Adversity Trends by Duane Elgin

3. Adversity Trends
No one can predict the future with certainty, but we can make educated guesses about how the major trends-population, resources, environment-will unfold in the decades ahead. There is, however, a spectrum of views regarding the meaning and impact of those trends. On the one hand, there are some who believe that, with engineering, biotechnology, and human ingenuity, we can solve the problems we face and realize an ever-improving future. On the other hand, there are others who who conclude from these same trends that humanity has already over-reached our relationship with life on our planet and that to secure a sustainable future for ourselves, we will need a change human culture and consciousness, as much as a change in technology.
The views of economist Stephen Moore, who writes about "The Coming Age of Abundance" in The True State of the Planet, are illustrative of the former perspective of technological optimism: "Every measurable trend of the past century suggests that humanity will soon be entering an age of increasing and unprecedented natural resource abundance." 13 Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that while "doomsayers" think there are too many people consuming too much for the planet to sustain, "cornucopians, in contrast, argue that humanity faces no real problems; technological and institutional advances have and will continue to make it possible to address any shortages." 14 Julian Simon, a professor of business, is another optimist. In The Ultimate Resource 2, he writes: "The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely." 15 The rationale for this optimism is that, historically, the opportunity for people to make a profit has spurred human ingenuity and problem-solving-and we end up better off. 16 It is easy to see how people could have this perspective. Over the last few decades various predictions of calamity have not materialized. As dates for eco-catastrophe and global famine come and go without dramatic disasters occurring, people's patience for these predictions wears thin.
When we consider the warnings from the world's senior scientists, however, it is easy to believe that we are reaching the limits of sustainability. In 1992, over 1,600 of the world's senior scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences signed an unprecedented "Warning to Humanity." In this historic statement, they declared that "human beings and the natural world are on a collision course . . . that may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know." They concluded with the following statement:

We, the undersigned senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated. 17 [emphasis added]

Is this a valid warning? Are we on a collision course with nature and perhaps our own human nature? To explore this important question, we shall look one generation into the future-the next 20 to 30 years. That will give us a rough idea of the kind of world that a child born today will likely inhabit as a young adult. There are dozens of trends that we could consider; to keep the inquiry manageable, we shall consider only five: climate change, population growth, species extinction, resource depletion, and global poverty.
Global Climate Change
It is no accident that, of the 10 warmest years on record, all have occurred in the last 15 years. In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the authoritative international body charged by the United Nations to study global climate change-reached the conclusion that "there is a discernible human influence on global climate." 18 They found that the primary cause for these climate changes is the increase in greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. The principal greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, which comes from burning gasoline, coal, and natural gas. The industrial revolution -- and its resulting pollution -- is thus altering the climate of our planet.
The several thousand scientists involved in the IPCC study have determined that we can expect at least a doubling of preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide by the middle of the next century. ." 19 Yet, there is growing scientific consensus that anything more than a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations poses an unacceptable risk. 20 Humanity is conducting a global experiment that could have catastrophic consequences. When the atmospheric carbon dioxide doubles, the impacts could include:

Widespread disruption and dislocation of agricultural growing regions
More rain in some areas, more drought in others
Stronger storms, more floods, stronger hurricanes
Stronger effects from El Niño
Heat waves that kill people, animals, and crops
Expansion of the Earth's deserts
Melting of the polar ice caps, with a rise in the sea level impacting coastal areas
Spread of infectious diseases that endanger human and animal health
Stress on the rest of the ecosystem (forests, wetlands, natural habitats)
Enormous financial burdens placed on individuals, communities, nations, insurance companies, and other public and private financial institutions.

The increase in greenhouse gases is affecting our climate in two distinct ways: it is causing both greater variability of the weather, and changes in average temperature. We are already experiencing greater variability in weather patterns. 21 This instability, which will most likely worsen, is particularly difficult on agriculture. Heavy rains in the spring can delay planting. An early frost in the fall can kill some crops and freeze others in the ground. A shift in rainfall patterns can make a major difference in the kind of crops that can be grown. Because an erratic and unstable climate jeopardizes the productivity of global agriculture, the melting of the global ice caps is not required for greenhouse gases to have a disastrous impact on the human family.
How could continued warming affect global agriculture? Here are just a few examples of the possible impact: Canada's climate could improve as a wheat-growing region, although its soils are not as productive as the prairie loam to the south that was built up over millions of years. ." 22 More frequent droughts in the American Midwest would make it difficult to maintain current levels of productivity in growing wheat and corn. Agricultural productivity will also likely fall in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and tropical Latin America-the regions where many of the world's poorest people live. Climate change could cause a dramatic restructuring of the regional and global economy.
In addition to causing greater variability in weather, the increase in greenhouse gases is also causing changes in average temperature. Research reveals that climate could change much faster than expected-so fast that even present generations could feel the dire impacts of global warming. Instead of gradual warming to which we could gradually adapt, climate could change abruptly. In an article titled "The Great Climate Flip-Flop," Professor William Calvin describes an unexpected result of rapid global warming-the potential for a dramatic cooling in Europe.

