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From: Mark Graffis <ab758@VIRGIN.USVI.NET>
Subject: [GAIA-L] Paul Ehrlich: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCES (fwd)
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http://dieoff.com/page157.htm
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies and
President, Center for Conservation Biology
Stanford University
The speech was part of the ceremonies presenting Ehrlich with the $125,000
H. P. Heineken Prize for Sciences by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences. Sept. 25, 1998
The past decade has been a critical one for the environmental sciences in
three changing areas: continuing growth in the scale of the human
enterprise, what is happening to the biosphere as a result of that growth,
and how the community of environmental scientists is approaching the
problems of achieving sustainability. As a result, it has been both an
exciting and worrying time for ecologists like myself. In this brief paper,
I want to deal with each of these three areas of change in turn.
The scale of the human enterprise, as measured by energy use, has increased
some 20-fold since 1850. 1 The environmental impact (I) of that scale can be
viewed in terms of the I
T identity, where P is the size of the
Population, A is Affluence (or consumption), and T is a measure of how
environmentally malign are the Technologies and the economic, social,
political and political arrangements involved in servicing the consmption. 2
Because the A and T factors are very difficult to sort out from available
statistics, it is customary to substitute per capita energy use for A x T in
the identity. In the past decade, the scale of the enterprise has increased
about 5 percent, despite one quite positive development in the factors
affecting that scale.
That development has been a small but significant decline in fertility rates
in many nations of the world. For example, in 1988 the global population
stood at 5.13 billion, the rate of natural increase for the world was 1,7
percent, and the total fertility rate (TFR)3 was 3.6. In mid-1998 the
population had grown to 5.93 billion, but the growth rate had declined to
1.4 percent, and the TFR was down to 2.9. Most important, in the rich
countries, where overconsumption per individual puts enormous pressure on
human life-support systems, average TFR dropped from 1.9 to 1.6, and their
populations had virtually stopped growing. At the same time the TFR in the
developing world (excluding China) declined from 4.9 to 3,8 -- more than a
full child per family. 4
All of this is a start in the right direction, but even on the population
front the world still has a long way to go. The decline in the P factor in
that decade simply moved the projected date at which the population will
pass 8 billion from 2019 to 2024. To put this in context, you must remember
that estimates of the long-term carrying capacity of Earth with relatively
optimistic assumptions about consumption, technologies, and equity (A x T),
are in the vicinity of two billion people.5 Today's population cannot be
sustained on the "interest" generated by natural ecosystems, but is
consuming its vast supply of natural capital -- especially deep, rich
agricultural soils, "fossil" groundwater, and biodiversity -- accumulated
over centuries to eons. In some places soils, which are generated on a time
scale of centimeters per century are disappearing at rates of centimeters
per year. Some aquifers are being depleted at dozens of times their recharge
rates, and we have embarked on the greatest extinction episode in 65 million
years.
Despite all this, the drop in vital rates in Europe has been a cause not for
rejoicing but for hand-wringing among those who are ecologically illiterate,
hand-wringing that has been echoed in the American press.6 The last time
Europeans panicked over demographic decline was during the depression of the
1930s. But Europe's population expansion has been unprecedented: despite
huge waves of emigration to the Western Hemisphere, the population of Europe
quadrupled between 1750 and 1950. Even since the depression, Europe has
added on the order of 75 million people -- more than the combined present
populations of the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. Now growth has
finally stopped and a slow decline is beginning -- a cause for celebration
on this vastly overpopulated continent. This European decline is especially
cheering because of the extremely high consumption rates and huge
"ecological footprint" 7 of European nations.
Outside of the population statistics, on the A x T front, most of the trends
over thc past decade have been negative, however. Consumption in many rich
nations continues to grow, much of it reasonably classed as
"overconsumption" in comparison to the material goods available to the
average human being. The most serious population growth in the world is
occurring in the United States, the third most populous nation in the world.
The U.S.A. still has a natural increase of 0.6 percent, a TFR of 2.0, and a
growth rate (thanks largely to immigration) of over one percent. Most
importantly, it has an extremely high level of consumption per person -- on
the order of ten to thirty times that of people in developing nations. Thus
the addition of each person to the American population, whether by birth or
immigration, is many times the disaster for the world as a birth in Kenya or
Bangladesh. Despite this, there is no sign of any official policy for
population limitation in the nation in which, from a global viewpoint, it is
most needed. And the United States is even further from a program of
consumption control, which is even more badly needed. 8
Most developing nations, in contrast, have recognized their population
problems and taken steps to deal with them. But the A x T element in those
nations can be a source of serious problems as well. In the rich sectors of
otherwise poor economies, like that of China, patterns of consumption are
converging on those of the developed nations. In China, for example,
increased meat consumption has been signaled by a 70 percent increase in the
percentage of total available grain fed to livestock between 1985-87 and
1995-97. 9 China has already surpassed U.S. consumption per capita of both
pork and eggs. 10 Indeed, in special cases, the pressures generated by
countries like China can often exceed those of the West and Japan. Hong
Kong, for instance, is a major consumer of the living resources of the sea.
