UNCERTAINTIES AND HOPES
Die Menschen sind wie Flugsand, und man ist nie sicher was morgen oben liegt.
Albert Einstein
Uncertain future is a key reality of human condition. We strive for a greater control, and during the past generation we have invested a great deal of intellectual effort into improving the capability of our quantitative techniques, and produced increasingly complex long-range forecasts. But retrospectives show little real success. As always, unpredictable discontinuities provided the best antidote against over-ambitious forecasting efforts. They had profound effects in every sphere of human action: from the Yom Kippur War to the disintegration of the Soviet empire, from floating exchange rates to widely fluctuating commodity prices, from the fall of western labour unions to the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, from the global primacy of Japanese car-making to the microcomputer explosion, and from the discovery of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) effects on the stratospheric ozone to fears of global warming.
There is no reason to assume that frequency of such profound unpredictable changes will diminish in the future. And even should we be successful in forecasting fairly accurately many particular developments, it is most unlikely that we will be able to foresee the complete settings of such changes. Such wholes matter much more than their parts, and forecasting the wholes of civilizational development is far beyond our abilities. An outstanding example suffices to illustrate this common impossibility.
In 1970, when China was slowly emerging from the madness of the Cultural Revolution, and when it had not published any proper statistics for more than a decade, a western demographer could have been lucky by forecasting quite accurately the country’s 1990 population total of nearly 1.15 billion people—and this total could lead to speculations about China’s desperate food and economic prospects. But how many experts in 1970 would have predicted that by 1990 Chinese farming would be entering the second decade of privatized production, and that it would be producing enough food to bring the country’s average per capita supply within less than 10 per cent of the Japanese mean? Or that China’s economy would be the fastest growing one in the Asia of the 1980s, generating a large trade surplus with the United States?
And so I will not offer yet another set of elaborate but almost instantly irrelevant forecasts. The most robust look must concentrate on those inevitable realities and trends whose outcomes cannot be fundamentally different regardless of the intervening discontinuities and altered wholes. I will limit my look to no more than two generations: a combination of demographic imperatives and operational inertia of principal energy and material supply systems guarantees that the shape of the world up to about half a century ahead is far more discernible than the more distant developments. An even more important particular justification is that the next two generations may well be the most critical period in the history of industrial civilization, and they may rank among the watersheds of human evolution. Why this may be so is best appreciated by viewing these decades in an evolutionary setting.
TWO PERSPECTIVES
On the other hand, the internal perils that life has to face, arising from the emergence within it of a reflective liberty…seem much more menacing and alive.
Teilhard de Chardin, Man’s Place in Nature (1966)
Life on the Earth has been evolving for more than three billion years and astrophysical imperatives allow for almost twice that time for further complexification. The inevitable terminal catastrophe awaits about five billion years from now, at a time when our star will exhaust a large part of hydrogen near its centre and the domain of the fusion reaction, converting hydrogen to helium and keeping stars alive, will travel rapidly outward, heating the Sun and expanding it enormously (Friedman 1986). Photosphere, the Sun’s outermost layer now about 150 million km distant from the Earth, will extend beyond the orbit of Mars as the giant star will vaporize all the terrestrial planets.
If no other catastrophic events—extraterrestrial or geogenic—would destroy it, a truly sapient global civilization could be thus evolving on the Earth over a span a million times longer than the time elapsed from the building of the first pyramid or the rule of the mythical Yellow Emperor (both events date to about 2800 BC). Other extraterrestrial catastrophes affecting the Earth are, of course, possible during the coming billions of years—but none of them is inevitable and their probabilities are exceedingly small. Perhaps the least likely is a ‘nearby’ explosion of a supernova which would flood the Earth with doses of radiation high enough to extinguish all life (Cosmovici 1973).
