Our decadent, wasteful, affluent, energy-intensive, resource-depleting lifestyle of today (I make no apology for that description) is condemning a large proportion of our children and grandchildren to death. And we are willingly paying for the services of their executioners.

In many of the famine-ravaged areas of third world Africa, women and children are routinely dying of starvation while their still-healthy husbands and fathers eat what food is available, there only being enough to keep one person alive and healthy. Their acts are condemning their wives and children to death. They live on in hopes that times will get better and they will be able to take another wife and rear more children. In a sudden wave of understanding and compassion, or through the cold lens of biology, we might even forgive them. They are, after all, looking to their own survival, as basic and base as that may be. We concede that right, perhaps begrudgingly, just as we accepted those in New Orleans looting stores for food and water to satisfy their needs. We even accepted people helping themselves to shoes for their feet and other essential clothing items, because they had lost everything in the flooding.

But most of us were not willing to condone the looting of stores for televisions, stereos, DVDs, entertainment systems, fashions and all of the other non-essential baubles that had nothing to do with survival. For many, looting is looting and those taking food and water were unfortunately tarred with the same brush as those stealing high-end electronics. Those acts of thievery placed the struggle for survival of the others in a totally different context, increased the societal price the others had to pay for their survival. They had to accept being called and treated like thieves for satisfying what is a basic right of life for all species on this planet, with the seeming exception of ourselves. We are expected to value the right of property over the right of survival, starve or die of exposure or dehydration rather than take what we need for survival from shops owned by someone else.

For many the key factor was that the shops being looted were unoccupied, their owners having evacuated before Katrina hit. By some strange twist of logic this made that looting acceptable to some, the fact that no one was physically present who had a claim against those goods, not the fact that the looters were desperate for food and water, desperate for the means of survival. The extension of that logic suggests that if the shop owner had been present that simple presence and possession of the shop would have outweighed the desperation of the hurricane and flood victims. The owner of the shop, were he present, would have been right to withhold that which we condone the taking of simply by the fact that he was absent. The rights of one person's property ownership outweighs the right of access to the means of survival of many, perhaps hundreds. That right of property ownership grants that person who owns the property the right to withhold the means of survival from others. Since they have no money to pay for their survival he can set fire to the shop, or booby-trap it with explosives, all to prevent it being looted, and simply walk away. It is, after all, his property to dispose of as he wishes.

Well, you may be thinking, they're desperate. They have been through a hurricane and a flood and have nothing. They have a right to survival. He can't just let them die. Why not? It's his property, his right. The law is on his side. That's what the law is for, to protect his right of property. Their survival is not his problem. Yes, some will say, but it's not as if that stuff is key to his survival. He's a merchant and that is commercial property, not personal property. That is not food and water that he needs for his and his family's survival. It is stuff he has for sale. Ah, but, property is property. The law is still on his side. Their survival is still not his concern. He still has the right to do with that stuff as he chooses simply because he owns it. Other people's survival has nothing to do with it.

This is the crux of arguably the greatest moral debate that our civilization should be having right now, and the plight of the people of New Orleans is the living lesson. The question is, by appearances, a simple one. Does one person's legal right of ownership of property outweigh the right of survival of others? Can one person morally withhold the means of survival from another when that being withheld is not essential to that person's own survival?

The issue is way beyond a legal question. It is absolutely a moral question. Do legal property rights include the right to put another person's survival in jeopardy, the right to withhold those means of survival even though that ultimately means the person from whom it is withheld may die? If the person in need were dependent on the withholder then the death of the dependent due to the withholding of what was needed would result in at least a charge of criminal negligence causing death. But if that shop owner is the only source of the water and nutrition that is all that stands between another and death, and that water and nutrition are withheld, is that any less a crime?

Since I suggested this should be a moral debate let me take the side of saying this. Commercial or other legal property rights should not permit the withholding of the means of survival from another when that withholding jeopardizes the survivability of that other and dramatically increases the probability that they will die.

