Thanks to all those who commented on that optimistic worldview. Bar these counterarguments, the central critique seems to be that – even though we live during the most enlightened and open-minded, least violent, least diseased, best fed, wealthiest, coolest, most exciting epoch the world has ever seen – it won’t count for much if Earth’s ecosphere goes into meltdown.

That’s a good point. Thanks to those who’ve made it.

In my view, environmental sustainability is the central long-term issue human civilisation faces. It will likely remain so when the crop of political and economic problems which currently dominate the news media have faded to historical footnotes.

The Jolly Pilgrim Angle

Constructive dialog about long-term sustainability is hampered by the idea that economic growth automatically equates to greater negative environmental side effects. This is a misconception.

The growth-sustainability misconception arises due to a failure to differentiate between things which are socially constructed (like money) and things which are physically real (like energy), and from the assumption that the entirety of the human adventure will predictably mirror recent history.

In fact, there is no underlying reason why civilisation cannot be made environmentally sustainable, while also continuing to have a growing economy and getting generally funkier.

My thoughts on this matter, for which this post is an introduction, are at the following link:

Sustainability and economic growth are not mutually exclusive

Comments are enabled. Do chip in.

The Ecosphere and Civilisation

The above is expanding on my view that:

• humanity is an ecological phenomenon;
• this ecosphere was always, sooner or later, going to give rise to a tool-using, civilisation-building species;
• the environmental problems we face are thus an historically inevitable bottleneck;
• the whole process is organic, Gaiaistic, rather wonderful and best embraced.

The sustainability-growth article is an expansion of page 277, paragraph 6, of the book. I’ve therefore added the relevant subchapter (a full version of the text abridged by The Ecologist, Gaiain Foundation, Treehugger and others) to the website: HERE.

I’ll publish more expansions when I get time to arrange and edit the material. They will be:

1. How the transition towards a sustainable civilisation is underway
2. A pan-human strategy for long-term environmental sustainability
3. Human civilisation as an emergent characteristic of Earth’s ecosphere

If this new material does not appear directly on the website, links to it will.

Respectfully

Pete Baker

Keep an eye on the long term while you are dancing in the flames – Sir Philip Hampton

PDF version: Sustainability and economic growth are not mutually exclusive_Peter Baker

In the past two centuries, human civilisation has experienced an unprecedented increase in global gross domestic product (GDP) – economic growth associated with a precipitous rise in material prosperity, which has left sixth sevenths of Earth’s population enjoying living standards beyond those of all but a small minority who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution.

That economic transformation continues to lift tens of millions of people out of absolute poverty each year, and further economic growth is a prerequisite to every proposed strategy for making absolute poverty history. The physical manifestations of all this growth, however, have had well-documented side effects on our planet’s ecosphere, in the form of pollution, ecosystem degradation and the release of heat-trapping gases.

Concern regarding where all this will lead has prompted the astrophysicist Tom Murphy – a prolific blogger on energy fundamentals – to calculate that if civilisation’s energy use were to continue increasing at its recent trend rate (between 2% and 3% per year), we would be using every watt of sunlight hitting the Earth in 275 years, every watt released by the sun in 1,350 years, and all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy within 2,450 years.

Striking a more populist tone, Dr Albert Bartlett, in his lecture series spread around the world via YouTube in The Most Important Video You Will Ever See, uses the exponential function to demonstrate how open-ended increases in anything from population to hydrocarbon use soon sends them beyond physically feasible limits. The conclusion is that open-ended economic growth intrinsically leads to open-ended ecological side effects, that such growth is therefore unsustainable, and that civilisation’s current golden age of material prosperity is built on a house of cards.

That conclusion is a fallacy. It is a fallacy based partly on a misunderstanding about what economic growth means and partly on a presupposition that the nature of future economic growth will predictably mirror that of recent history. But at its root is the false assumption that an intrinsic link exists between the energy use of civilisation (which is an objectively quantifiable feature of physical reality) and global GDP (which is a subjective human social construct).

This fallacy has been unthinkingly swallowed by too many people. It has had a negative effect on the quality of debate regarding the environmental consequences of the changes sweeping the human world, and it hampers our ability to think clearly about how the improvements in quality of life achieved during recent history can be captured for posterity in an environmentally sustainable manner.

What is unquestionably true is that anything tangible or entropy-producing (and that includes civilisation’s energy use, its physical manifestations and the global population) cannot grow exponentially, for long, in a finite universe. But global GDP does not measure those things – it measures the market ‘value’ of goods and services in a country’s economy over a given period. It is primarily a mental, rather than a physical, thing.

The future: not necessarily like the past or the present

 

Today’s economic realities as a phase in history

The cultural setting which has given rise to this fallacy is a period of history during which civilisation’s energy consumption has closely (although not precisely) tracked GDP growth.

Before the Industrial Revolution, civilisation’s energy use was more or less proportional to population (so the energy density of economic activity was basically constant). However, the phase of economic history inaugurated by the industrialisation of western Europe (and followed by that of North America, East Asia, Latin America, China and India etc) has been characterised by huge rises in the energy appetite of civilisation’s physical artefacts and hardware. This has taken the form of the mechanisation of manufacturing, the construction of a vast transport infrastructure, massively improved building stock and the host of machines which have replaced manual labour.

But that industrialisation is a one-off phase of history. Once everybody has a car (perhaps three), mod cons from dishwashers to televisions, along with good living arrangements with heating and/or air conditioning systems, rises in per capita energy consumption will start trending towards zero. In fact, as the ancient civilisations of China and India undergo this physical upgrade, we may now be living through the biggest proportional increase in energy consumption civilisation will ever see.

To extrapolate forward recent exponential increases in per capita energy use is to predict that everybody will have cars which are twice as fast, eat hamburgers which are twice as big and own washing machines that are twice as energy-hungry. Letting the compound exponentials run forward another century would see everybody on Earth with their own rocket ship and personal robot fleet.

 

The energy density of economic activity 

Per capita energy use in the developed world is already stabilising. According to the US Department of Energy, between 1980 and 2006, per capita energy consumption fell by 3% in North America and by 8% in the former-USSR countries. It rose by 8% in Europe, although this was accompanied by a far larger increase in economic activity.

