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Publications
Griffith University and the Department of the Environment, Sport & Territories, 1997
David Hicks
Bath College of Higher Education
United Kingdom
This workshop follows on from the previous Workshop Module on Introducing Alternative Futures. It extends the notion of preferable futures by inviting participants to explore possible 'goals for a better world' with particular reference to some key elements of sustainability.
During this workshop, participants will:
In this activity, participants work together to develop a collective preferable future based on their personal preferable futures timelines drawn in the Workshop Module, Introducing Alternative Futures.
Participants consider 5 goals for a better world and discuss their practice both locally and globally.
Participants create a flow diagram to illustrate the interrelationships between elements of sustainable development. The group also prepares a short briefing paper on 'The Way Ahead'.
In small groups, participants apply an element of sustainability to a chosen environmental or development issue or a specific area of the curriculum.
Resources
Resource 1: Envisioning the Future
Resource 2: Goals for a Better World
Resource 3: Notes on Sustainability
Reading
Reading 1: A Sustainable Future
Activity 1: The completed futures timelines from the workshop on 'Introducing Alternative Futures' are needed. Alternatively, if that workshop has not been used with the group, the timeline activity can be used to introduce this workshop.
Activity 3: Resource 3 needs to be copied and cut up into slips so that each group has a set of statements.
A3 paper, glue, felt pens.
Brown, L. (1991) A Sustainable Future, Resurgence, No 147, 8-13.
Brown, L. et al. (1997) State of the World 1997, Earthscan Publications, London.
Brown, L., Flavin, C. and Postel, S. (1991) Saving the Planet: How to Shape an Environmentally Sustainable Global Economy, W.W. Norton and Co., New York.
Green Justice: The South Speaks Out, The New Internationalist, No 230, April 1992.
Milbrath, L. (1989) Envisioning a Sustainable Society, State University of New York Press, Albany.
Meadows, D., Meadows, D. and Randers, J. (1992) Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or Sustainable Future, Earthscan Publications, London.
The images and expectations that we have of the future affect what we think is worth doing in the present. Fear of the future can be disempowering but it can also lead to engagement in social and political action to bring a different sort of world about. The resurgence of the peace movement in the early 1980s and, more recently, the environmental movement are cases in point. The images we have of the future matter because they help determine our priorities in the present.
Images of the future play a critical role in the creation of change. They are continuously being promoted by big business, advertising, politicians, the media and in science fiction. They exert a powerful influence over what people think is, or is not, worth doing in the present. We can most easily work towards the future we prefer if we have clear images of where we want to go and how we might get there. Sharing the process of envisioning these futures with others enhances their creative power, both at the individual and societal levels. Elise Boulding writes:
At any moment, there are hundreds of images of possible futures being generated within each society, and thousands for the planet as a whole. In any cultural epoch, only certain images of the future out of that much wider pool develop enough cultural resonance to affect the course of events. There is a selective empowerment of certain images, which 'explode' later, like time bombs, into the realised future.
Building a Global Civic Culture,
Teachers College Press, New York, 1988.
A crisis of direction in society, national or global, may stimulate the emergence of new guiding images. In this period of rapid change and social upheaval we should be searching for new guiding images - it may well be that the concept of sustainability provides just such an image.
The following list contains five goals for a better world*.
Take each goal in turn, and answer the following questions on each one:
1. Economic Welfare
Everyone should have access to the basic necessities of life such as food, clothes, shelter, health care and education. There should be both a minimum level of welfare, below which no one should drop, but also a maximum level beyond which no one should go, due to the finite nature of many of the earth's resources.
2. Freedom from Violence
No one should be subjected to direct personal violence, e.g. through assault, robbery or war, and neither should they suffer from indirect violence. Unjust social, political and economic systems can equally cause suffering in the form of poverty, hunger and other deprivation.
3. Social Justice
What one 'has' should not depend on who one 'is' in society. Thus the practices and procedures for allocating resources should not discriminate, directly or indirectly, on the basis of gender, race, class, culture or group.
4. Ecological Diversity
This requires full and appropriate protection of the biosphere on which all life depends. Thus the rights of non-human species must also be recognised and the need for concerned stewardship of air, water, soil, creatures and plants.
