How to Save your Butt. And Mine. (Part I)
Last night, I woke up from a weird dream.
I was sitting on a green couch next to a friend watching a movie and suddenly saw that our butts were growing. They were growing and growing, and they did not stop growing. In fact, our butts were growing so much, expanding to the left and right side, that the rest of our bodies were starting to sink to the inside. I was literally melting away.
And if this was not already disturbing enough, while I was screaming for help, fighting for my life, my friend did not seem to care at all. She was literally not reacting to this horrible occurrence. The only thing she seemed to care about was the TV, which she stared at motionlessly while melting away.
Then, everything turned dark. I woke up.
Puh. You can imagine my relief when I was sitting in my bed and realized that my butt was still the same size.
What a stupid dream, I thought. A stupid dream with no meaning at all.
I’m sure 99.4 % of all people on this planet would agree and move on. But for some reason, I did not.
Why the hell was I dreaming about a melting butt? I decided that right after that dream in the early morning, I would sit down next to my cup of coffee and a piece of paper, and ask myself this question over and over again. Frankly, I have been troubled with a certain topic for months now and it was clear to me that at some stage this sense of unrest and frustration growing inside of me would become visible somehow. And so it did. In the form of a dream. A dream of me melting away. And there it was. I found an answer: You, my friend, need to save your butt. And mine too.
And here is why.
The current situation
There are now 7.8bn people on this planet. And every minute, we have roughly 150 new human beings joining the club. This means that every month our world increases by the population of Spain or Argentina today. If you think this is already crazy news, let me tell you how many of us there will be 25 years from now: 10 billion butts. I don’t know about you, but this is unimaginable for me.
And craziness does not stop here.
The global network of everything
Our global consumption and purchasing level has risen to a point, which is not comparable to anything we have ever experienced: Today you wake up and take a black, quadric plastic-metal object into your hand, press a button and: *whabam!!* — you’re connected to a global network of everything.
Thanks to rapidly developing technologies, your skater fanatic brother can be based in Paris, France and orders those new funky caps from a brand in Malibu, California online and have them delivered to his front door within four business days. Your design-savvy aunt in Berlin, Germany meanwhile found a fantastic oak chair, made by a small company in Bali, Indonesia and has it shipped within seven business days too, wow!
We use social media to connect with people from around the world, catch up with friends and family on a daily basis, share one of the thousands of pictures of sleeping dogs or breakfast bowls, super wow! And then we take cars, ships and planes to reach destinations thousands of miles away (or just some miles +/- 1h away from us).
All these activities amount to us pumping 51bn tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere every year. 51bn tonnes. Let that sink in for a moment.
Did it sink in? Ok. Then you might wonder “where the hell does this number come from?” Did I make this up? No. Unfortunately not.
Where this number comes from
Just think about where we are today: All of our countries’ economies are operating these days with the goal of cost-efficiency, speed, and the satisfaction of the growing demands of an even faster-growing population.
Those 51 bn tonnes of GHG emitted each year can be broken down into the activities which are evolving around us and our consumption levels:
- Making things such as cement, for roofs over our heads, steel, as a strong and durable material for cars and refrigerators, or plastic (- not even including all the micro-plastics). All this makes up for almost 31% of the total emissions.
- Plugging in things such as electricity for our phones, light sources, and Netflix & Chill nights: 27%.
- Growing things which is related to all planting (crops for your porridge, burgers and beer) and animal activities (also for your burgers and milk in your cereals and don’t forget the Sunday egg benedict). Making 19% of the total emissions.
- Getting around which is considering planes, trucks and cargo ships to get your Amazon delivery from Malaysia to Germany within two and a half business days and flying from New York to the Maledives for an extended weekend makes up for 16%.
- Last but not least, keeping things warm and/or cool for you, such as heating your flat or cooling it with air-con on a hot summer day. 7%.
Besides being a little sarcastic here, let me assure you one thing: I am no better when it comes to experiencing convenience and consumption. But that is exactly my point. We need change. In fact, we do not only need a change. We also need to change.
Why? Well, if we look at the last 50 years, our population has doubled, we consume three times more food, twice as much water and three times more fossil fuels (find more information here). It makes sense that more people means more needs. But at some point, things went out of control and we paid a shocking price.