The opposing view, of course, is that the law is the law. The law is not concerned with morality. It deals with legality. And in the eyes of the law ownership is ownership, be it personal or commercial, and the owner of any property is not legally obligated to forfeit those rights of ownership to another whether for purposes of survival or not. There is, therefore, every legal right to withhold that property, moral arguments notwithstanding.

Having posited the opposing, legal-centric argument I will leave it stand for you to take up if you so wish while I barge ahead with my moral argument. The conflict between the legal rights of ownership and the needs of survival of others is not new one. The penalties in England, for example, for poaching game on another man's property could be quite severe. Arguments of need were not a persuasive defence. In certain less enlightened societies of the past stealing an apple from a street vendor was punishable by cutting off the offender's hand.

Over the centuries, however, such extremes have been weeded out of the law. The rights of property are no longer absolute in most societies. A man living upstream on a river cannot, for example, dam or divert a river's flow and deprive those downstream of the water they need for their survival. Nor can he dump toxins and contaminants into the river that jeopardize the health and life of people downstream. One cannot run nets completely across a river to block the free migration of fish up or down the river that others on the river rely upon for their survival. One cannot release poisons into the air on their own property that will drift onto the land of their neighbours and kill their crops, their animals, or those neighbours.

Corporations are, in the eyes of the law, persons. They have the same rights, freedoms and obligations under the law as you or I. But morality is not a legal concern, beyond those issues of morality that have become legally codified. Altruism, compassion, charity are not among them. There are no laws that require corporations to provide for the poor, to help disaster victims in their time of need. There are no laws that require corporations to give to charities. These are all moral acts beyond the purview of the law. Yet even here many corporations have seen value in the appearance of good citizenship, the value of moral acts beyond the requirement of the law. After Katrina hit New Orleans, many corporations stepped forward with significant donations of cash and water and food and clothing et al. Corporations offered, free of charge, the very same goods (water, food and clothing) to the victims of Katrina that those same victims were accused of stealing and looting by taking when their need was greatest. One cannot ignore the reality, however, that even some corporations accept that they have moral obligations to the community and do act on those perceived obligations, even if their reasons are selfish which, in fact, makes their actions no different than the charitable acts of most individuals. Charity reinforces the notion that the individual has the right to grant or withhold the means of survival of others.

It often seems, however, that when the core business of a corporation is itself a danger to the public, or to its own customers, thoughts of charity go out the window. Many corporations, even whole industries, have put Herculean efforts into covering up such dangers. And when they do come to light they will battle in court for years to avoid any admission of guilt or even complicity. Negative publicity will quickly be forgotten but the stain of a guilty verdict lasts forever. The tobacco industry is a good example, as are the various lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies when their products have been implicated in deaths or major illnesses, proven defective, or when their medical trials have proven other than what they claim to have proven. Giving away a few thousand dollars of water or food is good public relations. Admitting liability for defective products, even against an overwhelming weight of evidence, is something else. The tobacco industry settled out of court for countless billions of dollars rather than chance a court settlement against them. So clearly there is a limit to the morality a corporation is willing to exercise when not obligated to do so by law. That limit essentially is the point at which that morality ceases to have a financial return, where it starts to negatively affect the bottom line.

Companies who proceed with making and marketing a product even after their own testing have proven that their product is dangerous, even deadly, do not so quickly get beyond the negative stigma that eventually results. If found out! It is very tempting, with millions of dollars sunk into research and development and testing and marketing, to want to bury such evidence. It is only when weighed against the potential liabilities and lawsuits that will result, if the negative test results prove out in the market place, that many corporations decide to eat the cost and abandon the product if the defect cannot be corrected. But many decide to bury the evidence, go forward and take their chances. Their greed for current profits outweighs their concern for the safety of their customers. Time and again we have seen stories where product defects in new automobile models have been ignored and the model released because the number of failures and the estimated number of resulting deaths is low enough that the settlements from lawsuits expected over the product lifespan are lower than the cost of correcting the defect or issuing a recall. Rather than correct the defect, therefore, the manufacturer invests more money in advertising the product to pump up the sales to better cover the costs of the anticipated lawsuits. Their current sales and profits are far more important than the future loss of life amongst their customers.