5. Participation in Decisions
Genuine participation in all aspects of one's own life offers opportunities for responsibility, personal growth and enrichment. It means being in control of one's own life choices and being free to choose. This leads to ownership of decisions and is the reverse of alienation. * Inspired by the work of Johan Galtung
Energy
Continued reliance on fossil fuels such as coal and oil is likely to cause major climatic change, whilst nuclear power has increasingly proved to be a social, economic and environmental liability. A sustainable future will emphasise greatly increased energy efficiency, together with renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, water and biomass.
Transport
Unrestricted use of the car has created a major series of related problems ranging from severe traffic congestion and dangerous air pollution to urban sprawl. A sustainable future will minimise the need for people to travel, with jobs being closer to home, and emphasise the use of public transport, buses, trams and light rail, as well as cycling and walking.
Environment
Unrestrained consumption of the earth's resources is beginning to produce irreversible damage to the biosphere and a major decline in land, air and water quality. In a sustainable future people will see themselves as a part of nature rather than separate from it and environmental conservation will have as high a priority as economic growth.
Economics
Traditional models of development focus narrowly on economic growth as the indicator of 'progress'. A range of costs are thus 'discounted', e.g. damage to the environment, the effect on the poor, and the effect on future generations. In a sustainable future much more comprehensive indicators of human well-being will be used.
Cities
Uncontrolled urban growth is having a profound impact on human and planetary well-being, both in the rich and poor world. In a sustainable future, planning will be more participatory and land-use and transport policies carefully integrated. Homes, jobs, services and amenities will be mixed together and thus more easily accessible by public transport, cycle or foot.
Poverty
In the poor South three-quarters of the world's people consume 17% of the world's resources, whilst in the rich North one-quarter of the world's people consume 83% of the resources. Debt and falling export prices encourage unsustainable development. A sustainable future for all requires a major change of direction in the policies and lifestyles of the North towards greater justice and equity.
Resources
In a sustainable future waste reduction and recycling will have replaced rubbish collection and disposal. Planned obsolescence, appeals to convenience, and the throwaway society of today will be seen as an aberration. Manufacturing will thus be less energy intensive and less polluting. Many items will be re-used, recycled to form new products or burnt to extract energy.
Farming
Current intensive farming methods often lead to extensive land degradation and a massive international effort is needed to protect soil, conserve water and restore soil productivity. In a sustainable future more emphasis will be placed on organic husbandry and mixed farming with biological pest controls. More food will be grown and consumed locally and regionally.
Population
During the last decade of this century world population is expected to increase by at least 960 million people. The rate of population growth tends to fall as standards of living, health and education, especially of women, increase. In a sustainable future emphasis will be given to this and world population could stabilise at eight billion by the year 2030.
Source: Brown, L. R. (1991) A Sustainable Future, Resurgence, No. 147, 8-13.
THROUGHOUT OUR lifetimes, expanding economic activity has shaped environmental trends, often altering the Earth's natural systems in ways not obvious at the time. Now, we are moving into a period where the environmental changes we have set in motion increasingly will be shaping economic trends.
Each year, the earth's forest cover grows smaller while the deserts grow larger. Each year, the amount of top soil on our croplands diminishes, and the stratospheric ozone layer that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation is depleted. Each year, the concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere rise and the number of plant and animal species shrinks. The economic effects of the environmental degradation of the planet are already affecting world food production. All forms of environmental degradation, ranging from soil erosion to the hotter summers projected as the world warms, affect agriculture adversely.
The detrimental economic consequences of environmental degradation are no longer hypothetical. They can be seen in both Africa and Latin America where a combination of rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and rising external debt have contributed to falling living standards throughout the eighties. Both Africa and Latin America ended the eighties with lower living standards and more hunger than they had when the decade began.
After a point, environmental degradation and economic decline begin to feed on each other. If we have not reversed some of these trends by the end of the nineties, the downward spiral of environmental degradation and economic decline could spread to large areas of the world. That's the bad news. The good news is that public awareness of the extent and effects of the degradation of the planet is rising everywhere. This, combined with the ending of the Cold War, provides hope of redefining security, for recognizing that the real threats to our future come more from the environmental degradation of the planet than from military aggression.
Building an environmentally sustainable global economy, one that satisfies our needs without jeopardising the prospects of future generations, will be a massive undertaking. Unfortunately no models of sustainability exist today. For the past several decades, most developing nations have aspired to the automobile-driven economies of the industrial West. But from the localized problems of intractable air pollution to the global threat of climate change, it is now clear that these societies are far from durable; indeed they are rapidly bringing about their own demise.
