Is the human species in puberty?

With the recent news about climate change and the likely extinction of millions of animals, it is easy to start thinking we are approaching the end of the world. Certainly, we are at the end of something. But could it be possible that all that is happening is we are coming to the end of a growth spurt.  Said another way, could the human species be in puberty?

First, there is no question that at some point growth must stop. As you can see from the chart below, consistent growth eventually turns vertical.  Over time, populations grow, waste grows and so does the resource usage. The blue line represents growth for humans over the past 100,000 years. In the last 10,000 years it has started to get vertical and in the last few hundred years, the curve is accelerating rapidly. While no one knows where society is along the blue line, there is no question we are on the upswing.  In addition, there is a capacity to the resources on planet Earth, as represented by the orange line.  While innovation and technology can shift the orange line higher, there is no way out of the reality of the graph.

According Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics, “It would take four planets for everyone in the world to live as they do in Sweden, Canada and the United States.” Today we have 7-8 billion people on Earth today; in 50 years, we are likely to have more than 15 billion people. Whether it is 50 or 100 or 5,000 years, there is no avoiding the reality that unless we stop growing, we will hit our resource capacity.

The only way out of this conundrum is to stop or significantly curtail growth.  While this concept is a scary proposition for leaders and economists with the current mentality, there is no reason the growth curve could not be S shaped. 

What if our growth trajectory was similar to the human growth trajectory that accelerates through our teenage years and then stops. Like a 20 year-old, we may feel like all the good stuff will soon be behind us, but life does not end after our teenage years. In fact, our lives really just start then, and somehow we do it without growing physically. In fact, to stay healthy as we age, we need to cut resource consumption.

With this view, we can see the end of growth is not the end.  Then we can start to shift our mentality from physical growth (“more”) to a meta-physical growth model (“better”). That could be the start of a great new beginning.