During that 1980 to 2006 period, the energy intensity of each unit of GDP fell by 42% in the USA, 42% in the UK, 31% in the Netherlands and 20% in France. Since 1994, it has fallen by 32% in the former-USSR countries. These numbers are distorted by the relocation of energy-intensive industries to the developing world. Despite that, the overall energy intensity of economic activity, globally, fell by 14% between 1994 and 2006. None of this means we don’t have an energy crisis, but it is consistent with the decoupling of GDP from energy consumption and the levelling off of overall energy consumption, once industrialisation has taken place.

The main driver for contemporary increases in global per capita energy use is the industrialisation of the developing world. In the coming century, the main driver will be the industrialisation of those societies still currently mired in penury – increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and south and central Asia.

It’s critically important that those areas undergo this phase of economic evolution, for it involves not only massive increases in per capita GDP, but the stabilisation of population and a transformation in human welfare outcomes, which are the whole point of ‘development’. Once this process is complete (which could perhaps happen within as little as a century from now) we can focus on the central long-term issues of bringing down humanity’s environmental impact and constructing a sustainable-energy infrastructure.

Three questions are implicit to this state of affairs:

1. What will the energy consumption of civilisation be when it has completely industrialised, and has a stable or declining population?
2. What will the renewable energy infrastructure to run such a civilisation look like and how difficult will it be to construct?
3. How much ecological damage will be done between now and such a renewable infrastructure being put in place, and what steps can be taken to mitigate that damage?

Debates regarding all three questions are, quite properly, raging. However, for the purposes of this article, we’ll concern ourselves with how the evolving character of economic activity means that the world’s GDP can continue to rise, even while its energy consumption is stable or declining.

Larger and more efficient ones needed.

 

Rising global GDP, with steady-state energy consumption

To understand the possibilities of a civilisation run via a sustainable, steady-state energy infrastructure, we must bear in mind its limitations: crucially, the limits of the energy efficiency of physical devices.

Currently, overall energy efficiency in the developed economies improves by about 1% per year (allowing us to light more homes and manufacture more goods with a fixed energy income). Refrigerators now use half the energy they did in the 1970s. Cars travel twice as far per unit of petrol (and emit 1% as many smog-causing pollutants). Jet engine efficiency has nearly doubled.

However, the laws of physics – critically the second law of thermodynamics – impose hard limits on how far such efficiency improvements can take us. For example, heat engines (which include the internal combustion engine and the turbines in most power stations) are already within a factor of two of hard theoretical limits to efficiency. Refrigeration systems are within a factor of two to three of such limits. The best LEDs are within a factor of three. Electric motors, pumps, battery chargers and hydroelectric power plants already operate at near perfect efficiency (often around 90%). Furthermore, heating a fixed physical quantity of material (be that a meal-sized portion of food or the water for a shower) will always involve a fixed quantity of thermal energy.

In the coming centuries, market forces and engineering ingenuity can bring down the energy efficiency of civilisation’s physical hardware by maybe a factor of two. But total energy consumption (assuming a certain standard of living) can never be brought below a level proportional to the global population. Physical devices will, of course, improve in numerous other ways (today’s cars are better than those of the 1970s for reasons other than better energy efficiency) and their GDP value will consequently continue to rise.

However, long-term continued GDP growth, after energy efficiency, and consumption, have plateaued, implies:

1. A decreasing energy intensity per unit of GDP.
2. That the non-negotiable, energy-consuming parts of the economy (e.g. farming and manufacturing) will come to constitute an ever smaller proportion of global GDP.

Same energy density, and yet more expensive.

 

The next phase of economic history

These are precisely the trends now playing out in the advanced economies. To make sense of why and how, it is useful to think in terms of the three-sector hypothesis of economic activity, dividing it into primary (extraction of raw materials), secondary (manufacturing and industry) and tertiary sectors (services, education, healthcare, the arts etc).

In all pre-modern economies the primary sector overwhelmingly dominated. Following industrialisation, the second sector comes to predominate (think: Russia in the mid-twentieth century, or China now). But as economies mature the tertiary sector (sometimes further divided into quaternary and quinary – distinctions irrelevant to this analysis) ultimately comes to dominate, and that tertiary sector is not only less energy intense than the first two, it doesn’t require increased energy consumption to grow.

The clearest example of this process of economic evolution is in the most fundamental part of the primary sector: farming, which has already changed in ways that would have been inconceivable 300 years ago. In medieval Europe, agriculture overwhelmingly dominated the economy. By the 1970s it had fallen to 6% of Europe’s GDP. It’s now less than 2%.

Equivalent trends – driven by ever greater mechanisation and spiralling technological competence – are gradually playing out in the secondary sector. Factories are slowly evolving into places where people sit behind screens, making use of computer aided design and 3D printers, and grow materials with pre-specified properties using genetically engineered micro-organisms. The effects of this economic evolution will include lower inputs of labour, better and more innovative products, less waste, lower environmental impact, and the secondary sector constituting an ever smaller proportion of total GDP.

Even in Germany – the quintessential advanced industrialised economy – manufacturing is only 28.1% of GDP, while agriculture is 0.8% and the tertiary sector 71%. Overall, in 2012, the primary and secondary sectors came to just over 37% of the global economy, while the tertiary sector made up 62.9%. Despite their declining impact on GDP, the physical artefacts of civilisation will continue, for the most part, to improve in quality (and, for some time, in terms of absolute scale), even while the largely non-physical tertiary sector increasingly dominates overall economic activity.

 

Economic evolution and the world around us

Given the early twenty-first century context in which this article is written, such an economic evolution may be difficult to envisage. So, for a sense of what such transformational changes in the significance of an economic activity mean over long time frames, consider salt.

Economically, salt was central to the development of civilisation. Enormous efforts were made to produce and distribute the stuff. China’s Sung emperors partly funded their empire through a salt monopoly. Salt was a key trade good sustaining the Hanseatic League in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Medieval camel trains would spend months carrying blocks of it across the Sahara. Yet today salt is almost universally accessible, a trivial part of the global economy and so cheap it’s practically free.

Inhabitants of advanced economies may have noticed how, over time, more and more of their fellow inhabitants work in third-sector activities, such as the law, human resources, healthcare, education, information technology, the arts and other ‘ephemera’. One hundred years ago it’s likely those people would have worked in factories. Three hundred years ago they would almost certainly have experienced the unforgiving grind of subsistence agriculture.