Successfully structuring a sustainable society requires that we have some vision of what it would look like, how it would function. If not fossil fuels to power society, then what? If forests are no longer to be cleared to grow food, then how is a larger population to be fed? If a throwaway culture leads inevitably to pollution and resource depletion, how can we satisfy our material needs? In sum, if the present path is so obviously unsound, what picture can we use to guide our actions toward a global community that can endure?
Describing the shape of a sustainable society is a risky proposition. Ideas and technologies yet unknown will fill in many of the gaps. But just as any technology of flight, however primitive or advanced, must abide by the basic principles of aerodynamics, so must a lasting society satisfy some immutable criteria. With that understanding and from the experience garnered in recent decades, it is possible to describe an environmentally sustainable global economy, one that will yield a society quite different, indeed preferable to today's.
TIME TO GET the world on a sustainable path is rapidly running out. We believe that if humanity achieves sustainability, it will do so within the next forty years. If we have not succeeded by then, environmental deterioration and economic decline will be feeding on each other, pulling us into a downward spiral of social decay and political upheaval. At such a point, reclaiming any hope of a sustainable future may simply be impossible. Our vision therefore looks to the year 2030, a time closer to the present than the end of World War II.
Sketching the outlines of a sustainable society obviously requires some basic assumptions. First, new technologies will of course be developed. Forty years ago, for example, some renewable energy technologies now on the market did not even exist. Under the pressure of finding a means to slow global warming, researchers are likely to develop a range of new energy technologies, some of which may be difficult to imagine at the moment. In the interest of being conservative, however, the future we sketch is based only on existing technologies and foreseeable improvements in them.
Second, the world economy of 2030 will most certainly not be powered by coal, oil, and natural gas. It is now well accepted that continuing heavy reliance on fossil fuels will cause catastrophic changes in climate. The most recent scientific evidence suggests that stabilising the climate depends on eventually cutting annual global carbon emissions to some two billion tons per year, about one third the current level. Taking population growth into account, the world in 2030 will therefore have per capita carbon emissions that are one eighth the level in Western Europe today.
The choice then becomes whether to make solar or nuclear power the centrepiece of energy systems. We believe societies will reject nuclear power because of its long list of economic, social, and environmental liabilities. The nuclear industry has been in decline for over a decade. Only ninety-four plants remain under construction, down from nearly 200 a decade ago, and most will be completed in the next few years. Safety concerns and the failure to develop a safe way to store nuclear waste have turned people away from nuclear power.
It is of course possible that scientists could develop new nuclear technologies that are more economical and less accident-prone. Yet this would not solve the waste problem. Nor would it alleviate growing concern about the use of nuclear energy as a stepping stone to developing nuclear weapons. Trying to prevent this in a plutonium-based economy with thousands of operating plants would require a degree of control that is probably incompatible with democratic political systems. Societies are likely to opt instead for diverse, solar-based systems.
The third major assumption is out population size. Current UN projections have the world headed for nearly nine billion people by 2030. This figure implies a doubling or tripling of the populations of Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and scores of other countries where human numbers are already overtaxing natural support systems. Either these societies will move quickly to encourage smaller families and bring birth rates down, or rising death rates from hunger and malnutrition will check population growth.
The humane path to sustainability by the year 2030 therefore requires a dramatic drop in birth rates. As of 1990, thirteen European countries have stable populations; by 2030, most countries are likely to be in that category. For the world as a whole, human numbers will total well below nine billion. We assume a population of at most eight billion that will either be essentially stable or declining slowly, toward a number the earth can comfortably support indefinitely.
In the end, individual values are what drive social change. Progress towards sustainability thus hinges on a collective deepening of our sense of responsibility to the earth and to future generations. Without a re-evaluation of our personal aspirations and motivations, we will never achieve an environmentally sound global community.
DURING THE SEVENTIES and eighties, policymakers assumed that changes in the world energy system would be driven by depletion of the world's fossil fuel resources: as we gradually ran out of oil, coal, and natural gas, we would be forced to develop alternatives. Such a transition would have been comfortably gradual, extending over more than a century. But now the world faces a new set of limits. Long before fossil fuels are exhausted, rising global temperatures from their use would spell an end to civilization as we know it.
