http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000E5878-3E45-1CC6-B4A8809EC588EEDF&catID=2

The Author:
Edward O. Wilson has made major contributions to a number of fields,
including the behavior and evolution of social insects, chemical
communication, and the evolution of social behavior. His interest
in living organisms, especially ants, stems back to his childhood
and to his undergraduate studies in evolutionary biology at the
University of Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard
University, where he is now Pellegrino University Research Professor
and Honorary Curator in Entomology at the Museum of Comparative
Zoology. Among his many honors are the National Medal of Science,
two Pulitzer Prizes (for On Human Nature, 1978, and The Ants,
1990, with Bert Hölldobler), and the Tyler Prize for environmental
achievement. Other groundbreaking books include Consilience and
Sociobiology.

Feature Article
February 2002 issue
http://www.sciam.com/issue.cfm?issuedate=Feb-02

From the book The Future of Life, by Edward O. Wilson.

February 24, 2002
The Bottleneck
We have entered the Century of the Environment, in which
the immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck:
science and technology, combined with foresight and moral
courage, must see us through it and out.
By Edward O. Wilson

QUOTE #1:
"For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels
of consumption with existing technology would require four
more planet Earths."

QUOTE #2:
"The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century
was more bacterial than primate."

QUOTE #3:
"The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself
emotionally only to a small piece of geography."

QUOTE #4:
"We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility
not yet requiring examination. It is a hardwired part of
our Paleolithic heritage."

The 20th 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
ideologies that came dangerously close to global domination. While
preoccupied with all this tumult, humanity managed collaterally
to decimate the natural environment and draw 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 postideological 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?

The bottom line is different from that generally assumed
by our leading economists and public philosophers. They
have mostly ignored the numbers that count. Consider that
with the global population past six billion and on its way
to eight billion or more by midcentury, per capita freshwater
and arable land are descending to levels resource experts
agree are risky. The ecological footprint--the average
amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated
by each person in bits and pieces from around the world
for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce,
and waste absorption--is about one hectare (2.5 acres)
in developing nations but about 9.6 hectares (24 acres)
in the U.S. The footprint for the total human population
is 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres). For every person in the world
to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing
technology would require four more planet Earths. The five
billion people of the developing countries may never wish
to attain this level of profligacy. But in trying to achieve
at least a decent standard of living, they have joined the
industrial world in erasing the last of the natural
environments. At the same time, Homo sapiens has become
a geophysical force, the first species in the history of
the planet to attain that dubious distinction. We have
driven atmospheric carbon dioxide to the highest levels
in at least 200,000 years, unbalanced the nitrogen cycle,
and contributed to a global warming that will ultimately
be bad news everywhere.

In short, we have entered the Century of the Environment,
in which the immediate future is usefully conceived as a
bottleneck. Science and technology, combined with a lack
of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy,
brought us to where we are today. Now science and
technology, combined with foresight and moral courage,
must see us through the bottleneck and out.

"Wait! Hold on there just one minute!"

That is the voice of the cornucopian economist. Let us listen
to him carefully. He is focused on production and consumption.
These are what the world wants and needs, he says. He is right,
of course. Every species lives on production and consumption.
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 timelines. 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.

The ecologist has a different worldview. He is focused
on unsustainable crop yields, overdrawn aquifers, and
threatened ecosystems. His voice is also heard, albeit
faintly, in high government and corporate circles.
He sits on nonprofit foundation boards, writes for
Scientific American, and is sometimes called to Washington.
The planet, he insists, is exhausted and in trouble.

The Economist

"EASE UP. In spite of two centuries of doomsaying, humanity
is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. There are environmental
problems, certainly, 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 continuously. 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 worldwide
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.

"Genius and effort have transformed the environment to the
benefit of human life. We have turned a wild and inhospitable
world into a garden. Human dominance is Earth's destiny.
The harmful perturbations we have caused can be moderated
and reversed as we go along."

The Environmentalist

"YES, IT'S TRUE that the human condition has improved
dramatically 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 is finite and its environment increasingly brittle.
No one should look to gross national products 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
progress 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 downriver without measuring the cost is
a country traveling blind.

"Suppose that the conventionally measured global economic
output, now at about $31 trillion, were to expand at
a healthy 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 freshwater 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.

"The appropriation of productive land--the ecological
footprint--is already too large for the planet
to sustain, and it's growing larger. A recent study
building on this concept estimated that the human
population exceeded Earth's sustainable capacity around
the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times
that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be
set aside in order to protect the natural environment,
as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth's
sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still
earlier, around 1972. In short, Earth has lost its
ability to regenerate--unless global consumption is
reduced or global production is increased, or both."

