Excerpted from STATE OF THE WORLD - Worldwatch Institute · STATE OF THE WORLD 1999 A Worldwatch...

STATE OF THE

WORLD

1999A Worldwatch Institute Report on

Progress Toward a Sustainable Society

PROJECT DIRECTOR

Lester R. Brown

ASSOCIATE PROJECT

DIRECTORS

Christopher FlavinHilary F. French

EDITOR

Linda Starke

CONTRIBUTING RESEARCHERS

Janet N. AbramovitzLester R. BrownSeth DunnChristopher FlavinGary GardnerAshley Tod MattoonAnne Platt McGinnMolly O’MearaMichael RennerDavid Malin RoodmanPayal SampatJohn Tuxill

W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y

N E W Y O R K L O N D O N

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A New Economy for

a New Century

Lester R. Brown and Christopher Flavin

In the 1890s, the American PressAssociation brought together the coun-try’s “best minds” to explore the shape ofthings to come in the twentieth century.Conditions at the time were in flux.Technological advances had recentlymade it possible to travel from coast tocoast by rail, the first “skyscraper” had justbeen built, and electricity was becomingcommon in some urban neighborhoods.At the same time, the economy hadrecently been hit by a depression, citieswere filling with growing numbers of poorpeople, and supplies of wood and ironore that had always seemed unlimitedwere beginning to run short.1

As they looked forward to the centuryahead, the country’s “futurists” werealmost universally optimistic, predicting

that many problems would be solved, andthat advancing technology and materialgrowth would produce a near Utopia.Among the predictions that have held upwell: widespread use of electricity andtelephones, the opening of the entireworld to trade, and the emancipation ofwomen. Among the things they missedwere the birth control pill and theInternet. Other forecasts proved to benaive, including the notion that peoplewould live to be 150 and that air pollutionwould be eliminated. The dark sides ofthe twentieth century—two world wars,the development of chemical and nuclearweapons, the emergence of global threatsto the stability of the natural world, and abillion people struggling just to survive—were predicted by no one.2

Today, at the dawn of the next century,faith in technology and human progress isalmost as prevalent in the writings of lead-ing economic commentators. Their easyoptimism is bolstered by the extraordi-nary achievements of the twentieth centu-ry, including developments such as jet

1

The 1996 United Nations biennial population projections are used in this edition since the 1998projections were published too late to be incorpo-rated. The 1998 projections are modestly lower, butnot enough to alter the analysis. Units of measurethroughout this book are metric unless commonusage dictates otherwise.

aircraft, personal computers, and geneticengineering, that go well beyond any-thing predicted by the most imaginativefuturists of the 1890s. But like their pre-decessors, today’s futurists look aheadfrom a narrow perspective—one thatignores some of the most importanttrends now shaping our world. And intheir fascination with the information agethat is increasingly prominent in the glob-al economy, many observers seem to haveforgotten that our modern civilization,like its forerunners, is totally dependenton its ecological foundations.

Since our emergence as a species,human populations have continually runup against local environmental limits: theinability to find sufficient game, growenough food, or harvest enough woodhas led to sudden collapses in humannumbers and in some cases to the disap-pearance of entire civilizations. Althoughit may seem that advancing technologyand the emergence of an integratedworld economy have ended this age-oldpattern, they may have simply transferredthe problem to the global level.

The challenge facing us at the dawn ofa new century begins with scale. Humannumbers are four times the level of a cen-tury ago, and the world economy is 17times as large. This growth has allowedadvances in living standards that ourancestors could not have imagined, but ithas also undermined natural systems inways they could not have feared. Oceanicfisheries, for example, are being pushedto their limits and beyond, water tablesare falling on every continent, rangelandsare deteriorating from overgrazing, manyremaining tropical forests are on theverge of being wiped out, and carbondioxide (CO2) concentrations in theatmosphere have reached the highestlevel in 160,000 years. If these trends con-tinue, they could make the turning of themillennium seem trivial as a historicmoment, for they may be triggering thelargest extinction of life since a meteorite

wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 millionyears ago.3

As we look forward to the twenty-firstcentury, it is clear that satisfying the pro-jected needs of an ever larger world pop-ulation with the economy we now have issimply not possible. The western econom-ic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automo-bile-centered, throwaway economy—thatso dramatically raised living standards forpart of humanity during this century is introuble. Indeed, the global economy can-not expand indefinitely if the ecosystemson which it depends continue to deterio-rate. We are entering a new century, then,with an economy that cannot take uswhere we want to go. The challenge is todesign and build a new one that can sus-tain human progress without destroyingits support systems—and that offers a bet-ter life to all.

The shift to an environmentally sus-tainable economy may be as profound atransition as the Industrial Revolutionthat led to the current dilemma was. Howsuccessful we will be remains to be seen.Yet we have always stood out from otherspecies in our ability to adapt to new envi-ronmental conditions and challenges.The next test is now under way.

THE ACCELERATION OF

HISTORY

Although the specific turning point thatwill be observed on January 1, 2000, is apurely human creation, flowing from thecalendar introduced by Julius Caesar in45 B.C., the three zeros that will appear onthat day are powerful reminders of thepassage of time—and of how the pace ofchange has accelerated since the last suchturning point, in the Middle Ages.Today’s rapid changes tend to make usthink of a century, not to mention a mil-lennium, as a vast span of time. But the

(4) State of the World 1999

sweeping developments in the past centu-ry have all occurred in a period that rep-resents just 1 percent of the time sincehumans first practiced agriculture.4

In a sense, the acceleration of humanhistory began long before the first historybook was ever written. Scientists note thatthe development of technology suddenlysped up some 40,000 years ago, marked bythe proliferation of ever-more sophisticat-ed tools used for hunting, cooking, andother essential tasks. With these tools, ourancestors grew in number to roughly 4million, and spread out from their bases inAfrica and Asia, gradually populating vir-tually the entire Earth—from the humidtropics to arid plains and frozen tundra.5

The second burst of acceleratingchange began roughly 10,000 years agowith the development of settled agricul-ture, first in the “Fertile Crescent” nearthe eastern Mediterranean, and soonthereafter in China and Central America.Although the early development of agri-culture appears to have been spurred bygrowing populations and shortages of eas-ily gathered food, the AgriculturalRevolution soon transformed society,leading to more sophisticated tools andsocial structures, including the emer-gence of the first towns and cities. Theseadvances increased the human carryingcapacity of the planet: human numbers,which had been stalled at roughly 4 mil-lion for tens of thousands of years,jumped to an estimated 27 million in2000 B.C., then to roughly 100 million atthe start of the Christian Era, and to 350million by the beginning of the currentmillennium.6

World population failed to grow muchin the Middle Ages, as limited food sup-plies and devastating plagues sweptEurope and China, and societies stagnat-ed. The next acceleration of historybegan with the accumulation of humanknowledge and the emergence of sciencein the middle centuries of the currentmillennium. These led to the early stages

of the Industrial Revolution in the eigh-teenth century, as manufacturing grew,cities expanded, and trade increased. By1825, our population reached the 1 bil-lion mark for the first time. Even then,however, changes in communications,transportation, agriculture, and medicinewere so slow as to be scarcely perceptiblewithin a given generation. In the earlynineteenth century, most people lived onfarms, and travel was not much differentthan it had been 1,000 years earlier, limit-ed to the speed of a horse: the trip fromNew York to Boston, for example, took sixdays. That this situation could change,and change profoundly, was to most peo-ple unimaginable.7

One hundred years later, the accelerat-ing pace of change can be seen in virtual-ly every field of human activity. Thetechnological advances of this century,building on the scientific progress of ear-lier ones, can only be described as spec-tacular. Advances in mathematics, physics,and engineering have enabled us toexplore other planets in our solar systemand to visit Earth’s moon. Astronauts rou-tinely orbit the Earth in 90 minutes andcan see it as never before. Prior to thiscentury, economies were largely agricul-tural, and growth was generally limited tothe rate of clearing of new land, sinceland productivity changed little over time.But as the century progressed, the mod-ern industrial age unfolded and the west-ern industrial development model beganto spread. It was growth in the industrialsector that sharply accelerated overalleconomic growth during the earlydecades of this century.8

In many ways, the defining economicdevelopment of this century is the har-nessing of the energy in fossil fuels. In1900, only a few thousand barrels of oilwere used daily. By 1997, that figure hadreached 72 million barrels per day. (SeeChapter 2.) We have also seen a vastincrease in the use of materials, includinggrowth in the use of metals from 20 mil-

A New Economy for a New Century (5)

lion tons annually to 1.2 billion tons. (SeeChapter 3.) The use of paper increased sixtimes between 1950 and 1996, reaching281 million tons. (See Chapter 4.)Production of plastics, largely unheard ofin 1900, reached 131 million tons in 1995.The human economy now draws on all 92naturally occurring elements in the peri-odic chart, compared with just 20 in 1900.9

Among the most obvious acceleratingtrends is the increase in human mobility, adevelopment the forecasters in the 1890sdid not anticipate. At the end of the nine-teenth century, early steam-powered trainsand the first motor cars with internal com-bustion engines were limited to speeds ofabout 25 miles per hour—and their highcost kept most people on foot. In 1900,there were only a few thousand automo-biles in use worldwide. Today there are501 million. During the first half of thiscentury we went from the pioneeringflight by the Wright brothers in 1903 atKitty Hawk, North Carolina, to jet aircraftthat could fly faster than sound. Today,jumbo jets routinely carry 400 passengerson transoceanic flights. Their wingspansof 200 feet exceed the 120 feet that Wilburand Orville Wright traveled on their firstflight. On modern aircraft, we travel fasterthan our biological clocks can adjust, leav-ing us jetlagged, our bodies out of syncwith the local day/night cycle.10

Engineers built the first electronic com-puters in 1946; in 1949, Popular Mechanicsmagazine predicted that “computers inthe future may have only 1,000 tubes andperhaps weigh only one and a half tons.”Today, the average 5-pound laptop com-puter can process data faster than thelargest mainframes available at mid-centu-ry. Tiny silicon chips can now perform 200million calculations a second, up from 50million just four years ago. Computers,software, and related products and ser-vices are fueling economic growth anddoing it with a minimal use of physicalresources. Just as mechanization raisedblue collar and farm labor productivity,

computerization is doing the same forwhite-collar workers. In the United States,an important threshold was crossedrecently when the market capitalization ofMicrosoft passed that of General Motors,signifying the dominance of a new gener-ation of technology.11

One outgrowth of the information ageis what The Economist editor FrancesCairncross describes as “the death of dis-tance.” The number of telephone linesleapt from 89 million in 1960 to 741 mil-lion in 1996, while cellular phone sub-scribers rose from 10 million in 1990 to135 million in 1996. At the end of 1998,the world’s first affordable satellite tele-phones went on the market, bringing theworld’s most remote regions into the ubiq-uitous information web. And the numberof households with televisions went from 4million in 1950 to just under 1 billion asthe century closes, bringing the latestnews and cultural trends to a global com-munity. The explosive growth of theInternet, expanding from 376,000 hostcomputers in 1990 to more than 30 mil-lion in 1998, has far surpassed the growthof heavy industry during its heyday.12

In biology, this century saw the emer-gence of antibiotics and a dramatic reduc-tion in the toll of infectious diseases.Routine immunization of children hashelped make infant and child deaths a rar-ity in many societies. Led by the UnitedNations, the world has eradicated small-pox, once a scourge for most of humanity.A more recent U.N. initiative has eliminat-ed polio in two thirds of the world, andpromises to do away with this frighteningdisease entirely. Organ transplants arenow routine and the transfer of geneticmaterial from one species to another iscommonplace. At the same time, 29 newdiseases have been identified in the lastquarter of this century. Among them areLyme disease, the Ebola virus,Legionnaires’ disease, HIV, and the Hantavirus. HIV, now reaching epidemic pro-portions in Africa, is projected soon to


eclipse traditional diseases such as malariaand tuberculosis as the leading cause ofdeath from infectious disease.13

