An article in Nature magazine (408:8 (2000)) describes a recent meeting organized by
Jean-Jacques Salomon and Alexander Keynan in Paris on the topic of global scientific
cooperation in a post Cold War era.
Jesse participated in the meeting, and is quoted in the article.
* If interested in obtaining a copy of the article contact phe@rockefeller.edu
Our work on hydrogen is reported in the cover story of the Italian weekly newsmagazine
Liberal on 9 December 1999, pp. 9-13, (Vol. 2, no. 48).
The winter 1999/2000 issue of Earth Matters, published by the Earth Institute at Columbia University, contains
a synopsis of Jesse Ausubel’s speech, titled
“Resources are Elastic”,
presented at the “State of the Planet” Conference. (see the 17 November 1999
entry in this list for information on streaming audio/video of the conference).
Jesse’s millennial essay
“Where is energy going?” appeared in The
Industrial Physicist 6(1): 16-19, 2000 (February). The essay had appeared
in Italian in the special millennial edition of the Italian financial
newspaper, Il Sole/24 Ore, on 17 November 1999.
The April 2000 issue of The Industrial Physicist contains
several letters responding to the essay.
Two new articles about Virtual-U©, the
university simulator.
We participated in the 2nd conference of the CFR/WB/WWF on the Great
Restoration of forests. We presented a paper “How much will feeding more
and wealthier people encroach on forests?” All papers are posted on the
project website:
https://greatrestoration.rockefeller.edu
We newly post “Dematerialization,” our 1989 paper that popularized the use
of that word in environmental studies and helped start a wave of research
about it.
Coverage of Columbia’s 1999 “State of the Planet Conference” in the Boston Globe.
*No longer available, contact phe@rockefeller.edu if you wish more information.
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.
Our research is quoted in Time Magazine’s Visions of the 21st Century web report.
Check out Jesse’s talk at the “Sate of the Planet” conference held at Columbia University on Nov. 15-16th. (available via RealPlayer G2 streaming media).* no longer available, contact phe@rockefeller.edu if you wish more information.)
From Time Magazine‘s Visions of the 21st Century web report.
Can We Make Garbage Disappear?
Through the magic of recycling and modern alchemy, we will move swiftly toward a world without waste
by IVAN AMATO
Whoever said “waste not, want not” hasn’t had much influence on 276 million Americans. In 1997 we gave a collective heave-ho to more than 430 billion lbs. of garbage. That means each man, woman and child tossed out an average of nearly 1,600 lbs. of banana peels, Cheerios boxes, gum wrappers, Coke cans, ratty sofas, TIME magazines, car batteries, disposable diapers, yard trimmings, junk mail, worn-out Nikes–plus whatever else goes into your trash cans. An equivalent weight of water could fill 68,000 Olympic-size pools.
And that’s just the relatively benign municipal solid waste. Each year American industries belch, pump and dump more than 2.5 billion lbs. of really nasty stuff–like lead compounds, chromium, ammonia and organic solvents–into the air, water and ground. That’s about 400 Olympic poolfuls of toxic waste.
The really bad news is that most of the planet’s 6 billion people are just beginning to follow in the trash-filled footsteps of the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. “Either we need to control ourselves or nature will,” says Gary Liss of Loomis, Calif., a veteran of recycling and solid-waste programs who advises clients aiming to reduce landfill deposits. As he sees it, garbage–maybe every last pound of it–needs to become a vile thing of the past.
That may seem impossible, but it’s not unprecedented. In nature, Liss points out, there is no such thing as waste. What dies or is discarded from one part of an ecosystem nourishes another part. Liss says humanity can emulate nature’s garbage-free ways, but it will require innovative technology and a big change in attitude. We can get a glimpse of a less profligate future in Kalundborg, Denmark. There, an unusual place called an “eco-industrial park” shows how much can be gained by recycling and resource sharing. Within the park, a power company, a pharmaceuticals firm, a wallboard producer and an oil refinery share in the production and use of steam, gas and cooling water. Excess heat warms nearby homes and agricultural greenhouses. One company’s waste becomes another’s resource. The power plant, for example, sells the sulfur dioxide it scrubs from its smokestacks to the wallboard company, which uses the compound as a raw material. Dozens of these eco-industrial parks are being developed all over the world.
