STATE of the WORLD 1999 a Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society

Excerpted from ... STATE OF THE WORLD 1999 A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society PROJECT DIRECTOR CONTRIBUTING RESEARCHERS Lester R. Brown Janet N. Abramovitz ASSOCIATE PROJECT Lester R. Brown DIRECTORS Seth Dunn Christopher Flavin Christopher Flavin Hilary F. French Gary Gardner Ashley Tod Mattoon EDITOR Anne Platt McGinn Linda Starke Molly O’Meara Michael Renner David Malin Roodman Payal Sampat John Tuxill W . W . NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON Copyright © 1999 by Worldwatch Institute All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. The STATE OF THE WORLD and WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE trademarks are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Worldwatch Institute; of its directors, officers, or staff; or of its funders. The text of this book is composed in ITC New Baskerville, with the display set in Caslon. Composition by Worldwatch Institute; manufacturing by the Haddon Craftsmen, Inc. First Edition ISBN 0-393-04713-X ISBN 0-393-31815-X (pbk) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 http://www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A IPU 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 For more information about the Worldwatch Institute and other Worldwatch publications, please visit our website at www.worldwatch.org WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE 1 A New Economy for a New Century Lester R. Brown and Christopher Flavin In the 1890s, the American Press that many problems would be solved, and Association brought together the coun- that advancing technology and material try’s “best minds” to explore the shape of growth would produce a near Utopia. things to come in the twentieth century. Among the predictions that have held up Conditions at the time were in flux. well: widespread use of electricity and Technological advances had recently telephones, the opening of the entire made it possible to travel from coast to world to trade, and the emancipation of coast by rail, the first “skyscraper” had just women. Among the things they missed been built, and electricity was becoming were the birth control pill and the common in some urban neighborhoods. Internet. Other forecasts proved to be At the same time, the economy had naive, including the notion that people recently been hit by a depression, cities would live to be 150 and that air pollution were filling with growing numbers of poor would be eliminated. The dark sides of people, and supplies of wood and iron the twentieth century—two world wars, ore that had always seemed unlimited the development of chemical and nuclear were beginning to run short.1 weapons, the emergence of global threats As they looked forward to the century to the stability of the natural world, and a ahead, the country’s “futurists” were billion people struggling just to survive— almost universally optimistic, predicting were predicted by no one.2 Today, at the dawn of the next century, The 1996 United Nations biennial population faith in technology and human progress is projections are used in this edition since the 1998 almost as prevalent in the writings of lead- projections were published too late to be incorpo- ing economic commentators. Their easy rated. The 1998 projections are modestly lower, but not enough to alter the analysis. Units of measure optimism is bolstered by the extraordi- throughout this book are metric unless common nary achievements of the twentieth centu- usage dictates otherwise. ry, including developments such as jet (4) State of the World 1999 aircraft, personal computers, and genetic wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million engineering, that go well beyond any- years ago.3 thing predicted by the most imaginative As we look forward to the twenty-first futurists of the 1890s. But like their pre- century, it is clear that satisfying the pro- decessors, today’s futurists look ahead jected needs of an ever larger world pop- from a narrow perspective—one that ulation with the economy we now have is ignores some of the most important simply not possible. The western econom- trends now shaping our world. And in ic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automo- their fascination with the information age bile-centered, throwaway economy—that that is increasingly prominent in the glob- so dramatically raised living standards for al economy, many observers seem to have part of humanity during this century is in forgotten that our modern civilization, trouble. Indeed, the global economy can- like its forerunners, is totally dependent not expand indefinitely if the ecosystems on its ecological foundations. on which it depends continue to deterio- Since our emergence as a species, rate. We are entering a new century, then, human populations have continually run with an economy that cannot take us up against local environmental limits: the where we want to go. The challenge is to inability to find sufficient game, grow design and build a new one that can sus- enough food, or harvest enough wood tain human progress without destroying has led to sudden collapses in human its support systems—and that offers a bet- numbers and in some cases to the disap- ter life to all. pearance of entire civilizations. Although The shift to an environmentally sus- it may seem that advancing technology tainable economy may be as profound a and the emergence of an integrated transition as the Industrial Revolution world economy have ended this age-old that led to the current dilemma was. How pattern, they may have simply transferred successful we will be remains to be seen. the problem to the global level. Yet we have always stood out from other The challenge facing us at the dawn of species in our ability to adapt to new envi- a new century begins with scale. Human ronmental conditions and challenges. numbers are four times the level of a cen- The next test is now under way. tury ago, and the world economy is 17 times as large. This growth has allowed advances in living standards that our ancestors could not have imagined, but it HE CCELERATION OF has also undermined natural systems in T A ways they could not have feared. Oceanic HISTORY fisheries, for example, are being pushed to their limits and beyond, water tables Although the specific turning point that are falling on every continent, rangelands will be observed on January 1, 2000, is a are deteriorating from overgrazing, many purely human creation, flowing from the remaining tropical forests are on the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in verge of being wiped out, and carbon 45 B.C., the three zeros that will appear on dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the that day are powerful reminders of the atmosphere have reached the highest passage of time—and of how the pace of level in 160,000 years. If these trends con- change has accelerated since the last such tinue, they could make the turning of the turning point, in the Middle Ages. millennium seem trivial as a historic Today’s rapid changes tend to make us moment, for they may be triggering the think of a century, not to mention a mil- largest extinction of life since a meteorite lennium, as a vast span of time. But the A New Economy for a New Century (5) sweeping developments in the past centu- of the Industrial Revolution in the eigh- ry have all occurred in a period that rep- teenth century, as manufacturing grew, resents just 1 percent of the time since cities expanded, and trade increased. By humans first practiced agriculture.4 1825, our population reached the 1 bil- In a sense, the acceleration of human lion mark for the first time. Even then, history began long before the first history however, changes in communications, book was ever written. Scientists note that transportation, agriculture, and medicine the development of technology suddenly were so slow as to be scarcely perceptible sped up some 40,000 years ago, marked by within a given generation. In the early the proliferation of ever-more sophisticat- nineteenth century, most people lived on ed tools used for hunting, cooking, and farms, and travel was not much different other essential tasks. With these tools, our than it had been 1,000 years earlier, limit- ancestors grew in number to roughly 4 ed to the speed of a horse: the trip from million, and spread out from their bases in New York to Boston, for example, took six Africa and Asia, gradually populating vir- days. That this situation could change, tually the entire Earth—from the humid and change profoundly, was to most peo- tropics to arid plains and frozen tundra.5 ple unimaginable.7 The second burst of accelerating One hundred years later, the accelerat- change began roughly 10,000 years ago ing pace of change can be seen in virtual- with the development of settled agricul- ly every field of human activity. The ture, first in the “Fertile Crescent” near technological advances of this century, the eastern Mediterranean, and soon building on the scientific progress of ear- thereafter in China and Central America. lier ones, can only be described as spec- Although the early development of agri- tacular. Advances in mathematics, physics, culture appears to have been spurred by and engineering have enabled us to growing populations and shortages of eas- explore other planets in our solar system ily gathered food, the Agricultural and to visit Earth’s moon. Astronauts rou- Revolution soon transformed society, tinely orbit the Earth in 90 minutes and leading to more sophisticated tools and can see it as never before.

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