By dramatizing these two polar views of the economic
future, I don't wish to imply the existence of two cultures
with distinct ethos. All who care about both the economy
and environment, and that includes the vast majority,
are members of the same culture. The gaze of our two
debaters is fixed on different points in the space-time
scale in which we all dwell. They differ in the factors
they take into account in forecasting the state of the
world, how far they look into the future, and how much
they care about nonhuman life. Most economists today,
and all but the most politically conservative of their
public interpreters, recognize very well that the world
has limits and that the human population cannot afford
to grow much larger. They know that humanity is destroying
biodiversity. They just don't like to spend a lot of time
thinking about it.

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 replaced 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 that
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
six 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, though beginning to slow, is still basically
exponential: the more people, the faster the growth,
thence still more people sooner and an even faster growth,
and so on upward toward astronomical numbers unless the
trend is reversed and 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 six billion now.
During the 20th century more people were added to the
world than in all of previous human history. In 1800
there had been about one billion and in 1900, still
only 1.6 billion.

The pattern of human population growth in the 20th
century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo
sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already
exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass
of any large animal species that ever existed on the
land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another
100 years like that.

By the end of the century some relief was in sight.
In most parts of the world--North and South America,
Europe, Australia, and most of Asia--people had begun
gingerly to tap the brake pedal. The worldwide average
number of children per woman fell from 4.3 in 1960 to
2.6 in 2000. The number required to attain zero population
growth--that is, the number that balances the birth and
death rates and holds the standing population size
constant--is 2.1 (the extra one tenth compensates for
infant and child mortality). When the number of children
per woman stays above 2.1 even slightly, the population
still expands exponentially. This means that although
the population climbs less and less steeply as the number
approaches 2.1, humanity will still, in theory, eventually
come to weigh as much as Earth and, if given enough time,
will exceed the mass of the visible universe. This fantasy
is a mathematician's way of saying that anything above
zero population growth cannot be sustained. If, on the
other hand, the average number of children drops below
2.1, the population enters negative exponential growth
and starts to decline. To speak of 2.1 in exact terms
as the breakpoint is of course an oversimplification.
Advances in medicine and public health can lower the
breakpoint toward the minimal, perfect number of 2.0
(no infant or childhood deaths), while famine, epidemics,
and war, by boosting mortality, can raise it well above
2.1. But worldwide, over an extended period of time,
local differences and statistical fluctuations wash one
another out and the iron demographic laws grind on.
They transmit to us always the same essential message,
that to breed in excess is to overload the planet.

By 2000 the replacement rate in all of the countries
of western Europe had dropped below 2.1. The lead was
taken by Italy, at 1.2 children per woman (so much for
the power of natalist religious doctrine). Thailand also
passed the magic number, as well as the nonimmigrant
population of the U.S.

When a country descends to its zero-population birth
rates or even well below, it does not cease absolute
population growth immediately, because the positive
growth experienced just before the breakpoint has
generated a disproportionate number of young people
with most of their fertile years and life ahead of
them. As this cohort ages, the proportion of
child-bearing people diminishes, the age distribution
stabilizes at the zero-population level, the slack
is taken up, and population growth ceases. Similarly,
when a country dips below the breakpoint, a lag
period intervenes before the absolute growth rate
goes negative and the population actually declines.
Italy and Germany, for example, have entered a period
of such true, absolute negative population growth.

The decline in global population growth is attributable
to three interlocking social forces: the globalization
of an economy driven by science and technology, the
consequent implosion of rural populations into cities,
and, as a result of globalization and urban implosion,
the empowerment of women. The freeing of women socially
and economically results in fewer children. Reduced
reproduction by female choice can be thought a fortunate,
indeed almost miraculous, gift of human nature to future
generations. It could have gone the other way: women,
more prosperous and less shackled, could have chosen
the satisfactions of a larger brood. They did the
opposite. They opted for a smaller number of quality
children, who can be raised with better health and
education, over a larger family. They simultaneously
chose better, more secure lives for themselves.
The tendency appears to be very widespread, if not
universal. Its importance cannot be overstated.
Social commentators often remark that humanity
is endangered by its own instincts, such as tribalism,
aggression, and personal greed. Demographers of the
future will, I believe, point out that on the other
hand humanity was saved by this one quirk in the maternal
instinct.