That concept of time is very important. The further into the future those potential liabilities are the more emboldened the company is to bury the evidence and go ahead with making the product. The further away those potential liabilities are the more difficult it will be to legally link them back to the product. This was the case with the tobacco industry. Sure there was a risk of emphysema, lung cancer, mouth cancer, throat cancer, and a host of other cancers. Their own research told them so. But that risk was so far in the future, and so legally tenuous. They would never be able to tie it back to tobacco use and make it stick in front of a jury. So they buried the evidence.

There is strong evidence, and a large court case proceeding in India, that Coca Cola are, in the making of their product, depleting the underground aquifers that local Indian populations rely on for their water. They have used those aquifers for hundreds of years, dozens of generations, for their personal use and to water their animals and crops. Conditions in the area are sufficiently arid that their crops will not survive without that irrigation, nor will their animals, nor will the local people. Before Coca Cola began operations there were already long-term scientific studies that had determined the rate of flow and volume of water in those aquifers. And those numbers had been stable for longer than anyone could remember, probably for hundreds of years. Many people relied on that water and used only what was needed to survive, never more.

How does any corporation, no matter what the product they make, have the right to deprive all of those generations of people of their means of survival? If one man had sunk a well down to the aquifer and drained it into the nearby river to flow wasted to the sea, would that be within his right, though the well be sunk on his land? Any one of those people has a right to that share of the aquifer water that is necessary for their own survival. No one of them, nor any other, has the right to use that water for personal or corporate gain when in so doing they jeopardize the very survival of all the others critically dependant on it. That water needs to, and otherwise would have satisfied the needs of generations to come, generations that will forever be deprived of that resource in order that one company can make a profit from their natural inheritance. If there is any justice the company will lose the case and be forced to cease and desist in their use of water from the aquifer. Unfortunately there is very often a distinct separation between justice and the law, and the law usually wins.

Does any person, be that person actual, institutional or legal, as in the case of a corporation, have a right to draw down resources, that others are dependent on for their very survival, simply to make a profit or otherwise gain an advantage? To draw down resources not necessary to their own survival when that draw down jeopardizes the survival of others that also have a legitimate right to a fair share of that resource? As in the case above, does any person have a right to draw down resources, in excess of need, for profit or gain, when that draw down jeopardizes the survivability of the next generation that would have been able to survive on that same resource if that draw down were not allowed? What about the next generation after that?

Let us put the question more simply. Does any person, real or legal, have the right to draw down any resource in excess of need, whether for profit, gain or simply waste, when that draw down jeopardizes the survivability of other people living or yet to be born? Does any person have the right to jeopardize the chance of survival of others simply to satisfy not a need but a whim, a wish, a desire, a lust, an obsession, a fantasy, a dream?

This planet is the only place we have ever called or, it is reasonably certain, ever will call home. Aside from the daily supply of energy from the sun and the odd impact from a meteor or other extraterrestrial object, what you see is what you get. Earth is, essentially, a closed system. It is also, so far as we currently know, the only planet, the only closed system in the universe that harbours life. We are a part of that life, one of the millions of species that are trying to eke an existence out of this one beautiful planet.

This earth, however, has limited resources as all closed systems do, some more or less renewable but most finite, limited, non-renewable. Once a finite resource is used up it is gone forever, and forever is a very long time. Most of those finite resources have been around for a very long time, millions of years, many dating back to the very formation of the planet billions of years ago. Most of those finite, non-renewable resources are used in trace amounts by a great variety of lifeforms, some directly but most indirectly.

I am not going to launch into the argument about how our excessive draw down of this planet's resources jeopardizes the survival of other species, though that is very definitely one of my favourite soap boxes. There is only one species whose survival is threatened with our abusive consumption of finite resources that I want to discuss here. That species is homo sapiens, man. If our abuses are responsible for our own extinction we will take most or all of those other species down with us anyway.

All life consumes resources but, through the natural life-oriented processes that have evolved over millions of years, those resources are returned to the earth, or recycled by other living organisms, either as waste or at the expiration of that life form. Due to the low-level trace amounts of those raw resources used and the natural processes of recycling, the draw down of those finite resources is minimal, leaving sufficient of those resources to support that life for millions, if not billions, of years to come.