Some 6 million residents devour 300,000 tons of seafood (about 50 kg per
person) annually. They are partly responsible for the destruction of the
world's coral reefs from dynamite and cyanide fishing. Live reef fishes are
in enormous demand -- Hong Kong Chinese wishing to display their affluence
will pay up to 1000 Hong Kong dollars (US $130) for a plate of lips from a
large Napoleon wrasse (a reef fish), 11 One can easily imagine the impacts
on natural systems of increasing affluence in proportionately small but
numerically large subpopulations in China and other developing countries.
The spread of American consumerism is a global threat, and the prospect of
ever greater disparities in living standards not only between nations but
within nations bodes ill for the environment, which in most circumstances
benefits as equity increases. 12
Thirty years ago, timing ways to slow and halt population growth were near
the top of the agenda of the environmental science community. It is now
slowly dawning on us that curbing runaway consumption may be even more
difficult. And socio-economic and political constraints make it very
difficult to institute desirable changes in the mix of technologies used to
supply the consumption. In my view, for example, it would be wise to reduce
human exposure to a wide array of hormone-mimicking synthetic organic
chemicals, 13 but economic forces such as plastics manufacturers and users
powerfully resist such a reduction. Similarly, political power purchased by
the coal industry in Australia has kept that nation on the fossil fuel
treadmill, even though there has been strong public sentiment to switch to
solar and other more environmentally benign technologies in order to slow
global warming. Much the same can be said of the United States. Indeed, the
only major success in the technological arena in the last ten years has been
the implementation of the 1987 Montreal ozone protocol to limit the use of
freons. Achieving that was relatively simple, since a "smoking gun" was in
hand in the form of the ozone hole, and the relatively few corporations
involved could make even bigger profits manufacturing chlorofluorocarbon
substitutes. Limiting the flux of greenhouse gases from energy consumption,
deforestation, and agriculture will be orders of magnitude more difficult.
Now let's turn to the second topic -- what's happening to the biosphere.
What can be said about the past decade's increases hi our understanding of
the consequences of expansion of the human enterprise? Perhaps most dramatic
has been the growing evidence of anthropogenic climate disruption. The 1995
report of the scientific committee of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), cautiously stated that the warming measured over the last
century "is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin.., the balance of
evidence suggests that there is a discernable human influence on global
climate. " 14 Despite a determined campaign of denial by certain elements of
industry and a small group of dissident scientists, 15 it has become
increasingly clear that the IPCC is correct. One key piece of scientific
evidence that had been considered anomalous, satellite observations showing
a cooling trend in the troposphere, turned out to be due to the failure of
scientists interpreting the satellite data to take into account the steady
lowering of the satellite's altitude caused by atmospheric drag. When
corrections were made for this, satellite and surface data appeared in
agreement. Top atmospheric scientists wrote that: "warming trends of both
the surface and troposphere are now sufficiently clear that the issue should
no longer be whether global warming is occurring, but what is the rate of
warming." 16 There are, of course, many suspicious signs of rapid change in
the climate itself, from an increased frequency of extreme weather events in
North America 17 to a widespread meltdown in Alaska where glaciers are in
rapid retreat, long-standing permafrost is melting, and widespread
forest-death, caused by interacting stresses from permafrost soils being
converted to swamps and newly abundant insect pests attacking already
weakened trees. 18
Arguably equally important is thc growing documentation by biologists of the
degree to which human activities are modifying the biosphere -- and broad
acceptance of the conclusion that human influences arc increasingly
disrupting the functioning of ecosystems. 19 For instance, humanity has now
approximately doubled the annual natural rate of addition of nitrogen to the
terrestrial nitrogen cycle, creating potentially serious problems for the
maintenance of soil fertility, accelerating losses of biodiversity,
contributing to acid deposition, and enhancing the greenhouse effect. 20
Humanity has recently been calculated to bc using over half of the
reasonably accessible freshwater runoff, 21 and some 43 percent of Earth's
terrestrial vegetated surface has lost some of its capacity to supply
humanity with benefits -- overall about a 10 percent reduction in potential
value -- as a result of human actions. 22
The last decade has also seen an accelerating loss of populations and
species of other organisms that are involved in supplying crucial natural
services to society, as natural areas are more and more displaced by human
activities. Thus tropical forest destruction continues throughout most of
the developing world. 23 Destruction of oceanic fisheries has come to wide
public attention in the same period, as stock after stock is overfished, 24
and often the physical/biological infrastructure that supports the fisheries
is destroyed. There are also growing signs that the toxification of the
planet is causing serious effects on wildlife and human health through the
release of hormone-mimicking synthetic organic chemicals, although
demonstrating the causal links is difficult. 25 And ecosystem services that
are essential for maintaining agricultural production, such as pollination,
26 are faltering in many areas.
