"THE GLOBE IN 2100"
Philip Shabecoff Address to the
Society of Environmental Journalists
CONFERENCE - MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITYOCTOBER 21, 2000
The conference organizers asked me to speak about the globe in the year 2100 because they know about my uncanny ability to see into the future with absolute precision. Unfortunately, however, when I looked into my crystal ball to prepare for this panel, I saw an almost infinite number of possible scenarios.
Let us then consider two possible scenarios out of that infinity—not necessarily the best and worst but low end and high end possibilities.
The first scenario is that old reliable standby, business as usual. this means we keep to the comfortable but unsustainable path we are on—a path based on unchecked linear growth based on enormously powerful technologies.
We continue to try to curb but not eliminate pollution and other unwanted side-effects of our high-tech but still fossil fuel-fueled economy. More public land may be protected, but private land--forests, farms, wetlands, desert—will continue to be eaten up for tract housing, malls, second homes, dispersed industry, highways and other development. eventually, as needs mount, the pressure to develop public lands will prove irresistable. industrial agriculture, intensifying production to feed the growing number of human mouths, will increasingly deplete non-renewable water supplies. Food supplies will be increased by genetic engineering, but inadequate safeguards will cause unforeseen perhaps devastating side effects. toxics, endocrine disrupters, and other synthetic substances will continue to alter the structure of all biological life. geometrically increasing consumption, led by increased affluence in the developing nations will for the first part of the century, put intense, unsustainable pressure on natural resources—forests, some fossil fuels and minerals, arable land, fisheries. by the second part of the century, many of these resources. will, for all practical purposes, be exhausted.
Meanwhile, slavish adherence to the cult of unrestrained market capitalism—the invisible hand without a head—to make decisions about life support systems, will lead us deeper into the dark tunnel. An unreformed electoral system will mean political decisions affecting the environment are increasingly controlled by corporations and other special interests that dominate the system with money. A frustrated, dispirited electorate will cede the political field to the corporate oligarchy. Geopolitics will also be dominated by a handful of mega corporations that are increasingly beyond the reach of national governments to regulate their activities. The dream of effective global governance, and the ability to safeguard global life support systems, fades as the united nations is undermined to the point of complete futility by natiions such as the united states. Instead of a closer world community, many parts of the world will revert to tribalism or anarchy.
These trends will not necessarily lead to ecological catastrophe. humans are surprisingly resilient and inventive. we will probably muddle through. but if the scenario I have outlined is acted, but, the world in 2100 will not be a very pleasant or easy place for our great-grandchildren to live in. they will inhabit a hotter, drier, poorer, hungrier, diseased and biologically impoverished world. open space, trees, wildlife--except for rats, cockroaches and mousquitoes--will be scarce, and the availability of water and possibly even oxygen will be more limited than today. The harshness of life will put insupportable stresses on social and political institutions. democratic institutions could decay and individual liberties eroded to the vanishing point. Societies and individuals would compete not for riches but for the basics of survival. Such a world would be riddled with crime, drugs, mental as well as physical illness, overwhelmed by mass migrations of desperate peoples and policed by private armies hired by the few rich to protect themselves.
Those living in such a world would look back to the year 2000 as a golden age.
Such a future is far from inevitable. We already know what we have to do to avoid it. Indeed, libraries are overflowing with guides to a saner, sustainable course over the next century. my second scenario simply accepts the more or less obvious steps that we need to take, and already have the ability to take, if we humans were only wise enough and could muster sufficient will to do so.
We will stabilize population in order to flatten the downward curve of per capita supplies of potable
Water, arable land, and other commodities such as fish. we will shift our economy from on endlessly rising one way road of production and consumption to an economy of permanence that values quality, comfort, health and aesthetics more than it does disposable things. In so doing we will end our assault on the earth’s life support system with our wastes and pollution, poisons and radiation. We will do so by being far more careful than we are today about what products of science and technology we deploy and how we deploy them. We will end the era of fossil fuels that powered the industrial revolution and instead find all the energy we need from renewable sources, or alternatives such as hydrogen and from the enormous efficiency new machines and processes such as nanotechnolgy will afford us. we will not reject genetic technologies and biological engineering out of hand because they may provide enormous benefits to us and our posterity, but we will make sure that that they are not dispersed in the biosphere without exhaustive testing for safety and long term effects, and then only with rigid safeguards. we will learn to husband the earth’s genetic legacy carefully, so that we do irremediably alter the course of evolution. We will finally learn to cherish and safeguard the natural world rather than regarding it as an enemy to be conquered or simply a commodity to be exploited.
To enact that scenario we will need a new politics, a new geopolitics, a new economic model, new technologies and new ethics. It will require far more equity in the distribution of the world’s resources and wealth and far more democracy in the process of deciding how those resources are used. what I have described is an extremely tall order, I grant you, but not out of the realm of the possible, especially given our growing knowledge of how humans interact with the world and our ability to communicate that knowledge.
If something approaching this scenario takes place, our great grandchildren will live in a relatively clean, healthy world, with just about enough of everything to go around. It will be somewhat hotter, of course. climate change has probably progressed to the point where it will take more than a century to reverse. they will have to be more thrifty with water and other resources. their caloric intake may be a bit lower but they probably will have more salubrious diets. Cancer and heart disease rates will be way down. life spans will be substantially longer. Cities will be surrounded by green belts and open space and wildlife will be high societal values. Possibly small farms will proliferate to serve urban areas. global trade will flourish but it will not trump environmental values, the welfare of workers or other social goals. automation an robotics will ease reduce their labor to the point that leisure and recreation are prime social values.
The rich no doubt will still be around and will be able to command a more than their share of what the earth and human labor produce. Probably genetically engineering be bought to clone replicas of our billionaires and in the year 2100 their will be hundreds of copies of Bill Gates, Steve Forbes and Ross Perots offspring strutting their lengthy hour upon the stage. But perhaps abject poverty will also be a global rarity.
And if, by some miracle, the population tide is reversed and brought down, say, to what it was when I was born, around 2 billion, it can truly be a golden age—a world of plenty with every human sharing fully in its bounty.
Looking at the world as it is today, my first scenario seems much more realistic than the second. but as Rene Dubos noted, trend is not destiny. The world of 2000 is very different than the world of 1900—and the world of 2100 may be still more altered, conceivably for the better.