In spite of up to ten postulated episodes of exposures to 500 roentgens (a dose lethal for most mammals) since the Precambrian period (600 million years ago), actual radiation doses were too low to derail the course of evolution and the future probabilities of destructive impact on civilization can be further lowered owing to the forewarning to be expected before the arrival of radiation. If it is assumed that an advanced civilization could prepare shelters for its population during the year elapsing between the arrival of light and cosmic radiation, then an unavoidable dose of 500 roentgen should be encountered only once in one billion years. Probability of radiation catastrophe destroying much (most?) of human civilization would be then almost comparable to the unavoidable demise of the planet amidst the expanding red Sun.
Collision between the Earth and a large celestial object is an entirely different matter. Such currently uncontrollable encounters have undoubtedly happened in the past. A typical comet has a mass equal to a sphere of solid material with a radius of 10 kilometres (km) and in a head-on collision with the Earth the two objects could move with a relative speed as high as 70 km/second (Smil 1991 a). But chances of a head-on collision are not higher than about once in a billion passages for any comet coming near the Earth, or about once in 100 million years. A substantial piece of cometary material may hit the planet once every ten million years. Past encounters may (or may not) have caused large-scale species extinctions (Alvarez and Asaro 1990) but they could not sever the evolutionary process. Nor could grand tectonic motions separating and rejoining the continents, periods of intense volcanic activity, or pronounced climatic changes (Kasting 1989; Sharpton and Ward 1991).
Until the middle of the twentieth century no human action could pose even a remotely comparable threat to the integrity of the biosphere. Then the possibility of full-scale nuclear war became our dominant existential concern. Mutual nuclear overkill acted as an effective restraint, and the disintegration of the Soviet empire has dramatically lowered the risks of nuclear war. But extremely low probabilities of extraterrestrial catastrophes and lowered chances of nuclear war do not add up to a nearly risk-free future for the biosphere. Two unprecedented developments—rapid growth of the global population and its quest for material affluence and higher quality of life—have combined to put such stresses on the biosphere that we are now increasingly concerned about its ability to support long-term development of modern civilization.
These concerns may be exaggerated, as the biosphere may prove to be much more resilient, even self-equilibrating (Lovelock 1979)—but they may also be quite inadequate, as different environments may be responding to human stresses by increasingly non-linear deterioration. The same uncer tainty marks our ability to deal with such degradations. According to the catastrophists they will bring us much closer to an (irreversible?) civilizational collapse, while techno-optimists see in them opportunities for greater innovation. I must agree with B.J.L.Berry (1988) that ‘at this juncture the choice is not one of science but of ideology’.
What is undeniable is the enormous extent of human effects on the biosphere, the reach extending from myriads of local changes to potentially destabilizing interferences in grand biogeochemical cycles. These realities demand responses —and the next two generations may be critical in formulating them and putting them into effect. This need seems to be even more urgent when we turn to the second perspective, to the consideration of critical demographic and socioeconomic trends which will almost certainly mark the coming decades. First is the inexorability of further large population increases. Even if fertilities would be declining somewhat faster than expected, absolute population growth during the years 1990–2030 will surpass the record increase between 1950–90, and the global total will approach nine billion.
Second, more than nine-tenths of this increase will come in poor countries whose population expect to do better, but merely doubling the poor world’s average standard of living over a period of four decades (leaving it still far behind the affluent mean) would call for much higher flows of fuels, food and raw materials. Simple arithmetic shows that even if intervening technical advances would increase typical energy conversion and material utilization efficiencies by 50 per cent, the combination of the poor world’s population total about 70 per cent higher in the year 2030 than in the year 1990 and doubled per capita consumption would call for nearly doubling of energy and material inputs This would not be accompanied by inevitable intensification of biospheric degradation only if the rich world would be willing to give up a requisite share of its claims on biospheric resources and services.
Third, it will be impossible to accommodate the growing populations in rural areas. Inevitable intensification of farming will lower direct labour needs, and shortages of arable land will make its further subdivision increasingly difficult. High population and industrial densities accompanying massive urbanization will generate wastes at rates which even rich nations find very difficult to control. And high power density demands of large cities will make it much less likely that renewable flows will ease the environmental impacts of fossil fuel combustion. Fourth, while advances in crop breeding and agronomic management should make it possible to feed the expected population, those efforts will require further conversion of forests and grasslands to crop fields and further intensification of farming. Given the already existing soil erosion and declines in soil organic matter we must be concerned about the integrity of future agro-ecosystems.
