The Ragged Edge of the World (38 page)

Forty years ago, when I first began exploring the ragged edge of the world, the frontiers it demarcated were larger than they are now, if only because the world's ancient forests were so much larger then. Although the ragged edge itself may be smaller now, the rate at which the cultural and literal fires of this boundary are consuming what remains is actually accelerating, because so many of the world's wildlands have been cut or degraded. What's especially disheartening is to see the warnings of my early adulthood proven right by the daily developments of my middle age.

I was in my early twenties when I first read the dire predictions of Dillon Ripley and Tom Lovejoy, who warned of the consequences of habitat destruction, particularly in the world's wet tropical forests. Despite countless conferences, initiatives and declarations, laws, and even treaties, destruction of the rainforests continues unabated. Some nations and consumers have gotten religion about the destruction wrought by cutting these forests, but for every Japan that reforms its bad old ways, there is a China waiting in the wings.

In 1979 a blue-ribbon panel that included George Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, and climate scientist Roger Revelle presented a paper to President Jimmy Carter that warned that if nations did not take action to stem greenhouse gas emissions, we would see changes in climate by the end of the twentieth century. No action was taken on GHG emissions, and the world indeed saw changes, ranging from the rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice to increasingly intense droughts and weather extremes predicted two generations earlier.

In 1972 the Club of Rome published
Limits to Growth,
based on an approach to modeling called Systems Dynamics, which had been developed at MIT by Jay Forrester, one of the fathers of the computer. Using sophisticated feedback loops, the book projected possible outcomes for the world economy based on various usage rates of nonrenewable resources. The typical outcome was overshoot and collapse. For years afterward the book was widely ridiculed by libertarians and technological optimists. As of 2008, however, the trajectories it modeled were closer to what had actually taken place than any scenarios offered by so-called cornucopians.

One bomb that didn't go off, at least on the projected schedule, was the “Population Bomb,” a catastrophe that, in 1968, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich predicted would occur by the late 1970s. Ehrlich underestimated the impact of green revolution agricultural technologies on food production in places like India and China, but while he may have been wrong on his timetable, unfortunately he is now being vindicated on his premise. During the worldwide economic boom following the collapse of communism, concerns about population growth dropped from the headlines, but now they're back with a vengeance, as persistently high commodity prices and alarmingly tight stocks of grain remind people that population and material aspirations cannot continue to rise indefinitely in a world of finite resources.

So here we are in the beginning of the twenty-first century, pretty much where a chorus of voices in the twentieth century warned that we would be. (Those who are interested in where I think we are going are invited to read my books
The Future in Plain Sight
and
Winds of Change
.) Virtually every large predator, both on the land and in the sea, is on death row, and the only creatures that thrive are pests of all stripes and animals that can live off our copious garbage. We've so overtaxed the planet that we can't throw anything away without its landing on someone's or something's head. Atmospheric toxins get dumped on the formerly pristine north courtesy of the Arctic Front, while plastics from the entire North Pacific region are collected by the great gyres of the ocean. It's as though nature were saying, “Here is what I see when I gaze upon humanity's works.”

We live in an incongruous situation in which industry and individuals talk a greener line than ever before, while the world is more tattered than ever. Despite the environment's much-heralded ascendance as an American value, U.S. voters are willing to cast their ballots against environmental protections, such as the U.S. bans on offshore drilling on the outer shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, just because gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon. Imagine what will happen when, as is likely, we face a real resource shortage.

During the past fifty years conservationists and champions of indigenous peoples have won many battles, but on every front the war is being lost. I can't blame the cornucopians like the late Julian Simon. They provided a handy justification for ignoring the environment, but greed would have found another intellectual and moral justification if free market ideology hadn't been around.

One of my heroes is a decent man named James Gustave Speth, universally known as Gus, who in some sense is the last Boy Scout. He has devoted his life to working within the system. After Yale Law School he helped found the now-giant Natural Resources Defense Council, reasoning that experienced lobbyists and litigators could be crucial advocates in environmental battles. Later he worked in the White House, advising Jimmy Carter on environmental issues. Then he helped found the World Resources Institute to try to get corporations to work with governments and nonprofits on environmental issues. He tried to prod the international community to action when he headed the United Nations Development Program. He headed up Yale's celebrated School of Forestry and Environment, one of the institutions that will produce the next generation of environmental leaders. He has also written books, networked at the highest level, and lectured tirelessly around the country. Any one of these achievements would be extraordinary; to have all of them in the span of one career puts him in the company of America's greatest conservationists.

His long tenure at the forefront of America's environmental movement has given him a unique perch from which to assess how far we've come since the great environmental pulse began in the late 1960s. One might also think, given his front-row seat at many of these battles, that he would single out accomplishments like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Bills, and the National Environmental Policy Act, among many other environmental victories. One might think that, but one would be wrong. Taking a dry-eyed look back at his career, what Gus Speth sees is failure.

In 2008 I participated in a Yale panel with Gus in which we discussed climate change, oil and the future of the world economy. Usually I'm the darkest voice at such gatherings, particularly if I'm sharing the stage with pillars of the establishment like Gus. This time, however, armed with a devastating series of charts, he made the case that while his and others' efforts had won many individual victories over the decades, overall they had failed to halt decline by virtually any metric one could produce.

