The Global Politics of Environmental Protection

Colorado College's 125th Anniversary Symposium
Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences

Delivered at Colorado College on February 4, 1999 at 3:00 PM
in a discussion forum with the same title.

by

Eugene Linden

Thank you all for coming—proving Samuel Huntington’s point about the Puritan ethic and what made America great by not being outside on this beautiful day.

… We’re here to talk about the forces that will shape life in the next century, the forces that will determine to a degree whether we face a future of conflict or convergence or what proportion of each we might see in the coming decades. The question is overwhelming, of course, but I think we can simplify it a little bit. I’ve just gone through this exercise, in fact. A few years ago I began thinking about this cusp of history that we seem to be approaching, and I would say it’s a cusp. It doesn’t matter that it’s the year 2000—it could be the year 2374 or 2250 or the year after Michael Jordan. It’s an extraordinary time. On the one hand, lying just beyond the next millennium and befogging our view of the future, is a fateful series of global events affecting the skies, the earth, society. The wise elders of 2050, say, will know the answer to many of this century’s ultimate questions. They’ll know how nature and nations respond to the pressures of between eight and ten billion people. They will know whether the cumulative impact of all these stresses on the earth and human political institutions galvanized human initiative or, instead, drove humanity into a new Dark Age.

There isn’t any question, I think, that this is an extraordinary time. E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, made the comment that "humanity is the first species to become a geophysical force able to affect the basic systems that run the planet." The triumph of the consumer society and market economy means that, for the first time, the bulk of humanity lives with, if not by, the same set of economic rules. We’ve had the six-fold growth of human numbers in this century. We’re in the midst of what I would call a "grand global experiment," and I wondered how it would play out.

At the same time I was posing this question to myself, I was also very much aware of the perils of predicting the future. The future loves to confound the experts of the present. Witness, for instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which surprised armies of experts who had at their disposal data and satellite imagery that since the 1960s could track individual trucks moving down the Russian highways. Were the clues to the collapse of the so-called "evil empire" so well hidden that the combined intelligence and policy apparatus of the West could not see them? Hardly.

The clues lay in plain sight, but we are so blinded by the glare of the present that often we can’t see them, or, if we do see them, recognize their significance. And moreover, to divine the future, we tend to turn to experts on the present and past, an intellectual elite that by its very nature is ill-equipped to see the signals of change. It is safe to say that we have in place a foolproof mechanism for guaranteeing that we will always prepare for a future that never comes about and always be unprepared for the future that does.

With these cautionary thoughts in mind, I began wondering how to think about the future. Not being a scientist, I did this in a completely unscientific way. I asked myself, "What is the one question I would like to have answered about the future?" I gave this some thought, and my research consisted of reading the papers every day. Then, one day, the answer popped out, or at least what I think is the answer.

I came across the mention of a study done by the Max Planck Institute suggesting that waves were getting larger in the North Atlantic. The study itself has been hotly contested since, but it started me thinking about what that would mean. If a stormy North Atlantic persisted, it would impose costs on shippers, it would have serious effects on home owners and resorts and probably produce a reaction in the insurance industry that in turn would have additional effects on shipping and real estate markets. Then there were the other questions, issues that were raised by larger waves in the North Atlantic. What did that say about shifts in circulatory patterns and storm tracks that might be producing these bigger waves? In fact, since I began researching this book, there has been an increase in the number of breakups of large tankers and freighters in the Pacific as well. This wave phenomena seems to be real.

I began to think about what happens when climate becomes unstable. Then I began to think about the issue of stability, in general. Stability is fundamental. In stable times, people tend to prosper and innovate. In unstable times, societies contract and suffer, you have less investment, and you have less innovation, speaking very crudely. What this means is that even if you can’t predict the specifics of the future, if you could make an informed guess about whether it’s likely to be more or less stable than the present, you’d know a lot. But that begs a lot of questions. What is stability? To some degree, it’s in the eye of the beholder, but it does have formal significance—and feels like ecology and artificial life, among others. Ecologists, for instance, use words like resilience, persistence, and firm linkages between the component parts as design features to describe stable systems. Others might tackle the daunting task of quantitatively addressing the issue of whether the present time is stable or not, but I think I could make a pretty good case that the post World War II era has been extraordinarily stable.