And even if today’s share of total photosynthetic production appropriated by humans is considerably lower than some published estimates, it is certainly already high enough to preclude another doubling without major global effects on water, carbon and nutrient cycles. Similarly, uncertainties surrounding capacities of biospheric sinks and atmospheric responses make it impossible to offer any accurate forecasts of global warming, but physical imperatives are certainly increasing the risk of relatively rapid warming: again, it is most unlikely that we could double the current rate of emissions of greenhouse gases without any significant biospheric consequences.
During millennia of civilizational growth we have destroyed and impoverished numerous ecosystems on local and regional scales. During the next two generations we may come close to compromising the biosphere’s capacities to support further economic growth. If this is indeed the case—and if we act as risk-minimizers there is enough evidence to clearly assume so—then the next two generations will have to be a period when we will pay an unprecedented attention to maintaining the biospheric integrity, a task which will necessitate a transition to fundamentally different economic arrangements. I believe that the resulting socio-economic transformation would equal in its far-reaching implications the as-yet-unfinished world-wide transition from subsistence farming to urbanized industrial civilization. I also believe that we should approach this challenge with great humility.
PLANETARY MANAGEMENT
As for those who would take the whole world
To tinker it as they see fit,
I observe that they never succeed…
For indeed there are things
That must move ahead,
While others must lag…
So the Wise Man discards
Extreme inclinations
to make sweeping judgements…
Lao Zi, Dao De Qing
These lines—traditionally ascribed to Lao Zi, a recluse who became a historian in the secret archives of the Zhou dynasty—are more than 2000 years old and they contain the wisdom of a civilization which at that time had already accumulated several millennia of tempering experience with managing floods, droughts, invaders, interstate feuds, public duties and private probity. And Lao Zi’s sentiments would have been comprehensible to more than one hundred successive generations that lived with the all-embracing obligations and promises of traditional order, in China or elsewhere.
Only the near-magical advances of modern civilization led to the rapidly widening circles of tinkering, and to often arrogant perceptions about the chances of its success. Now, in order to preserve the biosphere capable to sustain further socio-economic advances, we face the challenge on the ultimate scale: managing the planet Earth. Such a task may appear to be a clear necessity, but the mission should make us very cautious. We should be highly critical of any sweeping judgements dominating discussions of environmental change, and we should be humbled by a large number of lesser challenges where we have tinkered—and failed as nations or as the international community. Yet even people who should know better are repeatedly drawn to sweeping judgements.
Are ecosystems fragile or resilient? Fragile seems to be the only adjective encountered in standard writings on environmental change. But before using the term one must define the criteria of fragility and examine their temporal trends in particular ecosystems. And while it certainly describes many properties of many ecosystems, fragility is not a general attribute of all ecosystemic functions in all communities. Will the anticipated global warming be fast or will the rate of change be tolerable? ‘Very fast’ reply the proponents of the catastrophic change who believe that the warming will bring ‘starvation, poverty, squalor, and streams of environmental refugees at a level which we can hardly imagine today’ (Topfer 1991). But certainly slower than the change in critical components of economies adjusting to slightly higher temperatures. Besides, ‘fast change that is anticipated may matter less than slower change that is unforeseen’ (Ausubel 1991b).
What kind of management will successfully bridge these sweeping judgements? And how does one know that the population of a particular country has already surpassed the carrying capacity of its environment? Carrying capacity is not too difficult to define for deer or gorillas—but without detailing average energy and material flows it is an enormously elastic concept for human societies, and one made even more fuzzy by increasing international trade. Only with clear definitions can we get meaningful answers, but there is little chance that undefined, but highly evocative, terms will disappear from the discourse of environmental change.
