Can we use it all and still have it?

Originally published 26 March 2002

We have no short­age of gurus will­ing to lead us into the envi­ron­men­tal future.

They range from doom-and-gloomers who fore­see immi­nent glob­al cat­a­stro­phe — melt­ing ice­caps, flood­ed cities, mass species extinc­tions, dis­ease, and star­va­tion — unless we turn our backs on our con­sumerist, tech­no­log­i­cal lifestyles and adopt the pas­toral “restraint” of our ances­tors, to right-wing, think-tank econ­o­mists and radio talk-show hosts who believe the “envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis” is an inven­tion of tree-hug­ging wack­os, and that any prob­lems caused by unfet­tered eco­nom­ic growth can be solved by technology.

Need­less to say, there are bits of truth buried in the rhetoric at both ends of the spec­trum, and cer­tain­ly democ­ra­cy thrives on dis­sent. Yet every open-mind­ed per­son who has lis­tened to the debate knows the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis is real (it has been with us since the dawn of human con­scious­ness), and that it behooves our best inter­ests as a species to adjust our behav­iors accordingly.

But how? We need our gurus. For my mon­ey, the best is Har­vard biol­o­gist Edward O. Wil­son, author of the recent­ly pub­lished The Future of Life (2002).

Wil­son has sev­er­al char­ac­ter­is­tics I look for in a guru:

1. He’s smart. A biol­o­gist of world stature and recip­i­ent of many of the world’s lead­ing prizes in biol­o­gy and conservation.
2. He under­stands the way life works. Wil­son spent most of his pro­fes­sion­al career study­ing ants and oth­er teem­ing crea­tures that inhab­it the mid­dle of the food chain. For him, the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis is not defined by pan­das, koalas, and baby seals, but by a con­tin­u­um of inter­act­ing and inter­de­pen­dent organ­isms that ranges from great blue whales to bacteria.
3. He lis­tens. In The Future of Life, as in his oth­er works, he lets his adver­saries have their say. Like any first-rate sci­en­tist, he gives all views a fair hearing.
4. He’s a human­ist, wide­ly read in his­to­ry, phi­los­o­phy, and lit­er­a­ture, a card-car­ry­ing empiri­cist with­out being a sci­ence nerd. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for his ele­gant prose.
5. He’s an opti­mist. His opti­mism is based, I sus­pect, on his upbring­ing in the rur­al, born-again South, but also on his under­stand­ing of human nature, which is root­ed, in Wilson’s view, in our biol­o­gy. Our self-inter­ests as a species, and the best inter­ests of the plan­et, over­lap suf­fi­cient­ly to give him hope that life’s future can be bright.
6. He has no obvi­ous per­son­al axes to grind. As far as I can tell, Wil­son is about as close as you get to a dis­in­ter­est­ed cham­pi­on for life on Earth.

But enough gush. What about the book?

Start with the dan­ger­ous and eth­i­cal­ly unsup­port­able dis­par­i­ties in wealth, health, and edu­ca­tion between the rich­est and poor­est peo­ples of the world. To bring every­one up to US lev­els of con­sump­tion with exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy would require, Wil­son says, the resources of four more plan­et Earths. The chal­lenge before us is to mit­i­gate the dis­par­i­ties with­out dev­as­tat­ing the nat­ur­al resources of the planet.

The wealth of the world mea­sured by per-capi­ta con­sump­tion is ris­ing, but dis­par­i­ties between rich and poor are increas­ing, and any mea­sure of pros­per­i­ty that takes into account the con­di­tion of the bios­phere is in decline. The rich get rich­er by liv­ing extrav­a­gant­ly on the plan­et’s nat­ur­al cap­i­tal; the poor strug­gle to make do in increas­ing­ly impov­er­ished environments.

Wil­son evokes as a telling exam­ple econ­o­mist Col­in W. Clark’s 1973 analy­sis of the eco­nom­ics of har­vest­ing great blue whales, the largest ani­mal that has ever lived and one of the eas­i­est to kill. By the ear­ly 1970s, the pop­u­la­tion of blue whales had plum­met­ed to sev­er­al hun­dred indi­vid­u­als. The Japan­ese, espe­cial­ly, were eager to con­tin­ue the har­vest even at the risk of extinction.

Clark asked, what prac­tice would yield the whalers the most mon­ey: Cease hunt­ing and let the whales recov­er, then har­vest them sus­tain­ably for­ev­er, or kill the remain­ing whales as quick­ly as pos­si­ble and invest the prof­its in growth stocks? The dis­tress­ing answer: Kill them and invest.

And here we come to the nub of Wilson’s argu­ment. Some­time in this cen­tu­ry, he says, if pop­u­la­tion can be sta­bi­lized, human­i­ty can pass through an envi­ron­men­tal “bot­tle­neck” and find sus­tain­able mate­r­i­al pros­per­i­ty for all with a rea­son­ably intact bios­phere. The big ques­tion is what kind of world do we want to find on the oth­er side of the bot­tle­neck. Will our descen­dants for­give us if in the inter­ests of unre­strained present con­sump­tion we trans­mit a world with­out blue whales and a rich diver­si­ty of species and ecosystems?

Wil­son makes com­pelling eco­nom­ic and sci­en­tif­ic argu­ments for pre­serv­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty, but the force of his analy­sis rests on argu­ments that are eth­i­cal, esthet­ic, one might even say reli­gious. It is pos­si­ble (if bare­ly) that we can have it all, he says, mate­r­i­al pros­per­i­ty and a vibrant bios­phere. One detects in his guard­ed opti­mism a bit of the South­ern Bap­tist preach­er who promis­es a bet­ter life for all “in the sweet by and by” when we “meet on that beau­ti­ful shore.”