The global trend toward smaller families, if it continues,
will eventually halt population growth and afterward
reverse it. What will be the peak, and when will it occur?
And how will the environment fare as humanity climbs to
the peak? The Population Division of the United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs released a spread
of projections to the year 2050 that ranged from 7.3 billion
to 14.4 billion, with the most likely scenario falling
somewhere between nine billion and 10 billion.

Enough slack still exists in the system to justify guarded
optimism. Women given a choice and affordable contraceptive
methods generally practice birth control. By 1996 about
130 countries subsidized family-planning services. More
than half of all developing countries in particular also
had official population policies to accompany their economic
and military policies, and more than 90 percent of the rest
stated their intention to follow suit. The U.S., where
the idea is still virtually taboo, remained a stunning
exception.

The encouragement of population control by developing
countries comes not a moment too soon. The environmental
fate of the world lies ultimately in their hands. They now
account for virtually all global population growth, and
their drive toward higher per capita consumption will be
relentless.

The consequences of their reproductive prowess are multiple
and deep. The people of the developing countries are already
far younger than those in the industrial countries and
destined to become more so. The streets of Lagos, Manaus,
Karachi, and other cities in the developing world are
a sea of children. To an observer fresh from Europe or
North America, the crowds give the feel of a gigantic
school just let out. In at least 68 of the countries,
more than 40 percent of the population is under 15 years
of age.

A country poor to start with and composed largely of young
children and adolescents is strained to provide even minimal
health services and education for its people. Its superabundance
of cheap, unskilled labor can be turned to some economic
advantage but unfortunately also provides cannon fodder for
ethnic strife and war. As the populations continue to explode
and water and arable land grow scarcer, the industrial
countries will feel their pressure in the form of many more
desperate immigrants and the risk of spreading international
terrorism. I have come to understand the advice given me
many years ago when I argued the case for the natural
environment to the president's scientific adviser:
your patron is foreign policy.

Stretched to the limit of its capacity, how many people
can the planet support? A rough answer is possible,
but it is a sliding one contingent on three conditions:
how far into the future the planetary support is expected
to last, how evenly the resources are to be distributed,
and the quality of life most of humanity expects to achieve.
Consider food, which economists commonly use as a proxy of
carrying capacity. The current world production of grains,
which provide most of humanity's calories, is about
two billion tons annually. That is enough, in theory,
to feed 10 billion East Indians, who eat primarily grains
and very little meat by Western standards. But the same
amount can support only about 2.5 billion Americans,
who convert a large part of their grains into livestock
and poultry. There are two ways to stop short of the wall.
Either the industrialized populations move down the food
chain to a more vegetarian diet, or the agricultural yield
of productive land worldwide is increased by more than
50 percent.

The constraints of the biosphere are fixed. The bottleneck
through which we are passing is real. It should be obvious
to anyone not in a euphoric delirium that whatever humanity
does or does not do, Earth's capacity to support our species
is approaching the limit. We already appropriate by some means
or other 40 percent of the planet's organic matter produced
by green plants. If everyone agreed to become vegetarian,
leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present
1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres)
would support about 10 billion people. If humans utilized
as food all of the energy captured by plant photosynthesis
on land and sea, some 40 trillion watts, the planet could
support about 16 billion people. But long before that
ultimate limit was approached, the planet would surely
have become a hellish place to exist. There may, of course,
be escape hatches. Petroleum reserves might be converted
into food, until they are exhausted. Fusion energy could
conceivably be used to create light, whose energy would
power photosynthesis, ramp up plant growth beyond that
dependent on solar energy, and hence create more food.
Humanity might even consider becoming someday what the
astrobiologists call a type II civilization and harness
all the power of the sun to support human life on Earth
and on colonies on and around the other solar planets.
Surely these are not frontiers we will wish to explore
in order simply to continue our reproductive folly.

The epicenter of environmental change, the paradigm
of population stress, is the People's Republic of China.
By 2000 its population was 1.2 billion, one fifth of the
world total. It is thought likely by demographers to creep
up to 1.6 billion by 2030. During 1950-2000 China's people
grew by 700 million, more than existed in the entire world
at the start of the industrial revolution. The great bulk
of this increase is crammed into the basins of the Yangtze
and Yellow rivers, covering an area about equal to that of
the eastern U.S. Hemmed in to the west by deserts and
mountains, limited to the south by resistance from other
civilizations, their agricultural populations simply grew
denser on the land their ancestors had farmed for millennia.
China became in effect a great overcrowded island,
a Jamaica or Haiti writ large.