The world energy system in the year 2030 is thus likely to bear little resemblance to today's. No longer dominated by fossil fuels, it will be run by solar resources daily replenished by incoming sunlight and by geothermal energy. And it will be far more energy-efficient.
In many ways, the solar age today is where the coal age was when the steam engine was invented in the eighteenth century. At that time, coal was used to heat homes and smelt iron ore, but the notion of using coal-fired steam engines to power factories or transportation systems was just emerging. Yet only a short time later the first railroad started running, and fossil fuels began to transform the world economy.
The late twentieth century, then is the dawn of the solar age. Many technologies have been developed that allow us to harness the energy of the sun effectively, but these devices are so far only in limited use. Without question, these resources are available in immense quantities: the annual influx of accessible renewable resources in the United States is estimated at 250 times the country's annual use of energy.
The mix of energy sources will likely reflect the climate and natural resources of each particular region. Northern Europe, for example, is likely to rely heavily on wind and hydropower. The economies of northern Africa and the Middle East may instead use direct sunlight. Japan and the Philippines will tap their abundant geothermal energy. And Southeast Asian economies will be powered largely by wood and agricultural wastes, along with sunshine. Some nations, Norway and Brazil for example, already obtain over half their energy from renewable.
Although some countries are likely to import renewable energy, the enormous oil-related bills that characterize modern trade relationships will dwindle. And renewable energy sources are to a large extent inflation-proof: solar, wind, and geothermal power plants require no fuel and so are not vulnerable to fuel price increases.
Due to the abundance of sunlight, direct conversion of solar energy will be the cornerstone of a sustainable world energy system. By 2030, solar panels will heat most residential water around the world. A typical urban landscape will have thousands of collectors sprouting from rooftops, much as television antennas do today.
LIVING PLANTS Provide another means of capturing solar energy. Through photosynthesis, they convert sunlight into biomass that can be burned. Today, wood already provides twelve per cent of the world's energy, chiefly in the form of firewood and charcoal in developing countries. Its use will surely expand during the next forty years, though resource constraints will not permit it to replace all of the vast quantities of liquid fuels in use today.
One promising approach is to grow energy crops on marginal lands not currently used for food. Land that is too steeply sloping or not sufficiently fertile or well watered for crops might support trees that are periodically harvested. The wood could then be burned directly in a wood-fired power plant or converted to ethanol.
Geothermal energy employs the huge reservoir for heat that lies beneath the earth's surface, making it the only renewable source that does not rely on sunlight. Continuing advances will allow engineers to use previously unexploitable, lower-temperature reservoirs that are hundreds of times as abundant as those in use today. Virtually all Pacific Rim countries, as well as those along East Africa's Great Rift and Mediterranean Sea, are well endowed with geothermal energy.
In both industrial and developing nations, energy production inevitably will be much more decentralized, breaking up the huge industries that have been a dominant part of the economic scene in the late twentieth century.
GETTING TOTAL GLOBAL carbon emissions down to two billion tons a year requires vast improvements in energy efficiency. Fortunately, many of the technologies to accomplish such reductions are already at hand and cost-effective. No technical breakthroughs are needed, for example, to double automobile fuel economy, triple the efficiency of lighting systems, or cut typical heating requirements by seventy-five per cent.
Automobiles in 2030 will be apt to get at least 100 miles per gallon of fuel, four times the current average for new cars. A hint of what such vehicles may be like is given in a recently developed prototype, the Volvo LCP 2000. It is an aerodynamic four-passenger car that weighs just half as much as today's models. Moreover, it has a highly efficient and clean-burning diesel engine. With the addition of a continuously variable transmission and a flywheel energy storage device, this vehicle could get ninety miles to the gallon.
Forty years from now, Thomas Edison's revolutionary incandescent light bulbs may be found only in museums, replaced by a variety of new lighting systems, including halogen and sodium lights. The most important new light source may be compact fluorescent bulbs that, for example, use eighteen watts rather than seventy-five to produce the same amount of light.
In 2030, homes are likely to be weather-tight and highly insulated, greatly reducing the need for both heating and cooling.
Solar thermal power is poised to become a principal means of harnessing sunlight. It uses mirrored troughs to focus sunlight onto oil-filled tubes that convey heat to a turbine and generator that then produce electricity. An 80-megawatt solar thermal plant built in the desert east of Los Angeles in 1989 converts an extraordinary twenty-two per cent of the incoming sunlight into electricity; at a third less than the cost of power from new nuclear plants. Such plants may make the deserts of the United States, North Africa, and central Asia major exporters of electricity and hydrogen fuel.