One of the most shocking scientific realizations of all time has slowly been dawning on us: the earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, and with breathtaking speed. We could go back to ice-age temperatures within a decade . . . triggered by our current global warming trend. Europe's climate could become more like Siberia's. Because such a cooling would occur too quickly to make readjustments in agricultural productivity and supply, it would be a potentially civilization-shattering affair, likely to cause an unprecedented population crash. . 23

Dramatic cooling could occur in Europe if the massive flow of warm water from the southern hemisphere to the north-the North Atlantic Current-were disrupted. Roughly the equivalent of a hundred Amazon Rivers, the North Atlantic Current is a conveyor belt of warm water that slowly flows from the equatorial region up to the north Atlantic, giving Europe an unusually warm and favorable climate. This flow of warm water "keeps northern Europe about nine to eighteen degrees warmer in the winter than comparable latitudes elsewhere." 24 Were it not for the North Atlantic Current, Europe would have the climate of Canada, and its now bountiful agriculture would be cut back to a fraction of current levels of production. "Whereas the familiar consequences of global warming will force expensive but gradual adjustments," Calvin explains "the abrupt cooling promoted by man-made warming looks like a particularly efficient means of committing mass suicide." 25
World Population Growth
Current trends in world population growth give reason for both optimism and concern. 26 There is cause for optimism because we seem to be moving in the direction of population stability. There is cause for concern because there remains considerable momentum in world population growth and stability is still many years away. Mid-range estimates are that population will grow for another 50 years before it peaks at around 10 billion-four billion more people than the number alive at the year 2000. (The predicted range in global population in 2050 is between 8 and 12 billion people, with 10 billion being in the mid-range. 27 )
Figure 2 shows world population growth in both developed and developing regions from 1750 (the beginnings of the industrial revolution), with projections to 2150.

Figure 2: Trends and Projections in World Population Growth: 1750-2150 (in billions of persons) Source: World Resources, 1996-97
Within the time-frame covered by this report (roughly until the end of the 2020s), middle-range estimates are that two to three billion people will be added to the Earth's population. 28 It is important to note that 95 percent of this growth is expected to occur in the poorest countries, which can least afford it, putting enormous pressures on natural resources and already overburdened cities. At the turn of the millennium, the world is half rural and half urban; it is estimated that by 2050, however, two-thirds of the world's population will be urban. The shift to a predominantly urban world will produce a radical change in humanity's cultural consciousness. According to U.N. estimates, by the year 2050, there will be 93 cities in the world with more than five million inhabitants each; 80 of them (86 percent) will be in developing countries. In the Third World, huge urban slums are emerging which lack paved roads, sewers, clean water, health care, fire and police protection, and space to grow food. With overcrowding and a lack of sanitation, epidemics of the past-like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid-are returning. If these U.N. estimates prove to be correct, we will see an enormous burgeoning of these places of misery, pollution, and disease.
Mass Extinction of Species
Perhaps the most direct measure of the health of our planet's biosphere is the status of its biological diversity. By this measure, the health of the planet is in jeopardy as industrial activity is a causing mass extinction of animal and plant species around the world. In 1998, a the American Museum of Natural History in New York commissioned a survey of 400 scientists; nearly 70 percent of the biologists polled said they believed that "mass extinction" is underway, and predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. 29 Nearly all of the loss of plant and animal species is attributable to human activity. Ellen Futter, president of the Museum of Natural History, commented that:

This survey is a dramatic wake-up call to individuals, governments, and institutions that we are facing a truly formidable threat not only to the health of the planet but also to humanity's own well-being and survival-a threat that is virtually unrecognized by the public at large. 30

Mass extinctions are progressively degrading the resilience and integrity of the biosphere. As plans and animals disappear, their absence can affect the entire ecosystem, particularly with regard to natural services such as pollination, seed dispersal, insect control, and nutrient cycling. 31 In addition, a larger pool of species insures that there will be more candidates to take the place of those species that cannot weather catastrophic droughts, freezes, pest invasions, and diseases. 32 Biodiversity is also important to health care; for example, roughly 25 percent of the drugs prescribed in the U.S. include chemical compounds from wild organisms. 33
Depletion of Natural Resources

