posted January 05, 2003 12:14 AM           

PS - Please excuse any typos - there're bound to be some.
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Chapter 2
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THE BOTTLENECK

The twentieth century was a time of exponential scientific and technical advance, the freeing of the arts by an exuberant modernism, and the spread of democracy and human rights throughout the world. It was also a dark and savage age of world wars, genocide, and totalitarian idealologies that came dangerously close to global domination. While preoccupied with all this tumult, humanity managed collaterally to decimate the natural environment and raw down the nonrenewable resources of the planet with cheerful abandon. We thereby accelerated the erasure of entire ecosystems and the extinction of thousands of million-year-old species. If Earth's ability to support our growth is finite - and it is - we were mostly too busy to notice.

As a new century begins, we have begun to awaken from this delirium. Now, increasingly postideaological in temper, we may be ready to settle down before we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate what it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for everyone into the indefinite future. The question of the century is: How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us?

posted January 05, 2003 12:27 AM           

That is the voice of the cornucopian economist. Let him listen to him carefully. You can read him in the pages of The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and myriad white papers prepared for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other politically conservative think tanks. I will use these sources to synthesize his position, as honestly as I can, recognizing the dangers of stereotyping. He will meet an ecologist, in order to have a congenial dialogue. Congenial, because it is too late in the day for combate and debating points. Let us make the honorable assumption that economist and ecologist have as a common goal the preservation of life on this beautiful planet.

The economist is focused on procuction and consumption. These are what the world wants and needs, he says. He is right, of course. Every species lives on production and consumpition. The tree finds and consumes nutrients and sunlight; the leopard finds and consumes the deer. And the farmer clears both away to find space and raise corn - for consumption. The economist's thinking is based on precise models of rational choice and near-horizon time lines. His parameters are the gross domestic product, trade balance, and competitive index. He sits on corporate boards, travels to Washington, occasionally appears on television talk shows. The planet, he insists, is perpetually fruitful and still underutilized.

posted January 05, 2003 12:40 AM           

"Ease up. In spite of two centuries of doomsaying, humanity is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. There are environmental problems, certaintly, but they can be solved. Think of them as the detritus of progress, to be cleared away. The global economic picture is favorable. The gross national products of the industrial countries continue to rise. Despite their recessions, the Asian tigers are catching up with North America and Europe. Around the world, manufacture and the service economy are growing geometrically. Since 1950 per-capita income and meat production have risen continously. Even though the world population has increased at an explosive 1.8 percent each year during the same period, cereal production, the source of more than half the food calories of the poorer nations and the traditional proxy of world-wide crop yield, has more than kept pace, rising from 275 kilograms per head in the early 1950s to 370 kilograms by the 1980s. The forests of the developed countries are now regenerating as fast as they are being cleared, or nearly so. And while fibers are also declining steeply in most of the rest of the world - a serious problem, I grant - no global scarcities are expected in the foreseeable future. Agriforestry has been summoned to the rescue: more than 20 percent of industrial wood fiber now comes from tree plantations.

"Social progress is running parallel to economic growth. Literacy rates are climbing, and with them the liberation and empowerment of women. Democracy, the gold standard of governance, is spreading country by country. The communication revolution powered by the computer and the Internet has accelerated the globalization of trade and the evolution of a more irenic international culture.

"For two centuries the specter of Malthus troubled the dreams of futurists. By rising exponentially, the doomsayers claimed, population must outstrip the limited resources of the world and bring about famine, chaos, and war. On occasion this scenario did unfold locally. But that has been more the result of political mismanagement than Malthusian mathematics. Human ingenuity has always found a way to accommodate rising populations and allow most to prosper. The green revolution, which dramatically raised crop yields in the developing countries, is the outstanding example. It can be repeated with new technology. Why should we doubt that human entrepreneurship can keep us on an upward-turning curve?

posted January 05, 2003 12:57 AM           

"Yes, it's true that the human condition has improved drastically in many ways. But you've painted only half the picture, and with all due respect the logic it uses is just plain dangerous. As your worldview implies, humanity has learned how to create an economy-driven paradise. Yes again - but only on an infinitely large and malleable planet. It should be obvious to you that Earth in finite and its environment increasingly brittle. No one should look to GNPs and corporate annual reports for a competent projection of the world's long-term economic future. To the information there, if we are to understand the real world, must be added the research reports of natural-resource specialists and ecological economists. They are the experts who seek an accurate balance sheet, one that includes a full accounting of the costs to the planet incurred by economic growth.

"This new breed of analysts argues that we can no longer afford to ignore the dependency of the economy and social progross on the environmental resource base. It is the content of economic growth, with natural resources factored in, that counts in the long term, not just the yield in products and currency. A country that levels its forests, drains its aquifers, and washes its topsoil down-river without measuring the cost is a country traveling blind. It faces a shaky economic future. It suffers the same delusion as the one that destroyed the whaling industry. As harvesting and processing techniques were improved, the annual catch of whales rose, and the industry flourished. But the whale populations declined in equal measure until they were depleted. Several species, including the blue whale, the largest animal species in the history of Earth, came close to extinction. Whereupon most whaling was called to a halt. Extend the argument to falling ground water, drying rivers, and shrinking per-capita arable land, and you get the picture.

"Suppose that the conventionally measured global economic output, now at about $31 trillion, were to expand at a healty 3 percent annually. By 2050 it would in theory reach $138 trillion. With only a small leveling adjustment of this income, the entire world population would be prosperous by current standards. Utopia at last, it would seem! What is the flaw in the argument? It is the environment crumbling beneath us. If natural resources, particularly fresh water and arable land, continue to diminish at their present per-capita rate, the economic boom will lose steam, in the course of which - and this worries me even if it doesn't worry you - the effort to enlarge productive land will wipe out a large part of the world's fauna and flora.

posted January 05, 2003 01:15 AM           

The environmentalist view is fortunately spreading. Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view. In a realistically reported and managed economy, balanced accounting will be routine. The conventional gross national product (GNP) will be replace by the more comprehensive genuine progress indicator (GPI), which includes estimates of environmental costs of economic activity. Already, a growing number of economists, scientists, political leaders, and others have endorsed precisely this change.

What, then, are essential facts about population and environment? From existing databases we can answer the question and visualize more clearly the bottleneck through which humanity and the rest of life are now passing.

On or about October 12, 1999, the world population reached 6 billion. It has continued to climb at an annual rate of 1.4 percent, adding 200,000 people each day or the equivalent of the population of a large city each week. The rate, although beginning to slow, is still basically exponential: the more people, the faster the growth, thence more people sooner and even faster growth, and so on upward toward astronomical numbers unless the trend is reversed and the growth rate is reduced to zero or less. This exponentiation means that people born in 1950 were the first to see the human population double in their lifetime, from 2.5 billion to over 6 billion now. During the twentieth century more people were added to the world than in all previous human history. In 1800 there had been about 1 billion; and in 1900, still ony 1.6 billion.

posted January 05, 2003 01:25 AM           

Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. New York: Knopf, 2002.