Aside from the growth of populationitself, urbanization is the dominant demo-graphic trend of the century now ending.(See Chapter 8.) In 1900, some 16 citieshad a million people or more, and rough-ly 10 percent of humanity lived in cities.Today, 326 cities have at least that manypeople and there are 14 megacities, thosewith 10 million or more residents. If citiescontinue to grow as projected, more thanhalf of us will be living in them by 2010,making the world more urban than ruralfor the first time in history. In effect, wewill have become an urban species, farremoved from our hunter-gatherer ori-gins and more separated from our natur-al underpinnings than ever before.14

Our growing population has requiredever greater quantities of food, and grow-ing incomes have led many societies todiversify and enrich their diets. Theseburgeoning food demands have been metby a continuing proliferation of new tech-nologies, including the development ofmore productive crop varieties, theexpanded use of fertilizer and irrigation,and the mechanization of agriculture.Grain use has increased nearly fivefoldsince the century began, while water usehas quadrupled. (See Chapter 7.)15

On the darker side, the twentieth cen-tury has also been the most violent inhuman history, thanks in part to techno-logical “advances” such as the airplaneand automatic weapons. Some 26 millionpeople were killed in World War I, and 53million in World War II; combined withother war deaths since the century began,the total surpasses the war casualty figurefrom the beginning of civilization until1900. (See Chapter 9.)16

Another major change that distin-guishes the twentieth century is globaliza-tion—the vast economic and informationwebs that now tie disparate parts of theworld together. By 10,000 years ago, our

ancestors migrating out of Africa had set-tled not only the vast Eurasian continentbut the Americas, Australia, and otherremote corners of the world as well. Ittook most of the time since then, until theEuropean Age of Exploration in the1500s, for the world’s distant peoples tobe brought into more immediate contactwith one another. And it was not until latein the nineteenth century that the devel-opment of steam-powered ships dramati-cally increased international trade. Amajor depression, two world wars, and thecold war slowed the pace of globalizationduring the early stages of this century, butthis has changed dramatically as the 1990send. World trade has grown from $380billion in 1950 to $5.86 trillion in 1997, a15-fold increase.17

With the acceleration of history hascome escalating pressures on the naturalworld—on which we remain utterlydependent, even in the information age.New forms of environmental disrup-tion—stratospheric ozone depletion andgreenhouse warming—have begun alter-ing natural ecosystems in the past twodecades, doing particular damage to coralreefs and suspected damage to speciesranging from frogs to trees. In addition,the continuously growing global economyhas collided with many of the Earth’s nat-ural limits. These collisions can be seen insuch trends as the shrinkage of forests,the depletion of aquifers, and the col-lapse of fisheries.

Our ancestors survived, multiplied,


The market capitalization ofMicrosoft recently passed that ofGeneral Motors, signifying the dominance of a new generation oftechnology.

and advanced by continually adjustingtheir economic patterns and finding newbalances with the natural world. Theaccelerating pace of change in the twenti-eth century has led us to new frontiersand wondrous changes that our ancestorscould not have imagined. But the econo-my that has been created cannot be sus-tained for another century. It is worthnoting that the Fertile Crescent, wherethe first humans settled and citiesemerged, was turned into a virtual desertby ancient farmers and herders, and nowsupports only a small human population.

History will undoubtedly continue toaccelerate, but if our descendants are toprosper, historical trends will have tomove in a new direction early in the twen-ty-first century.

THE GROWTH CENTURY

Growth is a defining feature of the twenti-eth century, and has become the de factoorganizing principle for societies aroundthe world. Although growth rates haverisen and fallen, the total scale of humanactivity has expanded continually, reach-ing levels that would have been unimag-inable in earlier centuries.

This growth story starts with humannumbers. It took all of human history forworld population to reach 1.6 billion in1900; the total did not reach 2 billionuntil 1930. (See Figure 1–1.) The thirdbillion was added by 1960, the fourth by1977, and the fifth in just 12 years, by1989. World population will pass 6 billionin 1999. If population growth follows theU.N. mid-level projection, human num-bers will grow by another 4.6 billion in thenext century. There is a key difference,however. During the twentieth century,growth occurred in both industrial anddeveloping countries; during the nextcentury, in contrast, almost all the

increase will take place in the ThirdWorld—and mainly in cities. Indeed, thepopulation of the industrial world isexpected to decline slightly.18

The annual rate of population growthclimbed from less than 1 percent in 1900to its historical high of 2.2 percent in1964. From there it has slowly declined,dropping to 1.4 percent in 1997. Despitethis, the number of people added eachyear kept increasing—from 16 million in1900 until a peak of 87 million in 1990.Since then the annual addition has alsodeclined, falling to roughly 80 million in1997, where it is projected to remain overthe next two decades before startingdownward again.19

Population is one area where detailedprojections are not only available, theyare revised biennially by the UnitedNations, giving us some sense of wherethe world is headed. According to the1996 update, population projections forindividual countries vary more than atany time in history. In some 32 countries,human numbers have stabilized, while inothers they are projected to double ortriple. With the exception of Japan, all thecountries in the stable group are inEurope. The number of people in a


1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 20000

1

2

3

4

5

6

7Billion

Source: PRB, United Nations

Figure 1–1. World Population, 1900–98

dozen or so countries, including Russia,Japan, and Germany, is actually projectedto decline somewhat over the next half-century. (See Table 1–1.) In another 40countries, which account for nearly 40percent of the global total, fertility hasdropped to at least replacement level—roughly two children per couple. Amongthe countries in this category are Chinaand the United States, the world’s firstand third most populous nations.20

In contrast to this group, some devel-oping countries are projected to tripletheir populations over the next half-cen-tury. For example, Ethiopia’s currentpopulation of 59 million is due to reach213 million in 2050, while Pakistan’s 147million are likely to become 357 million,surpassing the projected population ofthe United States before 2050. Nigeria,

meanwhile, is projected to go from 122million today to 339 million—more peo-ple than in all of Africa in 1950. Thelargest absolute increase is anticipated forIndia, which is likely to add nearly 600million by 2050, eclipsing China as themost populous country. Scores of smallercountries also face potentially overwhelm-ing population growth.21

Some developing countries have fol-lowed China, dramatically lowering birthrates and moving toward population sta-bility. But others are showing signs ofdemographic fatigue, a result of the effortto deal with the multiple stresses causedby high fertility. Governments strugglingwith the challenges of educating growingnumbers of children, creating jobs forswelling ranks of young job seekers, anddealing with the environmental effects of


Table 1–1. The 20 Largest Countries Ranked According to Population Size, 1998, With Projections for 2050

1998 2050Rank Country Population Country Population

(million) (million)

1 China 1,255 India 1,5332 India 976 China 1,5173 United States 274 Pakistan 3574 Indonesia 207 United States 3485 Brazil 165 Nigeria 339

6 Russia 148 Indonesia 3187 Pakistan 147 Brazil 2438 Japan 126 Bangladesh 2189 Bangladesh 124 Ethiopia 213

10 Nigeria 122 Iran 170

11 Mexico 96 The Congo 16512 Germany 82 Mexico 15413 Viet Nam 78 Philippines 13114 Iran 73 Viet Nam 13015 Philippines 72 Egypt 115

16 Egypt 66 Russia 11417 Turkey 64 Japan 11018 Thailand 62 Turkey 9819 France 60 South Africa 9120 Ethiopia 59 Tanzania 89

SOURCE: United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 1996 Revision (New York: 1996).

population growth are stretched to thelimit. When a major new threat arises—such as AIDS or aquifer depletion—theyoften cannot cope.

As recent experience with AIDS inAfrica shows, some countries with rapidpopulation growth are simply over-whelmed. While industrial countries haveheld HIV infection rates among theiradult populations under 1 percent, a 1998World Health Organization surveyreports that in Zimbabwe a staggering 26percent of the adult population is HIV-positive. In Botswana the figure is 25 per-cent, and in Namibia, Swaziland, andZambia, it is 18–20 percent. Barring a mir-acle, these societies will lose one fifth ormore of their adult populations withinthe next decade from AIDS alone. Thesepotential losses, which could bring popu-lation growth to a halt or even intodecline, are the most demographicallycatastrophic human losses from an infec-tious disease since European smallpoxdecimated Indian populations in the NewWorld in the sixteenth century or sincebubonic plague from Central Asia devas-tated Europe in the fourteenth century.These high AIDS mortality trends inAfrica are more reminiscent of the DarkAges than the bright new millennium somany had hoped for.22

Although the notion that populationgrowth can continue unaltered in thenext century is now questioned by many,faith in the feasibility—and desirability—of unending economic growth remainsstrong. During this century, the globaleconomy has expanded from an annualoutput of $2.3 trillion in 1900 to $39 tril-lion in 1998, a 17-fold increase. (SeeFigure 1–2.) Income per person, mean-while, climbed from $1,500 to $6,600, arise of just over fourfold, with most of thisrise concentrated in the second half ofthe century.23

The growth in economic output in justthree years—from 1995 to 1998—exceed-ed that during the 10,000 years from the

beginning of agriculture until 1900. Andgrowth of the global economy in 1997alone easily exceeded that during the sev-enteenth century. Growth has becomethe goal of every society, North andSouth. Indeed, it has become a kind ofreligion or ideology that drives societies.From the posh penthouses of Manhattanto the thatched huts of Bangladesh,human beings strive to raise their stan-dard of living by expanding their wealth.Aspiring politicians promise fastergrowth, and the performance of corpo-rate CEOs is judged by how quickly theirfirms expand.24

Economic growth has allowed billionsof people to live healthier, more produc-tive lives and to enjoy a host of comfortsthat were unimaginable in 1900. It hashelped raise life expectancy, perhaps thesentinel indicator of human well-being,from 35 years in 1900 to 66 years today.Children born in 1999 can expect to livealmost twice as long as their great-grand-parents who were born around the turnof the century.25

While one fifth of humanity lives betterthan the kings of yore, another one fifthstill lives on the very margin of existence,


1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 20000

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40Trillion Dollars

Source: Maddison

(1997 dollars)

Figure 1–2. Gross World Product, 1900–97

struggling just to survive. An estimated841 million people are undernourishedand underweight, and 1.2 billion do nothave access to safe water. The income gapbetween the more affluent and the morepoverty-stricken societies in the world iswidening each year. While growth hasbecome the norm everywhere since mid-century, some countries have been moresuccessful in achieving it than others,leading to unprecedented income dispar-ities among societies.26

As the century comes to a close amidstfinancial crises from Indonesia to Russia,doubts about the basic soundness of theglobal economy have mounted. Theneeds of billions are inadequately met inthe best of times, and as Indonesia’srecent experience shows, even a briefreversal of economic growth can leavemillions on the brink of starvation. Morefundamentally, our current economicmodel is overwhelming the Earth’s natur-al systems.27

OVERWHELMING THE EARTH

Easter Island was one of the last places onEarth to be settled by human beings. Firstreached by Polynesians 1,500 years ago,this small island 3,200 kilometers west ofSouth America supported a sophisticatedagricultural society by the sixteenth cen-tury. Easter Island has a semiarid climate,but it was ameliorated by a verdant forestthat trapped and held water. Its 7,000 peo-ple raised crops and chickens, caught fish,and lived in small villages. The EasterIslanders’ legacy can be seen in massive 8-meter-high obsidian statues that werehauled across the island using tree trunksas rollers.28

By the time European settlers reachedEaster Island in the seventeenth century,these stone statues, known as ahu, werethe only remnants of a once impressivecivilization—one that had collapsed in just

a few decades. As reconstructed by archae-ologists, the demise of this society was trig-gered by the decimation of its limitedresource base. As the Easter Island humanpopulation expanded, more and moreland was cleared for crops, while theremaining trees were harvested for fueland to move the ahu into place. The lackof wood made it impossible to build fish-ing boats or houses, reducing an impor-tant source of protein and forcing thepeople to move into caves. The loss offorests also led to soil erosion, furtherdiminishing food supplies. As pressuresgrew, armed conflicts broke out among vil-lages, slavery became common, and someeven resorted to cannibalism to survive.29

As an isolated territory that could notturn elsewhere for sustenance once itsown resources ran out, Easter Island pre-sents a particularly stark picture of whatcan happen when a human economyexpands in the face of limited resources.With the final closing of the remainingfrontiers and the creation of a fully inter-connected global economy, the humanrace as a whole has reached the kind ofturning point that the Easter Islandersreached in the sixteenth century.