Biotechnology is giving us additional tools to cope with waste–and turn it to our advantage. We now have microbes that can take toxic substances in contaminated soil or sludge–including organic solvents and industrial oils–and convert them into harmless by-products. Soon we may be using genetic engineering to create what Reid Lifset, editor of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, calls “designer waste streams.” Consider all that stalk, or stover, that every corn plant grows along with its kernels. Scientists at Monsanto and Heartland Fiber are working toward engineering corn plants with the kind of fiber content that paper companies would find attractive. So long as the genetic tinkering poses no ecological threat, that approach could tap into a huge stream of agricultural waste, turning some of it into an industrial ingredient.
In consumer markets, recycling has already spawned an army of alchemists. Jackets are being made from discarded plastic bottles, briefcases from worn-out tires and belts from beer-bottle caps. Even though the U.S. has barely begun to get serious about recycling, about 25% of its 430 billion lbs. of municipal garbage is now salvaged, at least temporarily, for some sort of second life.
Recycling will gain momentum as we develop materials that are easier to reuse. For example, Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, predicts that architects will increasingly rely on new types of foamed glass that can be made unusually strong but still lightweight. Glass is a very recyclable material made from sand, and it can be crushed back essentially into sand. Ausubel thinks we could see foamed glass replace much of the concrete in today’s buildings. There are limits, of course, to how many lives you can give a pile of debris. In the long run, we have to reduce the amount of material we use in the first place. Some progress is being made–aluminum cans and plastic soda bottles have become thinner over the years, for example–but more sweeping reductions will require a whole new kind of manufacturing process.
That, says Lifset, is where nanotechnology plays a role. In this emerging field, which employs just about every kind of scientific and engineering discipline, researchers expect to create products by building them from scratch, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. This bottom-up nanotechnological way of making things differs from the traditional drilling, sawing, etching, milling and other fabrication methods that create so much waste along the way.
Researchers have made headway toward molecule-size transistors and wires and even batteries thousands of times as small as the period at the end of this sentence. These laboratory feats make talk of sugar cube-size computers less speculative than it was a few years ago. Says Lifset: “A lot of the consumer goods and industrial equipment could become dramatically smaller when nanotechnology comes online. That, plus more efficient recovery of the discarded goods, ought to translate into huge reductions in waste.”
But technology is not enough. Just as critical are changes in attitudes and lifestyles. Brad Allenby, AT&T’s vice president for environment, safety and health, believes our move from the industrial age to the information age could help enormously. At last count, he says, 29% of AT&T’s management force telecommuted, meaning less reliance on cars. This, Allenby speculates, could be part of something bigger–a shift in our view of what enhances our quality of life. Maybe we’ll put less value on things that use lots of materials–like three cars in the family driveway–and more on things that don’t swallow up resources–like telecommuting and surfing the Internet. Maybe downloading collections of music from the Web will reduce the demand for CD cases. And while visions of a “paperless office” have proved wildly wrong so far, we still have an opportunity to use computers to cut consumption of paper and the trees it comes from.
Allenby thinks of such trends as “dematerialization.” The deeper dematerialization goes in society, the less stuff there will be to discard. What’s more, as society becomes more information-rich, the easier it will be to find uses for the diminishing amount of discarded materials. Maybe, with the help of brokering services on the Internet, we can generalize the principle that governs garage sales: One person’s garbage is another’s treasure. When that attitude goes global, the human beings of the third millennium may be able to look back on their former garbage-producing ways as a forgivable error of their youth as a species.
We post the papers: