A Turn for the Better

Scientists pondering the state of the planet at millennium’s end temper gloomy predictions with hope

By Scott Allen, Globe Staff, 11/22/99

NEW YORK – Predicting the fate of the Earth has long been a gloomy business, a profession where bad things only seem to get worse over time. From book like The Population Bomb to The End of Nature, ecological pundits of the past 40 years have forecast a dark future of pollution, extinction, and growing health problems.

But as the 20th century comes to a close, some leading researchers and policymakers see evidence that the world’s environmental tide may be about to turn. Already the “population explosion” is slowing down, as is the growth rate of gases that cause global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. In western nations, air, water, and land are getting cleaner, and even China is showing new interest in environmental protection.

Though the problems can’t be minimized – more than 5,000 plant and animal species worldwide are threatened with extinction – environmental thinkers gathered for a major conference on the planet’s future at Columbia University last week said the emerging successes offer hope for nature in the 21st century, like blades of grass growing through cracks in the pavement.

”There’s all sorts of evidence … that things are working a little bit better with a little less pounding on the environment,” said William Clark, an authority on environmental issues at Harvard University and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ”genius grant.”

Clark predicted that, by the late 21st century, the global population may finally level off, ending 200 years of dramatic growth that has fuelled a vast increase in environmental damage.

”For your children, each passing year will add fewer people than it did the year before. That is a statement that could not have been made from this podium any other time in the last 1,000 years,” he told the audience.

Equally striking was the optimism of James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the man who, perhaps more than anyone else, popularized the issue of global warming with alarming Congressional testimony in 1988 that emissions from cars and power plants are causing the planet to heat up.

Though Hansen predicted that the next 10 years will be the hottest in US history, he was encouraged that releases of so-called ”greenhouse gases” are growing much more slowly than 20 years ago. Already, he said, the slower growth has delayed by 50 years the date at which greenhouse gases in the air will double their pre-industrial levels. ”I would prefer to think we have turned the corner, and we have the potential to make greenhouse gas growth rates decrease even further in the future,” Hansen declared.

Of course, assessing the health of an entire planet is a complicated task confounded by conflicting information, and optimism was by no means universal among the historians and scientists at Columbia. However, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, seemed to capture the mood when he suggested that humans can solve even the worst problems – if they choose to.

”Our generation has to face a difficult challenge but, as recent history has proved, walls of difficulty, like the Berlin Wall, can fall,” said Gorbachev, who sent his remarks to be read at the conference after he was unable to attend.

The thread of optimism at the State of the Planet conference, held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is ironic, coming as it does at the end of a century that, by many measures, did unprecedented harm to the natural world.

The world population grew almost fourfold in the 20th century, to 6 billion, creating sprawling cities that erased the natural landscape and sucked up natural resources on an astonishing scale. Humans dammed up so much water that geophysicists say it has perceptibly altered the way the planet rotates.

The rise of oil and the modern chemical industry gave humans the power to send pollution to the far corners of the globe. The burning of oil and other fossil fuels increased the atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by 30 percent, while industry introduced 70,000 synthetic chemicals to the environment, some of them deadly toxins such as dioxin.

But, even as environmental problems intensified, promising changes, especially in the industrialized west, foreshadowed a recovery, said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University.

For example, food production exploded in the 20th century, allowing a single hectare of US farmland to feed 80 people where it had fed only three before. Tens of thousands of acres of less productive farmland were abandoned, bringing forests back in places such as Massachusetts, which had been nearly treeless in the 19th century.

In the same way, US water withdrawals have been dropping since the 1970s, said Ausubel, often due to simple plumbing changes. In Boston, for example, an aggressive program of pipe repair has reduced the city’s water use to its lowest level since the 1950s, eliminating the need to divert water from the Connecticut River to Boston’s reservoirs.

Finally, as the US moved away from smokestack industries toward a technology-based economy, industrial pollution has dropped steadily, spurred on by increasingly strict environmental laws.

