Many bourgeois scholars - sociologists, ecologists, philosophers, economists - have a rather pessimistic view. They see almost the only way to stop at all any development of terrestrial civilization, growth of production and consumption, to prevent further increase of the population.
It's no wonder that such extreme pessimism upset some people by pushing them into the ghostly world of religious hope. Moreover, the specific recommendations for the practical implementation of the aforementioned measures are often truly terrifying.
Here's what an American environmentalist J. Harden writes in one of his articles: "How can we help a country avoid overpopulation? Obviously, the worst thing we can do is send food ... Nuclear bombs made would be a better deal. "
In fact, the situation is not so desperate.
"The volume of each of the Earth's non-renewable natural resources," wrote Academician BK Fedorov, "is inevitably limited and decreasing as it is used.
Also, the possibility of using a proportion of natural resources being recovered is reduced - freshwater, oxygen in the atmosphere, forests, and fish. in the ocean, etc.
However, opportunities to meet human needs depend not only on the availability and volume of the relevant natural resource but also on the means of production. The ratio of several simultaneously ongoing processes should be considered. Reduction of natural resources - oil, coal, forests, etc. - is just one of them. The second is to increase resource efficiency. The third is the systematic disclosure, as a result of scientific and technological progress, of fundamentally new opportunities to meet basic human needs.
Already, a considerable amount of electrical energy is generated at nuclear power plants through the use of a chain reaction of spontaneous separation of heavy elements. In this case, the reserves of "nuclear fuel" are virtually unlimited, as the reactors were created, in the course of which new nuclear fuel is being reproduced.
A fundamentally new type of power plant is controlled thermonuclear reactors. They are capable of fully meeting the energy needs of humankind in the foreseeable future. All the more so as the fuel for them may be ordinary seawater.
A promising and another source of energy is the sun. It is possible that space orbiting solar power plants will be created this century, converting solar energy into electrical energy. And it will be transmitted to Earth via high-frequency or laser channels. By the way, this method is associated with minimal changes in the environment.
Already, almost half of the textile industry products are made from synthetic materials. Most parts of machines and mechanisms are made of synthetics. Synthetic materials with predetermined properties are created. But this is only the beginning. Over time, people will learn to produce literally "everything from everything". This means that the same portion of the substance in different forms will repeatedly serve people. This will obviously solve the problem of raw materials.
As for providing humanity with food, over time, the person will master the mechanism of photosynthesis and learn how to produce nutrients outside the green leaf of plants, that is, to do without agricultural production.
Not only will this free up enormous agricultural land, it will also make food production independent of the climate. Environmental pollution can also be successfully combated - the improvement of industrial enterprises, the creation of waste-free production with closed ecological cycles.
A much more difficult problem is maintaining that natural equilibrium that has evolved between different natural processes over many millions of years of Earth's evolution. But this does not mean that the task is to preserve exactly the state of things that exists in nature at the moment. This idea is not only very simplistic but also fundamentally wrong.
The problem requires a dialectical approach. It is necessary to maintain not equilibrium at all, but an equilibrium that corresponds to the modern level of development of humanity and to those tasks that are facing it in this era.
Thus, it is about creating a single self-regulatory system "man - production - nature", a system with such feedbacks and management capabilities that would allow for optimal interaction between human society and nature. In our country, solving this problem has become an extremely important state.
However, collaborative efforts are needed in many countries to ensure optimal human-nature interaction across the globe.