Similarly, it is not easy to judge the impact of environmental degradation on people. I find it impossible to believe that greater crowding will make for a higher quality of life (Simon and Kahn 1984), but it is quite obvious that a great deal of environmental degradation is acceptable by people as long as their material standard of living is rising. Indeed, as Day (1971) noted, the fluid nature of human values is a major threat to any effort blocking gradual deterioration of environmental quality. During the 1980s undeniable improvements in the average standard of living in many poor countries were embedded in the generally declining quality of their environment. Of course, there is nothing new in this trade-off: Europe and North America lived with it for many generations before the 1960s.
The only rational conclusion is that the complexity of links between population growth, resource use, environmental quality, and innovation leaves little room for simple generalizations. Closer looks almost always reveal a peculiar combination of disheartening trends and encouraging changes. Contrary to the commonly held impression (another case of an inexcusably sweeping judgement), Thomas Robert Malthus, the great initiator of modern debates on population growth and resources, was a thinker espousing such an eminently realistic position.
Of course, he will always be best known for his conclusion that ‘the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’ and that ‘this natural inequality…appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society’ (Malthus 1798). But his was a more complex vision, eloquently set in the second edition of his great essay (Malthus 1803):
On the whole, therefore, though our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish, yet they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society… And although we cannot expect that the virtue and happiness of mankind will keep pace with the brilliant career of physical discovery; yet, if we are not wanting to ourselves, we may confidently indulge the hope that, to no unimportant extent, they will be influenced by its progress and will partake in its success.
But a confidence in such an outcome is weakened by the burden of our failures. Too many countries in the poor world have been crippled by racial hatreds and killings, civil wars, mass corruption and organized crime, starvation, malnutrition, and extreme poverty—and in some of them these apparently intractable factors dominate the outlook. While this social disintegration does not invalidate concerns about environmental integrity, it certainly creates a different order of priorities and it reduces, even eliminates, meaningful participation in any global effort.
Dissipating forces are also at work in rich nations, where the challenges of racial discord, deep income disparities, economic stagnation, budget deficits, crime and drug addiction, mass functional illiteracy, poor education, family breakdown and public apathy combine to create conditions hardly conducive to pushing resolute policies elevating environmental management to a national priority. How readily will even these countries agree to long-term participation in global agreements specifying their costly commitments to the maintenance of the global commons?
The grandest of these co-operative approaches would be to agree on a global compact, a bargain between rich and poor countries. Its essential trade-off would be a drastic reduction of energy and material use in the rich countries in return for the commitment to an early achievement of replacement fertilities in the poor world. For example, in Holdren’s (1990) scenario rich countries will halve their per capita energy use by the year 2025 (largely by deploying highly efficient techniques) so the poor ones could double it during the same period with the total world energy use increasing to no more than twice the 1990 rate assumed to be affordably and sustainably manageable with advanced supply techniques. This exchange would be accompanied by a programme stabilizing the global population at nine billion, a goal requiring the world-wide achievement of replacement fertility by the year 2010.
Imposing such clear targets may seem to be an essential goal of planetary management, but uncertainties of our understanding argue for their avoidance. Risks of global warming provide an excellent illustration. During the 1970s forecasts assumed long-term primary energy growth at over 4 per cent a year (the rate prevailing since 1945), and close to 60 per cent of CO2 retained in the atmosphere. This would have doubled the pre-industrial CO2 mean before the year 2030. But a substantial drop of primary energy growth rate during the 1980s, and its long-term continuation (roughly 2 per cent a year), coupled with an atmospheric CO2 retention rate of around 40 per cent, would not bring the doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels before the year 2075. Demise of the USSR, the world’s second largest consumer of fossil fuels, is bringing further declines of energy consumption and this could push the doubling date closer to the year 2090.