Farming the world
Since the last decades, 30% of all tropical forest has been eradicated. Forest clearing for agricultural space ( for crops, soybeans, cows and therefore your burgers) helped to make farming become the №1 sport for countries worldwide.
35–40% of the world’s land today is covered by agriculture. But our creativity in farming potential does not stop on land. We also extended our farming activities away from the grounds into the wide oceans.
In 2018, the world capture fisheries and aquaculture production reached 96.4 million tonnes. To put that in perspective: an average loaded truck trailer can load up to 40 tonnes in volume. So we are talking 24 million trucks per year here (and this number does not even include bycatch).
Plus, this number was only accurate three years ago. What seems abundantly accurate, however, is the fact that we are harvesting more fish than ever. And this comes with a further cost too.
Research shows that we already lost about 70% of our biodiversity by 2020, and the numbers are increasing. I don’t know about you, but this sounds off to me. Catastrophic to be precise.
Yes, I hear you say, it’s a really sad story. But what the hell has any of it got to do with my butt?
If you do not move your butt
After spending hours evaluating stats, going through reports and forecasts, talking to experts and watching expert panel discussions, one thing became clear to me: our relationship with nature is broken. If we all proceed and consume as we do, this will not only continue, it will actually only get worse.
As shown above, 2021 is the seventh warmest year on record. And while some people in the Northern hemisphere might be very pleased, thinking this is great as it will finally lead to amazing summers with BBQs, piña coladas and bikini pool parties, then I’m sorry to be a downer. You need to know that this is nothing but concerning news.
Instead of an eternal summer paradise, scientific research has told us what will happen within the next 20 to 30 years:
“The Amazon rainforest will be cut down until it can no longer produce moisture and degrades into a dry savannah. This will bring catastrophic species loss and altering the global water cycle. The Arctic will become ice-free during summer. Therefore, without an ice cap, less direct sunlight will be reflected out to space, only promoting the acceleration of global warming. Additionally, throughout the north sphere, frozen soil thaw will release methane which is one of the biggest contributors to GHG and also many times more potent than carbon dioxide itself.” — David Attenborough, A Life on Planet, 2020
Unfortunately, there won’t be any time left to plan those bikini parties. There’s barely enough time to prevent global warming — to an extent. An extent which lies within the frame of 1.5°C.
Wait, why 1.5-degree celsius?
The thing about 1.5-degrees
In 2015, our world’s leaders came together and signed the Paris Agreement as an international accord. As a collective aim, they target the substantial reduction of GHG emissions, to limit the global temperature increase to below 2°C, while pursuing the ultimate goal of a reduction to 1.5 °C. And the reason is the following:
The United Nations IPCC special report on Global Warming shows an increase of more than 1.5°C of our global temperature will lead to:
- 14 per cent of the earth’s population exposure to severe heatwaves. Humans will face a higher likelihood of heat-related illness and death.
- The global population will face heavy food security risks as an increase above 1.5 °C is also expected to significantly raise the already high probability of extreme drought and risks related to overall water availability (you might remember what happened in Capetown 2018 or Chennai 2019).
- The risk of extreme precipitation in Northern American, European and Asian regions will rise too. These regions will experience more rainfall, cyclones and flooding than ever before. The likelihood of devastating bush fires like the ones that recently took place in Australia and California could become the new norm.
- And then there is the effect on the ocean: Devastation. The earth’s temperature increase will also lead to an increase in the ocean’s temperature. The acidity of the ocean will also increase and subsequently considerably lower its levels of oxygen. This poses significant risks to marine biodiversity, fisheries and ecosystems. The world’s coral reefs will likely die as a result. Fish populations will crash.
This can’t be real. I am convinced by now that these are all scenarios we can't and simply do not want to imagine. Unfortunately, this is the reality and our future if nothing changes. It should be clear by now that it will have an impact on all of us humans. And it will be an absolute catastrophe.
I guess my dream contained this very clear message: if we continue with our consumption behaviour, we are not only facing the extinction of everything around us as we once knew it but also the extinction of our human butts.
We’ll literally melt away if we continue adding more toxic behaviour to the earth. This also means that we won’t provide a sustainable future for our own butts- and the ones of our children. Sorry, but if I think about all the countries and gems of biodiversity, I am still planning to visit, with all the culinary delights, I feel this is absolutely not a great outlook.
Friends, we really need to cool down. And we need to cool down very quickly.
But how?