WE’RE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN DEFUSE THIS SITUATION
When David Suzuki first showed up on Canadian television in 1971 there were 4 billion of us on the planet. 40 years later our population is closing in on 7 billion. And, like Twitter, more people keep signing-up every single second.
But it’s not just our population that’s growing. It’s our insatiable appetites. We’re consuming more than ever before. And you have to wonder if we can carry on like this forever? Suzuki doesn’t think so. To make his point he likes to share a common scientific observation.
You put a single bacterial cell in a test tube full of food. The bacterium reproduced, eats, and reproduces again. After 60 minutes, the food is gone and the test tube is filled with a horde of starving bacteria.
Running out of food is scary. But what’s really scary in this story is how the growth occurs. Because the bacteria reproduce exponentially, at 59 minutes the test tube appears only half-full. Everything seems fine but in the final minute the population doubles and the test tube goes from half-full to completely full. Drawing the analogy to our situation is something David had been doing for years, but it has never been more relevant. You’re in a test tube. We’re all in a test tube. And, as David says, “most scientists he knows agree with him, we’ve reached the 59th minute”. So the question is, “What do we do wit our minute?”
Notes
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