Grand Transitions summary

There's a major transition going on in Japan.

In the next 50 years, the population is expected to shrink by 45 million people. That's about the entire population of Spain! This is an extreme example of the population decline that’s taking place across the world. The boom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries couldn’t last forever, and most countries are now heading in the opposite direction.

How would you like to eat lumpy oat bread every day, for every meal? Not so enticing? Then be glad you aren’t a worker in eighteenth-century England!

Actually, monotonous diets were the norm for most people for centuries. But for a large part of the world, our diets have changed and improved radically.

If you’re starting to feel ambivalent or even gloomy about all this so-called progress, just remember – it could be worse! For example, while pollution is a problem, the world would be far more polluted if all eight billion of us were still reliant on burning wood or dung as a source of heat.

Thankfully, that’s not the case. The shift from reliance on wasteful and inefficient biomass to fossil fuels has been a huge improvement. Fossil fuels have a bad reputation, but they could be considered a lesser evil . . . or at least a stop on the way to a greener future.

Next time you go shopping, keep this in mind. Our ancestors considered themselves lucky if they could upgrade from a stool to a chair, or afford multiple cooking pots. In early eighteenth-century France, for example, the average family spent 80 percent of their income on food.

Most of us now live in a consumer society, buying far more than just the basics. This was made possible by the rapid economic growth that began in the nineteenth century, after centuries of very gradual growth.

It’s a widespread misconception that humans have only caused the planet harm since the Industrial Revolution.

Because actually, human-caused environmental problems are nothing new – just ask the dodo! Our ancestors burned vast areas of vegetation and over-hunted some species to extinction.

The modern world is messy, but it’s magical too. The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The dramatic, rapid improvements in quality of life over the last two centuries are similarly magical.

We’re living longer, with higher incomes and access to an incredible variety of food. Travel is fast and affordable. We have unlimited access to free information. What’s that, if not magical? The media tends to focus on catastrophes, but we should appreciate our achievements too.

As we ponder our next steps, let’s go back to one of the few things that’s going in the right direction – energy. We’re slowly shifting toward renewable electricity. But we’re still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which currently provide almost 85 percent of primary energy supplies. Change may be possible, but the cost of changing the global system is an eye-watering $30 trillion.

Progress will take time. It always does. And given the scale of the modern world, we can expect the next transitions to be slow. For that reason, we should also be cautious when making predictions. It’s very difficult to make accurate forecasts, particularly in the long term. In the short term, only a few things seem certain, like booming population growth in Africa and aging populations in many countries.