Third, what are environmental scientists doing that is new? Their activities
constitute the best news outside of the lowering of birth rates. Building on
advances in basic ecology over the past half-century, they are making
important gains in understanding the significance of the negative
environmental trends, finding ways to counter them, and helping to move
humanity onto a path to sustainability. One outstanding example is the
substantial progress that has been made in analyzing the relationship
between the loss of biodiversity and the delivery of essential ecosystem
services. Increasingly, research by community ecologists like David Hooper,
John Lawton, Shahid Naeem, David Tilman, and Peter Vitousek indicates that
the long-term stability of the services will depend on maintaining a mix of
species to provide redundancy in each of various roles organisms play in
natural and agricultural ecosystems. 27 Another gain has been the
development, under the leadership of population biologist Gretchen Daily, of
the new field of "countryside biogeography," which seeks ways of maintaining
critical elements of biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes. This is an
especially important field, since every cubic centimeter of the biosphere
has already been altered by humanity to some degree, and most areas have
been modified dramatically from their state before humanity became a
significant ecological force. Since it is clear that relatively few parts of
the planet can be kept even relatively undisturbed, special efforts must be
made to maintain critical elements of biodiversity -- not just species but,
just as importantly, populations 28 of other organisms.
Perhaps most heartening of all is the rapidly growing cooperation of
economists and ecologists in efforts to find policy instruments to help
preserve humanity's natural capital. 29 While the trend traces to the early
efforts of Heineken Laureate Herman Daly, beginning in the 1960s, the last
decade has seen an explosion of activity. At Stanford University, weekly
seminars now bring together economists and ecologists (as well as engineers,
historians, members of the faculties of law and business, and others) to
discuss the environmental dimensions of the human predicament. I now
frequently share postdoctoral students with Larry Goulder of Stanford's
Department of Economics. The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics has
had an extremely active program of discussion and research in this area, and
has produced a long series of important publications bringing the two
disciplines together. 30 And the International Society of Ecological
Economics has grown enormously after starting its journal, Ecological
Economics. just a decade ago.
Related to this is a growing realization among my colleagues that one cannot
depend on working with governments alone to solve the growing environmental
crisis. Instead the emphasis is shifting to recruiting the business
community into the struggle to achieve a sustainable society. While there is
a long way to go in that process, there are encouraging signs such as thc
Natural Step program, begun by Dr. Karl-Henrick Robert in Sweden, and the
writings of businessmen Patti Hawken and Stephan Schmidheiny. 31 Some
businesses have already demonstrated that it is possible to make more money
operating in a manner that is ecologically sound than in one that ignores
the impact of operations on the environment. One outstanding example is
Interface, a company that (under the inspired leadership of CEO Ray
Anderson) supplies commercial carpeting on a rental basis. When the carpet
is worn, Interface replaces it and completely recycles the old material,
rather than dumping it into a landfill. The company is enormously
successful, grossing more than $1 billion annually. Through such examples,
other corporations may learn that they can do well while doing good.
It is important to recognize, however, that just converting business to a
powerful force for environmental quality cannot solve our predicament as
long as the scale of the human enterprise continues to grow. What is needed
now is to involve people in solving local end regional environmental
problems and in encouraging their governments to cooperate more in seeking
resolution of global problems. Business leaders have both heavy
responsibilities and great opportunities in these areas -- and they have a
great deal of expertise in putting theory into practice. They and their
children and grandchildren are fully as dependent for their lives on the
services supplied by natural ecosystems as everyone else. They depend on
those systems to make the air breathable, to supply freshwater and prevent
floods, to dispose of their wastes, arid to support the agricultural
enterprise that nourishes them by generating and maintaining soils and
providing free pest control and pollination services. And perhaps more than
anyone else, they are experts in the critical area of consumption -- and in
a position to help curb the growth of the energy use and material throughput
involved. Technological changes such as electronic communications instead of
travel and substitution of environmentally more benign energy sources for
the dominant fossil fuel technologies of today can help -- but changes in
lifestyle and human ambitions will be needed here also. The business
community also has the political power to lead a transition toward a
sustainable global society -- one with a smaller population supplied with
both necessities and substantial luxuries. I urge businessmen everywhere to
learn about the current environmental situation and then accept the
challenge. And scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens should do the
same. Nothing less is at stake than the fate of human civilization.
