Within the lifetime of anyone born at the start of the Baby Boom, the human population has tripled. Has this resulted in a human endeavor three times better — or one-third as capable of surviving? In the 1960s, humans took about three-quarters of what the planet could regenerate annually. By 2016 this rose to 170 percent, meaning that the planet cannot keep up with human demand, and we are running the world down.
“In other words,” say 17 of the world’s leading ecologists in a stark new看法在我们在生活中的地位上，“人类正在运行一个生态庞氏骗局，其中社会抢劫了自然和后代，以便在短期内为收入付出。”他们的标题鲜为人知的文章“低估了避免避免可怕的未来的挑战”，这是一种论点，而不是在致命的轨迹中盲目的小行星降雨。作者的指定目标不是驱使读者。他们写道：“我们的旨在为领导者提供现实的“冷水淋浴”，这对于计划避免可怕的未来至关重要。”
Put on your shower cap and step into the cold. Humans have altered about 70 percent of Earth’s land surface and ocean. Wetlands have lost 85 percent of their natural area; kelp forests have lost 40 percent; seagrass meadows are disappearing at 1 percent per year; the ocean’s large predatory fish are two-thirds gone; coral reefs have lost half their living mass. Agriculture has halved the weight of living vegetation on land, driving a diversity loss of 20 percent; 40 percent of extant plants are currently endangered. Farmed animals and humans now constitute 96 percent of all land vertebrates; only around 5 percent are wild, free-living animals. The world’s wild populations of birds, mammals, fishes, reptiles, and amphibians have declined by an average of nearly 70 percent in just the last 50 years, a breathtaking plummet. More than 700 vertebrate species have gone extinct over the last 500 years, an extinction rate 15 times the natural rate. Around a million species are now threatened with total extinction. These disruptions and declines have caused the deterioration of soil, air, and water quality; pollination; carbon sequestration; and human health. Other things have increased: floods, fires, the number of malnourished people, plastic pollution, general toxification, and infectious epidemics.
The point of seeing existential threats is not to face a doomsday future but to avert one.
Referring to the loss of living diversity and abundance, the authors note: “The mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.” But I think the problem is that the fabric of human civilization has been built and fueled precisely经过导致对生活世界的侵蚀。其他生物的痛苦很少是人类的，他们的利益很少考虑，它们的内在价值被打折了。（我仍然被问到“我们为什么要关心”即使是诸如正确的鲸鱼之类的标志性生物，也永远消失了。）
值得注意的是，作者是绝大多数的生态学家。就像我一样提供通过技术优先主义者。生态学家理解世界是相互依存的relationshipsamong diverse living and non-living systems. Ecologists examine feedbacks that result from, and make possible, the continuity and wondrous proliferation of life. Optimists tend to point to key human social trends such as rates of hunger and poverty. (The number ofmalnourished从1990年的10亿下降到2017年的8亿美元，一些良好的乐观主义者感觉很好。而贫穷rates同样下降了，人口增长导致了更加贫穷的人。）
In my view and the view of其他我们可以称呼谁skeptics, technology alone won’t solve the accelerating collision. Any social system, any technology, delivers on its值。具有相同价值的新技术可能会加速这些问题。（让人们失业的机器人想到了。）在核心方面，乐观主义者和生态学家没有进行相同的对话。乐观主义者对人类事情的发展方式感到乐观。生态学家看到了人类足迹，紧张的社会系统，气候反馈和灭绝危机的关系中的生存威胁。生态学家了解，建立一个不断大量的人类企业是由于通过浸润器抛弃了更多的世界而导致的，而牺牲了地球和世代的余生。在有限的星球上，这样的企业面临不可避免的限制。我们正在抨击护栏。
大雨导致了古尔加河溢出之后，2017年在哥伦比亚卡利的一条洪水泛滥。LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images
The point of seeing existential threats is not to face a doomsday future but to avert one. When the oil light comes on or the warning bells are insistent because you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, it is safest to pull off the road you are hurtling along and assess your situation.
