Scientific American
The Climax of Humanity
By George Musser
[Demographically and
economically, our era is unique in human history. Depending on how we
manage the next few decades, we could usher in environmental
sustainability--or collapse]
The 21st century feels like a letdown. We were promised flying cars,
space colonies and 15-hour workweeks. Robots were supposed to do our
chores, except when they were organizing rebellions; children were
supposed to learn about disease from history books; portable fusion
reactors were supposed to be on sale at the Home Depot. Even dystopian
visions of the future predicted leaps of technology and social
organization that leave our era in the dust.
Looking beyond the blinking lights and whirring gizmos, though, the new
century is shaping up as one of the most amazing periods in human
history. Three great transitions set in motion by the Industrial
Revolution are reaching their culmination. After several centuries of
faster-than-exponential growth, the world's population is stabilizing.
Judging from current trends, it will plateau at around nine billion
people toward the middle of this century. Meanwhile extreme poverty is
receding both as a percentage of population and in absolute numbers. If
China and India continue to follow in the economic footsteps of Japan
and South Korea, by 2050 the average Chinese will be as rich as the
average Swiss is today; the average Indian, as rich as today's Israeli.
As humanity grows in size and wealth, however, it increasingly presses
against the limits of the planet. Already we pump out carbon dioxide
three times as fast as the oceans and land can absorb it; midcentury is
when climatologists think global warming will really begin to bite. At
the rate things are going, the world's forests and fisheries will be
exhausted even sooner.
These three concurrent, intertwined transitions--demographic, economic,
environmental--are what historians of the future will remember when
they look back on our age. They are transforming everything from
geopolitics to the structure of families. And they pose problems on a
scale that humans have little experience with. As Harvard University
biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, we are about to pass through "the
bottleneck," a period of maximum stress on natural resources and human
ingenuity.
The trends are evident in everyday life. Many of us have had the
experience of getting lost in our hometowns because they have grown so
much. But growth is slowing as families shrink. Ever more children grow
up not just without siblings but also without aunts, uncles or cousins.
(Some people find that sad, but the only other way to have a stable
population is for death rates to rise.) Chinese goods line Wal-Mart
shelves, Indians handle customer-service calls, and, in turn, ever more
Asians buy Western products. Spring flowers bloom a week earlier than
they did 50 years ago because of global warming, and restaurants serve
different types of fish than they used to because species that were
once common have been fished out.
Looking at the present era in historical context helps to put the
world's myriad problems in perspective. Many of those problems stem,
directly or indirectly, from growth. As growth tapers off, humanity
will have a chance to close the books on them. A bottleneck may be
tough to squeeze through, but once you do, the worst is behind you.
The transitions we are undergoing define the scope of the challenges.
Scientists can estimate, at least roughly, how many people will inhabit
Earth, what they are going to need and want, what resources are
available, and when it is all going to happen. By the latter half of
this century, humanity could enter an equilibrium in which economic
growth, currently driven by the combination of more productivity, more
people and more resources, will flow entirely from productivity--which
would take much of the edge off conflicts between the economy and the
environment. Old challenges will give way to new ones. This process is
already evident in countries at the leading edge of the transitions.
The Social Security debate in the U.S., like worries about pensions in
Europe and Japan, is the sound of a society planning for life after
growth.
In the public's eyes, demographers have a checkered reputation. Thirty
years ago, wasn't overpopulation the big concern? Paul Ehrlich's book
The Population Bomb was a best seller. The film Soylent Green, starring
Charlton Heston, dramatized a future in which people would be stacked
like cordwood and fed little squares that looked like tofu but weren't.
Lately, though, underpopulation has become the cause célèbre, heralded
by neoconservatives such as Nicholas Eberstadt. Their concern is
epitomized by another Heston movie: The Omega Man, in which humanity
dwindles to nothingness. So which will it be: Too many people or too
few?
Mainstream demographers have not swung back and forth nearly as much as
these extreme depictions might suggest. Families in the developing
world have shrunk faster than expected, but the forecasts described in
Scientific American's 1974 special issue on population have largely
stood the test of time. In fact, the Soylent Green and Omega Man
scenarios each contain an element of truth. Humanity is still growing
enormously in absolute terms, and past success at avoiding Malthusian
nightmares is no guarantee of future performance. The decline in growth
rates is a worry, though. Historically, most stable or shrinking
societies have been down at heel.
Partisans of one scenario shrug off the challenges of the other,
expressing "confidence" that they can be handled without actually doing
much to ensure that they are. Once you blow away the fog of ideology,
the outlines of a comprehensive action plan begin to emerge. It is
hardly the only way forward, but it can serve as a starting point for
discussion.
A recurring theme of this plan is that business is not necessarily the
enemy of nature, or vice versa. Traditionally the economy and
environment have not even been described in like terms. The
most-watched economic statistics, such as gross domestic product (GDP),
do not measure resource depletion; they are essentially measures of
cash flow rather than balance sheets of assets and liabilities. If you
clear-cut a forest, GDP jumps even though you have wiped out an asset
that could have brought in a steady stream of income.
More broadly, the prices we pay for goods and services seldom include
the associated environmental costs. Someone else picks up the tab--and
that someone is usually us, in another guise. By one estimate, the
average American taxpayer forks out $2,000 a year to subsidize farming,
driving, mining and other activities with a heavy environmental
footprint. The distorted market gives consumers and producers little
incentive to clean up. Environmentalists inadvertently reinforce this
tendency when they focus on the priceless attractions of nature, which
are deeply meaningful but difficult to weigh against more pressing
concerns. The Endangered Species Act has provided iconic examples of
advocates talking past one another. Greens blamed the plight of spotted
owls on loggers; the loggers blamed unemployment on self-indulgent
ornithology. In fact, both were victims of unsustainable forestry.
In recent years, economists and environmental scientists have come
together to hang a price tag on nature's benefits. Far from demeaning
nature, this exercise reveals how much we depend on it. The Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment, published earlier this year, identified
services--from pollination to water filtration--that humans would have
to provide for themselves, at great cost, if nature did not. Of the 24
broad categories of services, the team found that 15 are being used
faster than they regenerate.
When the environment is properly accounted for, what is good for nature
is often what is good for the economy and even for individual business
sectors. Fishers, for example, maximize their profits when they harvest
fisheries at a sustainable level; beyond that point, both yields and
profits decline as more people chase ever fewer fish. To be sure, life
is not always so convenient. Society must sometimes make real
trade-offs. But it is only beginning to explore the win-win options.
If decision makers can get the framework right, the future of humanity
will be secured by thousands of mundane decisions: how many babies
people have, where they graze their cattle, how they insulate their
houses. It is usually in mundane matters that the most profound
advances are made. What makes a community rich is not the computers and
the DVDs, which you can find nowadays even in humble villages. It is
the sewage pipes, the soft beds, the sense of physical and economic
security. By helping to bring these benefits of modernity to all,
science and technology will have done something more spectacular than
building space colonies.
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