A Future at Risk?

Following the Second World War an unprecedented explosion of human populations, of powerful new technologies, and of advances in the sciences combined to impact the human condition and the environment in highly visible and often disturbing ways. Change has been accelerating faster than has understanding of its ramifications and consequences. Although there have been great advances in quality of life possibilities, perceptive persons have sought to alert society to the accompanying consequences of unbalanced and unsustainable growth and development. For example, in 1970 Alvin Toffler introduced the concept of Future Shock-disorientation due to an inability to readily adjust to radical environmental change. Earlier, in 1960, Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society warned of societal entrapment through technological ingenuity; and in 1974 Robert Heilbroner in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect asked, "Is there hope for man?" Is it possible "to meet the challenges of the future without the payment of a fearful price; the answer must be: no, there is no such hope."³ These writers, among many more, have questioned the prospect of attaining a tolerable future if humanity continues on its present course.

As awareness of environmental deterioration has grown, explanations and remedies have been sought. Were these events inadvertent and superficial or were there underlying common causes? The conventional popular assessment, (publicized by the news media) has been to regard the environmental problem as a temporary crisis-largely of pollution caused by mismanagement or neglect, and correctable by a few new laws and better engineering. In a more comprehensive science-based perspective the environmental problem is now seen as systemic-multi-dimensional and inherent in socioeconomic trends which, uncorrected, could lead to destructive consequences neither preventable nor remedial by technical or legal means alone. Avoidance would require major social changes-including a reorientation of popular expectations, a redirection of many public policies, and a reformation of institutions impacting adversely upon the environment.

By the 1970s it was becoming clear to all who understood the evidence that the so-called environmental crisis was a visible manifestation of a much deeper and broader problem involving nearly every facet of modern life. Unfortunately, too few people have understood the evidence, or have grasped the true scope and significance of the environment. The systemic explanation of the causes of environmental deterioration and disaster is radical in a fundamental sense-i.e., reaching for root causes. People commonly perceive their "environment" as the total of numerous separate interrelationships that have no apparent connections. In fact, these interactive relationships are ultimately, even though remotely, connected. Although humans consciously interact with the total environment only in relation to particular aspects or elements, survival as a species may depend upon their understanding that those interactions occur within the infinitely greater and more complex systemic reality. Science is progressively enlarging our awareness of this greater environmental context. Its ubiquitous complexity explains the rationale for the aphorism that "you can never do just one thing."

Meanwhile, advocates of environmental concern indiscriminately have been labeled "environmentalists" in the news media, suggestive of a special interest not necessarily shared by the general public. Some self-styled "conservatives" see environmentalism as a threat to property rights, free enterprise, and personal freedom. Although there has been a polarization of political attitudes toward environmental legislation, not all "conservatives" are "anti-environmental," and some "liberals" see the environment as preempting funds and attention from their favored social programs. For people who understand the comprehensive scope of the environment and its interactive dynamics, the state of the environment and its reaction to human impacts, should be a continuing focus for public policy.⁴ To the environmentally comprehending and concerned, the environment is an interest embracing all humanity and encompassing the living world.

That the world is at risk is hardly a new idea-it is as old as prophecy. Based largely on personal revelation, past prophecies were seldom fulfilled. Today, however, there are empirical, measurable means for identifying trends and projecting consequences. They are not regarded as prophecies, but rather as probabilities.

In 1992 the Union of Concerned Scientists published an open letter, World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, which was an informed perspective on the implications of human failure to respond rationally to the changing environmental situation. Over 1,600 signatories from leading scientific academies or associations in 70 countries, including 104 Nobel prize-winning scientists, declared that "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course." The warning continued:

Warnings to humanity are not new. As early as 1864, George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography Modified by Human Action offered reasons for reflective pause in the indiscriminate course of progress. Publications relating to human impact upon nature appeared with some frequency during the succeeding century. They attracted brief attention but had little immediate effect. Notable among them were Deserts on the March (1935) by Paul B. Sears; The Road to Survival (1948) by William Vogt; and Our Plundered Planet (1948) by Fairfield Osborn. Silent Spring (1963) by Rachel Carson, has been widely credited as a spark igniting environmental concern into a social movement, but her book may have inadvertently contributed to a popular impression that chemical contamination (i.e., "pollution") was the environmental problem. These books and others, in addition to numerous essays and conferences, recorded the environmental destructiveness of modern society and described its impoverishing consequences. Although widely reviewed, not until Silent Spring did the warnings receive serious attention.

Warnings of growing risks and threatening problems requiring attention continued. In 1969 in the magazine Science, John R. Platt, a biophysicist, projected an impending crisis of crises. "There is only one crisis-a crisis of transformation-it is now coming upon us as a storm of crisis proportions from every direction."⁶ In 1969 Paul R. Ehrlich in the Population Bomb, and in 1967 William and Paul Paddock in Famine, 1975, predicted catastrophe within a decade. Their chronology was off the mark-but not necessarily the trends basic to their predictions. At least they drew public attention to trends which people and politicians had hitherto largely ignored.

The foregoing publications represent a much larger volume of admonition and prediction which probably furthered the enactment of a large volume of environmental legislation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An error common to many of these warnings was the forecasting of an approximate date for apocalypse. The trends and consequences which they described were not invalidated by faulty timetables, but the failure of chronological prediction opened the way to discounting the warnings. In 1972, John R. Maddox, editor of the journal Nature, dismissed the apocalyptic literature in The Doomsday Syndrome. Nevertheless, an intimation of universal destruction continues to attract inquiry and conjecture. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, a 1,500-page three-volume collection of essays, has been edited recently by an international team of religious scholars.⁷

Since 1972 a "battle of the books" has been waged between "catastrophists" and "cornucopians."⁸ Assessments of risk have become cautious on timing but appreciation of the complexities, dynamics, and risks of interacting trends continues. In 1975 Lester R. Brown of the Worldwatch Institute wrote that "Accumulating evidence from around the world suggests that we may be on the verge of one of the great discontinuities in human history-economic, demographic and political."⁹ Also in 1971, I speculated that "the historical continuity of American society will be broken before the end of the (20th) Century."¹⁰ This discontinuity may be less apparent to people now living through it than it will be in historical retrospect. In 1998, Eugene Linden in The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability, drew upon the growing body of evidence indicating trouble ahead to form fictional scenarios of possible consequences of present trends. Also in 1998, Allen Hammond's Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century: Global Destinies-Regional Choices forecast the possibilities, prospects, and risks for a transformed world. Both books saw the present and near future as a time of choice which would determine the long-term future of humanity.

Although there is now wide recognition of self-imposed risks to humanity, there still remains disagreement on the seriousness of environmental risks and their importance in relation to other issues. Opinions differ over whether humanity is confronted by a number of discrete environmental problems which may be resolved by separate action directed to each of them-"growing pains," largely incidental to the mainstream of a growing economy-or whether these environmental risks and the damages incurred are manifestations of a fundamental change of state in the world reflecting a major "man-made" discontinuity in the history of mankind. Recourse to science cannot mediate these differences-its findings are more often probabilistic than conclusive. Science has not yet been able to predict with assurance the larger dynamics of the Earth's biogeochemical systems. Controversy over global climate change demonstrates our present forecasting predicament. Science identifies trends and projects probabilities. But it seldom offers unequivocal predictions.