From an adaptive point of view the difference between the two outcomes is fundamental. A doubling taking nearly a century would offer many more opportunities for adjustments and innovations than one accomplished in half of that time. Of course, analogical arguments are valid for the preservation of biodiversity or for drastic measures to reduce soil erosion: we simply do not know enough to start imposing clear targets. But successful actions reducing or preventing environmental degradation do not have to wait for the adoption of firm goals, or for a formulation and acceptance of grand strategies arrived at by consensual global adherence to sustainability goals.
Using again the example of global warming, effective long-range national policies should aim at a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions regardless of the imminence or the intensity of global climatic change and the success or failure of international negotiations. This risk-minimizing strategy would be an insurance against the prevailing uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises—but this benefit would not be the only, and not even the most important, reason for its adoption. Lower emissions of CO2 would require reduced consumption of fossil fuels, a goal which we should have been pursuing aggressively all along because of its multiple benefits.
These gains include not only a large number of environmental improvements—ranging from the avoidance of land destruction by surface coalmining to lower emissions of acid-forming gases, from reduced chances for major oil spills to cleaner air in urban areas, or from improved visibility to reduced disposal of fly ash and desulphurization sludge—but also notable socio-economic benefits. By reducing total exposure to a variety of pollutants lower fossil fuel combustion should bring decline in morbidity and longer life expectancy: these changes would not only improve the collective quality of life, but they would also affect health care costs. Lowered energy intensity of economic output would increase a nation’s competitiveness in foreign markets, a development benefiting the balance of payments and creating new employment opportunities.
If a nation is a major importer of fossil fuels (and with the exception of Russia and China all large economies are), then reducing the dependence on those imports will not only improve its fiscal position, but it will also enhance its national security. And to achieve substantial reductions in fossil fuel combustion a nation will have to engage in a long-term development and diffusion of new techniques and management approaches, a development increasing its scientific and technical prowess and its managerial abilities and requiring better education: socio-economic spin-offs of these achievements could be as important as the efficiency gains themselves.
Clearly, our decisions to optimize the use of fossil fuels need not be based on the absence or presence of climatic threats as every change aimed at reducing fossil fuel combustion has a large number of independent, and ultimately perhaps even more important, benefits. Similarly, we should not extol the value of unknown genetic treasures in order to preserve biodiversity, and we do not have to wait for new national accounts internalizing the costs of species loss. In the longer run bioengineering advances may make any benefits of vine saps or insect-produced fungicides look rather modest, and even the best environmental accounting may still include many arbitrary assumptions. But a species-rich forest should have been valued all along for its essential environmental services which may be ultimately more important for the civilization’s long-term survival than the demise of some endemic species.
Countries reducing their fossil fuel combustion or protecting their forests will thus have no regrets if there will be no pronounced global warming during the twenty-first century, or if advanced bioengineering will devalue their genetic stocks. No-regret strategies are clearly by far the best approach to environmental management. They move the countries in particular directions—controls, conservation, protection, efficiency, innovation—only if such commitments can be justified by more than an uncertain assessment of possible worst-case environmental risks and costs.
This pragmatic choice takes out most of the contention from the formulation of effective policies, and it avoids the difficulty of sustaining public and political support for measures with uncertain and remote benefits. But given the interconnectedness of biospheric changes, this approach does not leave out any major environmental concerns, and it should make it easier to select our management priorities by favouring measures with the largest number of identifiable environmental, social, economic and political benefits.
A great advantage of no-regret strategy is that it needs no grand agreements in order to make the difference. Energy and water conservation, higher conversion efficiencies, farming without excess, recycling, or preservation of ecosystemic services should be pursued as a matter of clear self-interest by all responsible nations without waiting for enactment of global accords which may be then seen anyway as too vague or too intrusive. There are two other notable advantages to this approach: it is necessarily incremental but many of its benefits can start flowing immediately; and as it is decentralized, it would avoid design and implementation perils of grand schemes and massive bureaucracies. Widespread, diffuse incremental adaptations are preferable to relatively sudden, centrally-ordered interventions whose frequent irrationality born of the crisis attitude is demonstrated by their rather rapid self-destruction, or by their notorious inefficiency.
