Creating a Sustainable Future: Are We Running out of Time?

James Gustave Speth

After hearing hours of scientific testimony on the Clean Air Act, Senator Ed Muskie once asked with frustration, "Aren't there any one-armed scientists?" The panel looked perplexed. Muskie continued, "We've had too much of 'on the one hand, on the other hand!' "

I'm afraid my assessment of the environmental challenges and opportunities ahead will have a little of that two-armed flavor. I want to begin by reviewing several disturbing trends and conclude on a hopeful note, reviewing some recent developments that are indeed very encouraging.

Disturbing Trends

The gravity of emerging global-scale environmental problems was communicated clearly to policymakers in the Global 2000 Report to the president at the end of the Carter administration. Other reports—from the United Nations Environment Programme, the Worldwatch Institute, the National Academy of Sciences, and elsewhere—were saying much the same around this time. Global 2000 got some things wrong, but on the big issues like population growth, species extinction, deforestation, desertification, and global warming its projections of what would happen if societies did not take corrective action have turned out to be all too accurate.

In other words, our political leaders were on notice twenty years ago that there was a new environmental agenda, more global, more threatening, and more difficult than the one that spurred the environmental awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, our information on global environmental trends is far more complete and sophisticated, but it is not more reassuring. Here are a few examples:

• Half the tropical forests are gone, and non–Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) countries are projected to lose another 15 percent of their forests by 2020. But this data gives an unduly rosy picture. The cumulative impacts of fire, El Niño–driven drought, and fragmentation in major forest areas such Brazil and Borneo exacerbate the effects of deforestation. And much of what's left is under contract for logging.

• A quarter of all bird species are extinct, and another 12 percent are listed as threatened. Also threatened are 24 percent of mammals, 25 percent of reptiles and amphibians, and 30 percent of fish species. The rate of extinctions today is estimated at one hundred to one thousand times the background rate.

• We are now appropriating about 40 percent of nature's net photosynthetic product annually. We are consuming half the available fresh water. Most people will soon live in water-stressed areas. We are fixing nitrogen at rates that far exceed natural rates and among the many consequences of the resulting overfertilization are fifty dead zones in the oceans, including one in the Gulf of Mexico that is the size of New Jersey.

• In 1960, 5 percent of marine fisheries were either fished to capacity or overfished. Today 70 percent of marine fisheries are in this condition.

• Hardest hit of all are freshwater ecosystems around the globe.

• Over these chilling descriptions of biotic impoverishment looms the biggest threat of all—global climate change. Few Americans appreciate how close we are to the widespread devastation of the American landscape. The best current estimate is that climate change will make it impossible for about half the American land to sustain the types of plants and animals now on that land. A huge portion of our protected areas—everything from wooded lands held by community conservancies, to national parks, forests, and wilderness—is now threatened. In one projection, the much-loved maple-beech-birch forests of New England will simply disappear. In another, much of the South-east will become a huge grassland savannah unable to support forests because it will be too hot and dry.

We know what is driving these global trends. There has been more population growth in the few decades since astronauts first walked on the moon than occurred across all the millennia before. It took all of history for the world economy to grow to $6 trillion in 1950. Today, it grows by more than that every five to ten years.

Looking ahead, the world economy is poised to double and then double again in the lifetimes of today's students. We could not stop this growth if we wanted to, and most of us would not stop it if we could. Half the world's people live on less than two dollars per day. They both need and deserve something better. Economic expansion at least offers the potential for better lives, though its benefits in recent decades have been highly skewed.

The OECD estimates that its members' CO2 emissions will go up by 33 percent between 1995 and 2020. Motor vehicle miles traveled in OECD countries are expected to rise by 40 percent by 2020. The U.S. Energy Information Agency predicts a 62 percent increase in global CO2 emissions over the same period.

The implications of all this are profound. Let me put it this way: we are entering the endgame in our relationship with the natural world. The current Nature Conservancy campaign has an appropriate name: they are seeking to protect the Last Great Places. We are in a rush to the finish. Soon, metaphorically speaking, whatever is not protected will be paved.

We dominate the planet today as never before. We have a tremendous impact on its great life support systems. Nature as something before and beyond us is gone. We are in a radically new moral position because we are at the planetary controls.

Looking back, it cannot be said that my generation did nothing in response to Global 2000 and similar alerts. The two basic things we've done are research and negotiate. The scientific outpouring of these twenty years has been remarkable and framework conventions have been established on climate, desertification, and biodiversity, to mention the most notable ones.

The problem is that these...