Same species. Higher assigned GDP value.

In the future, economic activity will become ever less dominated by making things and moving them around, and ever more dominated by people teaching, healing, entertaining and providing other services to one another. If that’s not social progress, I don’t know what is.

Observers of pop culture may have noticed the fad for celebrity chefs and the associated phenomenon of haute cuisine becoming increasingly mainstream – an example of the same basic activity being performed with increasing refinement and skill: (arguably) improving life quality and (certainly) being assigned a higher GDP ‘value’, even while using up no substantially greater amount of physical energy.

Get used to that sort of thing.

 

The exponential function, social constructs and spaceship design 

Those with an eye on the inexorable nature of the exponential function may note that, while the energy density of economic activity can forever trend downwards, it can never reach zero. Even the most brilliant bionic internet entrepreneur, using the most sophisticated quantum computer, providing the most specialised high-value services to clients around the world, still needs to eat, heat water for tea and power their hardware. GDP cannot, therefore, grow exponentially forever.

Bear in mind that GDP ultimately measures the utility of a good and service to humans, so a practical restatement of the above hypothetical is that – assuming a certain steady-state energy consumption – a time will come when no one can think of any practical way of innovating to make things better (without using more energy).

Even if (some time in the next thousand years) a significant proportion of human economic activity moves off-planet and taps into the energy resources available there, the limits inherent to a finite universe (outlined by Professor Murphy and summarised at the top of this article), will ultimately become pertinent – even using the power of a star or a galaxy, there will still be some maximum sustainable energy consumption available to construct, for example, spaceships.

In such a maximum-sustainable-energy scenario, the GDP ‘value’ of such a civilisation’s spaceships will ultimately become proportional to the artistry of their spaceship design.

Remember: ‘GDP’ is a social construct, dreamt up by humans because it’s useful. It was devised as a proxy for economic development in 1932 and only became the main tool for measuring the size of economies in 1944.

So is there some ultimate theoretical limit to spaceship innovation? Probably. Would a civilisation which had reached such a limit have use for GDP as a conceptual tool in assessing its wealth and economic activity? Who knows. However, at this point we’re speculating about the limits of a far-future civilisation in a way that holds few lessons for contemporary energy policy.

 

You may have a low carbon footprint,
but how efficient are your recycling systems?

Physical commodities: a limiting factor to economic evolution? 

While energy consumption is the global economy’s most fundamental footprint on physical reality, another cited reason for a ceiling on economic growth is the limitations of physical commodities (minerals, metals etc) and, of course, fossil fuels. At this point, Paul Collier, Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, has this to say:

‘The world has sustained overall economic growth, albeit with hiccups, for two centuries yet virtually no single economic activity has been sustained. Growth has not been a matter of everything getting bigger. Rather, it has been like running over ice floes: if you stand still you fall in and drown; if you keep going – even if each individual step is unsustainable – you survive.’

Civilisation does not require unlimited use of any particular physical commodity in order to sustain itself. In medieval Britain, the government was worried that it would run out of yew trees for longbows. But thanks to technology, we can now shoot people without yew wood. In the nineteenth century, Britain was worried about running out of tall trees for ships’ masts, but at a certain point ships no longer needed trees. The high-value natural assets of the nineteenth century were nitrates, which are far less valuable now. The world value of commodities can be tracked for over a century and there is little basis for concluding that prices are rising.

Indeed, other than for oil they may well be falling. Whether the current high prices for hydrocarbons will be sustained as part of a prelude to peak supply (or be one more blip as the forces of supply and demand play out) is a moot point. But nothing will accelerate the development of alternatives to current energy sources more effectively than sustained high prices for them.

To quote Sheikh Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi Oil Minister, ‘The Stone Age didn’t end because the world ran out of stone.’ Likewise, the Age of Oil will not end when the world runs out of oil. Technology will move on. Even fossil fuels, despite civilisation’s uncomfortable recent addiction to them, are not irreplaceable. In the most developed economies of North America, Europe and Japan, consumption of oil has already peaked, due to stabilising demographics, increased efficiency and substitution for other energy sources.

Earth’s fossil fuel endowment is sometimes contextualised as a one-off, irreplaceable gift of nature. Even if that’s fair, given that fossil fuels have been used to help lift billions of people out of poverty, create a planet-spanning technological civilisation, and multiply humanity’s understanding of its universe by several orders of magnitude, we’ve hardly wasted them.

 

Possibilities for future economic evolution

In my view, the irreplaceable-gift position has a hint of presentism about it. After all, it was the conditions of the eighteenth century – the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution – that put human civilisation in a position to make use of fossil fuels in the first place. Fossil fuels didn’t produce cleverness and industry, cleverness and industry empowered us to dig up and burn fossil fuels. They have, in turn, created the prerequisite conditions for constructing a renewable energy infrastructure which can power civilisation for millennia to come.

The world’s economy will keep evolving. The throw-away culture of today will be brought to an end, as market forces kick in to deal with the developing realities of the availability of physical commodities. The recycling systems being set up in today’s advanced economies will one day be seen as crude prototypes in a world where automated recycling systems strip down physical goods to their component materials, and feed them back into solar-powered manufacturing units.

The limiting factors to the scope of the physical civilisation we can build are ingenuity and imagination. These are qualities which humans possess in abundance.

 

Ultimate character of a long-term sustainable civilisation

As I repeatedly stress in my book: the world around us (including the nature of its economy) is just a phase in history. Civilisation in the grandest scales is not circular, but linear. Not long ago, the idea that only 1 in 100 people would need to work in agriculture in order to feed everybody would have struck most people as absurd.

Our ultimate guide to the physical characteristics of a long-term civilisation is nature. She provides the exemplary model for a self-sustaining physical system, powered by the sun. If nature can do it, so can we.

I’m no better than anyone at predicting which technologies will take hold and prove themselves in the future. But there is nothing unfeasible about a world in which all transport is electrified, where the planet is criss-crossed by super-fast maglev trains moving in partial vacuums, recycling systems are elegant and cost-effective, people live in eco-friendly cities with access to a health and educational infrastructures far beyond those we know, and the whole arrangement is powered by vast solar arrays in the Sahara, and Earth’s other deserts.