Photovoltaic solar cells are a semi-conductor technology that converts sunlight directly into electricity. Currently, photovoltaic systems are less efficient and four times as expensive as solar thermal power is. But they are already used in remote locations, and the cost is likely to decline rapidly.
Photovoltaic can be used not only in large electricity plants but to power small water pumps and rural communications systems. In addition, all Third World villages can be electrified with this technology. Unlike communities today, these villages will not have to depend on extended power lines connected to centralized plants.
Using this technology, home owners throughout the world may become producers as well as consumers of electricity. Indeed, photovoltaic shingles have already been developed that allow roofing material itself to become a power source. As costs continue to decline, many homes will be apt to get much of their electricity from photovoltaics, and in sunny regions residents will sell any surplus to the utility company for use by others.
Wind power is an indirect form of solar energy, generated by the sun's differential heating of the earth's atmosphere. Wind energy is already close to competitive with new coal-fired power plants. Engineers are confident that they will soon have improved wind turbines that are economical not just in California's blustery mountain passes, where they are now commonplace, but in vast stretches of the US northern plains and many other areas.
The United States could be deriving ten to twenty per cent of its electricity from the wind by 2030. Wind power is likely to attract new industries into windswept regions. The wind resources of the U S Great Plains, which have long pumped water for millions of cattle, may one day be used to generate electricity for sale to Denver, Kansas City, and other major cities.
For hydropower, which now supplies nearly one fifth of the world's electricity, prospects for future growth are most promising in the Third World, where the undeveloped potential is still large. Small-scale projects are likely to be more appealing than the massive projects favoured by governments and international lending agencies in past decades. In deciding which hydropower resources to develop, environmental issues such as land flooding and siltation will play an important role.
twenty five to sixty per cent less energy to make than that from wood pulp. And recycling glass saves up to a third of the energy embodied in the original product.
Recycling is also a key to getting land, air, and water pollution down to acceptable levels. For example, steel produced from scrap reduces air pollution by eighty-five per cent, cuts water pollution by seventy-six per cent, and eliminates mining wastes altogether. Paper from recycled material reduces pollutants entering the air by seventy- four per cent and the water by thirty-five per cent, as well as reducing pressures on forests in direct proportion to the amount recycled.
A hierarchy of options can guide materials policy: the first priority, of course, is to avoid using any nonessential item, a goal that can be furthered by concentrating design talents on durability instead of planned obsolescence. Second is to directly reuse a product, for example, refilling a glass beverage container. The third is to recycle the material to form a new product. Fourth, the material can be burned to extract whatever energy it contains, as long as this can be done safely. And finally, the option or last resort is disposal in a landfill.
For many cities, garbage disposal costs during the last decade increased several-fold, making it cost-effective for them to help establish recycling industries. During the nineties, this trend will be reinforced by the need to reduce carbon emissions, air pollution, acid rain, and toxic waste. In the early stages, countries will move toward comprehensive, systematic recycling of metal, glass, paper, and other materials, beginning with a source separation at the consumer level.
In the sustainable economy of 2030, the principal source of materials for industry will be recycled goods. Most of the raw material for the aluminium mill will come from the local scrap collection centre, not from the bauxite mine. Paper and paper products will be produced at recycling mills, with recycled paper moving through a hierarchy of uses, from high-quality bond to newsprint and, eventually, into cardboard boxes. Industries will turn to virgin raw materials only to replace any losses in use and recycling.
Although early moves away from the throwaway society are concentrating on recycling, sustainability over the long term depends more on eliminating waste flows. One of the most obvious places to reduce the volume of waste generated is in industry where a restructuring of manufacturing processes can easily slash wastes by a third or more.
Another major potential source of waste reduction lies in the simplification of food packaging. In the United States, consumers spent more on food packaging in 1986 than American farmers earned selling their crops. In the interest of attracting customers, items are sometimes buried in three or four layers of packaging. Forty years from now, government regulation is likely to have eliminated excessive packaging. Throwaway grocery bags will have been
By the year 2030, a much more diverse set of transportation options will exist. The typical European or Japanese city today has already taken one step toward this future. Highly developed rail and bus systems move people efficiently between home and work: In Tokyo only fifteen per cent of commuters drive cars to the office.
