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Our world in mid-2000 faces potentially conclusive change. The question is, in what direction will it take? Will the change come from strong world wide initiatives that reverse the degradation of the planet and restore hope for the future, or will it come from continuing environmental deterioration that leads to economic decline and social instability?
Muddling through will not work? Either will turn things around quickly on the self-reinforcing internal dynamic of the deterioration and decline scenario will take over. The policy decisions we make in the years immediately a head will determine whether our children live in development or decline?
There is no precedent of rapid and substantial change we need to make. Building an environmentally sustainable future depends on restructuring the global economy, major shift in human reproductive behavior, and dramatic change in values and lifestyles. Doing all this quickly adds up to revolution that is driven and defined by the need to restore and preserve the earth’s environmental systems. If this environmental revolution succeeds, it will rank with agricultural and industrial revolutions as one of the great economic and social transformations in human history.
Like the agricultural revolution, it will dramatically alters the population trends while the former set the stage for enormous increases in human numbers, this revolution will succeed only if it stabilizes human population size, reestablishing the balance between people and natural system which they depend. In contrast to the industrial revolution, which was based on a shift to fossil fuels, this new transformation will be based on a shift away from fossil fuels.
The two earlier revolutions were driven by technological advances the first by the discovery of farming and the second by the invention of the steam engine, which converted the energy in coal into mechanical power. The environmental revolutions, while it will obviously need new technologies, will be driven primarily by the restructuring of the global economy so that it does not destroy its natural support systems.
The pace of environmental revolution needs to be far faster than predecessors. The agricultural revolution began some 10, 000 years ago, and the industrial revolution has been under way for about two centuries. But, if the environmental revolution is to be succeed, it must be compressed into few decades. Progress in the agriculture revolution was measured almost exclusively in the growth in food output that eventually enabled farmers to produce a surplus that could fit city dwellers. Similarly, industrial progress was gained by success in expanding the output of raw materials and manufactured goods. The environmental revolution will be judged by whether it can shift the world economy into an environmental sustainable development path, one that leads to greater economic security, healthier lifestyles and a world wide improvement in human condition.
Many still do not see the need for such an economic and social transformation. They see the earth deteriorating physical condition as a peripheral matter that can be dealt with minor policy adjustments. But 20 years of efforts have failed to stem the tide of environmental degradation. There is now too much evidence in too many fronts to take these issues lightly.
Already the planet’s degradation is damaging human health, slowing growth in world food production, and reversing economic progress in dozen of countries. By the age of 10, thousands of people living in cities of highly developed countries such as Los Angeles basin have respiratory systems that are permanently impaired by polluted air. Some 600,000 people in former Soviet Union are being treated for radiation sickness caused by Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The accelerated depletion of ozone in the stratosphere in the northern hemisphere will lead to an estimated 50,000 skin cancer fatalities over the next half century in the US alone. World wide, millions of lives are at stake. These examples and countless others, show that our health is closely linked to that of the planet.
A scarcity of new cropland and fresh water plus the negative effects of soil erosion, air pollution and hotter summers on crop yields is slowing the growth of world grain harvest. Combined with continuing rapid population growth, this has reversed the steady rise in grain output per person that the world had become accustomed to between 1950 and 1984, the historical peak year, world grain production per person climbed by near 40%. Since then, it has fallen roughly 1% a year, with the drop concentrated in poor countries. Country like China and India is now more than 35% contributor of global Carbon dioxide emission in combine with food imports in poor countries restricted by rising external debt, and there are far more hungry people today than ever before. India alone has 400 million populations below poverty line. China’s economy grew this year by almost 11.2% but the people in rural areas are not benefited by these record economic books.
On the economic fronts, the signs are equally ominous: soil erosion, deforestation, and overgrazing and adversely affecting productivity in the farming, forestry and livestock sectors, slowing overall economic growth in agriculturally based economies. The World Bank reports that after three decades of broad based economic gains, incomes fell during the 1990s in 40 developing countries. Collectively, these nations contain more than 1 billion people almost three times the population of North America and nearly one-sixth that of the world. In Nigeria, the most populous country in the ill-fated group, the incomes of 15o million people fell a painful 29%, exceeding the fall in US incomes during the depression decade of the 1930s.
