The main problem is overpopulation and the complete lack of common sense around what we buy and consume every day. The human population remained below one billion for almost our entire history. We reached one billion around 1804, two billion in 1927, four billion in 1974, and eight billion in 2022. It took humanity roughly 300,000 years to reach the first billion, and little more than 200 years to add another seven billion. From four to eight billion took less than 50 years. Take something as simple as garden furniture. When I grew up, it cost a lot of money, but it lasted for decades if you maintained it. Today, we buy cheap plastic furniture and are lucky if it survives two seasons. The same applies to almost everything around the house. Cheap, mass-produced Asian rubbish, made to be used and thrown away. Then we have cars. For how many decades have we burned oil simply for fun? Who really needs three, four, five or eight-litre engines with turbochargers just to drive around? We also built poorer houses than my grandfather and great-grandfather did because electricity and oil were cheap. My grandparents saved and preserved everything they could from the farm and garden. My grandfather built the same kind of solid houses as his father and grandfather, using proper natural materials. They were expensive to build, but they lasted and were healthy to live in. During this population and consumption explosion, we have transformed most of the Earth’s natural land, destroyed wetlands and removed vast areas of natural forest. And natural forest cannot simply be replaced by planted forest. A tree plantation may produce timber and absorb some carbon, but it does not replace the biodiversity, soil systems, water cycles, fungi, insects, animals and ecological balance of an old natural forest. The loss of biodiversity is therefore just as important as the number of trees. We are dismantling systems that developed over thousands or millions of years, while still not fully understanding how all the parts depend on each other. We know enough to understand that the damage matters, but we do not yet know the full long-term consequences for climate, food production, water systems, disease, soil fertility or the general health and stability of the planet as we have known it. Now poorer countries understandably want the same lifestyle we have advertised to them for decades, and that is where the real problem becomes impossible to ignore. It is not only that each person consumes too much. The number of people consuming has increased from one billion to eight billion, while the lifestyle we promote is based on endless growth, cheap products, waste and replacement. Oil was never the problem. Oil was a gift from the gods. It gave us modern agriculture, medicine, transport, machinery, heating and opportunities earlier generations could never have imagined. The problem was what we did with it. We abused it, wasted it and built an entire throwaway society around it, just as we seem to do with everything that could have benefited everyone.