But our human draw down of those resources is not minimal. We don't use trace amounts of iron, copper, zinc, nickel, gold, silver, et al. In fact, if we lived in balance with nature, in balance with those natural systems that have evolved over millions of years, we would not have to draw down any of those finite resources directly. No other animal species on this planet does. All animals derive their nutrition from plants and other animals. They get their water from rivers, streams, lakes, ponds. We are the only species that uses, as opposed to needs, clothing. All animals, on occasion, need shelter, but that shelter may be under a tree, under a rock overhang, against a hill or cliff for protection from the wind. There are other species that build shelters, such as ants, termites, bees, wasps, beavers, many animals that dig dens, make nests. But no other species builds shelter so out of proportion to its needs as man does. And no other species uses the finite resources of the planet to produce the materials from which that shelter is constructed.

Every human excess in the draw down of finite resources, every human act of destruction or degradation of our living environment, reduces the future survival potential of all species, most particularly our own. If we were to continue those excesses for the next several generations they may very well prove to be the last generations of our species. Even as it stands today, there will be a need for a massive remedial effort to revitalize the life support capability of this planet sufficient to see our species through the millennium we have just ushered in. The longer it takes us to begin that effort the fewer survivable generations of humans there are yet to be born.

That excess draw down of the earth's resources is the greatest, though not the only, accumulation of debt of our species. We are using the credit card so heavily that we are rapidly reaching the point that we will not be able to repay that debt and may have to end by declaring bankruptcy. Bankruptcy in this case, however, is forever. Our record of bad debt cannot be erased in seven years, cannot be written off in Chapter 11. This debt absolutely will be collected. The penalty for non-payment is death.

We are not like other species on this planet. We have the gift of intellect, the gift of reason, the facility for invention and creation. We are the only species on this planet capable of foreseeing its own extinction. And we alone can understand the reason for that potential extinction, understand the impact we are having on the life support system of this planet. We alone are capable of understanding that our actions severely diminish the survival potential of future generations of our own and every other species.

Yet that greatest of gifts is also the source of our greatest disappointments. We also have the facility for denial, the ability to convince ourselves that our actions have no impact on all of those things. We can readily convince ourselves that finite resources are infinite, that our individual actions have no consequences, that the responsibility for that impact rests with others, like our government, or the next generation, or any other convenient rationalization.

Not content simply with a draw down of finite resources, however, we constantly move toward worsening the impact of that draw down. We build and sell and buy and dispose of things that we have no need of. We want things bigger and more complex and more energy intensive and call it a lifestyle choice. In the process we are not only worsening the survival potential of future generations but we mortgage our own personal future in the process by acquiring things with debt, purchasing goods and services today with the future income that we will need to sustain us. We convince ourselves that the future is unlimited, that our employability is assured, that our prosperity is guaranteed, all in order to convince ourselves that the yet-to-be-acquired money we are spending today will be available in the future. We conveniently ignore the sad reality that the only way to pay for our debts is to acquire ever more debt.

Our debt dramatically increases our rate of draw down of the earth's finite resources. Our debt not only mortgages our personal future but dramatically decreases the survivability of future generations who will need the resources we are using up. Our debt has vastly accelerated our destruction of the future life of this planet, the execution of future generations of humans on the altar of our current lifestyle of excess and convenience, our lifestyle of instant gratification.

The responsibility for our depletion of these non-renewable cannot be put off to past or future generations. Past generations did not fully comprehend the finitude of those resources. Future generations will have a serious struggle for survival even if some of those resources are left untapped. We are the generation that knows the impact we are having on this planet. And we are the generation that has chose, in the face of that knowledge, to exponentially accelerate our draw down of those resources. We are the generation whose utter greed for excesses is threatening the future survivability of all life on this planet.

Nor can our responsibility for depleting the earth's finite resources be condoned by wrapping it in authority, whether that be institutional or military. Governments and armies of nations no more so than individuals have the right to withhold the necessities of survival from any person or persons for the purpose of maintaining power over those persons.