For us, the key limits as we approachthe twenty-first century are fresh water,forests, rangelands, oceanic fisheries, bio-logical diversity, and the global atmos-phere. Will we recognize the world’snatural limits and adjust our economiesaccordingly, or will we proceed to expandour ecological footprint until it is too lateto turn back? Are we headed for a worldin which accelerating change outstripsour management capacity, overwhelmsour political institutions, and leads toextensive breakdown of the ecological sys-tems on which the economy depends?

Although our ancestors have struggledwith water shortages from ancientMesopotamia onward, the spreadingscarcity of fresh water may be the mostunderestimated resource issue facing theworld as it enters the new millennium.


(See also Chapter 7.) This can be seenboth in falling water tables and in riversthat run dry, failing to make it to the sea.As world water use has tripled since mid-century, overpumping has led to fallingwater tables on every continent.30

China and India, the world’s two mostpopulous countries, depend on irrigatedagriculture for half or more of their foodsupply. In China, water tables are fallingalmost everywhere that the land is flat.The northern half of the country is quiteliterally drying out. The water table undermuch of the north China Plain, a regionthat accounts for nearly 40 percent ofChina’s grain harvest, is falling by rough-ly 1.5 meters (5 feet) a year. Projections bythe Sandia National Laboratory in theUnited States show huge water deficitsemerging in some key river basins inChina as the new millennium begins.31

In India, the water situation may bedeteriorating even faster. As India’s popu-lation approaches the 1 billion mark, thecountry faces steep cutbacks in the supplyof irrigation water. David Seckler, head ofthe International Water ManagementInstitute in Colombo, the world’s premierwater research body, observes: “Theextraction of water from aquifers in Indiaexceeds recharge by a factor of 2 or more.Thus almost everywhere in India, fresh-water aquifers are being pulled down by1–3 meters per year.” Seckler goes on tospeculate that as aquifers are depleted,the resulting cutbacks in irrigation couldreduce India’s harvest by 25 percent—ina country where food supply and demandare already precariously balanced andwhere another 600 million people areexpected over the next half-century.32

At present, 70 percent of all the waterworldwide that is diverted from rivers orpumped from underground is used forirrigation, 20 percent is used for industry,and 10 percent goes to residences. Theeconomics of water use do not favor farm-ers. A thousand tons of water can be usedin agriculture to produce one ton of

wheat worth $200, or it can be used toexpand industrial output by $14,000—70times as much. As the demand for waterin each of these three sectors rises and asthe competition for scarce water intensi-fies, agriculture almost always loses.33

As the history of Easter Island suggests,wood has been essential to dozens ofhuman civilizations, and the inability tomanage forests sustainably has under-mined and destroyed several of them.Today, we have a global forest economy inwhich the demands of affluent Japaneseor Europeans are felt thousands of kilo-meters away—in tropical Africa,Southeast Asia, and Canada. (See Chapter4.) Since mid-century, the demand forlumber has doubled, that for fuelwoodhas nearly tripled, while paper use hasgone up nearly six times. In addition,forestlands are being cleared for slash-and-burn farming by expanding popula-tions and for commercial cropproduction and livestock grazing. As pop-ulation pressures intensify in the tropicsand subtropics, more and more forestsare being cleared for agriculture.34

A combination of logging and clearingland for farming and ranching has weak-ened forests in many areas to the pointwhere they are vulnerable to fire. Ahealthy rainforest will not burn. But largesegments of the world’s rainforests areno longer healthy. During the late sum-mer and fall of 1997, forests burned outof control in Indonesia. For months,heavy smoke filled the air in the region,causing millions of people to become ill. Some 1,100 airline flights were can-celed. Earnings from tourism droppedprecipitously.35

Although the fires in Indonesia cap-tured the news headlines, there was evenmore extensive burning in the Amazon,which received much less attentionbecause it was more remote. And in thespring of 1998, forests began to burn outof control in southern Mexico. The near-by state of Texas had several dangerous


air alerts as the smoke moved northward.At times, it drifted as far north as Chicago.In early summer 1998, fires also startedburning out of control in Florida. Evenwith personnel and equipment fromsome 23 states brought in to help, effortsto tame the fires failed. One entire coun-ty was evacuated along with parts of sever-al others—and this in a country thatprobably has the most sophisticated fire-fighting equipment in the world.36

No one could have anticipated theextent of the burning around the worldduring this 12-month span. But in retro-spect, there was a human influence ineach of these situations. A combination of forests weakened by the forces justcited, El Niño–related droughts, and insome cases, as in Florida, record hightemperatures contributed to this whole-sale burning.

Fisheries actually preceded agricultureas a source of food, but ours is the firstgeneration to reach—and perhapsexceed—the sustainable yield of oceanicfisheries. In fact, in just the last half-cen-tury the oceanic fish catch increasednearly five times, doubling seafood avail-ability per person for the world as awhole. Marine biologists doubt, however,that the oceans can sustain a catch muchabove the 95 million tons of the last fewyears. According to the U.N. Food andAgriculture Organization, 11 of theworld’s 15 most important fishing areasand 70 percent of the major fish speciesare either fully or overexploited. The wel-fare of more than 200 million peoplearound the world who depend on fishingfor their income and food security isthreatened. (See Chapter 5.)37

If the biologists are right, then thedecline in seafood catch per person,which started in 1989, will persist for aslong as population growth continues.Those born shortly before 1950 haveenjoyed a doubling in seafood availabilityper person, whereas those born in recentyears can expect to see a halving of the

catch per person during their lifetimes.The beginning of the new millenniummarks the turning point in oceanic fish-eries, a shift from abundance to onewhere preferred species become scarce,seafood prices rise, and the conflictsamong countries for access to fisheriesmultiply.

Although the yield data are not as pre-cise as those for oceanic fisheries, theworld’s rangelands cover roughly twicethe area of croplands, supplying most ofthe beef and mutton eaten worldwide.Unfortunately, as with fisheries, overgraz-ing is now the rule, not the exception.Sustaining future yields of meat, and insome cases milk as well, and providinglivelihoods for ever-growing pastoralistpopulations will put even more pressureon already deteriorating rangelands. Yetanother of our basic support systems isbeing overwhelmed by continuouslyexpanding human needs.38

Perhaps the best single indicator of theEarth’s health is the declining number ofspecies with which we share the planet.Throughout most of the evolutionary his-tory of life, the number of plant and ani-mal species has gradually increased, givingus the extraordinarily rich diversity of lifetoday. Unfortunately, we are now in theearly stages of the greatest decimation ofplant and animal life in 65 million years.39

Of the 242,000 plant species surveyedby the World Conservation Union–IUCNin 1997, 14 percent or some 33,000 arethreatened with extinction. (See Chapter6.) Some 7,000 are in immediate dangerof extinction and another 8,000 are vul-nerable to extinction. The principal cause


A healthy rainforest will not burn, butlarge segments of the world’s rain-forests are no longer healthy.

of plant extinction is habitat destruction,often in the form of land clearing for agri-culture and ranching, for housing con-struction, or for the drainage of wetlandsfor agriculture and construction. Large-scale species migration—propelled bygrowing trade—is compounding thatthreat, as is climate change, which couldeliminate whole ecosystems in thedecades ahead.40

The status of animal species is equallyworrisome. Of the 9,600 bird species thatpopulate the Earth, two thirds are now indecline, while 11 percent are threatenedwith extinction. A combination of habitatalteration and destruction, overhunting,and the introduction of exotic species isprimarily responsible. Of the Earth’s4,400 species of mammals, of which weare but one, 11 percent are in danger ofextinction. Another 14 percent are vul-nerable to extinction if recent trends con-tinue. Of the 24,000 species of fish thatoccupy the oceans and freshwater lakesand rivers, one third are now threatenedwith extinction.41

The globalization of recent decades isalso reducing the diversity of life onEarth. Mushrooming trade and travelhave broken down ecological barriersthat existed for millions of years, allowingthousands of species—plants, insects, andother creatures—to invade distant territo-ries, often driving native species to extinc-tion and disrupting essential ecologicalprocesses. Recent “bioinvasions” haveforced the abandonment of more than 1million hectares of cropland in SouthAmerica and devastated the fisheries ofEast Africa’s Lake Victoria.42

The presence of chemicals in the envi-ronment is affecting the prospects forsome animal species as well. In 1962, biol-ogist Rachel Carson warned in SilentSpring that the continuing use of DDTcould threaten the survival of predatorybirds, such as bald eagles and peregrinefalcons, because of its effect on eggshellformation. More recently, there is grow-

ing concern that a family of syntheticchemicals associated with pesticides andplastics, so-called endocrine disrupters,could be affecting the reproductiveprocess in some species of birds, fish, andamphibians.43

The global atmosphere also faces grow-ing stress. As our fossil-fuel-based globaleconomy has expanded, carbon emissionshave overwhelmed the capacity of naturalsystems to fix carbon dioxide. The resultis a buildup in CO2 from roughly 280parts per million at the beginning of the industrial era to 363 parts per millionin 1998, the highest level ever experi-enced. This buildup of CO2 and othergreenhouse gases is responsible for risingtemperatures over the last century,according to leading scientists. The 14warmest years since recordkeeping beganin 1866 have all occurred since 1980. Theglobal temperature in 1998 is projected tobe both the highest ever and the largestannual increase ever recorded. (SeeFigure 1–3.)44

If the world stays on the present fossilfuel path, atmospheric CO2 concentra-tions are projected to reach twice prein-dustrial levels as soon as 2050—and toraise the Earth’s average temperature


1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 200013.2

13.4

13.6

13.8

14.0

14.2

14.4

14.6

14.8Degrees Celsius

Source: Goddard Institute (prel.)

Figure 1–3. Average Temperature at theEarth’s Surface, 1866–1998

1–3.5 degrees Celsius (2–6 degreesFahrenheit) by 2100. This is expected tobring more extreme climate events,including more destructive storms andflooding, as well as melting ice caps andrising sea levels. A new computer simula-tion by Britain’s Hadley Centre forClimate Change in late 1998 projectedmajor reductions in food production inAfrica and the United States as a result ofclimate change. The Hadley scientists alsoidentify the potential for a “runaway”greenhouse effect after 2050 that couldturn areas such as the Amazon and south-ern Europe into virtual deserts.45

The global climate is an essential foun-dation of natural ecosystems and theentire human economy. If we are enteringa new period of climate instability, theconsequences could be serious indeed,affecting virtually all of Earth’s ecosys-tems, accelerating the pace of extinction,and leaving few areas of economic lifeuntouched.

Even in a high-tech information age,human societies cannot continue to pros-per while the natural world is progressive-ly degraded. Our food crops andmedicines are derived from wild plants,and even genetic engineering is based onrearranging the genes that nature has cre-ated. Moreover, our crops, industries, andcities require healthy ecosystems to storeour water and to maintain a nurturing cli-mate. Like the early residents of EasterIsland, we are vulnerable. But unlikethem, we can see the problem coming.

THE SHAPE OF A NEW

ECONOMY

As noted earlier, the western industrialdevelopment model that has evolved overthe last two centuries has raised living stan-dards to undreamed-of levels for one fifthof humanity. It has provided a remarkably

diverse diet, unprecedented levels ofmaterial consumption, and physicalmobility that our ancestors could not haveimagined. But the fossil-fuel-based, auto-mobile-centered, throwaway economy thatdeveloped in the West is not a viable sys-tem for the world, or even for the Westover the long term, because it is destroy-ing its environmental support systems.

