In Puberty on the Scale of a Planet, Dot Earth’s Andrew C. Revkin posits we are a teenage species at this moment. He asks, what do we want to be when we grow up?
9 Billion People + 1 Planet = ?
At a quickening pace, humanity is etching its signature across the Earth, diverting waterways and downing forests, spreading pythons to the Everglades and American bullfrogs to Bordeaux, extracting minerals used in cellphones from a last patch of gorilla habitat, altering the atmosphere, knitting the land with roadways and the sky with contrails. For two generations, the nascent environmental movement railed against this process. Like many, I was weaned on that scary sensibility. Population was a ticking bomb. Spring threatened to be silent. I still admire those who led the call for cleaning up the mess people had created in the rise and spread of industrialized, consumptive living.But lately I’ve come to see those recent dirty decades less as malfeasance (mind you, there have been plenty of dubious actors) and more as an inevitable phase, a transition as natural — and volatile — as puberty.
The real question is, what comes next? As its moment on Earth has arrived, H. sapiens, one of nature’s great experiments, has necessarily had to have a selfish, muscle-flexing, exuberant adolescence. It is only natural for a young person to break things, burn things, kill things, to be mean and even nasty sometimes, if only to learn how that attitude can bite back. In a youth’s life, mistakes are not only inevitable; they are vital.
In fact, by one measure we truly are a teenage species at this moment. There are currently about 1.2 billion humans between the ages of 10 and 19. Some demographers have recently concluded that this so-called “youth bulge” could well constitute the largest single generation that will ever exist (as long as humans are restricted to this planet, at least). This pulse of youth is not only intensifying pressures on resources, but also providing fodder for extremist movements and contributing to social unrest as employment fails to keep up. [READ ON]