The development trajectory leading to 2050 suggests demand for resources and ecosystem services will increase dramatically: a quadrupling of the world economy, 2 billion more people to feed, most of them living in cities, and a few billions more middle class consumers of cars, sofas, meat and computers.
Should we be worried? And if so, how do we express those concerns without sounding Malthusian?
In 1798 Reverend Thomas Malthus penned an essay arguing that real limits to human population and prosperity existed: famine, disease, and environmental limits inevitably bust every population boom. Humans, he predicted, will starve just like other species that reproduce beyond the environment’s capacity to feed them–such were the laws of nature, as he understood them. In the years since Malthus, there has been no shortage of alarms sounded about resource shortages, timber famines, peak oil, population explosions, ecological footprints, and limited carrying capacity of spaceship earth. Like the boy who cried wolf too many times, the alarms now fall on deaf ears.
Is the wolf showing up?
Concerns continue to be voiced by traditional actors: environmental groups, United Nation’s environmental programs, and European countries. But new voices are joining the chorus. The US Department of Defense has identified climate change as major threat to national security. There is now a Dow Jones Sustainability Index for stock investors. Coke, Pepsi, Wal-Mart and other Fortune 500 transnational corporations have active sustainability programs and meaningful efforts to green their supply chains. Deutsche Bank has a real time carbon counter. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development presents a sobering array of environment-related challenges confronting businesses in the 21st Century. And the normally technical and pro-development OECD sounds almost alarmist in its recent Environmental Outlook.
Are these new voices adding legitimacy to the call to action? Most people I talk to just roll their eyes. They are understandably concerned about jobs, gas prices, and civil rights. The people that won’t even talk to me seem more concerned with shopping, driving fast, and smart phones. And then there are those who think environmental science is a massive hoax perpetuated to steal property rights, promote socialism, and destroy America.
If the new trends are accurate, they suggest the past styles of governance and business will not work in the future. How can those of us who believe these trends engage others in discussions about getting to 2050 without being dismissed as Malthusians?
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