Wednesday August 24, 2005

The Climax of Humanity

sciam.com :

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 ...

After several centuries of faster-than-exponential growth, the world's population is stabilizing. As humanity grows in size and wealth, however, it increasingly presses against the limits of the planet.

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.

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.

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.

Once you blow away the fog of ideology, the outlines of a comprehensive action plan begin to emerge. 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 ...

In recent years, economists and environmental scientists have come together to hang a price tag on nature's benefits ... society must sometimes make real trade-offs. But it is only beginning to explore the win-win options ...

(2005-08-24 23:21:58 SGT) [Env] Permalink

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