Are These Two Reporters
on the Same Planet?

THE MEDIA THRIVE ON NOVELTY. WHEREAS DAILY NEWSPAPERS struggle for readers, tabloids flourish with lurid stories from outer and inner space. As competition for viewers intensifies with the proliferation of television channels, TV stories become shorter, kinkier, more violent, and more sensational than ever. All the while, our threshold for shock and violence rises.

Demand for increased titillation has changed the nature of documentary reporting. When I began television reporting in 1962, three- to four-minute interviews with articulate, thoughtful scientists were not at all unusual. Today they might get half a minute. Stories are shorter, punchier, faster, and slicker, but they are also shallower and provide less detailed historical and social context. In-depth reporting gives way to the exploitative and anecdotal. It’s not surprising, then, that Paul Bernardo, Lorena Bobbit, and Tonya Harding received coverage far in excess of their global significance.

During the 1970s and 1980s, as public awareness grew over the ramifications of our lifestyles and technology on the planet, we were constantly shocked and surprised by the unexpected interconnections and consequences. Who would have believed that DDT sprayed on fields to kill insects would end up causing thinner eggshells for birds, or that the heavy industries of Pennsylvania would affect trees in Québec? The stories were alarming, and the media reports reflected it.

But it was inevitable that sooner or later, stories that once sparked shock and outrage would induce yawns. Nothing is more stale than yesterday’s newspaper. Peter Desbarais, former dean of journalism at the University of Western Ontario, told Maclean’s, “I tend to resist articles announcing some new environmental threat. I feel that I’ve heard it all before.” He’s right, although not in the way he meant it. Virtually all environmental problems can be traced to the same causative factors of rapidly growing human population, overconsumption, and excessive technological power. But whereas murders, wars, business failures, political crises, or sports finals are eventually resolved, the solutions to environmental problems are seldom simple and easy; they are complicated and require long-term attention. That doesn’t make for good press.

The stories that do emerge often question the credibility of the environmental issues themselves. A spate of books, articles, and television programs have disputed the reality of the claimed hazards of global warming, overpopulation, deforestation, ozone depletion, and so on. Other stories are built around ever more frightening possibilities.

An article in the Atlantic Monthly by Robert D. Kaplan has galvanized both fear and denial. Entitled “The Coming Anarchy,” the report paints a horrifying picture of the future for humanity. Kaplan suggests that the terrible consequences of the conjunction between exploding human population and surrounding environmental degradation are already visible in Africa and Southeast Asia. As society is destabilized by an epidemic of AIDS, government control evaporates, national borders crumble beneath the pressure of environmental refugees, and local populations revert to tribalism to settle old scores or defend themselves against fleeing masses and marauding bands of stateless nomads.

Kaplan believes that as ecosystems collapse, this scenario could sweep the planet, first in the Eastern bloc countries and then the industrialized nations. It is a frightening scenario built on a serious attempt to project the aftermath of ecological destruction. And it has generated a great deal of discussion and controversy.

Marcus Gee pronounces Kaplan’s vision “dead wrong” in a major article in the Globe and Mail headlined “Apocalypse Deferred.” Assailing “doomsayers” from Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, Gee counters with the statistics favored by believers in the limitless benefits and potential of economic growth. Citing the spectacular improvement in human health, levels of education and literacy, availability of food, and length of life even in the developing world, Gee pronounces the fivefold increase in the world economy since 1950 to be the cause of this good news. He does concede that “immense problems remain, from ethnic nationalism to tropical deforestation to malnutrition to cropland loss,” but concludes that Kaplan has exaggerated many of the crises and thus missed the “broad pattern of progress.”

Are these two reporters on the same planet? How could they come to such different conclusions? And what is the reader to conclude?

Kaplan believes what he saw in Africa and Southeast Asia was the beginning of a global pattern of disintegration of social, political, and economic infrastructures under the impact of ecological degradation, population pressure, and disease.

In contrast, Gee focuses on statistics of the decline in child mortality and the rise in longevity, food production, and adult literacy in the developing countries to reach a very different conclusion—things have never been better! Economic indicators, such as a rise in gross world product and total exports, indicate, he says, “remarkable sustained and dramatic progress … life for the majority of the world’s citizens is getting steadily better in almost every category.”

Kaplan’s frightening picture is built on a recognition that the planet is finite and that degradation of ecosystems by the demands of population and consumption has vast social, political, and economic ramifications. Gee’s conclusions rest heavily on economic indicators. He points out the annual 3.9 percent rise in the global economy and the more than doubling of the gross output per person over the past thirty years. World trade has grown by 6 percent annually between 1960 and 1990, as tariffs have declined from 40 percent of a product’s price in 1947 to 5 percent today. Yet all this time, the gulf between rich and poor countries has increased.

Gee skips lightly over such facts as Third World debt and the death of 22,000 children a day of easily preventable diseases. He admits the real threats of loss of topsoil, pollution of the air, loss of forests, and contamination of water, but he concludes there is little evidence that they are serious enough to halt or even reverse human progress. He even suggests the preposterous notion that global warming and ozone depletion “may cancel each other out.”

Gee’s outlook rests on a tiny minority of scientists who have faith in the boundless potential of science and technology to transcend the physical constraints of air, water, and soil so that a much larger population can be sustained. His final proof ? The concomitant rise in living standards and population. But the relationship between changes in living standard and population growth is a correlation, not proof of a causal connection.

Gee quotes the “American scholar” Mark Perlman: “The growth in numbers over the millennia from a few thousands or millions of humans living at low subsistence, to billions living well above subsistence, is a most positive assurance that the problem of sustenance has eased rather than grown more difficult over the years.” Even the World Bank, which is not known for its sensitivity to ecosystems or local cultures, is quoted as stating “the food crisis of the early seventies will be the last in history.”

Gee relies heavily on Julian Simon, once an economic adviser to Ronald Reagan. Simon’s position was revealed when I once interviewed him and asked him about the population crisis. He retorted: “What crisis?” and went on to say that there have never been as many people so well off and that there will never be a limit to population, because more people means more Einsteins to keep making life better. But neither Simon nor Perlman is a scientist.

If we inherit a bank account with a thousand dollars that earns 5 percent interest annually, we could withdraw fifty dollars or less each year forever. Suppose, however, we start to increase our withdrawals, say, up to sixty dollars, then seventy dollars, and more each year. For many years, the account would yield cash. But it would be foolish to conclude that we could keep drawing more from the account indefinitely. Yet that is what the Gees, Simons, and Perlmans believe. As the Atlantic groundfishery shows, we are using up the ecological capital of the planet (biodiversity, air, water, soil) rather than living off the interest. It is a dangerous deception to believe that the human-created artifice called economics can keep the indicators rising as the life-support systems of the planet continue to decline.

The value system that pervades most of the popular media not only perpetuates the delusion that resources and the economy are infinitely expandable, but also creates blinders that filter out the urgency and credibility of warnings that an environmental crisis confronts us