Anyone who thinks these environmental, agricultural and economic trends can easily be reversed need only look at population projections. Those of us bore before the middle of 20 century have seen the world population more that double to 5.6 billion. We have witnessed the environmental effects of adding 3 billion people, especially in developing countries. We can see the loss of tree cover, the devastation of grassland, the soil erosion, global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity, terrorism, war and conflict, crowding and poverty, the land hungers and the air and water pollution associated with this addition of people. But what if 4.2 billion more people added by 2050, over 90% of them in developing countries, as now projected by UN population experts?
The decline in living standards that was once predicted by some ecologists from the combination of continuing rapid population growth, spreading environmental degradation and rising external debt has become a reality for one sixth of humanity.
Moreover, if a more comprehensive system of national economic accounting were used- one that incorporated losses of natural capitals such as forests and topsoil, destruction of productive grasslands, the extinction of plant and animal species, and the health costs of air and water pollution, nuclear radiation and increased ultraviolet radiation-from ozone depletion it might show the most humanity suffered a decline in living conditions in coming decades.
Today we study archeological sites of civilizations that were undermined by environmental deterioration. The wheat lands that made North America the greenery of Roman Empire are now largely deserts. The early civilizations of the Tigris Euphrates Basin decline as the water logging and salting irrigation system slowly shrank their food supply. And the collapse of Mayan civilization the flourished in the Guatemalan lowlands from the third century B.C. to the ninth century A.D. may have been triggered by deforestation and soil erosion.
No one knows for certain why centers of Mayan culture and art fell into neglect, or whether the population of 1 million to 3 million moved or died off, but recent progress in deciphering hieroglyphs in the area adds credence to the environmental decline hypothesis. One of those involved with the projects Linda schele of the university of Texas observes “They were worried about war at the end, ecological disasters, too Deforestation starvation. I think the population rose to the limits their technological could bear. They were so close to the edge, if anything went wrong it was all over.”
Whether the Mayan economy had become environmentally unsustainable before it actually began decline, we do not know. We do know that ours is. So, it is time for action for launching an environmental revolution.
Muddling through will not work? Either will turn things around quickly on the self-reinforcing internal dynamic of the deterioration and decline scenario will take over. The policy decisions we make in the years immediately a head will determine whether our children live in development or decline?
There is no precedent of rapid and substantial change we need to make. Building an environmentally sustainable future depends on restructuring the global economy, major shift in human reproductive behavior, and dramatic change in values and lifestyles. Doing all this quickly adds up to revolution that is driven and defined by the need to restore and preserve the earth’s environmental systems. If this environmental revolution succeeds, it will rank with agricultural and industrial revolutions as one of the great economic and social transformations in human history.
Like the agricultural revolution, it will dramatically alters the population trends while the former set the stage for enormous increases in human numbers, this revolution will succeed only if it stabilizes human population size, reestablishing the balance between people and natural system which they depend. In contrast to the industrial revolution, which was based on a shift to fossil fuels, this new transformation will be based on a shift away from fossil fuels.
The two earlier revolutions were driven by technological advances the first by the discovery of farming and the second by the invention of the steam engine, which converted the energy in coal into mechanical power. The environmental revolutions, while it will obviously need new technologies, will be driven primarily by the restructuring of the global economy so that it does not destroy its natural support systems.
The pace of environmental revolution needs to be far faster than predecessors. The agricultural revolution began some 10, 000 years ago, and the industrial revolution has been under way for about two centuries. But, if the environmental revolution is to be succeed, it must be compressed into few decades. Progress in the agriculture revolution was measured almost exclusively in the growth in food output that eventually enabled farmers to produce a surplus that could fit city dwellers. Similarly, industrial progress was gained by success in expanding the output of raw materials and manufactured goods. The environmental revolution will be judged by whether it can shift the world economy into an environmental sustainable development path, one that leads to greater economic security, healthier lifestyles and a world wide improvement in human condition.