Do you remember our grand government-sponsored solutions to energy crises? Our commitment to fast breeder reactors, corn-derived ethanol or to gargantuan synthetic fuel schemes? And how effective have been the huge and enormously expensive social-assistance programmes in reducing poverty and creating lasting employment? Do we want to commit analogical environmental blunders on a global scale by using uncertain claims in order to push dubious policies—or do we prefer to do things right because we will benefit in a number of important ways?
The fact that the industrialized countries in general, and the USA in particular, have been reluctant to do things right—that is, above all, to pay the real cost of extracting and converting natural resources and benefiting from environmental services—does not promise any rapid future changes. But this inexcusable record of irrational behaviour cannot simply go on. We cannot keep on encouraging high consumption and inefficient use of energy, water, food, feed or wood with low commodity prices—and then to suffer the impacts and cover the high costs of extensive environmental, health, social and military externalities created by such wasteful uses.
What will set the tone of world-wide environmental management will be the actions of rich countries, rather than communiqués of international conferences. Acting in their own self-interest, the rich countries must finally start pricing natural goods and services right. This will not be an easy transition to undertake, but there is hardly any more efficient way to finally recognizing that our economies are merely elaborate subsystems of the biosphere, and that the only way to ensure their long-term viability is to maintain environmental integrity. Inevitably, the burden of global leadership is on the rich countries. Can we look with some confidence to a relatively early start of the transition to saner economic arrangements?
CONFIDENCE OR DESPAIR?
In the morning sow thy seed, and
in the evening withhold not thy hand;
for thou knowest not which shall prosper,
whether this or that, Or whether they both
shall be alike good.
Ecclesiastes XI:6
Aggregate evidence of our limited understanding, unlearnt lessons, unrealistic expectations, slow adjustments and management failures is a rich source of exasperation and depressive feelings, especially when compared with the enormity of future challenges. But there is a profound distinction between these feelings and despair. Depression does not necessarily imply hopelessness about the future, while despair involves hopelessness as well as absence of larger human connection. ‘Moments of depression are inevitable; they are part of being human… Despair is overcome when we begin once more to believe in, and act on, a human future’ (Lifton 1985).
Effective actions must be based on our continuing progress in understanding the complexities of environmental change, but deeper knowledge alone will not suffice. Environmental realities are inseparable not only from existential necessities, but also from moral imperatives. Indisputable utilitarian success of the symbiosis between modern science and free enterprise is fundamentally self-destructive if not governed by the humility of a grander perspective. This need can be expressed in many different ways. One of its most eloquent confirmations comes from Centessimus Annus, the encyclical letter issued by John Paul II in 1991:
Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.
(John Paul II 1991)
The rich western world has obviously a unique responsibility in redressing this imbalance. Western civilization has had a global influence greatly disproportional to the number of people inhabiting its historic core and its new overseas outposts. The level of understanding reached by western civilization may take it beyond others in its fundamental behaviour, and it can become the foundation of a world civilization which, unlike any of its predecessors, ‘might be perpetually reconstituted and maintained at a level undreamed of in past history’ (Melko 1971).
Undoubtedly the single most important attribute which must be preserved in order to succeed in this challenge is our heritage of freedom, of dissent and choice. This is a liberating burden, a path to enormous opportunities beset with perils of wrong choices and grievous failures. There can be no guarantee of success, but profound scepticism, sustained inquisitiveness and uncircumscribed criticism are the best possible protectors of flexibility without which there is no viable adaptation and long-term survival. Scientific advice, now a critical part of this adaptive approach, must be as much a target of this questioning as our dysfunctional social and economic arrangements.
Will we be able to summon this intellectual vitality again and again—instead of just tiring out and fading away as other seemingly so successful civilizations? There is nothing inevitable about such a demise. The idea of societies as organisms going through predictable life stages from formation to decay is overly deterministic. There is no uncertainty in it but also no hope, no possibility of choice. Civilizations are not simple organisms with pre-ordained life cycles, but rather complex interactive systems able to adapt. Influences favouring their demise—environmental changes, external threats or internal malaise—can be buffered by social and technical adjustments and innovations (Butzer 1980).
