The Man with the Most Toys when He Dies…. Wins! 278

 I laughed at this wry comment on man’s bottomless need to consume. It was said with good but sarcastic humor by a gentleman I considered my second dad. Bob was a man who lived life well and fully but was also humble and self-reflective. He, some forty years ago, knew man would challenge Earth’s ability to meet not only our wants, but if we continued to abuse Mother Earth, our devotion to consumption would render her unable to meet our needs.

While the scientists of reputable science organizations tell us goal number one is to cease creating greenhouse gas pollution, there are related backstories that a wise and self-reflective society must confront. The big backstory often revolves around consumption. 

 

How will we meet the basic needs of humankind in the near future? This is not a problem we should leave only to the scientists. Today, our farmers provide us with more food than we consume. Agronomists and other scientists have made this possible by helping farmers increase their yields year after year. Only a hundred years ago, most of us were farming. Today, most of us have plenty of food produced by only a few farmers.  

 

But despite this miracle, people are starving. The current problem is distribution, not agricultural production. Many nations do not have the means to feed their citizens. Thus, they depend on imports from agricultural superproducers like North America’s Great Plains, Russia, Brazil, and the Ukraine.    

 

If one of these regions fails to deliver, the potential for nations to become unstable rises. 

The last massive interruption in global wheat production was in 2010. Putin, fearing instability in Russia when drought struck, prohibited wheat exports. The spike in the price of flour in Egypt and North Africa spawned the Arab Spring Revolutions. 

 

It is no wonder why the heads of African nations recently met with Putin to urge him to permit Ukrainian wheat exports through the Black Sea. No wheat, no flour, and no bread mean revolution wherever this happens.

 

I wonder what role we, the United States, is playing to keep people experiencing poverty in Africa fed. When I flew for the Military Sealift Command, we docked in Djibouti. I saw ships unloading tons of flour whose bags were stamped “Product of the USA.” I observed this with a great sense of pride. At least some small portion of my taxes fed people who might perish without American generosity.

 

Of course, people need more than food to live a life out of poverty. The United Nations has taken upon itself the task of bringing those who live in abject poverty to some low level of consumption that would bring them out.  

 

One complex problem is quantifying the level of consumption the world’s 1.2 Billion abjectly poor people need to live a decent life. Environmental scientists Johan Andrés Vélez-Henao and Stefan Pauliuk of the University of Freiburg and their colleagues took it upon themselves to accomplish this daunting task. They published their work in Environmental Science & Technology. The well-received study concludes that to remain out of poverty, a person must consume about 6 tons of food, fuel, clothing, and other supplies per year. They also determined this elevation in consumption is currently possible. 

 

But there are two major problems which confront us to meet the challenge. One is some of the new consumption would have to come from people willing to throttle back a bit. On average, we and the Germans have an annual consumption of 70 tons of food and stuff.  

 

The second major challenge is climate change and other environmental impacts. Ramping up consumption for the impoverished means we must produce more raw materials such as cement, metal, timber, and grain. These are important because their production and refining contribute about 23% of carbon emissions and more than 90% of biodiversity loss.

 

If “We are,” as Horace said, “just statistics, born to consume resources.” then we can rest easy. We in the developed world are achieving our destiny in a big way.

 

But if we feel some responsibility to the poorest of our fellow humans, not to mention the non-human creatures we share this planet with, then it is time to self-reflect. Maybe the goal to have more toys than the other guy when we die is, perhaps, a little selfish. 

 

If global peace is a shared goal, it is not the responsibility of the agronomist and the scientist to get us there. These dedicated men and women are already putting in the long hours to solve the most pressing problems facing us today.

 

Man’s ascent as Earth’s dominant species and biggest consumer is fascinating. Here is some great reading:

 

Scientist Hope Jahren gives us the facts and more in her book, “The Story of More.”

The 2020 article in the Guardian, “World’s consumption of materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year”

The 2012 Scientific American article, “Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment”.