and house 10 billion people in 2050, we will need twice what we used in 1987 when we were only 5 billions. That means we will need double floor space, double cars and smartphones, double oil, copper, iron, and cereals. And, probably, double CO2 emissions. Run away demography lets every problem grow bigger, not smaller, every day, making the wall come at us while we are running to it.

Then again, do we have a cure to our demography problem? China did try, for many good reasons, with its single kid plan. China gave it up in 2018, also for many good reasons: cultural choices created a gender imbalance, which is now causing women in neighboring countries to be needed for the excessive men population; elders, culturally accustomed to have their numerous children take care of them at old age, may find themselves alone and without resources; some psychologists add that social relationships between only single children is much more difficult.
Japan is experimenting a drop in population, population aging at high speed; Germany is the other OECD country with an eroding population; both countries are associated with high culture, high education youths, and little immigration. This cannot be the scheme for the rest of the world.

Do we have twice the arable land we had back in 1987? No, the figure is 14 million km², and this figure does not change much from one year to another. Shall we have double crop efficiency? Neither. Do we have twice more fish? No, we now have half the wild fish we used to have, and their figures are still headed down. So what is the plan? There is no plan, merely exchange the current 800 million undernourished people for 1,5 billion.

This multiplying effect merely is the easy part of the problem. The tough one is the mammal behavior: put a few mammals in a cage with food, they will behave happily with occasional hierarchical skirmishes. Put a load of them in the same small cage with the same amount of food, and you reach a number when all attack all, until a “satisfying” number of survivors is obtained. We will have this same reflex; the two world wars of the 20^th century, which made 100 millions victims, will be nothing compared to what will occur by the end of the 21^st century, with a possible billion victims. No-one knows how such a horrendous number can be reached; but the “war” will look quite different from what we know, it will be everywhere.

Globalisation created much wealth, and much inequality, on all continents. Those who have nothing always outnumber those who have a little, who also outnumber those who have much, etc. There is no need for these people to organize a fight, create a party or whatnot: when you have nothing, anything is better. All societies of the 21^st century will harbor ultra-poor people, who will stop at nothing merely for food. While power and order will always be in the hands of the rich, they may or may not want to use their power only to save the lower classes; the larger fights will take place between the poorest classes, with guns these classes never had in past history; these fights will become commonplace in most countries, creating the bulk of the one billion victims.

The Last Fight, 3: Environment destruction

 

Environment science has only just begun; we hardly understand how our environment works, let alone the idea of controlling it. We instinctively think it is some kind of complex system, balancing hundreds of thousands species at every second. Many species are similar, they are in charge of the same small ecological niche. We say they are in competition, but on the light side, they also are redundant: if one fails, another one is ready to assume the added responsibility, that much we understand.

Trouble is, not only we destroy species at a high speed, we also destroy them on a systemic basis. Bees are about to die – good old apis melliferis, which have been with us for so many millenia, giving us honey. Is that important? No, we can derive sugar from so many other sources. But bees are pollinators, all over the planet they pollinate plants, allowing plants to reproduce, turning flowers into fruit. Fruit trees are plants; our monster fruit farms are industrially pollinated by… bees, brought every season by whole trains of industrial beekeepers. In the year 2012, following a mayday call from the professional association of US beekeepers, it was discovered that 30 % of their bees had died over the winter, knowing that a 5-10 % mortality is considered natural. Pesticides were pointed at, and neonicotinoids got (partly) banned in Europe and the USA in 2018-2019. Knowing that the downfall in bees survival had been known in Europe since 1998, it took us 20 years to realize that pesticides kill insects, and bees are insects. Some other studies show that certain species, which could partly fill the role of bees, such as wasps, flies and butterflies, also are in sharp decline: we are not only killing one species worldwide: we are killing a whole ecological niche. 30% of what mankind eats depends on bees.

Five (known) mass extinctions occurred in the past of Earth; we started the sixth one, as we are currently destroying species at a faster pace than it ever happened. These destructions are occurring in many ways. The most obvious one is deliberately reducing biodiversity. In the nature, there is no occurrence of a single plant in a field one mile long: many different plants actually cohabit, and they harbor many different micro-organisms, etc. When we decided for intensive agriculture, centuries ago, we lost 90 % of living species in these areas. That allowed to feed more humans, and we decided it was good. We never saw we were actually replacing a rich environment by an extremely poor one; we had no idea it was the beginning of the end.