The bicycle will play a major role, as it already does in much of Asia as well as in some industrial-country towns and cities. In Amsterdam and many other communities such as Davis, California, bike-path networks have been developed that encourage widespread use of this form of personal transport. There are already twice as many bikes as cars worldwide. In the bicycle-centred transport system of 2030, the ratio could easily be ten to one.
Forty years from now, people will live closer to their jobs, and much socializing and shopping will be done by bike rather than in a one-ton automobile. Computerized delivery services may allow people to shop from home consuming less time as well as less energy. In addition, a world that allows only two billion tons of carbon emissions cannot be trucking vast quantities of food and other items thousands of kilometres.
Telecommunications will substitute for travel as well. Many people may work at home or in special satellite offices, connected to colleagues and supervisors by electronic lines rather than crowded highways. Daily trips to the office could be replaced by occasional visits. The saved time and frustration will both raise productivity and the quality of life. The automobile based modern world is now only about forty years old, but with its damaging air pollution and traffic congestion, it does not represent the pinnacle human social evolution. Although a world where cars play a minor role may be hard to imagine, our grandparents would have had a hard time visualizing today's world of traffic jams and smog-filled cities.
IN THE SUSTAINABLE, efficient economy of 2030, waste reduction and recycling industries will have largely replaced the garbage collection and disposal companies of today. The throwaway society that has emerged during the late twentieth century uses so much energy, emits so much carbon and generates so much air pollution, acid rain, water pollution, toxic waste, and rubbish that it is strangling itself. Rooted in planned obsolescence and appeals to convenience, it will be seen by historians as an aberration.
Most materials used today are discarded after one use; roughly two thirds of all aluminium, three quarters of all steel and paper, and an even higher share of plastic. Society will become less energy-intensive and less polluting only if the throwaway mentality is replaced by a recycling ethic.
Just five per cent as much energy is needed to recycle aluminium as to produce it from bauxite ore. For steel produced entirely from scrap, the saving amounts to roughly two thirds. Newsprint from recycled paper takes
replaced by durable, reusable bags of canvas or other material.
Societies in 2030 may also have decided to replace multi-sized and shaped beverage containers with a set of standardized ones made of durable glass that can be reused many times. These could be used for most, if not all, beverages, such as fruit juices, beer, milk, and soda pop. Containers returned to the supermarket or other outlet might become part of an urban or regional computerized inventory.
IN ADDITION TO RECYCLING and reusing metal, glass, and paper, a sustainable society also recycles nutrients. In nature, one organism's waste is another's sustenance; in urban societies, however, human sewage has become a troublesome source of pollutants in rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. The nutrient in human wastes can be reused safely as long as the process includes measures to prevent the spread of disease.
In some Asian cities, human waste is already systematically returned to the land in vegetable-growing green belts around cities. Intensively farmed cropland surrounding some cities there produces vegetables year-round using greenhouses or plastic covering during the winter to extend the growing season. Perhaps the best model is Shanghai: after modestly expanding its urban political boundaries to facilitate sewage recycling, the city now produces an exportable surplus of vegetables.
Some cities will probably find it more efficient to use treated human sewage to fertilise aquaculture operations. A steady flow of nutrients from human waste into ponds can supply food for a vigorously growing population of algae that in turn are consumed by fish. In Calcutta, a sewage-fed aquaculture system now provides 20,000 kilograms of fresh fish each day for sale in the city.
SOCIETIES IN 2030 will be using the land intensively; the needs of a population more than half again as large as today's cannot be met otherwise. But unlike the present, land use patterns would be abiding by basic principles of biological stability: nutrient retention, carbon balance, soil protection, water conservation, and preservation of species diversity. Harvests will rarely exceed sustainable yields.
Meeting food needs will pose monumental challenges, as some simple numbers illustrate. By 2030, assuming cropland area expands by five per cent between now and then and that population grows to eight billion, cropland per person will have dropped to a third less than we have in today's inadequately fed world. Virtually all of Asia, and especially China, will be struggling to feed its people from a far more meagre cropland area per person.
In light of these constraints, the rural landscapes of 2030 are likely to exhibit greater diversity than they do now. Variations in soils, slope, climatic, and water availability will require different patterns and strains of crops grown in different ways so as to maximize sustainable output. For example, farmers may adopt numerous forms of agroforestry;
the combined production of crops and trees to provide food, biomass, and fodder, while also adding nutrients to soils and controlling water runoff.