Neither ‘senility’ nor ‘decadence’ are the causes of civilizational breakdown: these most complex of all human systems meet their demise owing to concatenation of mutually reinforcing negative influences which overload the system beyond its adaptive capability. Civilization’s survival remains largely a matter of maladaptive probability rather than of a cyclical inevitability. The challenge is thus concentrated in meeting two classes of complex demands: minimizing the probability of negative, mutually-reinforcing concatenations, and maximizing the capability for adaptive responses.
What needs to be done? Given the large number of readily effective particular measures and realistic prospects for further substantial technical and managerial advances, we must assure above all that basic conditions are right for adoption and diffusion of such adjustments. Nothing is then more important than opting for flexible strategies growing from vigorous free dialogue. Glimpses of free societies may be disquieting. Their continuous discords, their accentuation of material possessions and bad news, their often frivolous preoccupations and apprehensions about the future add up to an image of a tacky instability. To be sure, all of this needs much constant improvement, but this uncertain, unruly, seemingly directionless assemblage of contending interests wary of the future is also still the best known self-correcting adaptive arrangement of human society—precisely because of its low level of dogmatic commitment and relatively high, creative flexibility.
Anything diminishing these two great fundamentals of a free society must be then minimized to the greatest possible extent. This means above all the avoidance of any demands for the safety and security of fixed truths. Their public appeal may become commensurately higher with the difficulties and costs of many choices we will have to take during the next few generations in order to prevent intolerable levels of environmental and socio-economic decline.
We have to resist the adoption of sweeping normative solutions no matter from which part of the ideological spectrum they come, no matter which preconceived salvations they represent. The idea of creating a sustainable world through a conversion to a small-is-beautiful paradise should not be treated with less scepticism than a call for a sustainable civilization based on mass deployment of nuclear fission. Extractive uses of tropical rain forests should not be seen as inherently superior to well-managed logging contributing to a nation’s real economic advance. We have to refuse, again and again, any offers of single-vision salvation: these dogmatic commitments would make it much more difficult to accommodate unforeseeable changes, their seeming simplicity would be negated by counterintuitive complications, their rigidity would foreclose precious flexibilities.
These would be the ways of simplifying maximalists, not the solutions of complexifying minimalists which are the best guarantee of flexibility and adaptability. To avoid inflexibility and simplification we have to engage in vigorous exchange of ideas. This requires constant intellectual vigilance as even science is prone to paradigmatic rigidities which may be hindering promising solutions. Indeed, the central question for the fate of mankind may be the rebirth of a genuine dialogue (Buber 1937). Such a dialogue can flourish only in free societies as they continuously, although often laboriously and discordantly, translate the intellectual flexibility into practical action and create futures which even the best minds are unable to visualize.
Management of environmental change is fundamentally the matter of human excesses, that is, the management of demands. Consequently, there can be no finer strategy than to avoid these demands or at least to minimize them, rather than to let them grow through neglect or inattention, or even to encourage them through irrational pricing and fiscal policies, and then to step in with regulations, taxation, controls, technical fixes and international treaties. Once this basic premise is accepted, two concerns become paramount: expanding populations in the poor world and the rising affluence of the rich nations.
Continuing rapid population growth in poor countries creates extremely burdensome demands. When Europe embarked on modern industrialization (1750–1800) its population growth averaged 0.6 per cent a year; a century later (1850–1900), during the decades of the greatest industrial expansion, the continent’s population was growing by about 0.7 per cent a year (Demeny 1990). In contrast, between 1950 and 1990 Africa’s population grew by 2.6 per cent a year, Latin America’s just slightly less, and Asia’s (outside China and Japan) by 2.3 per cent.