Basically, Gus says that if you examine the charts of extinction rates, loss of wildlands, and the wholesale transformation of ecosystems during the tenure of the modern environmental movement, you might rationally conclude that an asteroid had hit the planet. There
has
been a Great Collision, says Gus, but the asteroid in question is the global economy. Looking back over a lifetime of working within the system, Gus has come to the conclusion that the system is the problem. (He spells out his argument in his book
Between Two Worlds
.)

I believe he's right. For forty years I've been working out my own view of the nature of the consumer, and modern politics and the modern free market system have developed a perfect immune response for neutering any attempts to represent the long-term interests of either an economy or an ecosystem. Our only hope is that the present system gives way to one that does reintroduce our long-term requirements into present-day decision making.

During the past decades, when I traveled to remote places, I never imagined that my visits to the ragged edge of the world were a farewell tour. Perhaps, more accurately, I hoped they wouldn't prove to be a farewell tour. And there is just the tiniest ray of hope that they weren't. It won't be pretty, but there is a chance that we will awaken to the obvious.

When something goes on inexorably despite decades of warnings from the best minds and most prominent people in a society, we have to stop and think about why. This is not just a matter of the destruction of wildlands and loss of species. The scientific consensus on the threat of climate change is overwhelming and has been so for over fifteen years (and the threat has been discussed at the international level for thirty years), yet the world has done virtually nothing to contain greenhouse emissions.

Looking around, we see this pattern everywhere. Consider a couple of recent examples. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill: The recent Gulf oil spill, the most catastrophic environmental event in American history, directly followed from the neutering of regulations, safety mechanisms and procedures put in place after earlier spills such as the Ixtoc spill of 1979 and the
Exxon Valdez
spill in Alaska in 1989. Does anyone seriously believe that new regulations that arise from this disaster won't also be neutered? We need oil, and the easy-to-find oil is gone, so we need to drill in the most inaccessible, politically hostile and/or environmentally vulnerable places on the planet.

This raises some obvious questions: If oil is getting harder to find and our dependence on the fuel leaves us exposed to catastrophic risks, wouldn't an intelligent society focus on developing alternatives? Yes. And, since all these costs and looming scarcities have been discussed for decades, wouldn't an intelligent society have started developing alternatives long ago? Again yes. Has the United States done so? No; we had the lead on alternatives through the 1980s, but we handed it to the Europeans and Asians.

Or consider the financial crisis that began in 2008 and continues as of the writing of this book. As was the case with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the crisis followed ignored warnings and years of deregulation that stripped away protections instituted after past financial crises dating back to before the Great Depression. Despite this financial near-death experience Congress has not even reinstituted past protections that governed financial institutions, such as the Glass-Steagall Act. And even if politicians summon the political courage to do so, does anyone think that such regulations would remain in place long enough to prevent some new financial crisis?

Time and again our best and brightest have alerted society to looming problems, but our persistent pattern has been to ignore the warnings and suffer the consequences. The pathetic refrain of recent years—“Nobody saw this coming”—is always a self-serving lie. Something is making us stupid. My candidate is capitalism, specifically the skewed incentives of capitalism as practiced in the United States that give us hyperfocus on short-term gains, while leaving us effectively blind to long-term threats. Like Gus Speth, I believe the system is the threat. In each case cited above, actions to head off a threat were perceived to impinge on present profits, and, as a society, we have consistently made the decision that we'd rather head off a cliff in the future than limit the gains of those with access to the levers of power. What we have seen everywhere is that economic interests ultimately control the lawmakers. We've created a system that leaves us constantly surprised by the inevitable.

Can this be fixed? Sure, and by no means am I suggesting that we replace free market capitalism with socialism or communism (a system that inflicted grievous environmental harm in Russia, China and Eastern Europe). Free market capitalism does efficiently match resources with demand and it does foster innovation, but, as recent crises have shown, it desperately requires real regulation. Moreover (and perhaps this is a naïve hope), free market decisions need to be tempered by values or beliefs that recognize the health of the systems that support us, both economic and natural. While we may aspire to a society that is governed by reasoned debate and enlightened policies, a look at history suggests that environmental protection that derives from religious fear—think about the role of
maselai
in New Guinea as discussed earlier in the book—has a far better track record than any system of regulations. Regulations can be gamed; God or the ancestors cannot.

Will any of this happen? Apparently, not without shock therapy far worse than what we have recently endured, and that's exactly what we are likely to get.

Ironically, it is the ongoing economic crisis that gives me hope that we might divert ourselves from our express ride off a cliff. While politicians are able to blithely ignore the ecological calamity that has followed from free market ideology run amok, voters won't let them ignore the economic calamity now being visited upon households around the world. If the global economy merely picks up where we left off before the bubble burst in 2008, then we can expect that our human-produced Great Extinction will resume as well. My guess, though, is that the current economic crisis will get bad enough to profoundly reshape both values and thinking, and in that there is hope.