That is not our right! Our ancestors who started us on this road of resource depletion could be forgiven for their ignorance. We do not have the same lack of awareness to use as an excuse. We know what we are doing! And that borders on premeditation. We know we are capable of destroying this planet and ourselves, and by God we're going to prove it! What other possible interpretation could we put on it? We know we are destroying this planet and yet persist in doing exactly that which we know is the source of that destruction. Is that not premeditation? Is that not intent?

If we were to stop drawing down this planet's finite resources today no one knows how many future generations the planet will be able to support. No one knows if the long-term vitality and viability of the planet can be improved, whether the planet can recover from the excesses and abuses we have already inflicted upon it. But if we do not change, if we continue as we are going, sooner or later a tipping point will be reached beyond which the planet cannot recover. Sooner or later it becomes impossible to repay the debt. We may have already reached it, but not likely. But it could occur in five hundred years, a hundred years, fifty years, ten or even five. We do not know.

That uncertainty as to the timing is exactly the reason that we must implement serious changes now in the manner our species interacts with this planet. If we wait for certainty we will have waited too long. There is no question that in time we will reach that point. There is no question that our speciate lifestyle is unsustainable. There is no question that we are very rapidly drawing down this planet's resources and running out of time. There is no question that business-as-usual cannot get the job done, that it is the problem. And a problem cannot be its own solution. There should not be any question that technology and the markets and the economy very definitely cannot get us out of this dilemna. And there is no question that the work needed from the entire global population to make the necessary changes is immense and will take generations. Those changes themselves will require that we take on even more debt by drawing down even more of those scarce resources. We cannot afford to waste any more of them in delay.

It is very difficult writing pieces like this. It is easy enough to find fault, to identify the immense stupidity in the manner in which we use this planet. And to a large extent everyone can be led to understand that there is a problem. The difficulty is in suggesting what must be done to correct it. What must be done is not going to be acceptable to any of us. We are not talking about subtle changes in the way we live. We are talking about a need for massive societal upheaval, of having to completely rethink ther way we live, of having to abandon everything that we cherish and everything that we take for granted, that we view as a God-given right.

If you believe in a God, and I will confess here that I do not, you cannot believe that that God placed us, placed you on this planet to destroy it. You cannot believe that God gave us dominion over the beasts of the field and the fishes of the sea to act as their executioner. You cannot believe that your God gave you the right to destroy the means of survival for future generations of his flock. And you cannot believe that God is going to physically intervene to prevent us from our own self-destruction. If you believe in a God, then you believe that God helps those who help themselves. You can't believe that you can race toward the brink of extinction and expect your God to take up the challenge of saving you from yourself at the last possible instant.

This is our problem, our mess, and it is we who must clean it up. And we need to start a global dialogue now to figure out how we are going to do that. I don't have the answers and would not put them forward now if I did. We are all going to have to play a part and we must all be prepared to take ownership of the part we must play. As Shakespeare so prophetically wrote in As You Like It, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Paying the Executioner II

What are the critical drawdowns of excess through which we jeopardize the future survivability of humanity? The reality is that some of the most critical are both subtle and are wrapped in other complex moral issues. The greatest of these is existing and increasing global overpopulation and the ways in which it is and is not being addressed.

It is estimated, not unreasonably, that without the energy that we derive from fossil fuels the world can only support one to two billion people living a judiciously sustainable lifestyle wherein resources are used sparingly and nothing is wasted. We currently have six and a half billion, a quarter of which are extravagantly wasting resources as though they were infinite. At current rates of global population growth that total could be over nine billion by 2025. The rate of growth has slowed somewhat in the past couple of decades, however. This is not because the birth rate has declined (in fact that continues to increase) but rather because the global death rate is again on the increase. This is due largely to factors such as increased starvation in Africa and Asia, increased deaths due to diseases like HIV/AIDS and Ebola, increased deaths due to natural disasters like the Christmas Tsunami and the Kashmir earthquake, and continued deaths due to ongoing wars in several regions, most particularly Africa and the Middle East.

