Humans Face a “Ghastly Future” Unless Extraordinary Action Is Taken Soon on Sustainability
Without immediate and drastic intervention, humans face a “ghastly future” — including declining health, climate devastation, tens of millions of environmental migrants and more pandemics — in the next several decades, according to an international team of 17 prominent scientists.
“Humanity is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for short-term economic enhancement today,” said Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University professor emeritus of population studies and a co-author of the study.
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
We have summarized predictions of a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations) and resource conflicts this century. Yet, our goal is not to present a fatalist perspective, because there are many examples of successful interventions to prevent extinctions, restore ecosystems, and encourage more sustainable economic activity at both local and regional scales. Instead, we contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future. While there have been more recent calls for the scientific community in particular to be more vocal about their warnings to humanity (Ripple et al., 2017; Cavicchioli et al., 2019; Gardner and Wordley, 2019), these have been insufficiently foreboding to match the scale of the crisis. Given the existence of a human “optimism bias” that triggers some to underestimate the severity of a crisis and ignore expert warnings, a good communication strategy must ideally undercut this bias without inducing disproportionate feelings of fear and despair (Pyke, 2017; Van Bavel et al., 2020). It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and “tell it like it is.” Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst.
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