How could it be argued that such rates of population growth have little to do with pulling the people out of poverty, and hence out of their environmental morass? To wait for the expected feedbacks to work, that is, for the economic development to eventually lower fertilities to replacement level, is to condemn large numbers of living, and even larger numbers of yet to be born, Africans, Latin Americans and Asians to a degrading existence. Advances in food production may keep them just above starvation, but not without severe environmental cost brought by further intensification of cropping or by greater expansion of cultivated land. Inevitably higher urbanization will generate even higher energy demands and more concentrated pollution.
In terms of dignified material and intellectual gains this developmental path is for most of the affected people a reprehensible cul-de-sac. We know what works to reduce high fertilities—maternal education above all, ready availability of contraceptives, provision of basic infant health care—and we know that the benefit/cost ratios of these measures make them the best developmental, and that is also environmental, investments we could make. Clearly, vigorous population control measures are in the best interest of the worst affected countries.
Rich nations, with their near-stationary populations, should be no less aggressive in managing their energy and material demands by attacking both the frivolous consumption and enormous conversion and utilization inefficiencies. Realistic pricing is undoubtedly the best way to limit demand and to use resources efficiently. We should try hard to quantify the externalities of energy, food, water and raw material consumption and to pay for the real costs of these commodities. But this preference for market solutions is not incompatible with the advocacy of government interventions. Effective environmental management cannot do without realistic regulation, taxation and international agreements, and doctrinaire opposition to such approaches will ultimately be counterproductive. These adjustments, market or interventionist, may eventually yield substantial net economic benefits, but it is certain that they will cause a great deal of both temporary and permanent socio-economic dislocations. To portray such a great transition as a cost-free opportunity, or at worst as a penny ride, is irresponsible.
Difficulties abound, but possibilities exist everywhere. In rich countries they range from changing typical diets (a shift which would bring both notable environmental and health benefits) to getting serious about mandatory recycling of most usable waste materials. Of course, by far the greatest environmental gains can come from reduced energy use, and detailed sectoral studies show effective solutions even for the extraordinarily high and structurally embedded American energy addictions (OTA 1991).
Effective solutions could be found even in seemingly hopeless cases. Meier and Quium (1991) describe a path which, without any arcane techniques, could make the living in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, and one of the world’s poorest cities, considerably better by the middle of the next century. Fitjer (1990) notes that a major share of Ethiopia’s impressive hydro energy capacities can be developed by small rural stations: as in China, they would act as affordable, decentralized energizers of rural modernization. And a combination of traditional agronomic practices and bioengineering advances could turn the trend of African food production.
Challenge of the transition, enormous as it is in its scope and unique as it may be in its rapidity, is still certainly within our abilities. Any open-minded survey of civilizational transformation accomplished during the twentieth century must end up not only with exasperation, regrets and despair—but also with elation, approval and hope. Nobody can predict what our chances are in the very long run —but in spite of the uncertainties in our understanding of environmental change it is most unlikely that human actions have driven the biosphere on to a slope of an irreversible catastrophic decline. Urgency of decisive remedial actions will increase appreciably during the next generation, but today the outcome is as open as ever. The title of this closing section has thus a doubly negative answer. Neither confidence, nor despair.
In his profound collection of essays on the tragic sense of life Miguel de Unamuno (1921) formulated the answer with a persuasive recourse to one of his country’s greatest literary heroes. What is needed is ‘a faith based upon incertitude…of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the Knight Don Quijote de la Mancha; a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt’.
One cannot judge civilization’s record without deep exasperation, and the magnitude of challenges does not allow any simple, reflexive optimism. But it should not lead to despair either. Writing about the fears of nuclear conflict Robert Jay Lifton (1985) noted that:
We need to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the human future; rather, we must hope. Hope means a sense of possibility and includes desire, anticipation, and vitality. It is a psychological necessity and theological virtue, a state that must itself be nurtured, shared, mutually enhanced.
Earlier in this century Miguel de Unamuno (1921) expressed the same need even more forcefully: ‘Spero quia absurdum, it ought to have been said, rather than credo’.
How can one disagree?