We are depleting important renewable resources such as water faster than they can be replenished, and we are consuming precious non-renewable resources such as petroleum with little regard for future generations.
Sandra Postel, who does research on international water and sustainability issues, estimates that, by 2025, nearly 40 percent of the world's population will be living in countries whose water supplies are too limited for food self-sufficiency. 34 Among other reasons, supplies are short because ground water is being over-pumped and water is being redirected from agriculture to cities. Her study concludes that "water availability will be a serious constraint to achieving the food requirements projected for 2025." 35 Looking ahead even further, to the year 2050, former U.S. Senator Paul Simon has this to say about the consequences of depleting water resources:

It is no exaggeration to say that the conflict between humanity's growing thirst and the projected supply of usable, potable water could result in the most devastating natural disaster since history has been recorded accurately, unless something happens to stop it. 36

We are depleting cheap oil as well as water. The industrial era has fueled much of its growth on a one-time gift from nature: the fossil fuels that accumulated over millions of years. Petroleum has fueled not only our transportation, but also a revolution in agriculture with petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers. This extraordinary gift is running out much more quickly than most people realize.
In an article entitled "The End of Cheap Oil" in Scientific American, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, who have each worked in the oil industry for more than 40 years, predict that conventional oil production will begin to decline within a decade. 37 They write, "There is only so much crude oil in the world, and the industry has found about 90 percent of it." 38 They conclude that "barring a global recession, it seems most likely that world production of conventional oil will peak during the first decade of the 21st century. Perhaps surprisingly, that prediction does not shift much even if our estimates are a few hundred billion barrels high or low." 39 Even optimistic projections of remaining reserves suggest that conventional oil will top out by 2020. 40 While there are substitute forms of energy for a petroleum-based economy, it will take some time to make the transition and there is no concerted global effort to implement a sustainable energy system. Therefore, it seems likely that the end of cheap oil will cause serious dislocations as we make the transition to more renewable sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal.
An often overlooked but important consequence of the end of cheap oil will be an increasing cost for maintaining-high productivity agriculture that relies on petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. As will be discussed in a later section, at the very time the Earth will contain an added two to three billion people to feed, the skyrocketing cost of petroleum could undermine the ability of the poorest countries to feed those additional billions. Although high-yield agriculture is possible without heavy reliance on petroleum-based products, it would be a different kind of agricultural system. It would be smaller in scale, decentralized, attentive to local conditions, and operated by well-trained organic farmers. While an alternative to petroleum-based agriculture exists, the key question is whether we can make a smooth transition to another agricultural system as the cheap oil runs out in the next decade or two. 41
Poverty and Diminished Opportunity
The late Prime Minister of Canada, Lester Pearson, observed: "No planet can survive half slave, half free; half engulfed in misery, half careening along toward the supposed joys of an almost unlimited consumption. . . . Neither ecology nor our morality could survive such contrasts." 42 If the world is increasingly divided into the rich and the impoverished, then it will produce a volatile situation that is ripe for revolutionary movements. If the world is profoundly divided materially, there is little hope that it can be united socially and spiritually. Figure 3 vividly illustrates how far we are from an equitable distribution of global income. It shows the percent of global income distributed among five equal segments of the world's population:

Figure 3: Global Income Distribution 43

According to World Bank estimates, if the poverty line is set at $1 a day, 1.3 billion people (or roughly 20 percent of humanity) live in poverty. If the poverty line is set at $3 a day, 3.6 billion people (or roughly 60 percent of humanity) are poor. (By comparison, the official poverty line in the United States is approximately $11 a day or $4,000 per year, per person). What this means is that grinding poverty is the condition of life for a majority of the people in the world. While they do indicate how widespread poverty is in the world, these aggregate statistics do not reveal the depth of that poverty in our world. The following statistics give us a hint of how deep and crushing poverty is:

With the recent Asian economic crisis, the number of people living in absolute poverty (living on less than a $1 per day per person) in Indonesia has suddenly doubled from 20 to 40 million people. The poverty is so extreme that doctors at two clinics said the number of patients had fallen by half because they could no longer afford to pay the consultation fee, the equivalent of five cents in U.S. currency. 44

Although China's economy is growing rapidly, the World Bank estimates that "more than one-quarter of all Chinese-about 350 million-are in substantial deprivation, subsisting on less than $1 a day. Of these, 60 to 100 million are on the edge of starvation with less than 60 cents a day." 45

India continues to be the world's poorest nation. More than 500 million Indians earn less than $1 a day (many of them less than 5 or 10 cents a day) in terms of real purchasing power. 46

Nothing reveals the vulnerability of the world's poor more than the prospect of widespread food scarcity. As long as global food production grows faster than population, the poor can be relatively patient, hoping that their share of the world's resources will rise eventually. 47 When food production falls behind population growth, however, then how food is allocated becomes an intense and immediate political issue. As Lester Brown says, while there are substitutes for oil, there are no substitutes for food. He uses the case of China-which contains one-fifth of humanity and has recently become a net food-importing nation-to illustrate the coming food challenge:
If China's rapid industrialization continues-with its attendant rising affluence, land loss, and water shortages-its import demand will soon overwhelm the export capacity of the United States and all other grain-exporting countries. China's rising grain prices are now becoming the world's rising grain prices, China's land scarcity will become everyone's land scarcity, and China's water scarcity will become the world's water scarcity. Clearly, we are entering a new era. An age of relative food abundance is being replaced by one of scarcity. 48