If the western model were to becomethe global model, and if world populationwere to reach 10 billion during the nextcentury, as the United Nations projects,the effect would be startling. If, for exam-ple, the world has one car for every twopeople in 2050, as in the United Statestoday, there would be 5 billion cars. Giventhe congestion, pollution, and the fuel,material, and land requirements of thecurrent global fleet of 501 million cars, aglobal fleet of 5 billion is difficult to imag-ine. If petroleum use per person were toreach the current U.S. level, the worldwould consume 360 million barrels perday, compared with current production of67 million barrels.46

Or consider a world of 10 billion witheveryone following an American diet, cen-tered on the consumption of fat-rich live-stock products. Ten billion people wouldrequire 9 billion tons of grain, the harvestof more than four planets at Earth’s cur-rent output levels. With massive irrigation-water cutbacks in prospect as aquifers aredepleted and with the dramatic slowdownin the rise in land productivity since 1990,achieving even relatively modest gains isbecoming difficult.47

An economy is environmentally sus-tainable only if it satisfies the principles ofsustainability—principles that are rootedin the science of ecology. In a sustainableeconomy, the fish catch does not exceedthe sustainable yield of fisheries, theamount of water pumped from under-ground aquifers does not exceed aquiferrecharge, soil erosion does not exceedthe natural rate of new soil formation,tree cutting does not exceed tree plant-


ing, and carbon emissions do not exceedthe capacity of nature to fix atmosphericCO2. A sustainable economy does notdestroy plant and animal species fasterthan new ones evolve.

Once it becomes clear that the existingindustrial development model is notviable over the long term, the questionbecomes, What would an environmentallysustainable economy look like? Becausewe know the fundamental limits the worldnow faces and some of the technologiesthat are available, we can describe thisnew economy in broad outline, if not indetail. Its foundation is a new design prin-ciple—one that shifts from the one-timedepletion of natural resources to one thatis based on renewable energy and thatcontinually reuses and recycles materials.It is a solar-powered, bicycle/rail cen-tered, reuse/recycle economy, one thatuses energy, water, land, and materialsmuch more efficiently and wisely than wedo today.

The challenge in energy is to replacethe fossil fuel economy with an efficientsolar economy (see Chapter 2), definingsolar energy to include all the energysources that derive from the sun directlyor indirectly. Although solar energy in itsvarious forms has been widely considereda fringe source, it is now moving towardcenter stage. Wind power, for example,now supplies 7 percent of electricity inDenmark and 23 percent in Spain’snorthern region of Navarre, includingthe capital, Pamplona. More important,however, is the potential. A survey of U.S.wind resources by the Department ofEnergy concluded that just three states—North Dakota, South Dakota, andTexas—had enough harnessable windenergy to satisfy national electricity needs.China has enough wind potential to easi-ly double its current electricity generatingcapacity.48

The use of solar cells to supply electric-ity is also spreading rapidly. As of the endof 1998, some 500,000 homes, most of

them in Third World villages not yet con-nected to an electrical grid, were gettingtheir electricity from solar cells.Technologically, the most excitingadvance comes from solar roofing materi-al developed in the past few years. Thesesolar tiles and shingles are made of pho-tovoltaic cells that convert sunlight intoelectricity. They promise not only to cre-ate rooftops that become the powerplants for buildings, but to revolutionizeelectricity generation worldwide.49

Widely disparate growth rates in ener-gy use show that this new climate-stabiliz-ing solar energy economy is beginning totake shape. (See Table 1–2.) While theuse of coal during the 1990s has beenexpanding by 1.2 percent a year and thatof oil by 1.4 percent, sales of solar cellshave been climbing 17 percent annuallyand wind-generated electricity hasincreased 26 percent a year. Although the base from which these two newsources are developing is quite small,they are both projected to grow rapidly,

with the potential to become corner-stones of the world energy economy overthe next few decades. Thus far, most ofthe installed wind power, for example,


Table 1–2. Trends in Energy Use, by Source,1990–971

Average Annual Energy Source Growth Rate

(percent)

Wind power 25.7Solar photovoltaics 16.8Geothermal power2 3.0Natural gas 2.1Hydroelectric power2 1.6Oil 1.4Coal 1.2Nuclear power 0.6

1Energy use measured in installed generatingcapacity for wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclearpower; million tons of oil equivalent for oil, naturalgas, coal; and megawatts for shipments of solar cells.21990–96 only.SOURCE: See endnote 50.

is concentrated in Germany, the UnitedStates, Denmark, and India, but as morecountries turn to wind, growth is likely to accelerate.50

In 1997, British Petroleum announcedthat it was taking the threat of globalwarming seriously and was putting $1 billion into solar and other renewableenergy resources. Royal Dutch Shell followed shortly thereafter, announcing acommitment of $500 million to renew-able energy resources, with additionalfunds likely to follow. For energy compa-nies interested in growth, it is not likely tobe in petroleum, since due to resourcelimits, oil production is projected to peakin the next 5 to 20 years, and then tobegin declining.51

As the cost of electricity from wind andother solar sources falls, it will becomeeconomical to electrolyze water, produc-ing hydrogen. Hydrogen thus becomes away of both storing and transportingrenewable energy. A device called a fuelcell efficiently turns hydrogen back intoelectricity in automobiles or small powerplants located in homes or office build-ings. Several major oil and gas companies,including Royal Dutch Shell and Gasuniein the Netherlands, have begun to take aninterest in hydrogen, while Daimler-Benz,Ford, General Electric, and Toyota are allinvesting in fuel cells. By the middle ofthe next century, hydrogen producedfrom wind-generated electricity in theplains of Mongolia or solar electricityfrom the deserts of Arizona may be sentby pipeline to distant cities.52

The notion of transport systems cen-tered on bicycles and railroads may seemprimitive at first, but this is because gov-ernments everywhere have assumed thatthe auto-centered transportation systemwas the only one to consider seriously. Theunfolding reality, however, is quite differ-ent. In 1969, the world produced 25 mil-lion bicycles and 23 million cars. Andalthough car production was expectedshortly to overtake that of bicycles, it actu-

ally fell further and further behind. Inrecent years, annual production of bicy-cles has averaged 105 million while that ofautomobiles has averaged 37 million. Incontrast to the United States, where mostbicycles sold are for recreational use, mostof the 105 million bicycles sold each yearworldwide are for basic transportation.53

There are many reasons why bicycleshave gained in popularity a century afterthe automobile was invented. One is thatthe number of people who can afford abicycle is far greater than the number whocan afford a car. Not only has this beentrue in recent decades, but it is also likelyto be so for some decades to come. Citiesare turning to them because they requirelittle land, do not pollute, and reduce traf-fic congestion and noise. Even thoughsome cities in Asia, notably in China andIndonesia, are discouraging the use of thebicycle instead of the car, a growing num-ber of cities are favoring bikes.54

People everywhere are discovering theinherent incompatibility between theautomobile and the city as traffic conges-tion, air pollution, and noise diminish thequality of life. Land scarcity, especially inseverely populated countries, will limitthe role of the automobile. In China, agroup of prominent scientists has chal-lenged the central government’s decisionto build an auto-centered transportationsystem, arguing that the country does nothave enough land both to feed its peopleand to build the roads, highways, andparking lots needed for cars. The neweconomy will not exclude the automobile,because in many situations it is indispens-


In 1997, British Petroleumannounced that it was putting $1 billion into solar and other renewableenergy resources.

able, but it is unlikely to be the center-piece of the transportation system as it isin many nations today.55

Replacing a throwaway economy with areduce/reuse/recycle economy is per-haps more easily understood than restruc-turing the transportation system becauseof the progress already made in recycling.Nonetheless, even with substantial recy-cling gains, the flow of garbage into land-fills is still increasing almost everywherein the world. We still have a long way to goin increasing material efficiency. Someargue that it is possible to reduce materi-als use by a factor of four. Indeed, theOrganisation for Economic Co-operationand Development is investigating ways toreduce the use of materials in modernindustrial societies by 90 percent. (SeeChapter 3.) The overall challenge in man-ufacturing is to follow a new design prin-ciple, with services rather than goods asthe focus. Interface, for example—anAtlanta-based firm operating in 26 coun-tries—sells carpeting services to its clients,systematically recycling the worn-out car-pets, leaving nothing for the landfill. Thekey is to gradually reduce the materialthroughput of the economy, reducingenergy use and pollution in the process.56

Companies around the world are nowpursuing a concept known as “eco-effi-ciency,” with the goal of maximizing pro-duction while minimizing or, in somecases, eliminating effluents. WilliamMcDonough and Michael Braungartargue that these principles can underpina “new industrial revolution” in which

material and energy flows are minimizedand the water and air leaving a factory arein some cases cleaner than that going in.57

As water scarcity continues to spread,the need to make the global economymore water-efficient will become evenmore apparent. This includes both turn-ing to more water-efficient sources ofenergy and dramatically increasing theefficiency of water use in agriculture.Fortunately, the energy sources that donot destabilize climate, such as solar cellsand wind turbines, do not require largeamounts of water for cooling, in contrastto nuclear energy and coal.

Early signs of the emerging new econ-omy can be seen in recent decisions bycorporations and governments. In addi-tion to the oil companies that are nowinvesting heavily in wind and solarresources, other firms are also moving ina sustainable direction. MacMillanBloedel, for instance, the leading timbercompany in British Columbia, is aban-doning clearcutting, replacing it with theselective cutting of trees.58

Bill Ford, who became Chairman ofthe Ford Motor Company in late 1998,declares himself a “passionate environ-mentalist” and has predicted the demiseof the internal combustion engine popu-larized by his great-grandfather early inthe century. “There is a rising tide of envi-ronmental awareness,” says Ford. “Smartcompanies will get ahead of the wave.Those that don’t will be wiped out.”Thomas Casten, CEO of the fast-growingTrigen Energy Corporation, hasembraced the threat of climate change asone of the greatest business opportunitiesof the twenty-first century. The small,extraordinarily efficient power plants hiscompany provides can triple the energyefficiency of some older, less efficientplants. The issue, he says, is not howmuch it will cost to reduce carbon emis-sions, but who is going to harvest theenormous profits in doing so.59

At the government level, Costa Rica


Bill Ford, Chairman of the FordMotor Company, has predicted thedemise of the internal combustionengine popularized by his great-grandfather.

plans to generate all its electricity fromrenewable sources by 2010, and theDanish government has banned the con-struction of coal-fired power plants.China has banned timber harvesting inthe upper reaches of the Yangtze andYellow river basins, noting that the waterstorage capacity of intact forests makestrees three times more valuable standingthan cut for lumber. And most exciting ofall, Germany, now governed by a coalitionof Social Democrats and Greens, plans amassive tax restructuring, reducingincome taxes and raising energy taxes.60

These are just a few of the early exam-ples of companies and countries that arebeginning to envisage, and work toward, asustainable future. The century to comewill be the environmental century—either because we use the basic principlesof ecology to design a new economic sys-tem or because we fail to, and find thatcontinuing deterioration of the econo-my’s environmental support systems leadsto economic decline. The issue is notgrowth versus no growth, but what kind ofgrowth and where. Converting the econo-my of the twentieth century into one thatis environmentally sustainable representsthe greatest investment opportunity inhistory, one that dwarfs anything that hasgone before.

RETHINKING PROGRESS

As we approach the twenty-first century,many respected thinkers seem to believethat we are in for a period of inevitableeconomic and technological progress.Even the recent economic crisis that hasspread misery from Indonesia to Russia isseen as a brief pause in an unendingupward climb for Homo sapiens. In a spe-cial double issue on the economy in thetwenty-first century, Business Week ran aheadline proclaiming, “You Ain’t SeenNothing Yet,” forecasting even faster rates

of economic progress in the centuryahead. The magazine’s editors expect theglobal economy to ride a wave of technol-ogy in the decades to come, solving allmanner of social problems, as well asadding to the investment portfolios of itsreaders.61

This view of the future, fueled by headyadvances in technology, is particularlyprevalent in the information industry. Itreflects a new conception of the humanspecies, one in which human societies areseen as free of dependence on the natur-al world. Our information-based economyis thought capable of evolving indepen-dently of the Earth’s ecosystem.