Highly intelligent and innovative, its people have made
the most of it. Today China and the U.S. are the two
leading grain producers of the world. But China's huge
population is on the verge of consuming more than it can
produce. In 1997 a team of scientists, reporting to the
U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC), predicted that
China will need to import 175 million tons of grain annually
by 2025. Extrapolated to 2030, the annual level is 200 million
tons--the entire amount of grain exported annually in the
world at the present time. A tick in the parameters of the
model could move these figures up or down, but optimism
would be a dangerous attitude in planning strategy when
the stakes are so high. After 1997 the Chinese in fact
instituted a province-level crash program to boost grain
level to export capacity. The effort was successful
but may be short-lived, a fact the government itself
recognizes. It requires cultivation of marginal land,
higher per acre environmental damage, and a more rapid
depletion of the country's precious groundwater.

According to the NIC report, any slack in China's production
may be picked up by the Big Five grain exporters: the U.S.,
Canada, Argentina, Australia, and the European Union.
But the exports of these dominant producers, after climbing
steeply in the 1960s and 1970s, tapered off to near their
present level in 1980. With existing agricultural capacity
and technology, this output does not seem likely to increase
to any significant degree. The U.S. and the European Union
have already returned to production all of the cropland
idled under earlier farm commodity programs. Australia
and Canada, largely dependent on dryland farming, are
constrained by low rainfall. Argentina has the potential
to expand, but due to its small size, the surplus it produces
is unlikely to exceed 10 million tons of grain production
per year.

China relies heavily on irrigation, with water drawn
from its aquifers and great rivers. The greatest impediment
is again geographic: two thirds of China's agriculture is
in the north, but four fifths of the water supply is in
the south--that is, principally in the Yangtze River Basin.
Irrigation and withdrawals for domestic and industrial
use have depleted the northern basins, from which flow
the waters of the Yellow, Hai, Huai, and Liao rivers.
Starting in 1972, the Yellow River Channel has gone bone
dry almost yearly through part of its course in Shandong
Province, as far inland as the capital, Jinan, thence down
all the way to the sea. In 1997 the river stopped flowing
for 130 days, then restarted and stopped again through the
year for a record total of 226 dry days. Because Shandong
Province normally produces a fifth of China's wheat and a
seventh of its corn, the failure of the Yellow River is of
no little consequence. The crop losses in 1997 alone reached
$1.7 billion.

Meanwhile the groundwater of the northern plains has dropped
precipitously, reaching an average rate of 1.5 meters (five
feet) per year by the mid-1990s. Between 1965 and 1995 the
water table fell 37 meters (121 feet) beneath Beijing itself.

Faced with chronic water shortages in the Yellow River Basin,
the Chinese government has undertaken the building of the
Xiaolangdi Dam, which will be exceeded in size only by the
Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. The Xiaolangdi is
expected to solve the problems of both periodic flooding
and drought. Plans are being laid in addition for the
construction of canals to siphon water from the Yangtze,
which never grows dry, to the Yellow River and Beijing,
respectively.

These measures may or may not suffice to maintain Chinese
agriculture and economic growth. But they are complicated
by formidable side effects. Foremost is silting from the
upriver loess plains, which makes the Yellow River the most
turbid in the world and threatens to fill the Xiaolangdi
Reservoir, according to one study, as soon as 30 years
after its completion.

China has maneuvered itself into a position that forces
it continually to design and redesign its lowland
territories as one gigantic hydraulic system. But this
is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem
is that China has too many people. In addition, its people
are admirably industrious and fiercely upwardly mobile.
As a result, their water requirements, already oppressively
high, are rising steeply. By 2030 residential demands
alone are projected to increase more than fourfold,
to 134 billion tons, and industrial demands fivefold,
to 269 billion tons. The effects will be direct and
powerful. Of China's 617 cities, 300 already face water
shortages.

The pressure on agriculture is intensified in China
by a dilemma shared in varying degrees by every country.
As industrialization proceeds, per capita income rises,
and the populace consumes more food. They also migrate
up the energy pyramid to meat and dairy products.
Because fewer calories per kilogram of grain are obtained
when first passed through poultry and livestock instead
of being eaten directly, per capita grain consumption
rises still more. All the while the available water
supply remains static or nearly so. In an open market,
the agricultural use of water is outcompeted by industrial
use. A thousand tons of freshwater yields a ton of wheat,
worth $200, but the same amount of water in industry
yields $14,000. As China, already short on water and
arable land, grows more prosperous through industrialization
and trade, water becomes more expensive. The cost of
agriculture rises correspondingly, and unless the collection
of water is subsidized, the price of food also rises.
This is in part the rationale for the great dams at
Three Gorges and Xiaolangdi, built at enormous public
expense.