Compounding this situation, by the 2020s, billions of people will be living in urban slums without clean water, sanitation, telephones, transportation, health care, or a place to grow food-and yet most will have access to television which shows them in vivid detail the high-consumption lifestyles that will never be theirs. This is a recipe for resentment and revolution. For these billions, even a small rise in the price of food can be a serious threat to survival. To have a majority of humanity struggle all day to make a meager living and then to view on television each evening a flood of advertisements from the affluent world is to create a schizophrenic planet that is divided against itself. A world in which a majority of people are both "wired and poor" is likely to be a highly unstable situation. 49 It would be a world in which neither peace nor sustainability would be possible as William Ruckelshaus, writing in Scientific American, explains:
The maintenance of a livable global environment depends on the sustainable development of the entire human family. If 80 percent of the members of our species are poor, we cannot hope to live in a world at peace; if the poor nations attempt to improve their lot by the methods we rich have pioneered, the result will eventually be world ecological damage. 50

The human family is in a real quandary: On the one hand, if poverty and famine grow in the world, then our collective future will be in doubt as we descend into resource wars and the weapons of the powerless-terrorism. On the other hand, if consumption grows unrestrained, then our collective future will also be in doubt as we overtax the limits of the Earth's ecosystems. We have already touched on the growing prospect of global famine; let us briefly consider the other horn of this dilemma-the limits to historical forms of consumption.
A World Bank report released in 1997 projects that five developing countries-Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Russia -- will become economic superpowers by 2020. 51 The economy of China is projected to grow to more than five times its present size, that of India four times, Indonesia five times, and Brazil three times. Because the Earth is already showing signs of ecological stress from current levels of economic activity, Lester Brown poses the obvious question: "If the global economy is already overrunning its natural capacities, what happens as China, India, and other fast-developing countries strive to emulate the American lifestyle." 52 For example, if car ownership and oil consumption per person in China were to reach U.S. levels, then China would consume roughly 80 million barrels of oil per day. Yet, in 1996, the entire world produced only 64 million barrels of oil per day. This is a stark example of how the industrial model of development "is not viable for China or for the world as a whole, simply because there are not enough resources." 53 Brown concludes:
If the western development model is not viable for China, then it is not viable for India's 960 million or for the other developing countries, home to another 2 billion people. And in the integrated, global economy, it will not be viable for western industrial countries themselves over the long term. China is demonstrating that the world cannot remain for long on the current economic path. It is underlining the urgency of restructuring the global economy, including the economies of the industrial world. 54

The world does not have the resources to sustain the consumerist culture that is rapidly spreading from developed nations to the rest of the world. The only path through this dilemma-of increasing poverty on the one hand and natural limits to unrestrained consumption on the other hand-seems to be a middle way of conscious balance.
A new kind of justice is required in a world that is integrated economically, ecologically, and culturally. In Earth Community Earth Ethics, Larry Rasmussen writes that to a great degree, we now share one another's fate, so our choice is whether to promote one another's well-being as a way to promote our own. 55 Basic justice and fairness are essential if we are to live peacefully on this planet. Recognizing that, we could work to create the local conditions around the world that enable people to provide the food, shelter, education, health care, and other essentials needed to realize their potentials as productive and respected members of the human family, and able to contribute to building a sustainable future.
A Global Challenge
The driving trends of climate change, population growth, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, and poverty are not disconnected from one another. We are using up cheap oil to fuel a global economy whose success is changing the global climate and supporting an unprecedented increase in world population. In turn, a dramatically larger population and expanding industrialization are consuming an increasing proportion of the Earth's biosphere and simultaneously destroying ecosystems, thereby causing the most massive extinction of species in the last 65 million years. One byproduct of industrialization is that several billion human beings now live in impoverished, urban slums. When individual adversity trends interact and amplify each other's impact, the result can be a challenge to the entire planetary system. How critical this world-system challenge will become is uncertain, but there seems little doubt that it will be sufficiently powerful to provide the rite of passage required for humanity to move to a higher level of maturity and community. At a minimum, the combined impact of adversity trends seems sufficient to motivate us to begin an earnest dialogue about where we go from here.
This brief review of adversity trends presents a distressing picture of life one generation from now. Still, it tells only half the story. In the next section we shall consider another set of forces that could transform adversity into trailblazing opportunity for the human family.

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© Copyright 1999, Duane Elgin
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