The complacency reflected in this viewoverlooks our continued dependence onthe natural world and the profound vul-nerabilities this represents. It concen-trates on economic indicators whilelargely overlooking the environmentalindicators that measure the Earth’s physi-cal deterioration. This view is dangerousbecause it threatens to discourage therestructuring of the economy needed ifeconomic progress is to continue. If weare to build an environmentally sustain-able economy, we have to go beyond tra-ditional economic indicators of progress.If we put a computer in every home in thenext century but also wipe out half of theworld’s plant and animal species, thatwould hardly be an economic success.And if we again quadruple the size of theglobal economy but many of us are hun-grier than our hunter-gatherer ancestors,we will not be able to declare the twenty-first century a success.

One of the first steps in redefiningprogress is to recognize that our genera-tion is the first whose actions can affectthe habitability of the planet for futuregenerations. We have acquired this capac-ity not by conscious design but as a conse-quence of a global economy that isoutgrowing its environmental support sys-tems. In effect, we have acquired thecapacity to alter the Earth’s natural sys-


tems but have refused to accept responsi-bility for doing so. We live in a world thathas an obsessive preoccupation with thepresent. Focused on quarterly profit-and-loss statements, we are behaving asthough we had no children. In short, wehave lost our sense of responsibility tofuture generations.

Parents everywhere are concernedabout their children. In their efforts toensure a better life for them, they investin education and medical care. But unlesswe now assume responsibility for the evo-lution of the global economy, our short-term investments in our children’s futuremay not amount to much; our principallegacy to them would be a world that isdeteriorating ecologically, declining eco-nomically, and disintegrating socially.

Building an environmentally sustain-able global economy depends on a coop-erative global effort. No country actingalone can stabilize its climate. No countryacting alone can protect the diversity oflife on Earth. No country acting alone canprotect oceanic fisheries. These goals canbe achieved only through global coopera-tion that recognizes the interdependenceof countries. Unless the needs of thepoorer nations for food, sanitation, cook-ing fuels, and other basic requirementsare being met, the world’s more affluentnations can hardly expect them to con-tribute to solving long-term global prob-lems such as climate change. Thechallenge is to reverse the last decade’strends of rising international inequalities

and shrinking aid programs. In short, we can no longer separate

efforts to build an environmentally sus-tainable economy from efforts to meetthe needs of the world’s poor. Accordingto various estimates, some 841 millionpeople in the world are malnourished, 1.2billion lack access to clean water, 1.6 bil-lion are illiterate, and 2 billion do nothave access to electricity.62

Forbes magazine estimates that the 225richest people in the world now have acombined wealth of more than $1 trillion,a figure that approaches the combinedannual incomes of the poorest one half ofhumanity. Indeed, the assets of the threerichest individuals exceed the combinedannual economic output (measured atthe current exchange rate) of the 48poorest countries. It is now becomingobvious that the widening gap betweenrich and poor is untenable in a worldwhere resources are shared. In theabsence of a concerted effort by thewealthy to address the problems of pover-ty and deprivation, building a sustainablefuture may not be possible.63

Efforts to restore a stable relationshipbetween the economy and its environ-mental support systems depends on socialcohesion within societies as well. As at theinternational level, this cohesion is alsoinfluenced by the distribution of wealth.As communications improve, and asseverely deprived people everywherecome to understand better their relativeeconomic position, they are likely to takeaction to achieve a more equitable shareof the economic pie. In October 1998, thedisenfranchised in the economicallydepressed southern part of Nigeria begantaking over oil wells and pumping stationsto protest their government’s failure touse its vast flow of oil wealth to benefitpeople in the region. A villager noted that even though oil had flowed out of the area for 30 years, his village still had “no school, no clinic, no power, andlittle hope.”64


We need a new moral compass toguide us into the twenty-first cen-tury—a compass grounded in theprinciples of meeting human needssustainably.

The trends of recent years suggest thatwe need a new moral compass to guide usinto the twenty-first century—a compassthat is grounded in the principles ofmeeting human needs sustainably. Suchan ethic of sustainability would be basedon a concept of respect for future genera-tions. The challenge may be greatest inthe United States, where the per capitause of grain, energy, and materials is thehighest in the world, and where in the1990s half of all adults are overweight,where houses and cars have continued toget larger, and where driving has contin-ued to increase, overwhelming twodecades’ worth of efficiency improve-ments. The world’s ecosystems have large-ly survived 270 million people living likethis in the twentieth century, but they willnot survive 8 billion or more doing so inthe twenty-first century.65

At issue is a change in understandingand values that will support a restructur-ing of the global economy so that eco-nomic progress can continue. Althoughsuch a transformation may seem far-fetched, the end-of-century perspectiveoffers hope. The past 100 years have seenvast changes in ethics and standards. Theconcept of “human rights,” for example,has flowered in the twentieth century.The basic principles of human rights havebeen around for several hundred years,but only in 1948—a mere half-centuryago—did governments adopt a complexbody of national and international lawsthat recognize these rights. Anotherexample of changing attitudes and values,

one that has occurred even faster, is thegrowing understanding of the effects ofcigarette smoking on health. This recog-nition has led to a sea change in publicattitudes and policies toward smokingwithin a few decades.66

It is difficult to overstate the urgency ofreversing the trends of environmentaldeterioration. Archeologists study theremains of civilizations that irreparablyundermined their ecological support sys-tems. These societies found themselves ona population or economic path that wasenvironmentally unsustainable—and werenot able to make the economic adjust-ments to avoid a collapse. Unfortunately,archeological records do not tell uswhether these ancient civilizations did notunderstand the need for change, orwhether they saw the problem but couldnot agree on the steps needed to stave offeconomic decline. Today, the adjustmentswe need to make are clear. The question iswhether we can make them in time.

We know what we need to do. We havea vision of a restructured economy, onethat will sustain economic and socialprogress. In Chapter 10 we describe thepolicies—including the key one of restruc-turing the tax system—that can be used toget us there. The challenge is to mobilizepublic support for that economic transfor-mation. No challenge is greater, or moresatisfying, than building an environmen-tally sustainable global economy, onewhere economic and social progress cancontinue not only in the twenty-first cen-tury but many centuries beyond.


NotesChapter 1. A New Economy for aNew Century

1. Dave Walter, ed., Today Then: America’sBest Minds Look 100 Years Into the Future on theOccasion of the 1893 World’s ColumbianExposition (Helena, MT: American & WorldGeographic Publishing, 1992).

2. Ibid.

3. 1900 population estimates from CarlHaub, “How Many People Have Ever Lived onEarth,” Population Today, February 1995; pre-sent population from United Nations, WorldPopulation Prospects: The 1996 Revision (NewYork: 1996); economic activities estimatesfrom Worldwatch update of Angus Maddison,Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992 (Paris:Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD), 1995); carbon dioxideconcentrations from Timothy Whorf and C.D.Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography,La Jolla, CA, letter to Seth Dunn, WorldwatchInstitute, 2 February 1998.

4. Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning theMillennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a PreciselyArbitrary Countdown (New York: HarmonyBooks, 1997); Clive Ponting, A Green History ofthe World: The Environment and the Collapse ofGreat Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books,1991); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1997).

5. Ponting, op. cit. note 4.

6. Ibid; Haub, op. cit. note 3.

7. Ponting, op. cit. note 4; Haub, op. cit.note 3; time to travel from New York to Bostonis a Worldwatch estimate based on 55 kilome-ters per day in a stagecoach.


9. Arnulf Grubler, Alan McDonald, andNebojsa Nakicenovic, eds., Global EnergyPerspectives (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998); British Petroleum (BP), BPStatistical Review of World Energy 1998 (London:Group Media & Publications, 1998); metalsfrom Metallgesellschaft AG and World Bureau ofMetal Statistics, MetallStatistik/Metal Statistics1985–1995 (Frankfurt and Ware, U.K.: 1996),and from Metallgesellschaft AG, StatisticalTables (Frankfurt: various years); paper fromU.N. Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO), FAOSTAT Statistics Database,<http://apps.fao.org>; plastics from UnitedNations, Industrial Commodity Statistics Yearbook(New York: various years); dependence on naturally occurring elements from U.S.Congress, Office of Technology Assessment,Green Products by Design: Choices for a CleanerEnvironment (Washington, DC: U.S Govern-ment Printing Office, September 1992).

10. James J. Flink, The Automobile Age(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988);Worldwatch estimate based on American Auto-mobile Manufacturers Association (AAMA),World Motor Vehicle Facts & Figures 1997(Detroit, MI: 1997), and on Standard & Poor’sDRI, World Car Industry Forecast Report(London: February 1998); Wright brothersfirst flight from <http://www.nasm.edu>,viewed 6 November 1998; wingspan of Boeing

777 from <http://www.boeing.com>, viewed 6November 1998.

11. Popular Mechanics from Wilson Dizard,Jr., Meganet: How the Global CommunicationsNetwork Will Connect Everyone on Earth(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); NicholasDenton, “Microsoft Capitalisation Exceeds$200bn,” Financial Times, 26 February 1998.

12. Frances Cairncross, The Death ofDistance: How the Communications Revolution WillChange Our Lives (Boston: Harvard BusinessSchool Press, 1997); telephone lines and cellular phones from International Tele-communication Union (ITU), World Tele-communications Indicators on Diskette (Geneva:1996), with 1996 from ITU, Challenges to theNetwork: Telecoms and the Internet (Geneva:September 1997); satellite telephones fromIridium Corporation, “The World’s FirstGlobal Satellite Telephone and Paging StartsService Today,” press release (Washington, DC:1 November 1998); televisions from UnitedNations, Statistical Yearbook (New York: variousyears), and from “World TV Households: TheGrowth Continues,” Screen Digest, March 1993;host computers connected to Internet fromNetwork Wizards, “Internet Domain Surveys,1981–1998,” <http://www.nw.com>, viewed 6 February 1998.

13. World Health Organization (WHO),The World Health Report 1998 (Geneva: 1998).

14. Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years ofUrban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston,NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987); UnitedNations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 1996Revision (New York: 1997).

15. Grain and water use increases are esti-mates of Lester Brown based on world popula-tion in 1900 and the assumption that grainconsumption per person remained roughlythe same between 1900 and 1950; grainincreases since 1950 are from U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA),Production, Supply, and Distribution, electronicdatabase, Washington, DC, updated October

1998; water increases since 1950 from SandraPostel, Last Oasis, rev. ed. (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1997).

16. World War I deaths from EricHobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of theWorld, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books,1994); World War II deaths from Ruth LegerSivard, World Military and Social Expenditures1996 (Washington, DC: World Priorities,1996); historical war casualties from WilliamEckhardt, “War-Related Deaths Since 3000BC,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, December 1991.

17. Diamond, op. cit. note 4; trade figuresfrom International Monetary Fund (IMF),World Economic Outlook October 1997(Washington, DC: 1997), from IMF, FinancialStatistics Yearbook, November 1997, and fromIMF, International Financial Statistics, January1998.

18. Figure 1–1 and population estimatesfrom Haub, op. cit. note 3, and from UnitedNations, op. cit. note 3.

19. United Nations, op. cit. note 3.

20. Ibid.; Population Reference Bureau,World Population Data Sheet, wallchart(Washington, DC: May 1998).


22. Joint United Nations Programme onHIV/AIDS and WHO, Report on the GlobalHIV/AIDS Epidemic (Geneva: June 1998); his-torical plagues from Diamond, op. cit. note 4.

23. Figure 1–2 based on a Worldwatchupdate of Maddison, op. cit. note 3.

24. Ibid.; Herbert R. Block, The PlanetaryProduct in 1980: A Creative Pause? (Washington,DC: U.S. Department of State, 1981).


26. FAO, The Sixth World Food Survey (Rome:1996); U.N. Development Programme(UNDP), Human Development Report 1998 (NewYork: 1998).