Many still do not see the need for such an economic and social transformation. They see the earth deteriorating physical condition as a peripheral matter that can be dealt with minor policy adjustments. But 20 years of efforts have failed to stem the tide of environmental degradation. There is now too much evidence in too many fronts to take these issues lightly.
Already the planet’s degradation is damaging human health, slowing growth in world food production, and reversing economic progress in dozen of countries. By the age of 10, thousands of people living in cities of highly developed countries such as Los Angeles basin have respiratory systems that are permanently impaired by polluted air. Some 600,000 people in former Soviet Union are being treated for radiation sickness caused by Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. The accelerated depletion of ozone in the stratosphere in the northern hemisphere will lead to an estimated 50,000 skin cancer fatalities over the next half century in the US alone. World wide, millions of lives are at stake. These examples and countless others, show that our health is closely linked to that of the planet.
A scarcity of new cropland and fresh water plus the negative effects of soil erosion, air pollution and hotter summers on crop yields is slowing the growth of world grain harvest. Combined with continuing rapid population growth, this has reversed the steady rise in grain output per person that the world had become accustomed to between 1950 and 1984, the historical peak year, world grain production per person climbed by near 40%. Since then, it has fallen roughly 1% a year, with the drop concentrated in poor countries. Country like China and India is now more than 35% contributor of global Carbon dioxide emission in combine with food imports in poor countries restricted by rising external debt, and there are far more hungry people today than ever before. India alone has 400 million populations below poverty line. China’s economy grew this year by almost 11.2% but the people in rural areas are not benefited by these record economic books.
On the economic fronts, the signs are equally ominous: soil erosion, deforestation, and overgrazing and adversely affecting productivity in the farming, forestry and livestock sectors, slowing overall economic growth in agriculturally based economies. The World Bank reports that after three decades of broad based economic gains, incomes fell during the 1990s in 40 developing countries. Collectively, these nations contain more than 1 billion people almost three times the population of North America and nearly one-sixth that of the world. In Nigeria, the most populous country in the ill-fated group, the incomes of 15o million people fell a painful 29%, exceeding the fall in US incomes during the depression decade of the 1930s.
Anyone who thinks these environmental, agricultural and economic trends can easily be reversed need only look at population projections. Those of us bore before the middle of 20 century have seen the world population more that double to 5.6 billion. We have witnessed the environmental effects of adding 3 billion people, especially in developing countries. We can see the loss of tree cover, the devastation of grassland, the soil erosion, global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity, terrorism, war and conflict, crowding and poverty, the land hungers and the air and water pollution associated with this addition of people. But what if 4.2 billion more people added by 2050, over 90% of them in developing countries, as now projected by UN population experts?
The decline in living standards that was once predicted by some ecologists from the combination of continuing rapid population growth, spreading environmental degradation and rising external debt has become a reality for one sixth of humanity.
Moreover, if a more comprehensive system of national economic accounting were used- one that incorporated losses of natural capitals such as forests and topsoil, destruction of productive grasslands, the extinction of plant and animal species, and the health costs of air and water pollution, nuclear radiation and increased ultraviolet radiation-from ozone depletion it might show the most humanity suffered a decline in living conditions in coming decades.
Today we study archeological sites of civilizations that were undermined by environmental deterioration. The wheat lands that made North America the greenery of Roman Empire are now largely deserts. The early civilizations of the Tigris Euphrates Basin decline as the water logging and salting irrigation system slowly shrank their food supply. And the collapse of Mayan civilization the flourished in the Guatemalan lowlands from the third century B.C. to the ninth century A.D. may have been triggered by deforestation and soil erosion.
No one knows for certain why centers of Mayan culture and art fell into neglect, or whether the population of 1 million to 3 million moved or died off, but recent progress in deciphering hieroglyphs in the area adds credence to the environmental decline hypothesis. One of those involved with the projects Linda schele of the university of Texas observes “They were worried about war at the end, ecological disasters, too Deforestation starvation. I think the population rose to the limits their technological could bear. They were so close to the edge, if anything went wrong it was all over.”
Whether the Mayan economy had become environmentally unsustainable before it actually began decline, we do not know. We do know that ours is. So, it is time for action for launching an environmental revolution.
