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In a series of six interconnected short essays, the editors of The Economist present an up-to-date summary of global environmental issues, including sustainable development, the amount of information available on the environment, climate change, and the role of both technology and market forces in helping to shape the future of environmental systems.
The process of globalization has produced increasing modernization among both contemporary and modern cultures. Will human adaptability be enough to offset the massive culture changes that accompany such meta-trends as development of a global economy and society?
Globalization, which was supposed to be such a good thing, has become a polarizing issue for policy analysts, environmental activists, economists, and others. The idea of removing barriers to the movement of goods and services has meant an increasing impact on environmental systems through the alteration of economic systems.
According to a National Academy of Sciences report, around 1980 the collective demands of humans upon Earth’s resource base exceeded the regenerative capacity of global environmental systems. In economic terms this has produced a “bubble” economy that will keep expanding until it bursts—or until humans decide to stabilize population growth and climate and eliminate both environmental change and human poverty.
A general consensus exists among scientists that the roots of the current environmental crisis are to be found in a combination of population growth, affluence, and increasing technology. No such consensus exists, however, about the ultimate cause of either population growth or the desire to consume. Notwithstanding this lack of agreement, society needs to sublimate the desire to acquire things for the good of the global commons.
Most people think of national security in terms of protecting a country against another World Trade Center disaster and think of the answers to such events in military terms. But there are many security dangers that do not involve rogue states or terrorists. There is an important area where environmental conditions and security issues coincide. Is it more important to preempt al Qaeda or global warming?
The spread of factory farming—the intensive raising of livestock and poultry in enclosed conditions—has allowed meat to become a more important part of diets worldwide. It has also reduced local diversity of breeds and increased the dangers from animal diseases. As more developed countries place stricter environmental regulations on factory farming, this industrialized agriculture spreads to developing countries with weaker or no legislation.
Much of the past history of conflict in the North African/Southwest Asian culture realm has been based in religion, ideology, and territory. Future conflict in this area is more likely to be based in environmental scarcity such as too little oil and not enough water to support the population growth that is far outpacing economic growth.
Modern climate change is certainly producing problems for the world’s farmers: changing weather is bringing the potato blight to areas of the high Andes and Kansas wheat farmers operate in an uncertain environment where rains come at the wrong time. The threat of global warming could even change the character of the monsoons, altering agriculture in the world’s most populous area—South Asia.
Late in the 20th century, the population growth finally outstripped the increase in food production. Earth’s farmers have used up just about all the available arable land and have increasingly limited access to fresh water. As the world population continues to grow—even if it grows more slowly—more people will have to share less land, food, and water.
In the vast open spaces of the American West, energy development in the form of natural gas extraction competes with livestock raisers for the same land. Much of the problem lies in the curious nature of mineral rights in which the owners of the minerals under the land are often different from the owners of the land itself—and mineral rights nearly always take precedence over surface rights.
Several facts about energy consumption need to be recognized: any use of energy is going to have some negative environmental impacts, current reliance on fossil fuels cannot continue, most alternative energy systems (such as wind or solar power) are still inefficient enough to be very expensive. The solution that many energy experts are seeking is a scaling down of energy production and control—from huge power plants to those that power small areas such as cities or neighborhoods
Wind power is one of the oldest energy sources, used by power mills and water pumps for thousands of years. It is now one of the most promising of the alternative energy strategies. But in spite of its environmental attributes, wind power meets with considerable local resistance because of aesthetics, noise, and potential damage to bird populations. The proper strategy is to develop wind power in sites where it meets the least resistance.
Everyone from the President of the United States to the hopeful consumer has jumped on the hydrogen energy bandwagon. This will be the energy of the future: cheap, non-polluting, and infinite in supply. But many energy experts warn that, as an alternative to other sources, hydrogen is just “a better mousetrap” when it comes to solving energy shortages. More important, it is still a mousetrap that is a long ways away from being able to catch a mouse.
For hundreds of millennia, species emerged and stayed in relatively discrete geographical regions. With the expansion of worldwide transportation systems and goods of all kinds being moved about the world, many species have gained the capacity for movement. These invasive alien species are contributing factors in approximately 30 percent of all the extinctions of plants and animals since 1600.
The traditional approach to the protection of biodiversity has been government action and financing. As both money and action has been diverted to other purposes, those concerned with conservation of biodiversity have turned increasingly to market oriented funding sources. Private funding sources often recognize the economic benefits of preserving biodiversity more quickly than do governments.
Nearly 40% of the African continent is dryland with rainfall insufficient for intensive agriculture. In some African dryland areas desertification, or the conversion of formerly productive land to desert through overuse, has occurred. Yet, experiments in Nigeria and elsewhere have shown that careful ecosystem management can overcome environmental obstacles.
In the drought-stricken American West, a new round of water wars has erupted, with farmers, fishermen, ranchers, and urban dwellers all contesting for an increasingly scarce water resource. The first major river system to become a casualty in the conflict for water is the Klamath River of northern California and southern Oregon where federally mandated irrigation rights produced enough water withdrawal to cause a massive salmon dieback.
When the value of a clean water resource is calculated in monetary terms, it becomes increasingly clear that conservation methods make both economic and ecologic sense. The tricky part is manipulating the economic system that drives our behavior so that it makes sense to invest in and protect natural assets—like clean water.
More than half of all the world’s freshwater resources are now consumed by humans and their agricultural and industrial systems. As a consequence of increasing uses of water for irrigation, we are now seeing not just humans competing with humans—but farmers against factories—for water. What is now emerging in some areas of the world is interspecies competition for a dwindling resource.
The environmental dangers of many agricultural pesticides and other chemicals have been recognized in the United States and other industrialized countries for decades. But the tradeoffs between increased agricultural production and the use of these chemicals is a difficult one for developing countries where their use has increased rather than decreased.
The United States is far ahead of much of the world in cleaning up its surface water supplies, due to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Although water pollution problems persist in the United States, those problems are less severe than in most of the world’s less-developed countries. It has been estimated that nearly one-third of the world’s people suffer from diseases associated with polluted water.
Chemicals, whether natural or man-made, have a way of not only working their way into environmental systems but becoming concentrated in those systems as a result of the process of bioaccumulation. As materials such as perchlorate—a primary component of rocket fuels—escapes from military containment and enters groundwater systems, it often appears in dangerous concentration in vegetables that use that water.
A controversial new interpretation of climate history suggests that our ancestors who first developed agriculture may have prevented a new ice age by engaging in land use practices that led to global warming. If a handful of farmers with primitive technologies could alter global environments, what can modern fossil-fuel based technologies do?
By increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, human kind is engaging in an uncontrolled experiment. Once in the atmosphere, this greenhouse gas is difficult to remove. An experimental method of injecting CO2 into underground formations of sedimentary rock, however, might allow for carbon sequestration that would be sufficient to reduce the threat of global warming.
While the Arctic is often thought of as one of the world’s last pristine environments, in fact, it is one of the most polluted. Pollution of the northern high latitudes is the result of wind and water currents that carry toxic industrial wastes from cities and factories in Russia, Europe, and North America into the Arctic Ocean and, thence, into the food chain that feeds the people of the Far North.
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