THE FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES that are needed in energy, forestry, agriculture, and other physical systems cannot occur without corresponding shifts in the social, economic, and moral character of human societies. During the transition to sustainability, political leaders and citizens alike will be forced to reevaluate their goals and aspirations and to adjust to a new set of principles that have at their core the welfare of future generations.
Shifts in employment will be among the most visible as the transition gets under way. Moving from fossil fuels to a diverse set of renewable energy sources, extracting fewer materials from the earth and recycling more, and revamping farming and forestry practices will greatly expand opportunities in new areas. Losses in coal mining, auto production, and metals prospecting will be offset by gains in the manufacture and sale of photovoltaic solar cells, wind turbines, bicycles, mass transit equipment, and a host of materials recycling technologies.
Wind prospectors, energy efficiency auditors, and solar architects will be among the booming professions stemming from the shift to a highly efficient, renewable energy economy. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands today, jobs in these fields may collectively total in the millions worldwide within a few decades. Opportunities in forestry will expand markedly.
Many people will find their skills valued in new or expanded lines of work. Petroleum geologists may be retrained as geothermal geologists, for example, while traditional midwives continue to broaden their roles to include the spectrum of family planning needs.
Long before 2030, the trend toward ever larger cities and an increasing ratio of urban-to-rural dwellers is likely to have reversed. For example, the increasing energy intensity of food distribution necessitated by cities cannot continue indefinitely. Smaller human settlements will also be favoured by the shift to renewable energy sources.
Power from renewable technologies, whether photovoltaic cells, wood-fired plants, or wind generators, will allow local areas to capitalize on their natural endowments, whether that be strong winds, bright sunshine, abundant woodlands, or proximity to geothermal reservoirs. In so doing, they foster greater local self-reliance.
As the transition to a more environmentally benign economy progresses, sustainability will gradually eclipse growth as the focus of economic policy-making. Over the next few decades, government policies will encourage investments that promote stability and endurance at the expense of those that simply expand short-term production.
As a yardstick of progress, the gross national product (GNP) will be seen as a bankrupt indicator. By measuring flows of goods and services, GNP undervalues qualities a sustainable society strives for, such as durability and resource protection, and overvalues planned obsolescence and waste. The pollution caused by a coal-burning power plant, for instance, raises GNP by requiring expenditures on lung disease treatment and the purchase of a scrubber to control emissions. Yet society would be far better off if power were generated in ways that did not pollute the air in the first place.
In 2030, planners will measure economic and social advances by sustainability criteria rather than simply by growth in short-term output. As economist Herman Daly observes, a new direction of technical progress is needed, 'one that squeezes more service per unit of resource, rather than one that just runs more resources through the system'. National military budgets in a sustainable world will be a small fraction of what they are today. Moreover, sustainability cannot be achieved without a massive shift of resources from military endeavours into energy efficiency, soil conservation, tree planting, family planning, and other needed development activities. Rather than maintaining large defence establishments, governments may come to rely on a strengthened UN peacekeeping force.
Nations will undoubtedly be co-operating in numerous other ways as well. Careful tracking of changes in atmospheric chemistry, forest cover, land productivity, and ocean resources will be among the many efforts handled by multinational teams of scientists and government work
ers. Even as individual nations move to decentralize power and decision making within their own borders, they may simultaneously establish an unprecedented degree of cooperation and co-ordination at the international level.
Movement toward a lasting society cannot occur without a transformation of individual priorities and values. Throughout the ages, philosophers and religious leaders have denounced materialism as a viable path to human fulfilment. Yet societies across the ideological spectrum have persisted in equating quality of life with increased consumption.
Because of the strain on resources it creates, materialism simply cannot survive the transition to a sustainable world. As public understanding of the need to adopt simpler and less consumptive life-styles spreads, it will become unfashionable to own fancy new cars and clothes. The potential benefits of unleashing the human energy now devoted to producing advertising, buying, consuming, and discarding material goods are enormous.
This energy can be channelled into forming richer human relationships, stronger communities, and greater outlets for cultural diversity, music and the arts. As the amassing of personal and national wealth becomes less of a goal, the gap between haves and have-nots will gradually close.
Lester Brown is President of Worldwatch Institute. He is a recipient of a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation 'genius award' and winner of the UN's 1989 environment prize.