It is NOT a unicorn

None of that is contrary to the laws of physics. None of it is unreachable. None of it requires technology that isn’t feasible within foreseeable timeframes. It is just several stages of cultural and technological evolution beyond where we stand today. The GDP of such a world’s physical and non-physical systems will be astronomical by our twenty-first century standards. Its energy consumption and environmental impact do not have to be.

If you think such a world sounds like science fiction, remember that today’s world would have seemed as such to those living 300 years ago. If you think it sounds like paradise, remember that the material prosperity of almost everybody reading this would have seemed as such to their very recent ancestors.

Just as the business end of economic activity moves from the physical to the ephemeral, so do humanity’s concerns. That future world will have a new set of problems. No doubt they will be – or appear – as grievous as ours.

It is in the interests of everybody alive that we work towards such a world – by adjusting lifestyles, according to our improving understanding of environmental best practice, and doing our bit to ensure technological and economic evolution drive human civilisation forward in a sustainable direction.

As debates regarding sustainability intensify, there is much talk of the bleak futures which must be avoided. Let us also remember the bright and sustainable future, for ourselves and this planet, which is well within our grasp.

 

Peter Baker, 2012

• More thoughts on the long-term trajectory of human affairs: www.thejollypilgrim.org
• The Jolly Pilgrim, is published by SRA Books and is available from Amazon.

 

Free PDF download: Sustainability and economic growth are not mutually exclusive_Peter Baker

 

Sources

• Collier, P. The Bottom Billion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Collier, P. The Plundered Planet. London: Penguin Books, 2010.
• Findlay, R and O’Rourke, K. H. Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009
• Yergin, D. The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2011
• Tom Murphy, Do the Maths: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
• Dr Albert Bartlett, The Most Important Video You Will Ever See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
• US Department of Energy: http://energy.gov/
• Carbon Nation: http://www.carbonnationmovie.com/about

I’ll remember the Olympic Closing Ceremony until I drop dead or go mental. That morning, me and my crew from the pink truck had free run of the deserted stadium. Two of the girls, Kim and Fiona, found the BBC commentary box and took pictures of themselves in the white leather armchairs normally occupied by Denise Lewis and Michael Johnson.

Ten hours later, as we were about to go live to half a billion people, me and my pub-lad mates walked across the middle of the packed stadium in full costume while eruptions of camera flashes shimmered over the massive terraces. We then hid beneath the blue-lit Gherkin as 80,000 people counted to ten and Gareth – our dancing master – gave us NASA-style instructions via our personal radios. ‘Pub lads, hold. Hold. Pub lads, go.’

Then we poured out from the giant models of London landmarks, waved flags, sang ‘God Save the Queen’, performed to Madness and Blur, and did stadium-sized dance routines to the Pet Shop Boys and One Direction (never thought I’d say that). Twenty-five minutes later, we exited through the terraces, high-fiving the audience as we went. Adrenaline overload.

Bursting into the holding area with hugs and elation was followed by hazy, euphoric wandering. Then I and seven pink-truck mates were whisked into some of the best seats in the house by a good Samaritan. We were directly behind the cauldron.

Annie Lennox was stupendous. Take That were awesome (never thought I’d say that, either). When The Who closed with ‘My Generation’, a spiral of fireworks swept around the stadium roof, and they dumped a mountain of red, white and blue confetti over us, I actually lost my cool.

I was reduced to jumping up and down on the spot, windmilling my arms and shouting, ‘Aaaaaaargh!” It really was worth £1,000 per ticket.

After the whopping spectacular, we headed for the 24-hour casino. Then I collected two 18-year-old pack backers, went back to our place, drank cocktails, and passed out on the sofa at 6 a.m. on Monday morning, beneath two Union flags. Win.

Three weeks earlier I was on stage at the Secret Garden. I had 15 minutes, fluffing for Mark Stevenson of the League of Pragmatic Optimists. Everybody was wasted. The stage manager hadn’t slept for three days and was tripping on acid. Before me was marquee of muddy festival goers, slumped wide-eyed on wicker armchairs.

I explained to them that the human world is in better shape than ever before, and that we should see through the sea of alarmist media around us and keep a sense of perspective. Happy applause. Did anyone get that?

As I left the stage, two outrageously striking young women, dressed as fairies, with the cheekbones to pull it off, tugged on my jeans. One of them said ‘That was amazing. You really put it all in perspective. All those graphs about life expectancy. Everything I’ve been learning just fell into place and made sense. I think you’ve just inspired me to study economics.’

They received a free book, right there.

A week later I was in a disused industrial building, with a post-apocalyptic feel, off Seven Sisters road, doing marketing shots for a forthcoming interview. Marian, the self-possessed Hungarian photographer in charge, spent the whole day shouting commands at me.

I was taken to the roof, with a panoramic view of London, surrounded with lighting rigs, then Marian ordered me to take my shoes and socks off, and sit in a puddle of cold, stagnant water. She was a professional, so I complied.

The interview is tomorrow. Yaz, the British Jordanian conducting it, says that The Jolly Pilgrim is basically correct, except for the bit about religion. He promises a bellicose discussion. I’m looking forward to it.

Pictures and things:

• Marian and me on the roof (full 360-degree picture)
• That picture in the puddle, again (full 360-degree version)
• THE BOOK! 

We came in peace for all mankind  – Neil Armstrong

All comments welcome below …

This excerpt deals with the fact that our historical context, and our brains’ internal hardwiring, leads us to think about the world in a certain way. Climate change is used as an example.

Every night on my way up the east coast I was pouring out my heart into the weather-beaten and black gaffer-tape-reinforced notebook I carried. Since visiting India, I’d stopped writing poetry.

By this point I was on a mission. The notion I’d absorbed during my travels was that there’s an approach to thinking about the world – a modern approach – which is ready to be synthesised by someone with the interest, time and head space. So that’s what I’d do. 

Thinking About Oneself from the Outside

Whilst hitchhiking

Imagine a party. Now imagine that somewhere in that party, on a tray, is a glass of champagne full of bubbles. Now imagine sticking (bubble-sized) brains in those bubbles and asking them what they thought about their world. They’d probably come up with lots of bubble-related issues to talk about, such as who was the biggest bubble and which bubble sparkled the brightest. If they started talking to each other, no doubt it wouldn’t take long for bubble politics to emerge.

