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Can mankind head off an eco-apocalypse?
The environment
Squaring the circle
Jul 31st 2003
From The Economist print edition
Can mankind head off an eco-apocalypse?
HALF a century after the cold war, Sir Martin Rees, a 61-year-old veteran of the anti-nuclear movement believes that the world came closer�and more often�to the brink of thermonuclear destruction than most people realise. Could it happen again? More broadly, could man, even unwittingly, unleash a chain of events that destroys the natural environment, and ultimately humanity itself?
The debate over how to safeguard our world is not limited, of course, to disaster scenarios. Conservationists, politicians and scientists of every hue continue to hold forth on mankind's environmental depredations. For Sir Martin, a respected Cambridge University astrophysicist and Britain's Astronomer Royal, the emphasis is on warning; for others it is the more difficult task of trying to devise prescriptions.
The spectre of a terrorist attack or an accident involving bio-organisms or nanotechnology so concerns Sir Martin that he is ready to wager $1,000 that 1m people die as a result of a single horrendous act by 2020. In addition to threats from disgruntled misfits or religious radicals, he worries about the destruction of the natural environment that may result from broader policy choices made by society. And he is particularly concerned that the current pattern of industrialisation, urbanisation and motorisation might fuel climate change and biodiversity loss on such a scale as to lead to environmental disaster.
However, unlike most dystopian works, which are often melodramatic and misleading, "Our Final Century" is lively, informative and often witty. Sadly, the same cannot be said about "The Wealth of Nature", a provocative but unsatisfying work by Robert Nadeau, who teaches at America's George Mason University.
Mr Nadeau believes that the world is already in the throes of an environmental disaster of man's making. Conventional economics, he says, making a play on Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", is not very good at valuing nature and "cannot introduce the incentives necessary to a sustainable global environment." He dismisses recent efforts by environmental economists to put "a green thumb on the invisible hand": first in Scandinavia, and now in many countries, governments are imposing effluent taxes and other market-friendly reforms to help reduce pollution. He also dismisses similar efforts by ecological economists�cuddlier, philosophically greener versions of environmental economists�as ultimately destined to fail.
It is easy for Mr Nadeau to scoff at the prospects for greening Adam Smith's hand, but in fact market-based environmentalism may well be the best hope for reconciling future economic growth with the need to preserve nature. That is certainly the view of a distinguished group of scientists, economists and other conservation experts assembled by the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body. In "Capturing Carbon and Conserving Biodiversity: The Market Approach", the boffins examine various challenges involved in dealing with two of the biggest environmental problems: global warming and biodiversity loss.
Crucially, they argue that turning to market forces can help solve both problems at once. By putting an economic value on the neglected "ecosystem services" provided by forests, such as their ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, they argue that both deforestation and climate change can be dealt with. That is not to say that the market-friendly approaches advocated in this book are cure-alls. There are still plenty of problems to overcome. One example is that scientists still do not fully understand how and how fast different trees absorb carbon as they grow, making accurate measurements particularly difficult to calculate.
Even so, explains Ian Swingland, who edited this collection of articles, this approach is far more promising than the failed conservation approaches of the past that relied on "a donation-driven western culture permeated by the idea that so-called expert and political committees could and should plan what should happen, and draw lines on maps as boundaries between people and the rest of the animal and plant world. Well-meaning it may have been, but disastrous it has proved." In arguing that "biodiversity can pay for itself through benign systems of sustainable extraction, where people can receive some equitable share by right, not patronage," Mr Swingland and his co-authors make a compelling case that the best way to reduce the risk of any potential eco-disaster is to embrace market greenery.
The future may be brighter than the eco-doomsayers suggest. One reason is that man has more power to influence that future benignly�through innovations in technology and economic policy�than some suggest. Another is that it is simply wrong to imply that most environmental indicators suggest an environmental disaster is imminent. Inspect Sir Martin's work closely, for example, and you find that he is careful about his language and predictions: unlike many greens (and, it must be said, Mr Nadeau at times), who adopt the alarmist tactic of giving only the shocking high end of forecasts of potential global warming without mentioning the low end of the forecast, Sir Martin tends to give ranges and add appropriate qualifiers and caveats. The Cambridge academic is also very wary of the so-called precautionary principle, a misguided pseudo-philosophy invoked by greens to stifle innovation in areas like genetically modified foods.
So how does he justify his suggestion that mankind might have only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century�our final century, to use the alarmist title of the book? Even before your correspondent could ask him that question at a recent literary event, Sir Martin confessed to being a fan of Bjorn Lomborg�a Danish academic who recently caused some controversy when he suggested that greens have been systematically distorting the fact that the environment has been getting healthier in many countries.
Sir Martin then took the reviewer's copy of "Our Final Century" and pencilled in a question mark after the title. His publishers had ruled it out. The American publishers even changed the title from "Our Final Century" to "Our Final Hour". Sir Martin is clever enough to know that the end is not nigh, but he put up with the chicanery in order to gain a wider audience. A small sin, perhaps, in such an important book.
Source: The Economist
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