It is, however, also due to an increasing rate of decline of productivity of fossil-fuel supported agriculture coupled with an increasing annual loss of agricultural soil taken out of production due to salt build up from over-irrigation and toxicity from the continuous and escalating use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (fertilizer and pesticide use per acre has increased over thirty-fold in the last three decades).

The reality probably is, however, that we are fast approaching a global peak in fossil-fuel-supported human population. This should come as no surprise since we are also rapidly nearing the peak in global oil production following which we will quickly reach the peak in global fossil-fuel production. It appears unlikely that we will ever reach that nine billion population level or, if we do, a vastly increased proportion of that population will live in destitution and malnourishment with a gradually declining life expectancy.

The underlying signs of the trigger for that approaching population peak are increasingly ominous. Despite appearances to the contrary in the virtual world of the industrialized nations, the key to population support is, always has been, and always will be food.

• We are now losing arable land faster than new arable land can be developed, just as we are consuming oil over four times faster than new oil reserves are being found
• The life-supporting top-soil of our arable lands is disappearing, through wind loss and erosion, by billions of tons every year. It is estimated that by the end of this century effectively all of the life-supporting top-soil which, like oil, took millions of years to create, will be gone
• There is very little undeveloped arable land left anywhere in the world that could still be brought into production
• Our human communities continue to expand into the prime arable land that once surrounded them, taking that land out of food production in favour of sub-division production: we are increasingly growing houses and chemically- dependent lawns rather than food
• The crop surpluses in the most agriculturally productive regions, that have been critical in supporting the populations in areas that can no longer produce enough food to support themselves, are rapidly disappearing
• The destruction of arable land in those surplus-producing regions is a process of continuous export of soil nutrients in the food exported to other regions of the globe, those complex nutrients continuously replaced by only the Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus in artificial fertilizers. That's like replacing old-growth, complex hardwood forests with monoculture pine-tree plantations
• Due to changes in plant growth patterns brought on by global warming the nutritional value and content of the food our arable land is now producing is rapidly diminishing and is itself contributing to growing malnourishment It is also my opinion, and only an opinion, that this is also a prime contributor to the increasing level of obesity in industrialized society: decreasing nutritional value of food coupled with the income to increasingly buy more poor-quality food in an attempt to make up for that nutritional deficiency

Where is the moral issue in all of this? What is the relationship to excess resource drawdown?

Through the excess use of fossil fuels, the Green Revolution, started by Doctor Norman Borlaug in the second half of the last century, has allowed us to produce enough food to more than double the global human population in less than half a century. Apart from the fossil fuels themselves, what were the excess drawdowns from resources required by future generations? Top soil. Rain forests. Soil nutrients. Soil organisms. Soil fertility. Potable water. Wilderness. Food nutritional value. These are all global drawdowns.

The Green Revolution was initially hailed as a great achievement of mankind, the salvation of millions of manourished throughout the third world. A more important reality, however, is that the green revolution allowed agriculturally-deficient regions of the planet, which had already overshot their local carrying capacity, to export their population crisis and overshoot to other more production regions of the planet. In order to support the excessive and still growing populations of these regions, the Green Revolution began to also push productive areas of the planet toward overshoot by rapidly and dramatically increasing the drawdown of their agricultural capacity to produce crop excesses for export to those regions of the planet already in overshoot.

In the natural world if a species overshoots the carrying capacity of their region they must pay the price of that overshoot either by moving on to another area and competing for its resources against those species already established and dependent on it, as often happens with species on large continents, or by succumbing to a die-off, as happens with species overshooting the carrying capacity of a smaller, more finite region like an island or a limited climatic region to which a species such as the polar bear or coral is highly adapted.

No other species on this planet has the ability to import food from other regions when they have overshot their local carrying capacity. Unfortunately we do. We have the ability to relieve people of the responsibility of facing the consequences of overshooting their local carrying capacity by allowing them to draw down the resources now of other areas that still have future carrying capacity in the bank. In the process the current reproductive excesses of those areas already in overshoot are reducing the future survivability not just of themselves but of those people in regions still below their carrying capacity. An accumulation of local human population overshoots has, as a result, now been turned into a global human population overshoot. That massive excess of human population has not yet collapsed because of the artificial increase in carrying capacity afforded by the Green Revolution and our use of fossil fuels.