From the point of view of bubbles in a champagne glass, which bubbles are the biggest and brightest are matters of note. But the really interesting thing is the party swirling around them. In my view, at this point in history humans are at the point of perceiving the glass and the party, while still thinking stubbornly like bubbles.

For example, the east coast of Australia is an environmentally aware region in an environmentally aware nation. When I hitchhiked along it the issue on everyone’s lips, just as in Sydney, was climate change.

Here are two narratives for thinking about that issue.

Narrative One

For more than a century, people have relied on fossil fuels for their energy needs. Burning such fuels releases carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas (i.e. it traps heat by forming a blanket around the Earth). As carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for many years, concentrations of it are building up and global temperatures are rising.

As a result humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb and has a short period of time in which to avert a major catastrophe. This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, problem facing the human race. Our failure to tackle it decisively could soon send the planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.

Narrative Two

Humans are a species of hominid thrown up by Earth’s biosphere. The evolutionary processes which gave rise to them caused their line to develop hands, tool use, large brains and sophisticated culture. Twelve thousand years ago those characteristics allowed humans to start producing food via the technique of agriculture.

That, in turn, set in motion a chain of events which caused human technology to improve inexorably until, at the end of the eighteenth century, they’d started to build machines powered using the fossilised organic matter in the Earth’s crust.

That, in turn, helped drive an enormous increase in humanity’s command of the physical sciences such that, by the late twentieth century, humans realised that the waste gases their industry and transportation systems released affected the constitution of their planet’s atmosphere which, in turn, had side effects.

That realisation came as a shock. Humans had not previously understood to where the forces of history were driving them, or the effects their actions had on the Earth’s meteorological rhythms. Theories were soon postulated, computer models cobbled together and everyone began arguing about what to do.

Historical Context, Internal Hardwiring and World Views

I believe that the second narrative is a much more complete way of thinking about what’s happening (with greenhouse gases and climate change) than the first one.

The view from the inside

I also believe that the reason climate change is thought of as the overarching threat of the twenty-first century (rather than the inevitable consequence of being a civilisation-building tool-using species on a planet with fossil fuels) is the same reason champagne bubbles who one day realise that they’re floating in a glass in the middle of a party might initially panic – because they’re subroutines in a system which they’re only just beginning to comprehend.

A century and a half before this book was written, humans began to grasp that life forms evolve across generations and that, over time, species subdivide into new species. At the time, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe this newly grasped process.

But ‘fittest’ is a subjective idea. The ancestor of the tapeworm was an animal that ran around and had legs, but it evolved into an egg-laying parasite which could only exist in the guts of other species. The reason we think about a phenomenon like evolution by natural selection in terms of an idea like ‘survival of the fittest’ is because we’re thinking about it from the inside.

Earth’s biological systems throw up sets of differently designed beings in every generation of every species. Those beings are born into a dynamic environment, so what survives (i.e. constitutes ‘fittest’) is ceaselessly changing. In addition, any animal born into an ecosystem alters it – resulting in a permanent feedback mechanism which helps keep the flavour of Earth’s biosphere in flux.

There’s a modern twist. Human activity is intensifying that feedback loop. In addition to affecting other species on the planet, civilisation changes so fast that it constantly introduces new variables affecting who has children. That, in turn, affects the direction civilisation will take.

We’re not currently in a position to design equations to model how particular new technologies and cultural trends alter human breeding patterns. But in a world where human action changes the environment, the environment changes who breeds and people inherit the traits of their parents, evolution will be never-ending.

Such processes led to every mental and physical attribute of the animal reading these words. For example, you were taught to use tools (knifes, forks, loo paper) by your parents (or whoever brought you up). They were taught by their parents, and so on. But if you follow that line back to the first thing ever to use a tool, it wasn’t human. It was one of your non-human hominid ancestors.

And yet because the appendages at the ends of that ancestor’s forearms were so well suited to basic tool use; and because being able to use basic tools made them slightly more likely to breed, a two-and-a-half-million-year feedback process of greater manual dexterity was set in motion which led to the shape of the hands holding this book right now (which are, as you can see, brilliantly evolved for advanced tool use).

It’s more straightforward to think of oneself as a member of a static species that evolved, rather than the momentary expression of a constantly churning biosphere. But thinking about oneself as that momentary expression – a single revolution in the circle of life – is not only more complete, it’s more fun.

Until recently humans had little information regarding what they were and how they came to be here. The frameworks we’d built up for thinking about the world were limited in a direct reflection of that limited knowledge. But now we can assess our situation stripped of the assumptions implicit in human discourse since prehistory, everything starts to look even more beautiful.

Sometime later …

Back inside the Bottle

By November 2006 I was already emailing out the diary in the knowledge that it would only fully make sense once bound together with these musings. But scribbling away in my tent was never going to nail the job. Going to the Andes had been Susie’s idea. In the end that self-imposed isolation was to constitute an acceleration, rather than the culmination, of the path I was on. However, before going to Quito I first returned to Sydney and, before that, I went diving.

It was run as an extract by The Ecologist magazine. See that version here.

More material about:

• the environment
• thinking big

Since moving to Manor Park, five-minutes by train from the Olympic site, in 2008, I’ve watched the stadium rise from the wasteland north of Stratford during daily commutes to the City.

Beyond that physical manifestation of their approach, for most of the past four years the Olympic Games only impinged upon my consciousness to the extent of the predictable rows over their budget, occasional stories about Team GB and the reshaping of local land prices and transport connections. All that changed at the end of last year when a friend suggested I apply to be a volunteer cast member in the closing ceremony.

Ten thousand volunteers were required across all four ceremonies (opening and closing, for the Olympics and the Paralympics), and they were short of men who were unafraid to bust a move in front of half a billion people. I’m no John Travolta, but I’ve never been shy on the dance floor.

Attending the auditions brought home the massive scale of the operation humming away, down the road from Stratford, at 3 Mills Studios – Olympic command centre during the run-up to the Games.

Simply processing, auditioning and referencing the thousands of applicants was a huge logistical undertaking, and 3 Mills is a sprawling operation. At one point I was taken to a warehouse-sized room crammed with work desks over which wardrobe people busied themselves with scissors and sewing machines. In one curtained-off corner, cast members were being photographed and logged, in another they were descended upon by costume teams armed with pins and measuring tapes.