(190) Notes (Chapter 1)

27. Mark Landler, “Living for Rice,Begging for Rice,” New York Times, 7September 1998.


29. Ibid.

30. Postel, op. cit. note 15.

31. Share of harvest from irrigated land inChina from Working Group on EnvironmentalScientific Research, Technology Developmentand Training, “The Role of SustainableAgriculture in China: Environmentally SoundDevelopment,” presented at the FifthConference of the China Council forInternational Cooperation on Environmentand Development, Shanghai, 23–25September 1996, and in India from MarkLindeman, USDA, Foreign AgriculturalService, conversation with Brian Halweil,Worldwatch Institute, 14 December 1997;water table drops and grain share from northChina Plain from Liu Yonggong and John B.Penson, Jr., “China’s Sustainable Agricultureand Regional Implications,” presented to thesymposium on Agriculture, Trade andSustainable Development in Pacific Asia:China and its Trading Partners, Texas A&MUniversity, College Station, TX, 12–14February 1998; Dennis Engi, ChinaInfrastructure Initiative, Sandia NationalLaboratory, <http://mason.igaia.sandia.gov/igaia/china/water.html>, viewed 3 November1998.

32. United Nations, op. cit. note 3; DavidSeckler, David Molden, and Randolph Barker,“Water Scarcity in the Twenty-First Century”(Colombo, Sri Lanka: International WaterManagement Institute, 27 July 1998).

33. I.A. Shiklomanov, “World Fresh WaterResources,” in Peter H. Gleick, ed., Water inCrisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);“Water Scarcity as a Key Factor Behind GlobalFood Insecurity: Round Table Discussion,”Ambio, March 1998.

34. FAO, State of the World’s Forests 1997(Oxford, U.K.: 1997).

35. Cindy Shiner, “Thousands of FiresRavage Drought-Stricken Borneo,” WashingtonPost, 24 April 1998; World Wide Fund forNature, The Year the World Caught on Fire, WWFInternational Discussion Paper (Gland,Switzerland: December 1997).

36. Anthony Faiola, “Amazon Going Up inFlames,” Washington Post, 27 April 1998; MollyMoore, “Fires Devastate Mexico,” WashingtonPost, 12 April 1998; “The Sky Flashed,” TheEconomist, 11 July 1998.

37. FAO, Yearbook of Fishery Statistics: Catchesand Landings (Rome: various years), with1990–96 data from FAO, Rome, letters toWorldwatch, 5 and 11 November 1997; 11 of15 based on Maurizio Perotti, fishery statisti-cian, Fishery Information, Data and StatisticsUnit, Fisheries Department, FAO, Rome, e-mail to Worldwatch, 14 October 1997.

38. H. Dregne et al., “A New Assessment ofthe World Status of Desertification,”Desertification Control Bulletin, no. 20 (1991).

39. Extinction rates from Chris Bright, LifeOut of Bounds (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1998).

40. Kerry S. Walter and Harriet J. Gillett,eds., 1997 IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants(Gland, Switzerland: World ConservationUnion–IUCN, 1997).

41. Jonathan Baillie and BrianGroombridge, eds., 1996 IUCN Red List ofThreatened Animals (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN,1996).

42. Bright, op. cit. note 39.

43. Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski,and John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future(New York: Dutton Books, 1996).

44. J.T. Houghton et al., eds., ClimateChange 1995: The Science of Climate Change,

Notes (Chapter 1) (191)

Contribution of Working Group I to theSecond Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996); C.D. Keeling and T.P. Whorf,“Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations (ppmv)Derived From In Situ Air Samples Collected atMauna Loa Laboratory, Hawaii,” ScrippsInstitution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA,August 1998; Figure 1–3 from James Hansen etal., Goddard Institute for Space Studies,Surface Air Temperature Analyses, “GlobalTemperature Anomalies in .01 C, Meteoro-logical Stations Only” and “Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index,” <http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP>, viewed 25September 1998, based on data for the firsteight months of 1998.

45. Houghton et al., eds., op. cit. note 44;Robert T. Watson, Marufu C. Zinyowera, andRichard H. Moss, eds., Climate Change 1995:Impacts, Adaptations, and Mitigation of ClimateChange: Scientific-Technical Analyses, Contribu-tion of Working Group II to the SecondAssessment Report of the IPCC (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1996); HadleyCentre from Paul Brown, “British ReportForecasts Runaway Global Warming,”Guardian (London), 3 November 1998.

46. Mathew L. Wald, “Number of Cars isGrowing Faster Than Human Population,”New York Times, 21 September 1997; AAMA, op.cit. note 10; U.S. Department of Energy(DOE), Energy Information Administration(EIA), Monthly Energy Review (Washington, DC:September 1998).

47. USDA, op. cit. note 15.

48. BTM Consult ApS, Ten Percent of theWorld’s Electricity Consumption from Wind Energy!,prepared for Forum for Energy &Development (Ringkobing, Denmark:October 1998); Esteban Morrás, EnergíaHidroeléctrica de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain,discussion with Christopher Flavin, 23October 1998; D.L. Elliott, L.L. Windell, andG.L. Gower, An Assessment of the Available Windy

Land Area and Wind Energy Potential in theContiguous United States (Richland, WA: PacificNorthwest Laboratory, 1991).

49. Christopher Flavin and Molly O’Meara,“Solar Power Markets Boom,” World Watch,September/October 1998.

50. Table 1–2 based on the following: windfrom Birger Madsen, BTM Consult,Ringkobing, Denmark, letter to ChristopherFlavin, 10 January 1998, and from BTMConsult, International Wind Energy Development:World Market Update 1996 (Ringkobing,Denmark: March 1997); solar photovoltaicsdata from Paul Maycock, “1997 WorldCell/Module Shipments,” PV News, February1998, and from Paul Maycock, PV News, variousissues; geothermal power data from MaryDickson, International Institute for Geo-thermal Research, letter to Seth Dunn,Worldwatch Institute, 3 February 1997, andfrom Mary H. Dickson and Mario Fanelli,“Geothermal Energy Worldwide,” WorldDirectory of Renewable Energy Suppliers and Services(London: James & James Science Publishers,1995); natural gas and oil use data from DOE,EIA, International Energy Annual 1996(Washington, DC: February 1998), and fromBP, op. cit. note 9; hydropower and coal usedata from United Nations, Energy StatisticsYearbook 1995 (New York: 1997), and from BP,op. cit. note 9; nuclear power from WorldwatchInstitute database. Wind potential in fourcountries from Madsen, op. cit. this note.

51. BP, “BP HSE Facts 1997: HSE,”<http://www.bp.com>, viewed 24 August 1998; Jeroen van der Veer, Group ManagingDirector, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, “Shell International Renewables—BringingTogether the Group’s Activities in Solar Power,Biomass, and Forestry,” press conference,London, 6 October 1997; Colin J. Campbelland Jean H. Laherrere, “The End of CheapOil,” Scientific American, March 1998.

52. Robert F. Service, “A Record inConverting Photons to Fuel,” Science, 17 April1998; “First World Hydrogen Conference


Opens in Latin America, Shell Is Briefed onHydrogen,” Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Letter, July1998; Jacques Leslie, “Dawn of the HydrogenAge,” Wired, October 1997.

53. Bicycle production from “Focus onForeign Markets,” 1998 Interbike Directory(Laguna Beach, CA: Miller-Freeman, 1998);AAMA, World Motor Vehicle Data 1997 (Detroit,MI: 1997); AAMA, op. cit. note 10.

54. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Tide of TrafficTurns Against the Sea of Bicycles,” New YorkTimes, 3 November 1998; Indonesia from“Living Dangerously,” Sustainable Transport,summer 1996.

55. Patrick E. Tyler, “China TransportGridlock: Cars vs. Mass Transit,” New YorkTimes, 4 May 1996.

56. OECD, “OECD Environment MinistersShared Goals For Action,” press release (Paris:3 April 1998), <http://www.oecd.org/news_and_events/release/nw98-39a.htm>;Interface from Braden R. Allenby, IndustrialEcology: Framework and Implementation (UpperSaddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).

57. Stephan Schmidheiny with the BusinessCouncil for Sustainable Development,Changing Course (Cambridge, MA: The MITPress, 1992); William McDonough andMichael Braungart, “The Next IndustrialRevolution,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1998.

58. Greg Helten, “Canadian Timber GiantRenounces Clearcut Logging,” EnvironmentalNews Service, 11 June 1998.

59. Ford cited in David Bjerklie et al.,“Look Who’s Trying to Turn Green,” Time, 9November 1998; Thomas R. Casten, TurningOff the Heat: Why America Must Double EnergyEfficiency to Save Money and Reduce GlobalWarming (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,1998).

60. Jose Maria Figueres, President of CostaRica, address to Third Conference of theParties of the UN Framework Convention on

Climate Change, Kyoto, Japan, 8 December1997; “Energy Market Report,” Financial TimesEnergy Economist, October 1997; “Forestry CutsDown on Logging,” China Daily, 26 May 1998;Peter Norman, “SPD and Greens AgreeGerman Energy Tax Rises,” Financial Times, 19 October 1998.

61. “Special Double Issue on the 21stCentury Economy,” Business Week, 31 August1998.

62. UNDP, op. cit. note 26.

63. Forbes estimates are described in ibid.

64. “Nigeria: A Catastrophe Bound toHappen,” The Economist, 24 October 1998.


66. United Nations, “United NationsLaunches Fiftieth Anniversary of the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights,” press release,New York, 5 December 1997.


Reinventing the

Energy System

Christopher Flavin and Seth Dunn

When the American Press Associationgathered the country’s “best minds” onthe eve of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fairand asked them to peer a century into thefuture, the nation’s streets were filled withhorse-drawn carriages and illuminated atnight by gas lights that were still consid-ered a high-tech novelty. And coal—whose share of commercial energy usehad risen from 9 percent in 1850 to morethan 60 percent in 1890—was expected toremain dominant for a long time tocome.1

The commentators who turned theircrystal balls toward the nation’s energysystem foresaw some major changes—butmissed others. They anticipated, forexample, that “Electrical power will beuniversal….Steam and all other sorts ofpower will be displaced.” But while somewrote of trains traveling 100 miles an hourand moving sidewalks, none predicted theascent of oil, the proliferation of the auto-mobile, or the spread of suburbs andshopping malls made possible by cars.Their predictions also missed the many

ways in which inexpensive energy wouldaffect lives and livelihoods through theadvent of air-conditioning, television, andcontinent- bridging jet aircraft. Nor didthey foresee that oil and other fossil fuelswould one day be used on such a scale asto raise sea levels, disrupt ecosystems, orincrease the intensity of heat waves,droughts, and floods.2

To most of today’s energy futurists, thecurrent system might seem even moresolid and immutable than the nineteenth-century system appeared 100 years ago.The internal combustion engine hasdominated personal transportation inindustrial countries for more than eightdecades, and electricity is now so takenfor granted that any interruption in itssupply is considered an emergency. Todaythe price of energy is nearly as low—interms of consumer purchasing power—asit has ever been, and finding new energysources that are more convenient, reli-able, and affordable than fossil fuels isbeyond the imagination of many experts.Former Eastern Bloc countries seek eco-

2

nomic salvation in oil booms, while Chinaand other developing nations are rushingto join the oil era—pouring hundreds ofbillions of dollars into the construction ofcoal mines, oil refineries, power plants,automobile factories, and roads.3

Fossil fuels—coal, oil, and naturalgas—that are dug or pumped from theground, then burned in engines or fur-naces, provide 90 percent or more of theenergy in most industrial countries and75 percent of energy worldwide. (SeeTable 2–1.) They are led by petroleum,the most convenient and ubiquitousamong them—an energy source that hasshaped the twentieth century, and thatnow seems irreplaceable. But as theChicago World’s Fair writings remind us,energy forecasts can overlook what laterseems obvious. A close examination oftechnological, economic, social, and envi-ronmental trends suggests that we mayalready be in the early stages of a majorglobal energy transition—one that is like-ly to accelerate early in the next century.4