That increase in food production, however, is at or near its peak. As is global oil production which will quickly lead to a global peak in overall fossil-fuel production. All of the global human population, regardless of their local level of food security, is about to begin paying the ultimate price for the reproductive excesses in those areas of the world that have long-since overshot their own local carrying capacity. As fossil fuels and dependent global food production decline the human population will begin to decline as the artificial carrying capacity begins the inexorable decline toward the real carrying capacity of the planet estimated, as previously mentioned, to be 1-2 billion, roughly the global human population at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Had things taken a different turn at the time of the industrial revolution, in fact, we would not today be faced with the extreme moral dilemna of a population four to six times the carrying capacity that then existed. But that is history which can be, and often is, rewritten, but never changed. And so we must face the moral issues that that course of action begun three centuries ago have left us to deal with, whether we like it or not.

• What moral right do the people in those regions already in overshoot have to continue to reproduce at prodigious levels which can only be supported by food resources and future food security of other regions of the world?
• What moral right do the government and agricultural industry, in those regions that still have enough carrying capacity to support their own present and future population, have to draw down the future food security and survivability of their own people to support the people in regions that have already overshot their carrying capacity?
• What moral right does that government have to further increase even the local demand on that carrying capacity by continuing to import the population overshoot of those regions by continuing the current immigration policies of bringing in the excess population of those overshot regions, this simply to persist with a strategy of continuous economic growth as required by business and industry?
• What moral right does business and industry, or the investors in those businesses, have to push us ever faster and ever closer to a massive global population die-off in the pursuit of a few more years or decades of financial profits?

We will soon reach and surpass the peak in conventional global oil production and, a little later, the forced global production peak in non-conventional oil and other fossil fuels as we seek to replace the energy derived from oil with those other sources. When we do, the food security and carrying capacity in all regions of the world will begin to diminish, probably slowly at first but gaining momentum as we slide down the far slope of Hubbert's Peak. Concurrent with that, of course, will begin an accelerating decline in the global human population.

The impact of that decline will not be limited to those nations that have already overshot their carrying capacity, though it will initially most strongly manifest itself in those areas. In all probability, however, it will quickly start to also be felt in the industrialized world. Those governments will likely fall into the trap of continuing to try to alleviate the problems of the third world through providing food to and accepting immigration from those overshot regions. This will take an increasing toll on their own current citizens and, just as importantly, on future generations of their own people. Without the current level of agricultural fossil-fuel support the drawdown of future food security will be accelerated through increased losses of soil, agricultural land and soil fertility. This will accelerate the decline of sustainability of their own countries and push them more rapidly toward local overshoot. When that point is reached the global population will begin to decline dramatically as every attempt to ameliorate the impact of overshoot will likely, unfortunately, increase that impact.

As we pass the peak in global oil production and more inexorably forward to the post-oil world the most difficult reality we have to deal with is that current global population levels are unsupportable and unsustainable. The entire human population cannot be saved and any attempt to do so ultimately dooms more of that population. If the big decisions of humanity continue to be made on economic grounds, by and for big business and industry, we cannot possibly expect morality to be paramount in those decisions. There is little morality in continually trying to save a population of 6.5 billion people in a world that can only support 1-2 billion. That is politically expedient pseudo-morality. Nor is it moral to continue to ignore the problem of massive global over-population as we approach the tipping point. There will be an unavoidable decline of up to eighty percent of the human population levels in the few decades following the inevitable collapse of global energy supplies below demand levels. Dealing with that crisis will be the greatest moral test in human history, a test thrust upon every single person on the planet. It is a moral test that cannot be abdicated to the heads of business and government. We must all look our humanity and morality squarely in the face. We must each ask ourselves who lives and who dies. And we must hope that the answer does not come easily or quickly.

–  Richard Embleton