Rehearsals started in May. Teaching thousands of people (with mostly no professional performance experience) vast choreographed set pieces is no small undertaking. Kim Gavin, the artistic director, appeared at the beginning, then turned us over to his ‘captains’, a team of professionals dancers (all extremely helpful, very beautiful and, I formed the impression, a bit mental) who’ve been our handlers over the past three months.

Those dance captains are led by Mr Gavin’s two lieutenants: Nathan, a blond, hunky Australian fellow and Gareth, a grand master in the art of firing-up crowds and making them feel good about themselves. ‘Oh my God, you guys are so fierce!’ he would breathlessly declare into his microphone. After the first few rehearsals, everybody adored Gareth.

The volunteer performers are a mixed bag of locals, from healthcare workers to investment researchers to ex-military guys, and (this being London) a substantial smattering of foreigners. My 25-strong pod includes Chen from China, Ko from Japan, Adam from America and Csilla from Hungary. Volunteering was a major commitment (over 70 hours of rehearsals across 13 sessions) and from day one everyone took it very seriously.

At one point, when the dance captains were drilling us in waves, I climbed onto a giant piece of set lying at the edge of the rehearsal space. Every volunteer on a break was using the downtime to practise their moves. It was inspiring to behold: hundreds of people, working for free, throwing themselves into a giant creative project for the sake of London and the Games.

From June, the rehearsals decamped to Dagenham.

The site there is a stadium-sized car park near the Thames featuring a 60-foot, double-floored scaffold tower in which the creative team sit behind two banks of computers, and deliver their instructions via personal radios with which everyone is issued on arrival. That is how casts of thousands are directed in the third millennium. As they were coordinating multiple groups of performers and stage-management teams, for us volunteers there was initially lots of thumb-twiddling.

Then the Games arrived, and we all received tickets to the Opening Ceremony dress rehearsal, two days before the real thing. What struck me that evening was the electrifying atmosphere in the Olympic Park, which had metamorphosed from a ‘polluted dump’ (to quote Brett, a cast volunteer who has lived near the site for 30 years) into a sparkling, ultra-modern sporting complex, filled with spectacular beds of multicoloured flowers.

Whoever oversaw staff training had done a stunning job. The purple-coated Olympic ambassadors were everywhere – bursting with enthusiasm and throwing themselves into their work. In the Team GB shop, up-for-it young things were beside every counter, eager to discuss the merits of T-shirts and fridge magnets. They were also a bewildering ethnic mix – marking them out as locals to Newham, the most racially diverse borough in the UK.

That evening it really felt like the world’s greatest sporting event had arrived in the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. There was a palpable sense of collective joy, global belonging, openness, friendliness and freedom – one that I’ll wager Beijing could not match.

Since then, with the red, white and blue arena of dreams exploding with sporting action down the road, rehearsals have been taking up half our lives. Following the spectacle of the opening, we were determined to make the closing ceremony even more rock ‘n’ roll.

During the fourth Dagenham session a violent rainstorm crashed across the site, just as a thousand cast members were dancing and prancing over the set. The experience was bizarre, but the cast stoic. Half a day with soggy feet is nothing compared to the once-in-a-lifetime shared experience for which we were preparing.

Twenty-first century London is as vibrant and open-minded as metropolitan area which has so far existed. It is a global centre of the arts, science, commerce, cuisine, literature, finance, the media, education and sport. Three hundred languages are spoken within its bounds and it has an almost peerless cultural inheritance. Humanity is coming together here in a way unlike any other place during any previous period in history.

The closing ceremony will celebrate this remarkable golden age – while throwing in masses of cheeky British cultural references.

It’s been deeply fulfilling to play a tiny part in the extraordinary construct of the Olympics, in which hundreds of thousands of people come together to stage a celebration of life and the human spirit. The London 2012 Games are ready to pass into legend. For us, it’s nearly show time. If you look carefully, you might catch a glimpse of me in the stadium.

Peter Baker is a volunteer cast member in the London 2012 Olympic Closing Ceremony, which is due to start at 20.55 GMT on Sunday 12 August. 

His book, The Jolly Pilgrim, is published by SRA books and available on Amazon.

Finally, big up to my team: Andy, Jo, Angela, Richard, Fiona, Roger, Mia, Richard, Sandy, Kimberley, Chris, Brett, Lax, Jamie, Senita, Csilla, Grace, Roslyn, Mary, Robert, Walter, Adam, Ko and Chen.

• Civilisation as an emergent property of Earth’s ecosphere
• The last 1,000 years of homicide, poverty and human-welfare data
• A Gaian perspective on current environmental issues

I’ll be joined on stage by Tom Mansfield – the performance poet commissioned to write the poem for the London 2012 Olympic Village – who will be reading the H. G. Wells passage. I’ll be followed by the League of Pragmatic Optimists.

The Book

Website Revamped

The website for The Jolly Pilgrim has now been rebuilt and arranged so it can act as a platform for my stuff for the rest of my life.

Notable pages:

• Front page
• Synopsis by chapter (I did the funky graphics myself)
• Nice things readers have said about the book
  - if you want adding – say something nice!
• Core philosophical positions (with submenu at the bottom)
• Media and press
• If you want write a travel book

Lots of new material will be bolted onto the site over the coming months – much of it about sustainability.

Fun, sun, sea, sand and jugs of Olympic spirit.

Pete Baker
The Jolly Pilgrim on Amazon

Roses are red. My name is not Dave. This poem makes no sense. Microwave. – Comedy TED

The sales documents used to represent the book to agents and publishers are also online, as a free PDF download (both here and on page six, linked below). Writers and aspiring writers should feel free to use these documents for ideas, inspiration, or as an example of how to sell work.

The section dealing with writing and publishing the travel book is divided into nine pages, each with multiple links out to blogs, written during the process, with further detail. The nine web pages are:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Conceiving the idea
• Part 3: Philosophy in a travel book?
• Part 4: A Year in a Shed
• Part 5: Binding Travel and Philosophy
• Part 6: The Road to Publication
• Part 7: Post-Production
• Part 8: Networking
• Part 9: The Publishing Deal

The two-year, round-the-world, 60,000-miles, 24-country, five-continent journey began on 27 May 2005 and ended on 8 June 2007. Work on the book commenced immediately, and finished in February 2010. The book was published on 15 August 2011.

Download: Sales docs for agents and publishers_The Jolly Pilgrim

Happy reading. I’m happy to answer questions and can be contacted through this website.