To understand energy in world historyis to expect the unexpected. And as welive in a particularly dynamic period, theleast likely scenario may be that the ener-gy picture 100 years from now will closelyresemble that of today. Although thefuture remains, as always, far from crystalclear, the broad outlines of a new energy

system may now be emerging, thanks inpart to a series of revolutionary new tech-nologies and approaches. These develop-ments suggest that our future energyeconomy may be highly efficient anddecentralized, using a range of sophisti-cated electronics. The primary energyresources for this system may be the mostabundant ones on Earth: the sun, thewind, and other “renewable” sources ofenergy. And the main fuel for this twenty-first-century economy could be hydrogen,the lightest and most abundant elementin the universe.5

This transition would in some sense bea return to our roots. Homo sapiens hasrelied for most of its existence on a virtu-ally limitless flow of renewable energyresources—muscles, plants, sun, wind,and water—to meet its basic needs forshelter, heat, cooking, lighting, andmovement. The relatively recent transi-tion to coal that began in Europe in theseventeenth century marked a major shiftto dependence on a finite stock of fos-silized fuels whose remaining energy isnow equivalent to less than 11 days of sun-shine. From a millennial perspective,today’s hydrocarbon-based civilization isbut a brief interlude in human history.6

The next century may be as profound-ly shaped by the move away from fossilfuels as this century was marked by the

Reinventing the Energy System (23)

Table 2–1. World Energy Use, 1900 and 1997

1900 1997Energy Source Total Share Total Share

(million tons of oil (percent) (million tons of oil (percent)equivalent) equivalent)

Coal 501 55 2,122 22Oil 18 2 2,940 30Natural gas 9 1 2,173 23Nuclear 0 0 579 6Renewables1 383 42 1,833 19

Total 911 100 9,647 1001Includes biomass, hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar energy.

SOURCE: See endnote 4.

move toward them. Although it may takeseveral decades for another system to fullydevelop, the underlying markets couldshift abruptly in the next few years, dryingup sales of conventional power plants andcars in a matter of years and affecting theshare prices of scores of companies. Theeconomic health—and political power—of nations could be sharply boosted ordiminished. And our industries, homes,and cities could be transformed in wayswe can only begin to anticipate.

Through the ages, the evolution ofhuman societies has both influenced andbeen influenced by changes in patterns ofenergy use. But the timing of this nexttransition will be especially crucial.Today’s energy system completely bypass-es roughly 2 billion people who lack mod-ern fuels or electricity, and underservesanother 2 billion who cannot afford mostenergy amenities, such as refrigeration orhot water. Moreover, by relying on therapid depletion of nonrenewableresources and releasing billions of tons ofcombustion gases into the atmosphere,we have built the economy on trends thatcannot possibly be sustained for anothercentury. The efforts made today to lay thefoundations for a new energy system willaffect the lives of billions of people in thetwenty-first century and beyond.7

PRIME MOVERS

Energy transitions do not occur in a vacu-um. Past shifts have been propelled bytechnological change and a range ofsocial, economic, and environmentalforces. Understanding these develop-ments is essential for mapping out thepath that humanity may follow in the next100 years. The emergence of an oil-basedeconomy at the beginning of this century,for example, was influenced by rapid sci-entific advances, the growing needs of an

industrial economy, mounting urbanenvironmental problems in the form ofsmoke and manure, and the aspirations ofmillions for higher living standards andgreater mobility.8

Resource limits are one force thatcould help push the world away from fos-sil fuels in the coming decades. Oil is themain energy source today, accounting for30 percent of commercial use; natural gashas emerged as an environmentally pre-ferred alternative for many uses, and hasa 23-percent share; coal has maintained akey role in power generation, and holds a22-percent share of total energy use.Natural gas and coal are both available insufficient amounts to last until the end ofthe twenty-first century or beyond—butoil is not. Just as seventeenth-centuryBritain ran out of cheap wood, today weface the danger of running out of inex-pensive petroleum.9

Although oil markets have been rela-tively stable for more than a decade, andreal prices approached historical lows in1998, estimates of the underlyingresource base have increased very little.Most of the calm in the oil markets of the1990s has been due to slower demandgrowth, not an increase in supply. Despiteprodigious exploration efforts, known oilresources have expanded only marginallyin the last quarter-century, though somenations have raised their official reservefigures in order to obtain larger OPECproduction quotas. Approximately 80 per-cent of the oil produced today comesfrom fields discovered before 1973, mostof which are in decline. Total world pro-duction has increased less than 10 per-cent in two decades.10

In a recent analysis of data on world oilresources, geologists Colin Campbell andJean Laherrere estimate that roughly 1trillion barrels of oil remain to be extract-ed. Since 800 billion barrels have alreadybeen used up, this suggests that the origi-nal exploitable resource base is nearlyhalf gone. As extraction of a nonrenew-


able resource tends to follow a bell-shaped curve, these figures can be extrap-olated to project that world productionwill peak by 2010, and then begin todecline. (See Figure 2–1.) Applying themore optimistic resource estimates ofother oil experts would push back thisproduction pinnacle by just a decade.11

A peak in world oil production early inthe new century would reverberatethrough the energy system. The problemis not just the large amount of oil cur-rently used—67 million barrels daily—butthe intent of many developing countries,most lacking much oil of their own, toincrease their use of automobiles andtrucks. Meeting the growing needs ofChina, India, and the rest of the develop-ing world in the way industrial countries’demands are met today would require atripling of world oil production, evenassuming no increases in industrial-coun-try use. Yet production capacity in 2020 isunlikely to be much above current lev-els—and may well be declining.12

Long before we completely run out offossil fuels, however, the environmentaland health burdens of using them mayforce us toward a cleaner energy system.Fossil fuel burning is the main source of

air pollution and a leading cause of waterand land degradation. Combustion ofcoal and oil produces carbon monoxideand tiny particulates that have been impli-cated in lung cancer and other respirato-ry problems; nitrogen and sulfur oxidescreate urban smog, and bring acid rainthat has damaged forests extensively. Oilspills, refinery operations, and coal min-ing release toxic materials that impairwater quality. Increasingly, oil explorationdisrupts fragile ecosystems and coal min-ing removes entire mountains. Althoughmodern pollution controls haveimproved air quality in most industrialcountries in recent decades, the deadlyexperiences of London and Pittsburghare now being repeated in Mexico City,São Paulo, New Delhi, Bangkok, andmany other cities in the developing world.Each year, coal burning is estimated to kill178,000 people prematurely in Chinaalone.13

Beyond these localized problems, it isthe cumulative, global environmentaleffects that now are calling the fossil fueleconomy into question. More than 200years have passed since we began burningthe sequestered sunlight of fossilizedplants that took millions of years to accu-mulate, but only recently has it becomeevident that the carbon those fuels pro-duce is disrupting the Earth’s radiationbalance, causing the planet to warm.Fossil fuel combustion has increasedatmospheric concentrations of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide (CO2) by 30percent since preindustrial times. (SeeFigure 2–2.) CO2 levels are now at theirhighest point in 160,000 years, and globaltemperatures at their highest since theMiddle Ages. Experts believe humanactivities could be ending the period ofrelative climatic stability that has enduredover the last 10,000 years, and that per-mitted the rise of agricultural and indus-trial society.14

In recent years scientists have exten-sively documented trends—receding glac-


1500 1700 1900 2100 2300 25000

5

10

15

20

25Billion Barrels

Source: DOD, DOE

Actual Production

Estimated Resources

Figure 2–1. World Oil Production andEstimated Resources, 1500–2500

iers, rising sea levels, dying coral reefs,spreading infectious diseases, migratingplants and animals—that are consistentwith the projected effects of a warmerworld. The extraordinary heat of 1998—on pace to hit a new record—was relatedto, but extended well beyond, an unusu-ally strong El Niño phenomenon. Thiscontributed to a range of extreme weath-er events, including droughts and rarefires in tropical and subtropical forestsfrom Indonesia to Mexico; historic floodsin China and Bangladesh; severe stormsand epidemics in Africa and North,Central, and South America; and deadlyheat waves in the United States, southernEurope, and India. The climate system isnonlinear and has in the past switchedabruptly—even in the space of a fewdecades—to another equilibrium aftercrossing a temperature threshold. Suchshifts have the potential to greatly disruptboth the natural world and human soci-ety. Indeed, previous changes have coin-cided with the collapse of several ancientcivilizations.15

Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concen-trations at safe levels will require a 60–80percent cut in carbon emissions from current levels, according to the best esti-

mates of scientists. The Kyoto Protocol tothe U.N. Framework Convention onClimate Change, agreed to in December1997, is intended to be a small step on thislong journey—which would eventuallyend the fossil-fuel-based economy as weknow it today.16

Energy transitions are also shaped bythe changing needs of societies. Historiansargue that coal won out over wood andother renewable resources during theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries inpart due to the requirements of the shiftfrom a rural, agrarian society to an urban,industrial one. Abundant and concentrat-ed forms of energy were required for thenew industries and booming cities of theperiod. In this view, coal did not bringabout the transition but adapted to it morequickly. Ironically, the success of water-mills and windmills in promoting earlyindustrialization led to expanding energydemands that could only be met by thecoal-fired steam engine.17

Today’s fast-growth economic sectorsare not the production of food or auto-mobiles, but software, telecommunica-tions, and a broad array of services—fromfinance and news to education and enter-tainment. The Information Revolutionwill, like the Industrial Revolution, haveits own energy needs—and will place apremium on reliability. Computer systemsfreeze up if power is cut off for a fractionof a second; heavy industries, such aschemical and steel production, nowdepend on semiconductor chips to oper-ate. Yet the mechanical machines and networks of above-ground wires andpipelines that power current energy systems are vulnerable. Today’s systemsare also centralized, while much of theservice economy can be conducted fromfar-flung locations that are connectedthrough the Internet, and may requiremore localized, autonomous energy sup-plies than power grids or gas lines canprovide. As with the water wheel, so withoil: the growing demands of the new


1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000270

280

290

300

310

320

330

340

350

360

370Parts Per Million by Volume

Source: ORNL, IPCC, Scripps

Figure 2–2. Atmospheric Concentration ofCarbon Dioxide, 1000–1997

economy might not be met by the energysystem that helped launch it.18

In the twenty-first century, the require-ments of the developing world—where 80percent or more of the new energy invest-ment is expected to take place—are likelyto be the leading driver of energy mar-kets. Eighteenth-century Great Britainshifted to coal, and the twentieth-centuryUnited States to oil, in part to meet thedemands of growing populations; similarchanges might be expected as more than5 billion people seek more convenienttransportation, refrigeration, air-condi-tioning, and other amenities in the yearsahead. Technologies that can meet thedemands of developing nations at mini-mal cost may therefore assume prominentroles in the overall transition.19

SYSTEMIC CHANGE

The closing decades of the nineteenthcentury were a fertile period in the histo-ry of technology, as inventors appliednovel scientific advances to a range of newdevices. The incandescent light bulb, elec-tric dynamo, and internal combustionengine were invented in the late 1800s buthad relatively little effect on industry ordaily life as the century ended. As theycame into widespread use in later decades,however, it became clear in retrospect thatthe technological foundation for the tran-sition was largely in place by 1900.20

Today a new energy system is gestatingin the late-twentieth-century fields of electronics, synthetic materials, biotech-nology, and software. The silicon semi-conductor chip, promising increasedprocessing power and miniaturization ofelectronic devices, allows energy use to bematched more closely to need. Wider useof these chips offers efficiency gains inappliances, buildings, industry, and trans-port, making it possible to control pre-

cisely nearly all energy-using devices.Electronic controls also enable a range ofsmall-scale, modular technologies to chal-lenge the large-scale energy devices of thetwentieth century.21