A couple of years ago, Paul Johnson wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "the fifty-plus year period without great power conflicts since the end of World War II is unprecedented," and, still quoting him, "not a single leader of any of the great powers has a program in which war plays any part. As an historian, I can confidently say that this is unique. There is no precedent in human history for war being ruled out of calculations at such a high level." He links this happy state of affairs to an emergent practicality and the decline of absolute ideologies. After the search for perfection brought us the mass destruction of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, humanity has turned to democracy, capitalism, and the notion of incremental improvements, supposedly reducing both the stakes and the risk of conflict.

Immediately, I’m sure many of you in the audience are thinking, "What about Russia, what about Liberia?"—and I agree. Stability doesn’t have to be ubiquitous to describe an era. I’m sure anyone living in those countries—as well as Somalia, Sudan, and a dozen other nations—would take issue with this characterization. For the great majority of humanity, however, relatively stable times have allowed improvements in health care, standards of living, and education. It’s also been seventy years since the great depression. And several mandarins of global finance also announced, perhaps prematurely it turns out, that the global economy was entering a new golden age following a couple of years of world economic expansion that approached four percent per year in the mid-1990s. That figure was believed to be unattainable as recently as the 1980s, and again we’re hearing less of this talk lately.

There are other indications of stability as well. It’s been roughly eighty years since the last great killer epidemic, although, again, AIDS is making its mark know. In the words of the late epidemiologist, Uwe Brinkman, "The world has enjoyed a honeymoon from infectious disease in this century." Again, we’re hearing less about this lately.

Attributes of persistence and resilience characterize stable systems in the global economy’s ability to absorb shocks. Think about some of the threats that have arisen since the early 1970s. We had the OPEC oil embargo, the Third World debt crisis, the S & L crisis here, the rise of Japan, the fall of Japan, and so on. So far, the system’s absorbed them all. Finally, again, up until recently, the global climate has been behaving well. Since the reverberations of the little Ice Age began diminishing in the early part of the nineteenth century, the weather’s been pretty good. And if we look at the really long term, the weather over the last 8,000 years has been pretty good compared to the upheavals of the Ice Ages that dominated most of humanity’s time on the planet.

Thus, baby boomers like myself were born and have grown up in stability nested in stability nested in stability. It is quite natural for us to think that this is the norm and that it’s just going to continue. But is it? What might cause the present stability to unwind?

Among the things I did to address this question was to spend a few days at the Santa Fe Institute at the invitation of Murray Gell-Mann. One of the fellows there was a guy named Christopher Langton, a theoretician and one of the pioneers in the field of artificial life. One of his concerns is the shift between stable systems and unstable systems. In a nutshell, here is how he describes the paradigm:

Faced with opportunities, competing organisms use various strategies to exploit a system, and over time a stability emerges. This state continues until someone comes along with a special advantage, or something changes the ecology sufficiently to give someone a special advantage. The favored competitor prospers, driving out rivals until the whole system crashes and enters a new period of chaos. This, in turn, continues until the surviving competitors stabilize around a new game.

He uses this to describe everything from market crashes to the emergence of life on earth. There is nothing earth-shaking in this model, but it seems to apply to everything. It makes a very useful point, I think, that stability does not beget stability in perpetuity. At some elusive tipping point, stable systems begin to unravel. Often it’s been because a species or corporation or whatever continues to adhere to a once successful strategy after it’s become maladapted. To a degree, we can see that something similar happened in South Korea, in which the financial crisis was exacerbated to some degree by hyper-competitive industrial practices that destroyed the terms of trade in certain industries.

So, when I set out to thinking about what might unravel the present global stability, I decided to consider only those forces that we can least do something about under the perhaps optimistic assumption that, if there is a solution to a global problem, humanity would probably solve the problem at some point. I wanted not to leave myself vulnerable to some amazing technological innovation making some problem disappear. Here are some of the things I left on the table. I thought long and hard about international gangs and organized crime but ultimately decided not to include this problem. In the time frame I was considering, going out about fifty years, the likelihood was that nations in the international community would find some way to reduce the threat of Mafiosi gangs. Same thing with toxins. Same thing with energy, running out of oil.

