Urban Area

Both culturally and genetically, human beings have always been small-group animals, evolved to deal with at most a few hundred individuals. Humanity is suddenly (in ecological time) faced with an emergency requiring that it quickly design a governance and economic system that is both equitable and suitable for a population of billions, and sustainable on a finite planet. Earth is now so overpopulated that it would require something like five more planets to support permanently today’s global population at the average American lifestyle, and yet several billion more people are scheduled to be added to the population by mid-century, even though several billion are now living in misery. Humanity is exhausting its natural capital: deep agricultural soils, fossil groundwater, and the biodiversity that runs its life-support systems. It is disrupting the climate, spreading toxic chemicals from pole to pole, increasing the chances of vast epidemics, and risking nuclear war over resources, especially water. And the scientific community fears that at most a decade or two remain to revolutionize our energy mobilizing systems (still extremely dependent on fossil fuels) and revise our agriculture and water-handling systems to enable them to respond to the centuries of changing precipitation patterns predicted by climate scientists. Any chance of growing enough food to give a decent diet to all of today’s population requires success in these endeavors. Creating a just society, in which care for each other and our life-support systems moves to the top of the political agenda, depends on social movements such as Occupy Wall Street.

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