The authors of “Avoiding a Ghastly Future” highlight several main implications of our road too heavily travelled. One, current trends put the future on track to be much worse than generally appreciated. The scale of existential threats to humanity and other living things is so great as to be nearly incomprehensible. Second, humanity’s existing governments and leaders are not up to what’s needed. And mounting stresses such as managing climate refugees will perversely drive politics toward adiminishing认识和处理问题的能力 - 变得非常明显。难民例如，在阿富汗，萨摩亚，菲律宾和美国墨西哥湾沿岸等地逃离气候相关的饥荒或海平面上升 - 造成了政治和反应系统，从而造成危机，从而破坏了散布潜在的危机危机问题的可能性。
The most fundamental driver of putting more material into our enterprise, human population growth, is on track to continue at least through this century. But population growth and its effects are uneven around the globe. Some nations are stable or even declining slightly in numbers; some consume vastly less per person. But even the poorest, lightest-living people need land, food, and water, and the results are stark to anyone who has known and loved a place over several decades.
就像人口增长和消费不统一一样，痛苦也不是造成的。估计有四分之三的十亿人正在缓慢饿死，而10至20亿人没有足够的食物来充分充当人类。人口增长会导致拥挤，失业，摩擦和冲突。随着人口的增长，管理摩擦的热量，经济承受着跟上的压力，使其更加困难。由于更迫切的需求，领导者认识到冷却而不是加油的可能性较小。这很明显，因为近乎全世界的政策着重于获得“更多” - 例如，更多的食物，而不是通过激励人口扁平和发展的政策来缓解危机。
大多数经济学家和政治家灾难性地将增长和改善视为同义词。
但是，大多数经济学家和政治家及其政策灾难性地将增长和改善视为同义词。根本的区别在于，增长意味着通过将更多材料推入系统来增大。改进意味着更有效的结果。我们都经历了一个时期，我们的身体计划是增长的。当增长停止时，我们的重点可能会改善。改善医疗保健，教育和同情心不需要增长作为必要的条件。相反，对增长的关注通常会妨碍改善。
同时，全球经济增长将持续到本世纪，这意味着在未来几十年中，总消费将增加。化石燃料目前可实现大多数消费；它们是85％的商业能源，65％的纤维和大多数塑料的来源。农业也取决于化石能源。由于这种燃烧，气候变暖的结果与先前的科学预测相匹配或超过了先前的科学预测，并且最新模型比早期模型更具变暖。
The loss of living things may mean little to most people, but climate changes are more obvious and more directly damaging to human life and investments. Perversely, atmospheric warming threatens to lower regional agricultural yields, increase mortality and morbidity, and even affect human cognitive functioning. The intensifying storms, coastal wash-overs, and fires of late might reasonably cause us pause. Such existential threats would seem likely to command the full attention of governments.
An Amur leopard, one of the world's most endangered big cat species, at a zoo in Lyon, France. As of 2019, there were just 90 of these leopards left in the wild.JEFF PACHOUD/AFP via Getty Images
But national and international responses have been wholly inadequate. Nations are not meeting goals set under the Paris climate accord, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Sustainable Development Program, due mainly to the lack of governmental commitment to their success. The authors say that without fulfilling existing pledges — not to mention additional measures required — “Earth’s temperature will be catastrophic for biodiversity and humanity.”
Worsening trends should prompt positive responses from a rational being. The opposite is occurring. Worsening trends exacerbate social pathologies. Politics works short-term; changes necessary for a livable future are politically risky. Meanwhile politicians seldom get blamed for incurring the real risks and mounting costs behind catastrophic floods and fires. Conflicts, refugees, and wars are seldom understood as being partly (sometimes wholly) attributable to environmental changes. Those problems increase discord. Crises fuel the rise of extreme ideologies, terrorism, and autocratic heads of state (the U.S., Brazil, and Russia are among the examples). All this makes较少的likely the cooperation necessary to ease root causes, creating a perverse cycle of ecological decline, rising risks, catastrophic damages, social inequality, and dysfunctional responses.