Earnestly

Pete Baker
The Jolly Pilgrim on Amazon

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. – Winston Churchill

This is an excerpt from the book, to add content for the ‘Religious Architecture’ section. The excerpt was mainly written in the Croatain infection hospital, in Zagred, where I read the second half of the Bible, a bit before starting the Qur’an. 

To claim that a book was directly, deliberately and uniquely inspired by God, that God is perfect and can do anything and that the book in question contains His complete and eternal message for humanity is a very big set of claims. One would expect such a book to be – at the very least – comprehensively spectacular and overflowing with transcendent wisdom.

After reading the Bible in its entirety my view is that, whichever holy spirits inspired its authors, the words they wrote have the signs of humanity stamped all over them. Reading what those words actually say (as opposed to what other people say they say) was most enlightening. The whole thing is considerably more confused and ambiguous than I’d previously been led to believe.

In the hospital, reading the Bible and taking notes.

For example, the reputation of the city of Sodom comes down to a single incident. Lot’s house is surrounded by locals who want him to send out his guests so they can have sex with them (Lot instead offers his virgin daughters). Whether or not Sodom was actually full of raging homosexuals is difficult to judge (though for millennia it’s been interpreted that way). However, God is evidently pissed off as he destroys the city with burning sulphur.

I was under the impression that King Solomon was a paragon of goodness and wisdom. The only story I knew was the one with the two women, where they both claim a child; Solomon threatens to cut it in two, then awards the baby to the woman who objects. What I hadn’t understood is that that’s the only wise thing Solomon does. Apart from that it just goes on (for pages and pages) about how wise he is, along with gushing about how many chariots he’s got, his 700 wives, 300 concubines and the slave labour he uses to construct prestige buildings. He doesn’t actually do anything else wise.

The Book of Psalms contains 150 intensely beautiful religious poems. However, with a handful of exceptions they deal exclusively with a few closely related themes: God is great, the righteous man will seek God, the unrighteous will be punished, God will protect the righteous, and the righteous will triumph over the unrighteous.

Here’s an excerpt from Psalm Nine:

The Lord reigns for ever;
he has established his throne for judgement.
He will judge the world in righteousness;
he will govern the peoples with justice.

It’s gorgeous stuff, but it doesn’t seem very substantial to me. It doesn’t provide concrete instructions on how to conduct oneself, and the overwhelmingly most important difference between righteousness and unrighteousness is belief in God. But if being righteous means saying you believe in God and believing in God involves being righteous then the arrangement is circular. Unless, of course, one is prepared to be a little more specific about what one means by the word ‘God’.

Jesus is marvellous. He is against elitism and materialism and in favour of humility, compassion and love. Fabulous. I also note that he makes it pretty clear that if you’re rich then you’re going to go to hell. Unless, of course, you can get a camel through the eye of a needle. Jesus is very specific about it and it’s mentioned three times.

St Paul seemed to write most of the New Testament. I didn’t like him. He goes around proclaiming willy-nilly who will, and will not, go to heaven. This is downright cheeky as such things are clearly a matter for God. Whereas Jesus says things like ‘Love thy neighbour’, Paul says things like ‘I don’t like the following people …’. The list of people Paul doesn’t like is long and includes homosexuals (who commit ‘shameful lusts’), women (who must be silent and submissive) and people with long hair (which I personally felt was just creepy).

I had not anticipated that studying the Bible would trigger my conversion, but I had expected more in the way of world-illuminating insights. As regards that expectation, I must admit to a pang of disappointment. Glimpsing into the minds of those Middle Eastern holy men was fascinating, but if the voice of the divine is hidden in their ancient words then I could not make it out.

*****

My dinner with Dr Santini

The evening of the day after I drew these conclusions, I had dinner with one Dr Santini. Among the matters we discussed was her Catholic faith. She told me about how that faith had given her great strength and how she had witnessed it guide so many people through, and make sense of, the trials, tribulations and struggles of birth, life, marriage and death.

There’s a position on religion which holds that it is mere ancient superstition, programmed into each generation by the next. I don’t regard that as a very thorough narrative. It is true that many evil and preposterous things have been said, and done, in religion’s name. Yet, as a phenomenon, it has been central to the human adventure and key to many of the most awesome things we’ve accomplished.

Isn’t the underlying point that this universe we all live in is profoundly mysterious and wonderful, and that something extraordinary and magnificent is clearly going on – right here, right now – on this planet?

An excerpt from the travel and philosophy book, The Jolly Pilgrim.

< More on religious architecture >

For those interested in world history, global society, cultural and technological evolution, the wider human project or the worldview expounded in The Jolly Pilgrim, below are a list of my key intellectual influences, in rough order of importance.

In the explanations of individual writers, scientists and historians (they’re all writers, scientists and historians; and all men, worryingly) are links to some of the individual books which were important to me.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was an astronomer, cosmologist and (in my view) the greatest scientific communicator who has ever lived. Anyone familiar with Sagan’s work will recognise his profound influence on The Jolly Pilgrim. Key books include: Cosmos, about the human project in the context cosmic evolution (a book that is to popular science what Hamlet is to the stage play); Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a tour de force on evolutionary psychology; and The Dragons of Eden, the book which first got be interested in anthropology, when I was 15.

Clive Ponting
Clive Ponting is a writer, academic and former civil servant. His World History: A New Perspective remains the best mainstream history book I‘ve ever read. In the book, Mr Ponting lays out, with extraordinary lucidity, the long continuum of human history, and how economic, demographic and (in particular) technological changes have driven all other social and political changes since the development of agriculture. Mr Ponting shaped my understanding of world history more than any other writer.

Steven Pinker
Professor Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the department of Psychology at Harvard University, specialising in language and cognition. His 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature enormously deepened my understanding of contemporary civilisation and modern history. The book sets out a penetrating and enlightening narrative of developments in human societies over recent centuries, via a mixture of philosophy, evolutionary psychology, narrative history and mountains of data.

Marcus Aurelius 
Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor between 161 CE and 180 CE and a stoic philosopher. His book, Meditations, has been the most influential book of pure philosophy in shaping my convictions regarding morality and a well-lived life – convictions I attempted to put into practice in the journey recorded in The Jolly Pilgrim.

