By David von Seggern, Sierra Club Maine Volunteer
In one of the most enlightening articles (The global human day, 2023) I have read in months (years?), an international set of authors analyzed how the human species spends its time. Drawing on diverse datasets and applying interpolation and extrapolation as needed, the authors provide charts of how the world’s population spends its time, and the results are provocative. Here is a quote from the article explaining the purpose and need:
“A complete and holistic quantification of how global humanity allocates its ~190 billion hours per day could therefore provide a firm grounding from which to assess how human behavior is changing over time, as well as the scope and plausibility of strategies to simultaneously achieve multiple goals, such as the 17 internationally agreed upon Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”
The article makes some interesting revelations in regard to the use of energy and to sustainability. For instance, the authors show that humans spend on average 35 minutes per day creating the human technosphere — products, infrastructure, artifacts — while spending an average of less than a minute in waste disposal and treatment. This ratio needs to change in order to establish a circular economy to underpin a sustainable world.
They also estimate that the ratio of produced energy (renewable, fossil fuels, nuclear, etc.) to the part of the collective human metabolism devoted to creating that energy is a factor of roughly 5,000. In other words, we have multiplied our bodily energy level by roughly 5,000 through technology. This tremendous energy “gain” is unfortunately the driving factor in the widespread destruction of our natural surroundings and the undesirable impacts upon our planet. Clearly, it is the impetus for the defining of the Anthropocene Epoch in geologic time, a proposal before the international body of stratigraphy scientists.
Also, surprising to me, was the estimate in the article that humans spend over 4.6 hours per day on average in passive activity or social interaction. This may be considered wasted time by some sociologists or economists; but it may really be essential to progress, arts, health, peace, and many other positive outcomes. A breakdown by country may show that, in the US, this slice of daily time is significantly less than the world average.
The allocation of tasks in the human day is of course all intertwined with economics, and this is where the changes need to be made. The authors show how some allocations of time are very dependent on a country’s wealth (as measured by GDP) while others are fairly constant over differing wealth. How should we reallocate human time to affect a sustainable planet? In light of the findings of this article, it is clear that policy and cultural changes will need to be made globally in order to rearrange how we spend time on our planet and have any hope of it being sustainable.