环保主义，而不是被认为是将人类融合在一起的无党派努力，以寻求自我保护和行星稳定（如1970年代），现在通常被视为一种政治意识形态。正如“避免可怕的未来”的作者指出的那样，美国的绿色新交易一直是政治两极分化的闪点。确实，环保团体经常被标记为“恐怖分子”。要快速了解保护土地，野外事物和野地的危险，请搜索网络：环保主义者被谋杀（结束了200killings in 2019).
Big-picture solutions exist, including fundamentally tweaking global capitalism by including costs of pollution in the production of carbon and chemicals, for instance; rapidly attenuating fossil-fuel use; and ditching the delusional ideology of perpetual growth. Even the most fundamental issue, human numbers, could largely solve itself as social progress continues alleviating what might be the world’s most widespread inequity — suppression of women.
如果有一颗银弹，那子弹是全面的公民身份和赋予妇女权力的。
但是，解决方案的机构在掌舵上缺乏的是一种能够具有远见，合作和同情心的物种，可以避免使行星方舟沉没。人类是否可以成为该物种还有待观察。我们显然能够创建行星问题。我们没有证明能够修复它们。
估算即将到来。作者警告说，唯一的选择是通过设计或通过灾难退出过期。如果我们不明白，它将抓住我们。没有第三种方法可以摆脱经济增长和人类扩张的不可避免的收缩。
从积极的一面来看，许多例子在较小的尺度上进行了许多成功的干预措施，例如由美国和其他地方的法律和政策以及《美国濒危物种法》的成功所产生的清洁天空和水。但是作者认为，在全球范围内，只有巨大的国际方法解决巨大的问题才能使各国绘制“未来较少的未来”。
The point of “Avoiding a Ghastly Future” is that we all must recognize the enormity of these problems. But the authors believe that reality can be faced without sowing “disproportionate” fear and despair. They say the necessary choices will entail “difficult conversations about population growth” and “the necessity of dwindling but more equitable standards of living.”
Meenakshi Dewan, a solar engineer, inspects solar panels in the rural community of Tinginaput, India.Abbie Trayler-Smith / Panos Pictures / Department for International Development
关于最后的结论，我不完全同意它一定是这样。我希望他们警告的乐观偏见不会妨碍我。更多的公平生活水平并不意味着所有人的标准，而是对于许多人来说，比当前的不平等迫使数十亿美元的生活更大，更好的生活。获得授权的妇女倾向于寻求较小的家庭，而作为个人选择。因此，对于某些人来说，对于现在被剥夺尊严，教育和平等的许多人来说，困难的地方应该具有很大的吸引力。
在我看来，如果有一颗银色子弹可以平息我们迫在眉睫的未来的多头龙，那子弹是妇女的完全公民身份 - 在法律，财务上和文化上。在妇女可以接受高等教育，获得银行贷款，继承财富，自己的企业并升至商业和政府职位的高度的地方，人口增长在很大程度上往往会放慢，因为生活变得更加公平。妇女更多地控制自己的决定和生活，选择出生间隔和较小的家庭规模。无需讨论需要与全球人口估算；个人决策就足够了。那些获得更多控制自己生活的人的秘密是，较小的家庭为人们提供了更大的生活。最大的馅饼切成薄片，最少被拥挤的桌子切割。
“避免可怕的未来”中概述的冷水淋浴应该激发科学家大声疾呼，并应激励投资者和政策制定者设想和实施许多comprehensive已绘制的解决方案。这并不是“避免”可怕的未来的问题；这是我们决定创建一个。如果我们决定不这样做，我们将有我们的工作以及我们的道德和道德思考 - 为我们削减。
