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TODAY Monday 30 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Monday 30 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Investing in Pessimism
Environmentalism is an indisputable downer. It's our job to spoil the party, to ask earnestly if there isn't more here than meets the eye. Sure, the economy is booming, we say, but underneath the smooth surface nature is being pillaged. Because environmentalism is concerned with losses, it's only reasonable that we'll be regarded as "negative," or as "pessimistic," even when people think we're right.
Of course you can argue the case the other way round. Environmentalists are "positive" types who actually think that people can discern disagreeable truths and take corrective actions. Environmentalism implies a stretched sense of time that cherishes a natural legacy and hopes to pass it on to future generations. That's a radically optimistic worldview. Dr. Bernard Lown, the longtime head of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, likes to say that "Optimism is an historical duty." It certainly is difficult to imagine being an environmentalist and thinking it's all futile (although it's also hard to be Irish and not want to put some money down on the side of disappointment).
Sometimes it seems necessary to scare the bejeezus out of people and foment a little hysteria. That was certainly the case with nuclear weapons -- we used to write truthful but appalling descriptions of how the remnants of organized medicine would try to cope with millions of burn victims -- and it may be the case with climate change. Floods, plagues, intractable heat waves; how else are we going to get people's attention? It may be said that sometimes we environmentalists seem to derive a little too much conspicuous enjoyment from bad news, and feel disappointingly empty if evidence emerges that an ecological problem may not be so bad as we feared.
As a corrective, there's good news aplenty in the lead story of the current (July) issue of Wired magazine. "THE LONG BOOM," it says on the cover, "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?"
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do, you bleeping little geeks, was my unfortunate first reaction. Not knowing what the authors --Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden -- actually said, I reflexively lined up against them because of a deep preconception that the role of a true environmentalist is to bum people out. Still, you have to be mildly aware in this world, so I took a breath and read the article.
Luckily, it was unpersuasive, and I could return to the snug lair of dark pessimism.
Schwartz and Leyden set out to write "a history of the future, 1980 - 2020," and they artfully describe how trends underway for more than a decade now -- in information technology, the global economy, biotechnology, and cultural tolerance -- can interact in such ways as to open a new era of spreading prosperity that need not trash the earth. They are careful to say that what they describe is a plausible "scenario," not a "prediction," and they even list ten things that could go very wrong (ecological disasters figure prominently).
What's unpersuasive is that they don't tell you enough about how openness and ingenuity and the information society are actually going to achieve the divorce between economic growth and environmental degradation, a marriage that flourishes today. They confine their hopes to two technical breakthroughs that if achieved, would indeed be major. The first is the conversion of the automobile to hydrogen fuel cell power systems, at first stimulated by government mandates, then induced by market demand. And the second is the development of agricultural biotechnology so that increases in population can be fed through existing farm operations, and with less need for pesticides and herbicides.
There is no question that those two changes would be of enormous consequence. You may not want a world of universal traffic jams and you may be queasy about the morality and side effects of genetic engineering -- the authors are clearly not into deep ecology -- but it can't be said that their techno-hopes are marginal. Transportation and agricultural are probably the two most environmentally important sectors of any economy.
What's missing, though, is a scenario that deals with the unsettling fact that thus far, at least, the advanced information societies are even more material-intensive than the industrial societies they've supplanted. As researchers in the US, Japan, and Europe have demonstrated ("A New Measure"), the link between the growth of Gross Domestic Product and the decline of nature is intimate. Whether it's from soil loss, or deforestation, or long-term toxicities, the realm of nature is being depleted in and by societies that were supposed to have moved on from "mere" materialism. Absent strong new recycling/reuse patterns in the material bases of consumerism -- dwellings, clothing, household objects, stuff in general -- advances in energy efficiency will be necessary but insufficient conditions for the green Utopia of the 21st Century. Two billion cars that don't pollute from their tailpipes are better, probably, than one billion cars that do. In the meantime, I' d like a rosy scenario on how the cars are going to be made and what will happen to them when they run down. Maybe Siberia can be set aside for the junkyards and the chop shops.
TODAY ON THE SITE
We want Schwartz and Leyden to be right about hydrogen power for cars; for information about Websites that can tell you how we might get from here to there, look into the High Fives on new automotive technologies put together by Jeff Zesiger and the incomparable Amory Lovins and his colleagues from the Rocky Mountain Institute. As for the troubling questions on materials and materialism, check out John Young.
Last week's "Today" columns:
6/27: Good Speech (Keep It Quiet)
6/26: Bleeping Joan of Arc
6/25: The World at 42nd Street
6/24: Il Faut Que Get a Grip
6/23: The Emily Dickinson Parking Garage
To access "Today" columns from previous weeks, click "Archives" below.