I also decided to be technologically neutral. I should say that most of the arguments that we’re entering a new golden age are somehow based on the notion that the information age has changed the basic rules of business, permitting efficiencies and responsiveness that makes the business cycle a thing of the past. I just don’t buy it. The recent dramatic examples of volatility in the global markets provides a vivid demonstration of how the information age technologies permitting light speed transactions actually amplify or can amplify instabilities. I have no doubt that there will be some wonderful technological breakthroughs in the coming decades, but I specifically chose clues, as I said, that are not susceptible to some technological magic bullet. In general, I assume that the DNA that governs the future recombines elements of the present.

With all these caveats and assumptions, I set out to think about what lay in the present day landscape that might point the way whether the world faced a future that would be more or less stable than the present. I don’t have time here to go through all the clues. I’m just going to tick them off and then summarize a little bit about what I think they mean in terms of the topics of these meetings.

The first clue, I think, is the integrated global market itself. I argue that it is inherently unstable. You can have currency controls and capital controls and a less-robust market, but if you’re going to have an integrated global market with a free flow of capital, I argue that you are also going to have to face the facts of volatility and instability. And that instability, economic instability, as we have seen in Indonesia, can lead to political instability and food riots.

Another clue I chose was explosive growth in megacities in the Third World. I’ve written a couple of articles about that, one for Time and one for Foreign Affairs. Again, I bow to no one in my respect for the ability of the people of these cities to take what would seem on the surface intolerable situations and make the best of them. But, any system that is predicated on people behaving better than they have ever behaved before in history, I think, is doomed to failure at some point.

I think in the coming decades the pressures from migration will continue to the cities, and, in certain countries, for instance Karachi and Pakistan, turmoil in the big cities can lead to turmoil in the nation and turmoil in the region it’s destabilizing. Migration. I called this clue "no vent for surplus," referring to a phrase by Adam Smith who always talked about wild lands being a vent for surplus. What happens if pressures from migration continue to increase even as everybody around is putting up no vacancy signs? I’ll give you just a very brief example. Mexico’s natural population growth of the work force is about 900,000 a year, which is about one percent. About one million people a year are estimated to be thrown off the land by desertification and environmental degradation. Then you have the effects of the peso crisis, which temporarily put two million out of work. These are pressures that are not going to get less as time goes by, at least not for the next two decades.

Another clue: the wage gap. It was considered to be a problem around the world at the end of World War II. We’ve had the greatest economic boom in history, and it’s an even bigger problem today. I suggest, and I’m willing to talk about this later, that this is intrinsic and has to do with information age technologies, in fact. There is a cap on wages anywhere in the world now because almost any industry has access to a global labor force.

Then, we get to some of the environmental clues. I think climate is probably the biggest thing of all. My reason that it is not first on the list is that it’s unclear whether the extraordinary weather we’ve seen since 1982 is part of natural variation or is, in fact, reflecting human inputs. We’ve had eight of the ten warmest years in the last century in this decade alone. We’ve had an increase in extreme storms. We’ve had an increase in winter storms and their severity. Then we have other signs. We have melting of mid-latitude glaciers, we have birds migrating south earlier in Britain, spring coming earlier in Siberia, freezing lines moving up mountains, all sorts of things. Something is changing in the systems around the world.

Another clue I chose was ecosystem fragmentation, which I think is probably the most serious of all because it is the least able to be remedied. It is a function of the sum total of human impacts on the globe. There is no one thing that leads to the continued slicing and dicing of the life support systems of the planet.

Another clue I chose was volatility in the global food system. I want to stress here I didn’t say we’re running out of food, but with eighty or ninety food importing nations and only a few food exporting nations, in times when there is a temporary problem with crops, you can have instability as a product of being priced out of the market. Some two billion live primarily on rice, the food of the world’s poor. Only a very small percentage of the crop is in the export market so they basically have to grow their own. The places that have to grow their own are some of the poorest nations. So you have the potential for instability, like what we just saw in Indonesia.

