The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

Bolstered by this unremitting appetite for growth, the world economy is projected to quadruple again by 2050.43 It is difficult to imagine what a quadrupling of our current economic activity would mean to the human experience and to the planet on which we all rely. Scientists have calculated that humans now appropriate more than 40 percent of the total energy available to sustain life on earth—called net primary productivity—for our own consumption. We use more than half the world's freshwater for our own purposes and have transformed 43 percent of the earth's terrain into agricultural or urban landscapes. To sustain our current rate of expansion, it's been estimated that human appropriation of net primary productivity would need to double or triple by mid-century. Scientists are understandably asking if this is in fact possible.44