Nature

More people will have access to natural spaces to steward, for enjoyment, research, and to harvest resources in sustainable ways.  Small cities will be surrounded by limited areas of managed farmland, but as human islands within a wider landscape largely left to nature.

Humanity is currently using up resources and destroying habitats, both on land and at sea, at unprecedented rates.  We are changing the atmosphere, and causing sea levels to rise.  Humans have left indelible traces in the geological record, and are likely to cause the sixth major extinction of species, unless we drastically change course.

Economic growth can be fundamentally opposed to healthy ecosystems.  Many leaders see environmental protections as barriers to improving productivity and jobs.  Population growth is also seen as a problem for conservation.  As humanity increases in numbers, the needs of increasing numbers of people must surely limit space left for nature.

One response is to protect key areas as national parks, which are funded via elite tourism.  However these aren’t large enough to adapt to climatic changes, and displace local people. Expecting populations to protect their own ecosystems once they grow wealthy enough generally ignores the impact their increased consumption has outside their own countries.

There is a paradox here.  If we need increasing amounts of resources, why are we also so wasteful of the resources we’ve already extracted and used?  Instead of becoming more scarce and expensive, raw materials keep getting cheaper, and we discard the end results.  Our careless levels of pollution would not happen if resources were actually scarce.

Population growth is misunderstood.  Conservation fears can be based on racist prejudices.  Africa remains home to some of the world’s most impressive megafauna, and the continent is so vast, it will have a relatively low population density when the human population peaks.  The worst conservation legacies are those of relatively wealthy industrialised countries.

The underlying problem is economic patterns which have become extractive and insatiable. These have roots in our overheating megacities, which fuel artificially high costs of living, and rates of return on investment.  This discourages sustainable stewardship of resources wherever they exist – from remote forests to the deepest parts of the ocean floor.

Agricultural markets are also unbalanced.  We now easily grow far more food than we need.  This makes staples low value commodities, so large producers find ways to retain profits by scaling up industrially, and add value by moving up the food chain.  This explains why cows now are double the biomass of humans, vastly reducing the habitats left over for nature.

Only by reducing economic pressures can we reverse the conversion of the Amazon to grow soy beans for animal feeds, orang-utan habitats for palm oil, and overfishing in the oceans. This will require changing the economic pressures created by overcrowding into megacities, and the psychological and economic desperation, and then overconsumption, this leads to.