Paul Collier
Paul Collier is Professor of Economics, and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, at Oxford University. He has greatly affected my thinking on economic geography and development, primarily through his book The Bottom Billion. His more recent The Plundered Planet was also relevant to the ideas in The Jolly Pilgrim and on this website – dealing with how to raise-up the poorest parts of the world in an environmentally sustainable way.

Ibn Khaldun of Tunis
Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historiographer, historian, philosopher and polymath genius. I came to his most famous work, Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon, in English), looking to understand his path-breaking influence on sociology and economics. However, it was his remarkable writing on God and religion which were actually most affecting to me.

Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is an American writer and scientist, who is professor of geography at the University of California. His famous book Guns, Germs and Steel is an eye-opening look at the development of human civilisation and how geography has affected human culture, and technological and social progress. His ideas are heavily paraphrased in the sections of The Jolly Pilgrim dealing with deep history.

Robert Wright
Robert Wright is a journalist and scholar whose book Nonzero (a review of human cultural evolution) I read some years after writing The Jolly Pilgrim. Despite being almost entirely familiar with the ideas discussed in Nonzero prior to reading it, it had an enormous effect on me, due to its breadth of scope and cutting-edge analyses of the underlying patterns of history. His interviews on major world thinkers on the subject of religion have also been an very influential on me

J. A. Roberts
J. A Roberts was a British historian. He had a major influence on the way I think about world history, particularly through his book A History of Europe.

Nicholas Wade
Nicholas Wade is science journalist who works for The New York Times. His extraordinary book Before the Dawn, which I read after finishing The Jolly Pilgrim, is a review of our understanding of prehistory after humans became behaviourally modern – as that understanding stands at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an economist and social theorist. His book Economic Facts and Fallacies was crucial to the narrative of economic history and economic geography set out in The Jolly Pilgrim.

Max Rodenbeck Max Rodenbeck is a journalist and writer based in Cairo. I read his book Cairo: The City Victorious as research for trip to Egypt in 1999. It’s paints a biography of Cairo through a jigsaw of anecdotes and historical passages, covering the great metropolis’ modern, medieval and ancient life. The book was a key influence on The Jolly Pilgrim‘s double-narrative structure.

Angus Maddison
Angus Maddison was a specialist on quantitative macroeconomic history. He was one of the world’s most important economic historians and his work provided the foundation for the data on civilisation’s economic development through the last millennium, on which The Jolly Pilgrim draws.

Lawrence Keeley
Lawrence Keeley is professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois. He was one of the key academics to first demonstrate the decline of violence since prehistory (summarised in his book War Before Civilisation). His work challenged the previously oft-accepted notion that civilisation was degenerative to the human spirit – an idea entirely embraced in The Jolly Pilgrim.

Links – worldview section of the website:

• The Human Project
• What I’m Trying to Achieve
• The Long Now (with downloads)
• Gaia and Humanity (with downloads)
• Religious Architecture (with downloads)
• Planetary Economy (with downloads)
• Info-graphics
• My Influences

SUMMATION

The often-accepted narrative of a world in decline is inconsistent with the facts. Judging the state of humanity from first principles – that of a species of evolved, fallible apes on a rock with no rule book, making it up on the fly – is not only the most realistic way to think about human civilisation, but lends itself to a profoundly optimistic, big-picture reinterpretation of today’s social, economic and geopolitical realities.

Our world is getting better. If we keep our cool, a sense of perspective, and set long-term policy appropriately, there’s every reason to hope it will continue to get better.

NUMBERS

Globally, life expectancy is the highest it has ever been, having risen from 20-30 years in prehistory, to 31 years in 1900, 47 years in 1950 and 67 years in 2010. It continues to rise steadily across the world.

The global homicide rate is now by far the lowest it’s been since humans evolved. Battle deaths in international wars – the most deadly form of human conflict – have fallen from 65,000 per year in the 1950s to 2,000 per year in the 2000s (a factor of 30 in just 50 years).

Global fertility has plummeted from 4.47 in 1970 to 2.55 today, and continues to fall in every region of the world. The global population is projected to be in decline by 2100.

Infant mortality has plummeted from historical levels of 20%, to 15.7% in 1950 and to 5.7% in 2003. It continues to fall in nearly every part of the world.

Average daily calorie intake per person worldwide increased by 24% between 1961 and 2002. Inflation-adjusted prices of food commodities declined by 75% between 1950 and 2000. Chronic undernourishment in the developing world decreased from 37% in 1971 to 17% in 2002. A wide range of developing and emergent technologies hold out the possibility of further improvements in human nutrition, at ever lower rates of environmental impact.

Global literacy has risen from less than half the human population in 1970 to over three quarters of it today. The number of years spent in education is rising in every region of the world.

In 1900 no country in the world was a full democracy. Now 44% of the people alive live in democracies and 18% live in limited democracies. Since 1974 multiparty election systems have been introduced in 113 countries.

Globally, average wealth has risen from $450 per year in 1000 AD, to $700 in 1800 AD, to $1261 in 1900 AD and to over £9,000 in 2010 – it continues to rise even in these difficult economic times. The world economy is 100 times larger than it was in 1800 AD. The average human is ten times richer.

The problems humanity faces are considerable. However, the momentum of human civilisation is decisively upwards and we currently live during the greatest golden age humanity has ever seen, by every measurable parameter of human welfare. And this is only the beginning.

Download a free PDF of this: The state of humanity – some numbers

BACKGROUND

The above is based on a flyer produced for Speaker’s Corner by:

• Tom Mansfield: Co-founder of the League of Pragmatic Optimists 
• Peter Baker: Author of The Jolly Pilgrim 

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future.
- Richard Feynman

SOURCES

• Historical GDP: Angus Maddison, The World Economy, A Millennial Perspective, University of Groningen
• Modern GDP: The World Bank
• Historical homicide: Lawrence Keely, University of Illinoois, War Before Civilisation
• 20th Century battle-death rates: Univesiry of Uppsala, Sweden, Uppsala Conflict Data Programme
• Overall mortality: Samuel H Preston, from The State of Humanity, edited by Julian Simon
• Childhood mortality: Kenneth Heath, from The State of Humanity, edited by Julian Simon
• Literacy: Indur Goklany, The Cato Institute, Washington
• Global Fertility: The World Bank
• Calorie intake: Indur Goklany, The Cato Institute, Washington
• Democracy stats: United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2000.