Another systematic clue of instability is trends in infectious disease, which since 1982 have again turned upward, even leaving out AIDS. I know there has been a lot of debate over this issue, but if you leave out AIDS, the trend is still upward. There are only a few people who now talk as confidently about the epidemiological transition, which was all the rage in the late 70s.

Then the last clue I chose—I call it "the rise of the true believers"—is an increase in religious extremism in all respects. This is not just a factor of Islam. We see it in India with Hindu extremism and around the world. This is both again a symptom of instability as well as a cause of instability. We certainly have destabilizing Islamic radicalism in Algeria, Afghanistan, Egypt, and a number of other nations.

It’s comforting to see the future in the present because it makes it more familiar. Our fears tend to focus on unprecedented alien threats and asteroids smacking into the planet, some nemesis microbe that emerges from the jungle or a lab. More often than not, as in the Mafia, the bullet that gets you comes from a familiar face. So we worry about Ebola but fail to see that ordinary flus have become more robust, and the flu that’s going around now is a whopper, as I’m sure all of you know. So my clues are noteworthy not because they foretell specific catastrophes but because they are systematic of increasing instability in fundamental aspects of life. Volatility, the loss of diversity, a narrowing base—these phrases recur in characterizations of the financial system, food production, and ecology. Nor do these clues operate in isolation. Climate change would exacerbate epidemics, the loss of biodiversity, and instability in the food system, for instance. The loss of biodiversity affects the food system as well. Climate change, food volatility, and market upheavals affect human migration—they’re all intertwined.

Where does that leave us in terms of the thesis of this conference? Although I come at this topic from a very different angle, and, although I disagree with Samuel Huntington’s distinction between modernization and Westernization, I do agree that the potential for conflict rises in the coming decades as life becomes more unstable.

In the conclusion of my book, I also argue that the consumer society itself is inherently unstable. That’s a complicated argument, and I won’t go into it here. One reason is that there really is no way to represent the long term. It’s also unsustainable, and, because it is unsustainable, it will eventually yield the stage to a successor. Now here, I think, there is room for hope. There are some hopeful signs of the shape of this successor in the present, one of which is an emerging environmental ethic. We spend roughly two percent of our gross domestic product on environmental remediation. A lot of economists would say, Murray Weidenbaum being one, "This is absurd. It’s a drag on consumption, therefore a drag on quality of life, therefore voters will repeal this legislation once they realize how much they’re spending." This couldn’t be more completely wrong. Voters of both parties have consistently supported that kind of spending. We see also around the world, in poor countries as well, a recognition that our health, human health, is tied to viable ecosystems. Look at the response of the Chinese last summer to the devastating floods. All of a sudden they start enforcing forestry laws that they had never enforced before because they realized they had really exacerbated the floods by cutting the watershed. I was at a conference in Korea not too long ago. There, one of the leading consumer advocates in Indonesia said that one of the ironic byproducts of the Indonesian crisis was that, for the first time, the Indonesians were sort of adopting a green life style. The middle class Indonesians, mainly, had been coerced into it. The other thing is, let’s say we do face more stringent material circumstances. Let’s say that, if instability leads to a reduction in economic activity, people do have a harder time living a life of consumption. People tend to make a virtue of necessity, and the non-material things become more important as well. It’s dangerous to extrapolate trends from the present, but I’m certain that an environmental ethic will play a strong role in the successor to the consumer society—infiltrating major religions, spurring new religions.

I will say one other thing. How do people react to instability? One thing they do is take out insurance. Your best insurance is your family. Another type of insurance is religion. Another type of insurance is community. There may be less innovation. Traditional hierarchies tend to reassert themselves. There are bad aspects to this because communities can be exclusionary—you could see an increase in xenophobia and racism. On the other hand, there’s probably not much bad in strengthening family ties. Not all reactions to instability are bad. It is a very different life, however, and a very different future than most of what we read about, which has to do with technological progress and such like that.

In conclusion, I take hope. I think if bad ideas can transform the world, so can good ideas.

Thank you very much.

© 1999 by Eugene Linden