These improvements haven’t come to the world’s developing nations, from Central America to China, where political leaders often seek to emulate western-style industrial development, with all its attendant pollution from coal dust in the air to oil in drinking water supplies. Developing countries are now the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

But, even in developing nations, the 20th century saw some material improvements as infant mortality rates dropped, literacy rose, and real incomes tripled. To be sure, 800 million people still don’t have enough to eat, but Maurice Strong, secretary general of the landmark 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio De Janeiro, said he sees signs that developing nation leaders understand that economic growth shouldn’t come at the expense of the environment.

”I see an immense surge in new interest in the environment and sustainable development movement” in China, said Strong, who recently discussed the environmental crisis there with Premier Zhu Rongji. ”Not because they have particularly listened to our rhetoric, but because they have experienced (environmental degradation) firsthand.”

In some ways, the buoyance at Columbia hinged on faith in technology to produce environmental solutions that don’t derail the booming global economy. Speakers called for new technologies that provide cheap, clean power, such as fuel cells, as well as cost-effective ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

”The greatest threat to prosperity is the rejection of science,” warned Rockefeller’s Ausubel.

Others argued that the planet was never in as serious shape as some have contended, because they always underestimated human ingenuity.

”The purveyors of doom have discovered how to profit from creating an endless series of false alarms,” said William O’Keefe, president of the 400-member American Petroleum Institute, noting that the world is nowhere near running out of oil despite repeated predictions to that effect.

But Clark of Harvard argued that much of the environmental progress in the west might not have happened without the public outrage generated by authors such as Carson and Ehlrich, even if they over-stated their case.

”We need our Jeremiahs,” said Clark, referring to the gloomy Biblical prophet. ”They are why anyone listens to us.”

In fact, a senior environmental official at BP Amoco, one of the biggest oil companies, conceded that public pressure is a major reason that his industry, one of the biggest polluters of the century, is trying to become ”greener.” London-based BP has voluntarily committed to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 10 percent, and the company is investing heavily in cleaner energy sources such as solar power.

”We’re reinventing the company. There’s a lot of new thinking going on,” said Paul Rutter, BP’s environmental technology leader.

One prominent environmentalist, Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, sees the changing attitudes in the oil industry as evidence that the world is on the edge of an environmental revolution where corporate executives ”sound like spokespeople for Greenpeace,” and the world finally addresses fundamental environmental issues.

”I believe that there are now some clear signs that the world is in the early stages of a major shift in environmental consciousness,” wrote Brown in a much-discussed essay earlier this year.

Even if Brown is right, however, the world has its work cut out for it. Though greenhouse gases aren’t building up as fast as they did 20 years ago, they could still raise the Earth’s average temperature by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, something that Columbia University climate researcher Wallace Broecker calls ”poking the angry beast with a stick.”

Meanwhile, more and more people are placing themselves in harm’s way if global warming produces higher sea levels and more violent coastal storms as many predict. Already, growing populations along rivers and the sea has helped increase the worldwide damage in floods and other natural disasters from $2 billion to $92 billion since 1980.

The question, said one speaker after another, is whether humanity is ready to do what’s necessary to preserve the environment. The issue, they said, is less scientific than it is a question of the human spirit.

Robert Hass, the US poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, seemed to sense both the promise and the peril of the situation in the poem he wrote for the conference, ”State of the Planet:”

”The earth and its heated atmosphere, its cargo

of everything alive, is swimming in a sea we hardly understandOur own primitive astronomical maps of. The young know this story

From the disaster films they flock to see. Because we’re humans, there’s always a love story in it somewhere,

Even as the ship goes down. In fact, we are capable

O f sending the ship down to intensify the story…

Blessings on the ship. Terror for the ship, and pity for it

A nd its hapless crew. For her, standing at the prow,

Our lucky charm, and hope, and heiroglyph,

T he riddle we have to interpret, the future we have to answer to.”

This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 11/22/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.