In pursuit of profit...

Its the dry season in Nepal. Or rather the very dry season. The vast majority of rain falls in the monsoon period between June and early September. This heavy rainfall recharges the water tables that everybody relies on to supply water until the following year. Some light rain falls in January and February, but in comparison to the monsoon, this is not much to speak of. By April and May the water table is dropping and streams high above the valley floor are drying up. People then have to go hunting for water, or do without. Recently I travelled to Kaskikot, a small village on a panoramic ridge close to Pokhara. They have a huge issue with water supply. To cut a long story short, rainfall is decreasing and temperatures increase, both attributed to climate change. This means that people have access to water for as little as one hour per day, and roughly speaking, the per capita allocation of water is around 10 litres per day. That's one traditional toilet flush to give it some perspective. So that has to function for drinking, cooking, washing and toilet usage. Its a very tough situation. The story is not uncommon in Nepal. A popular perception held by outsiders is that Nepal is a land of snowy mountains and raging rivers, and that that somehow implies that water is in abundance. The former is true, the latter is far from the case. Every week news reports cite another village as being in desperate shortage of water. In Kathmandu it is no different. Many houses, those that can afford it that is, are resorting to having water delivered by tanker. Last week on a short hike up a hill beyond Swayambu I saw children ever so patiently waiting for something no more than a trickle from a standpipe to fill their assorted buckets and bottles. The climate is undeniably changing and the debate on whether industrialisation and consumerism are responsible is all but closed. Imagine the irony then of seeing bottles of Perrier and San Pellegrino mineral water for sale in a nearby supermarket in Kathmandu. Yes it is patronised mainly by tourists, but still, if there was ever a symbol of the profligacy of modern (western) society, it is shipping bottled drinking water long distances. Wine however...

Slowly growing things will one day get ridiculously big

"the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"

So says Dr. Albert Bartlett, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado. I stumbled upon a transcript of his well-honed lecture on Arithmetic, Population and Energy. It is a polished lecture, replete with wisdom and well worth reading. If his statement above is true, then by reading you are getting insight in to the greatest shortcoming of the human race. So, really, it is worth 10 minutes out of your day (or out of your facebook time). In his lecture he looks at the oxymoron "sustainable growth". Think about it business people. He offers a very simple trick to understand growth rates and what they mean in terms of doubling time.

You just take the number 70, divide it by the percent growth per unit time and that gives you the doubling time. So our example of 5% per year, you divide the 5 into 70, you find that growing quantity will double in size every 14 years.

He goes on to use this to make us look at population growth, space and the use of natural resources. Using the simple maths, he shows how intelligent people can be rather dumb. It reminds me of an intelligent friend who's mother was involved in a pyramid scheme. He just couldn't see that after several levels, there simply wouldn't be enough gullible (or otherwise) people left in the universe to join the scam. Anyhow, his main thrust comes back to population. Its worth re-quoting a quote he quotes by Isaac Asimov:

“What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?” and Asimov says, “It’ll be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then they both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there’s no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, ‘Aren't you through yet?’ and so on.” And Asimov concluded with one of the most profound observations I've seen in years. He said, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.”

And from this he summarises.

"And so, central to the things that we must do, is to recognise that population growth is the immediate cause of all our resource and environmental crises."

So, there you have it. If you don't decide to read the article, at least try to work out right now what the doubling time is from a 1.3% growth rate is. Then you'll know, theoretically at least, when you'll be sharing the planet with 13 billion others. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645