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This is a pre-Katrina essay about change on a big scale. Which will it
be, bottlenecks, flow or yin and yang? kwc The Climax of Humanity
Demographically and economically, our era is unique in human history. Depending
on how we manage the next few decades, we could usher in environmental
sustainability--or collapse
By George Musser, Scientific
American, August 22, 2005
The 21st century feels like a letdown. We were promised flying cars,
space colonies and 15-hour workweeks. Robots were supposed to do our chores,
except when they were organizing rebellions; children were supposed to learn
about disease from history books; portable fusion reactors were supposed to be
on sale at the Home Depot. Even dystopian visions of the future predicted leaps
of technology and social organization that leave our era in the dust. Looking beyond the
blinking lights and whirring gizmos, though, the new century is shaping up as
one of the most amazing periods in human history. Three great transitions set in motion by the
Industrial Revolution are reaching their culmination. After several centuries of
faster-than-exponential growth, the world's population is stabilizing. Judging
from current trends, it will plateau at around nine billion people toward the
middle of this century. Meanwhile extreme poverty is receding both as a
percentage of population and in absolute numbers. If China and India continue
to follow in the economic footsteps of Japan and South Korea, by 2050 the
average Chinese will be as rich as the average Swiss is today; the average
Indian, as rich as today's Israeli. As humanity grows in size and wealth,
however, it increasingly presses against the limits of the planet. Already we
pump out carbon dioxide three times as fast as the oceans and land can absorb
it; midcentury is when climatologists think global warming will really begin to
bite. At the rate things are going, the world's forests and fisheries will be
exhausted even sooner. These three
concurrent, intertwined transitions--demographic, economic, environmental--are what historians of the future will
remember when they look back on our age. They are transforming everything from
geopolitics to the structure of families. And they pose problems on a scale
that humans have little experience with. As Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, we are
about to pass through "the bottleneck," a period of maximum stress on
natural resources and human ingenuity. The trends are evident
in everyday life. Many of us have had the experience of getting lost in our
hometowns because they have grown so much. But growth is slowing as families
shrink. Ever more children grow up not just without siblings but also without
aunts, uncles or cousins. (Some people find that sad, but the only other way to
have a stable population is for death rates to rise.) Chinese goods line
Wal-Mart shelves, Indians handle customer-service calls, and, in turn, ever
more Asians buy Western products. Spring flowers bloom a week earlier than they
did 50 years ago because of global warming, and restaurants serve different
types of fish than they used to because species that were once common have been
fished out. Looking at the present
era in historical context helps to put the world's myriad problems in
perspective. Many of those problems stem, directly or indirectly, from growth.
As growth tapers off, humanity will have a chance to close the books on them. A
bottleneck may be tough to squeeze through, but once you do, the worst is
behind you. The transitions we are
undergoing define the scope of the challenges. Scientists can estimate, at
least roughly, how many people will inhabit Earth, what they are going to need
and want, what resources are available, and when it is all going to happen. By the latter half of this century,
humanity could enter an equilibrium in which economic growth, currently driven
by the combination of more productivity, more people and more resources, will
flow entirely from productivity--which would take much of the edge off
conflicts between the economy and the environment. Old challenges will give way
to new ones. This process is already evident in countries at the leading edge
of the transitions. The Social Security debate in the U.S., like worries about
pensions in Europe and Japan, is the sound of a society planning for life after
growth. In the public's eyes,
demographers have a checkered reputation. Thirty years ago, wasn't
overpopulation the big concern? Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb was a best seller. The film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston,
dramatized a future in which people would be stacked like cordwood and fed
little squares that looked like tofu but weren't. Lately, though,
underpopulation has become the cause célèbre, heralded by neoconservatives such
as Nicholas Eberstadt. Their concern is epitomized by another Heston movie: The Omega Man, in which humanity dwindles
to nothingness. So which will it be: Too many people or too few? Mainstream
demographers have not swung back and forth nearly as much as these extreme depictions
might suggest. Families in the developing world have shrunk faster than
expected, but the forecasts described in Scientific
American's 1974 special issue on population have largely stood the
test of time. In fact, the Soylent Green
and Omega Man scenarios each
contain an element of truth. Humanity is still growing enormously in absolute
terms, and past success at avoiding Malthusian nightmares is no guarantee of
future performance. The decline in growth rates is a worry, though.
Historically, most stable or shrinking societies have been down at heel. Partisans of one
scenario shrug off the challenges of the other, expressing
"confidence" that they can be handled without actually doing much to
ensure that they are. Once
you blow away the fog of ideology, the outlines of a comprehensive action plan begin to
emerge. It is hardly the only way forward, but it can serve as a starting point
for discussion. A recurring theme of
this plan is that business is not necessarily the enemy of nature, or vice
versa. Traditionally the economy and environment have not even been described
in like terms. The
most-watched economic statistics, such as gross domestic product (GDP), do not
measure resource depletion; they are essentially measures of cash flow rather
than balance sheets of assets and liabilities. If you clear-cut a forest, GDP jumps even
though you have wiped out an asset that could have brought in a steady stream
of income. More broadly, the
prices we pay for goods and services seldom include the associated environmental
costs. Someone else picks up the tab--and that someone is usually us, in
another guise. By
one estimate, the average American taxpayer forks out $2,000 a year to
subsidize farming, driving, mining and other activities with a heavy
environmental footprint.
The distorted market gives consumers and producers little incentive to clean
up. Environmentalists inadvertently reinforce this tendency when they focus on
the priceless attractions of nature, which are deeply meaningful but difficult
to weigh against more pressing concerns. The Endangered Species Act has
provided iconic examples of advocates talking past one another. Greens blamed
the plight of spotted owls on loggers; the loggers blamed unemployment on
self-indulgent ornithology. In
fact, both were victims of unsustainable forestry. In recent years,
economists and environmental scientists have come together to hang a price tag
on nature's benefits. Far from demeaning nature, this exercise reveals how much
we depend on it. The Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, published earlier this year, identified services--from
pollination to water filtration--that humans would have to provide for
themselves, at great cost, if nature did not. Of the 24 broad categories of services, the
team found that 15 are being used faster than they regenerate. When the environment
is properly accounted for, what is good for nature is often what is good for
the economy and even for individual business sectors. Fishers, for example,
maximize their profits when they harvest fisheries at a sustainable level;
beyond that point, both yields and profits decline as more people chase ever
fewer fish. To be sure, life is not always so convenient. Society must
sometimes make real trade-offs. But it is only beginning to explore the win-win
options. If decision makers can
get the framework right, the future of humanity will be secured by thousands of
mundane decisions: how many babies people have, where they graze their cattle,
how they insulate their houses. It is usually in mundane matters that the most profound
advances are made. What
makes a community rich is not the computers and the DVDs, which you can find
nowadays even in humble villages. It is the sewage pipes, the soft beds, the
sense of physical and economic security. By helping to bring these benefits of
modernity to all, science and technology will have done something more
spectacular than building space colonies. |
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