In theory, an affluent industrialized country does not
have to be agriculturally independent. In theory, China
can make up its grain shortage by purchasing from the
Big Five grain-surplus nations. Unfortunately, its
population is too large and the world surplus too
restrictive for it to solve its problem without altering
the world market. All by itself, China seems destined
to drive up the price of grain and make it harder for
the poorer developing countries to meet their own needs.
At the present time, grain prices are falling, but
this seems certain to change as the world population
soars to nine billion or beyond.

The problem, resource experts agree, cannot be solved
entirely by hydrological engineering. It must include
shifts from grain to fruit and vegetables, which are
more labor-intensive, giving China a competitive edge.
To this can be added strict water conservation measures
in industrial and domestic use; the use of sprinkler
and drip irrigation in cultivation, as opposed to the
traditional and more wasteful methods of flood and
furrow irrigation; and private land ownership, with
subsidies and price liberalization, to increase
conservation incentives for farmers.

Meanwhile the surtax levied on the environ-ment
to support China's growth, though rarely entered
on the national balance sheets, is escalating to
a ruin-ous level. Among the most telling indicators
is the pollution of water. Here is a measure worth
pondering. China has in all 50,000 kilometers of
major rivers. Of these, according to the U.N. Food
and Agriculture Organization, 80 percent no longer
support fish. The Yellow River is dead along much
of its course, so fouled with chromium, cadmium,
and other toxins from oil refineries, paper mills,
and chemical plants as to be unfit for either human
consumption or irrigation. Diseases from bacterial
and toxic-waste pollution are epidemic.

China can probably feed itself to at least midcentury,
but its own data show that it will be skirting the edge
of disaster even as it accelerates its lifesaving shift
to industrialization and megahydrological engineering.
The extremity of China's condition makes it vulnerable
to the wild cards of history. A war, internal political
turmoil, extended droughts, or crop disease can kick
the economy into a downspin. Its enormous population
makes rescue by other countries impracticable.

China deserves close attention, not just as the unsteady
giant whose missteps can rock the world, but also because
it is so far advanced along the path to which the rest
of humanity seems inexorably headed. If China solves
its problems, the lessons learned can be applied elsewhere.
That includes the U.S., whose citizens are working at a
furious pace to overpopulate and exhaust their own land
and water from sea to shining sea.

Environmentalism is still widely viewed, especially in
the U.S., as a special-interest lobby. Its proponents,
in this blinkered view, flutter their hands over pollution
and threatened species, exaggerate their case, and press
for industrial restraint and the protection of wild places,
even at the cost of economic development and jobs.

Environmentalism is something more central and vastly
more important. Its essence has been defined by science
in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets,
is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living
shell to create the special conditions on which life is
sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface
have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their
present condition by the activity of the biosphere,
a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose
activities are locked together in precise but tenuous
global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter.
The biosphere creates our special world anew every day,
every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical
disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species
is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any
direction, we move the environment away from the delicate
dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish
species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet
has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.

Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into this
world. Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved
here, one among many species, across millions of years,
and exist as one organic miracle linked to others.
The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary
ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery,
our school, and remains our one and only home. To its
special conditions we are intimately adapted in every
one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions
that gives us life.

That is the essence of environmentalism. It is the guiding
principle of those devoted to the health of the planet.
But it is not yet a general worldview, evidently not yet
compelling enough to distract many people away from the
primal diversions of sport, politics, religion, and
private wealth.

The relative indifference to the environment springs,
I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain
evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a
small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen,
and two or three generations into the future. To look
neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a
Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore
any distant possibility not yet requiring examination.
It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do
they think in this shortsighted way? The reason is
simple: it is a hardwired part of our Paleolithic
heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked
for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives
and friends lived longer and left more offspring--even
when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms
and empires to crumble around them. The long view that
might have saved their distant descendants required
a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult
to marshal.

The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems
from this conflict between short-term and long-term
values. To select values for the near future of one's
own tribe or country is relatively easy. To select
values for the distant future of the whole planet
also is relatively easy--in theory, at least.
To combine the two visions to create a universal
environmental ethic is, on the other hand, very
difficult. But combine them we must, because a
universal environmental ethic is the only guide
by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely
conducted through the bottleneck into which our
species has foolishly blundered.

###

[ return to top ]