Notes
1. J.P. Holdrin, 1991, Population and the energy problem. Population and
Environment 12:231-235, and personal communication (1998).
2. J. Holdrin and P. Ehrlich, 1974, Human population and the global
environment, American Scientist 62:282-292; P. Ehrlich and A. Ehrlich, 1990,
The Population Explosion, Simon and Schuster, Now York.
3. Roughly the average completed family size.
4. Demographic statistics from Population Reference Bureau, World Population
Data Sheet,1988 and 1998.
5. G.C. Daily, A.H, Ehrlich, and A. Ehrlich, 1994, Optimum human population
size. Population and Environment 15:469-475.
6. On July 10, 1998, a long, incompetent article appeared in the New York
Times was entitled "Population Implosion Worries a Graying Europe." Charles
Krauthammer followed up in the Washington Post with another of his
exquisitely ignorant environmental columns on the same general theme (July
17). Its headline said it all: "Saved by immigrants the U.S. fertility rate
is barely at replacement level."
7. M. Wackernagel and W. Rees, 1996, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing
Human Impact on Earth. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island BC.
8. P.R. Ehrlich, et al., 1997, No middle way on the environment, The
Atlantic Monthly 280 (6):98-104.
9. World Resources Institute, 1998, World Resources 1998-99, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
10. L. R. Brown, 1998, The future of growth. In L.R. Brown, et al., State of
the World, 1998, W.W. Norton, New York.
11. C. Safina, 1997, Song for the Blue Ocean. Henry Holt and Company, New
York.
12. G. Daily and P. Ehrlich, 1996. Socioeconomic equity, sustainability, and
Earth's carrying capacity, Ecological Applications 6(4):991-1001.
13. A steady flow of recent information has made ever more pertinent the
1996 warning of T. Colborn, D. Dumanoski, and J.P. Myers in Our Stolen
Future, Dutton, New York.
14. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1996. Climate Change
1995, Summary for Policymakers, Working Group I, pp. 10-11
15. Although there has been some genuine scientific debate, much of this
campaign has been outright disinformation (see P. Ehrlich and A. Ehrlich,
1996, Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-environmental Rhetoric
Threatens Our Future Island Press, Washington, DC; R. Gelbspan, 1997, The
Heat is On: The High Stakes Battle over Earth's Threatened Climate,
Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. The most recent incident involved the
circulation fake reprint designed to look like an article that had been
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A.
16. J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy, A. Lacis, and J. Glascoe, 1998, Global
climate data and models: a reconciliation. Science 81:930-932.
17. T.R. Karl and R.W. Knight, 1998, Secular trends of precipitation amount,
frequency, and intensity in the USA. Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society 79:231-242.
18. W. Stevens, 1998, As Alaska reeks,' scientists consider the reasons why.
New York Times, 18 August.
19. P. Vitousek, et al., 1997. Human domination of Earth's ecosystems.
Science 277:494-499.
20. P. Vitousek, H. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, and J. Melillo, 1997. Human
alteration of the global nitrogen cycle: sources and consequence. Ecological
Applications 7:737-750
21. S. Postel, G. Daily, and P. Ehrlich, 1996. Human appropriation of
renewable freshwater. Science 271:785-788.
22. G. Daily, 1995. Restoring value to the world's degraded lands. Science
269:350-3.54.
23. N. Myers, 1996. The world's forests: problems and potentials.
Environmental Conservation 23:156-168.
24. D. Pauly, 1998. Fishing down marine food webs. Science 279:860-863.
25. E.g., J. Toppari, et al., Male reproductive health and environmental
xenoestrogens, Environmental Perspectives 104 (suppl. 4):741-803.
26. E.g., Buckmann and O. Nabhah, 1996, The Forgotten Pollinators, Island
Press, Washington, DC; G. Nabhan and S. Buchmann, 1997, Services provided by
pollinators. In O. Daily (ed.), Nature's Services, Island Press, Washington,
DC, pp. 133-150.
27 For a popular summary see Bob Holmes, 1998, Life support, New Scientist,
15 August, pp. 30-34.
28. Ehrlich and G. Dally, 1993, Population extinction and saving
biodiversity, Ambio 22:2-3; J. Hughes, G. Daily, and P. Ehrlich, 1997,
Population diversity: its extent and extinction, Science 278:689-692.
29. P. Ehrlich, 1997, World of Wounds: Ecologists and the Human Dilemma,
Ecology Institute, Oldendorf/Luhe, Germany, chapter 5.
30. E.g., K. Arrow, et al., 1995, Economic growth, canting capacity, and the
environment, Science 268:520-52l.
31. P. Hawken, 1993, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of
Sustainability. HarperCollins, New York; S. Schmidheiny, 1992, Changing
Course: A Global Perspective on Development and the Environment, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
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