A New Economy for a New Century

Humanist, May, 1999 by Lester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin

In the 1890s, the American Press Association brought together the country's "best minds" to explore the shape of things to come in the twentieth century. As they looked ahead, the country's "futurists" were almost universally optimistic. Among the predictions that have held up well are the widespread use of electricity and telephones, the opening of the entire world to trade, and the emancipation of women.

Other forecasts proved to be naive, including the notion that people would live to be 150 and that air pollution would be eliminated. The dark sides of the twentieth century--two world wars, the development of chemical and nuclear weapons, the emergence of global threats to the stability of the natural world, and a billion people struggling just to survive--were predicted by no one.

Today, as compared to a century ago, faith in technology and human progress is almost as prevalent in the writings of leading economic commentators. Their easy optimism is bolstered by the extraordinary achievements of the twentieth century--including developments such as jet aircraft, personal computers, and genetic engineering--that go well beyond anything predicted by the most imaginative futurists of the 1890s.

But like their predecessors, today's futurists look ahead from a narrow perspective--one that ignores some of the most important trends now shaping our world. And in their fascination with the Information Age, many observers seem to have forgotten that our modern civilization, like its forerunners, is totally dependent on its ecological foundations.

Overcoming Adversity

Since our emergence as a species, human populations have continually run up against local environmental limits: the inability to find sufficient game, grow enough food, or harvest enough wood has led to sudden collapses in human numbers and, in some cases, to the disappearance of entire civilizations. Although it may seem that advancing technology and the emergence of an integrated world economy have ended this age-old pattern, they may have simply transferred the problem to the global level.

Oceanic fisheries, for example, are being pushed to their limits and beyond, water tables are falling on every continent, rangelands are deteriorating from overgrazing, many remaining tropical forests are on the verge of being wiped out, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have reached the highest level in 160,000 years. If these trends continue, they could make the turning of the millennium seem trivial as a historic moment, for they may be triggering the largest extinction of life since a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

The Western economic model--the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy--that so dramatically raised living standards for part of humanity during this century is in trouble. If it were to become the global model, and if world population were to reach ten billion during the next century, as the United Nations projects, the effect would be startling.

If in 2050, for example, the world has one car for every two people, as in the United States today, there would be five billion cars. Given the congestion, pollution, and the fuel, material, and land requirements of the current global fleet of 501 million cars, a global fleet of five billion is difficult to imagine. If petroleum use per person were to reach the current U.S. level, the world would consume 360 million barrels per day, compared with current production of 67 million barrels.

Or consider a world of ten billion with everyone following an American diet, centered on the consumption of fat-rich livestock products. Ten billion people would require nine billion tons of grain, the harvest of more than four planets at Earth's current output levels. With massive irrigation-water cutbacks in prospect as aquifers are depleted, and with the dramatic slowdown in the rise in land productivity since 1990, achieving even relatively modest gains is becoming difficult.

An economy is environmentally sustainable only if it satisfies the principles of sustainability--principles that are rooted in the science of ecology. In a sustainable economy, the fish catch doesn't exceed the sustainable yield of fisheries, the amount of water pumped from underground aquifers doesn't exceed aquifer recharge, soil erosion doesn't exceed the natural rate of new soil formation, tree cutting doesn't exceed tree planting, and carbon emissions don't exceed the capacity of nature to fix atmospheric carbon dioxide. A sustainable economy doesn't destroy plant and animal species faster than new ones evolve.

We are entering a new century, then, with an economy that cannot take us where we want to go. The challenge is to design and build a new one that can sustain human progress without destroying its support systems--and that offers a better life to all. The shift to an environmentally sustainable economy may be as profound a transition as was the Industrial Revolution that led to the current dilemma.