Breakthroughs in chemistry and mate-rials science are also playing key roles inenergy, providing sophisticated, light-weight materials that operate without thewear and tear of moving parts. Modernwind turbines use the same carbon-fibersynthetic materials found in bullet-proofvests, “gore-tex” synthetic membranes linethe latest fuel cells, and new “super-insu-lation” that reduces the energy needs ofbuildings relies on the same aluminumfoil vacuum process that keeps coffeefresh. The latest electrochemical windowcoatings can be adjusted to reflect orabsorb heat and light in response toweather conditions and the time of day.22

A particularly fertile area of advance isin lighting, where the search is on for suc-cessors to Thomas Edison’s incandescentbulb. Improvements in small-scale elec-tronic ballasts have given rise to the com-pact fluorescent lamp (CFL), whichrequires one quarter the electricity ofincandescent bulbs and lasts 10 times aslong. Manufacturers are now working oneven more advanced models with tiny bal-lasts that work with any light socket, andthat cost half as much as today’s models.Yet the new light-emitting diode (LED), asolid-state semiconductor device thatemits a very bright light when charged, istwice as efficient as CFLs and lasts 10times as long. Today’s LEDs produce redand yellow light, which limits their marketto applications such as traffic signals andautomobile taillights, but scientistsbelieve that white-light versions will soonbecome practical.23

Late-twentieth-century technology hasalso revived an ancient source of energy:the wind. The first windmills for grindinggrain appeared in Persia just over 1,000years ago, and eventually spread to China,throughout the Mediterranean, and to


northern Europe, where the Dutch devel-oped the massive machines for which thecountry is still known. Wind poweremerged as a serious option for generat-ing electricity when Danish engineersbegan to apply advanced engineering andmaterials in the 1970s. The latest versions,which are also manufactured by compa-nies based in Germany, India, Spain, andthe United States, have variable-pitchfiberglass blades that are as long as 40meters, electronic variable speed drives,and sophisticated microprocessor con-trols. Wind power is now economicallycompetitive with fossil fuel generatedelectricity, and the market, valued atroughly $2 billion in 1998, is growingmore than 25 percent annually. (SeeFigure 2–3.)24

Use of the sun as an energy source isalso being renewed by modern technolo-gy. The solar photovoltaic cell, a semicon-ductor device that turns the sun’sradiation directly into electric current, iswidely used in off-grid applications as apower source for satellites and remotecommunications systems, as well as in con-sumer electronic devices such as pocketcalculators and watches. Improvements incell efficiency and materials have lowered

costs by 80 percent in the past twodecades, and the cells are now being builtinto shingles, tiles, and window glass—allowing buildings to generate their ownelectricity. Markets are booming. (SeeFigure 2–4.) The cost of solar cells willneed to fall by another 50–75 percent inorder to be fully competitive with coal-fired electricity, but automated manufac-turing, larger factories, and more- efficientcells promise further cost reductions inthe near future. Semiconductor researchis also nurturing the development of aclose cousin of the solar cell, the “ther-mophotovoltaic” cell, which can produceelectricity from industrial waste heat.25

The technology that could most trans-form the energy system, the fuel cell, wasfirst discovered in 1829, five decadesbefore the internal combustion engine.The fuel cell attracted considerable inter-est at the turn of the century but requiredefficiency improvements before its firstmodern application in the U.S. space pro-gram in the 1960s. Fuel cells use an elec-trochemical process that combineshydrogen and oxygen, producing waterand electricity. Avoiding the inherentinefficiency of combustion, today’s topfuel cells are roughly twice as efficient as


1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 20000

1,500

3,000

4,500

6,000

7,500

9,000Megawatts

Source: BTM Consult

Figure 2–3. World Wind Energy GeneratingCapacity, 1970–97

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 20000

150

300

450

600

750

900Megawatts

Sources: Maycock, PV News

Figure 2–4. World Photovoltaic Shipments,Cumulative, 1970–97

conventional engines, have no movingparts, require little maintenance, arenearly silent, and emit only water vapor.Unlike today’s power plants, they arenearly as economical on a small scale ason a large one. Indeed, they could turnthe very notion of a power plant intosomething more closely resembling ahome appliance.26

Although the first fuel cells now run on natural gas—which can be separatedinto hydrogen and carbon dioxide—in the long term they may be fueled bypure hydrogen that is separated fromwater by using electricity, a process knownas electrolysis. Researchers are also testingvarious catalysts that, when placed inwater that is illuminated by sunlight, may one day produce inexpensive hydro-gen. Chemists have recently developed a solar-powered “water splitter” that nearly doubles the efficiency of convert-ing solar energy to hydrogen. Some scien-tists note that finding a cheap andefficient way to electrolyze water couldmake hydrogen as dominant an energycarrier in the twenty-first century as oilwas in the twentieth.27

Many energy analysts argue that it willtake a long time for such devices tobecome competitive with fossil fuels. Butdwelling on the current cost gap ignores aprinciple that Henry Ford discovered ear-lier this century. Mass production allowedFord to cut the cost of a Model T by 65percent between 1909 and 1923. As withthe Model T, the costs of the new, modu-lar energy devices are expected to fall dra-matically as their markets expand.28

Historically, energy innovations havefirst emerged in specialized “niches”where they were, for a variety of reasons,preferred to the conventional fuel.Petroleum’s initial market was as areplacement for whale oil used in lightingkerosene lamps; what now seems a mar-ginal use of oil was a powerful force in thelate nineteenth century, sufficient toattract millions of dollars of investment.

Today’s emerging energy technologiesare exploiting similarly small but growingniches that are spurring investment andlarger-scale manufacturing. Shipments ofsolar cells doubled between 1994 and1997 as a result of burgeoning niche mar-kets such as powering highway signals andwater pumps, as well as a half-millionhomes not connected to a grid, wheresolar power is the most economicalsource of electricity. Fuel cells are firstappearing in buses, hospitals, militarybases, and wastewater treatment plants,and are being developed for cellularphones, laptop computers, and cabinlamps. One day, they could be found inmost buildings and automobiles.29

As these examples suggest, downsizingand decentralization may become majorfeatures of the twenty-first century energyeconomy. While the twentieth century hasseen a trend toward larger facilities andgreater distances between energy sourceand use, the new technologies would placean affordable, reliable, and accessiblepower supply near where it is needed. Thiswould retrace the computer industry’spath from mainframe to desktop comput-ers in the past two decades—and resurrectThomas Edison’s vision of decentralized,small-scale power generation. In contrastto today’s monoculture of power genera-tion, a distributed energy system wouldcombine a range of new devices: small tur-bines in factories, fuel cells in basements,rooftop solar panels, wind turbines scat-tered across pastures, and power plantsthat can be carried in a briefcase.30

The information age—itself downsizedand decentralized—could help ensurethe reliability of a distributed power sys-tem through instantaneous telecommuni-cations and sophisticated electroniccontrols that coordinate millions of indi-vidual generators, much as the Internetworks today. Computer and telecommuni-cation companies are developing “intelli-gent” power systems that send signals overphone lines, television cables, and electric


lines. Micro-generators and even homeappliances can be programmed torespond to electronically relayed priceinformation, providing power to the gridand storing it—in the form of hydrogen,or the kinetic energy of a flywheel—asdemand fluctuates. This fine-tuning ofthe balance between electricity supplyand demand would increase the efficien-cy of the new system—reducing pollutionand saving energy and money.31

Buildings were energy self-sufficientfor much of history, but in the last centu-ry they have become dependent onincreasingly distant sources of supply. Adistributed energy system would allowbuildings to once again meet most oftheir own energy needs with rooftop solarsystems, fuel cells, and flywheels—evenbecoming net energy generators that sellexcess power back to the grid. Basementfuel cells could provide electricity andheat during the day, while automobilesand electric bicycles might be replenishedwith household-generated hydrogen orelectricity at night. “Zero net energy”buildings can be tightly designed to relyon passive solar energy and on the bodyheat of occupants. Buildings themselvesmay be made of mass-produced compo-nents and modules that can be shipped toa site and then assembled.32

The automobile, too, is likely to bereshaped. Oil’s automotive successors—bethey batteries or turbines, flywheels or fuelcells—will likewise motivate engineers tomake the rest of the vehicle as lightweightas possible, as demonstrated with the bulky

lead-acid battery and sleek exterior of thefirst modern commercial electric car,designed by General Motors (GM). Thefirst commercially available “hybrid-elec-tric” vehicle, Toyota’s Prius, uses engineand battery in tandem and is twice as fuel-efficient as the average U.S. car. (Morethan 7,700 sold in the first eight months,leading the company to double produc-tion during its first year; Toyota plans tomarket the vehicle in North America andEurope by 2000.) In a combination ofthese two ideas, the first hybrid-electricfuel cell taxi has appeared on the streets ofLondon. Trucks, locomotives, and otherheavy vehicles may also soon shift—andadjust—to the new technologies.33

Running a modular energy system onrenewable resources will require adaptingthe system to their intermittent nature. Atemporary measure might be to buildbackup generators using efficient gas tur-bines, fuel cells, or pumped water storage;new technologies such as compressed air,plastic batteries, flywheels, and otherenergy storage devices also have parts toplay. But the key to a reliable, diversifiedenergy system based on renewable sourceswill be the use of hydrogen as a majorenergy carrier and storage medium.34

Developing a system for storing andtransporting hydrogen will be a majorundertaking. In the long run, materialsthat can store large amounts of hydrogen,such as metal hydrides or carbon nan-otubes, are being developed for use inelectric vehicles and other applications.And deriving hydrogen from natural gasfor the initial generation of fuel cellswould allow the early stages of a hydrogeneconomy to be based on the extensivenatural gas pipelines and other equip-ment already in place. Small-scale reform-ing units that convert natural gas intohydrogen could be placed in homes,office buildings, and service stations. Thecarbon dioxide released from this conver-sion would be far less than from internalcombustion engines, and could be turned


The key to a reliable, diversified energy system will be the use ofhydrogen as a major energy carrierand storage medium.

into plastics or sequestered in under-ground or undersea reservoirs.35

The use of natural gas as a “bridge” tohydrogen might allow for a relativelyseamless transition to a renewable-energy-based system. Hydrogen could be mixedwith natural gas and carried in the samepipelines, then later transported throughrebuilt pipelines and compressors that aredesigned to carry pure hydrogen. Largeamounts of hydrogen might be producedin remote wind farms or solar stations,and then stored underground; homeown-ers could produce hydrogen from rooftopsolar cells and store it in the basement.Liquid hydrogen could find a niche in airtransport—replacing the kerosene thatfigured prominently in the rise of oil andthat still fuels most commercial jets.36

Systemic change can begin slowly, butgather momentum quickly. The transitionfrom gas to electric lighting proceededquietly at first: in 1910, only 10 percent ofU.S. houses had electricity. At the turn ofthe twentieth century, the gasoline-pow-ered car was still competing with thehorsedrawn carriage and the steamengine– and electric battery–powered car,while oil accounted for just 2.4 percent ofU.S. energy use. Within a generation,however, the internal combustion enginehad displaced the others; oil had sur-passed coal by 1921; and by 1930, 80 per-cent of the country’s houses had beenelectrified. The pace and direction of anenergy transition, then, are determinednot just by technological developments,but also by how industries, governments,and societies respond to them.37

AN INDUSTRY TRANSFORMED

The oil industry that formed in the roughhills of western Pennsylvania in the 1860swas fiercely competitive, prone to wildprice fluctuations, and full of entrepre-

neurs who found niches supplying equip-ment, drilling wells, and running railroads,pipelines, and refineries. But the entrepre-neurial phase of the industry lasted lessthan two decades. A young man by thename of John D. Rockefeller entered theoil refining business and began buying uphis competitors—first going after otherrefiners, and then moving into the drillingand transportation business. Using tacticsranging from persuasion to coercion—some of which would be illegal today—Rockefeller built Standard Oil into avirtual empire that dominated the oil busi-ness, from the well to the retail markets,along the eastern U.S. seaboard. “It wasforced upon us,” Rockefeller explainedlater. “The oil business was in chaos anddaily growing worse.” Rockefeller tamedthe competition, increased the scale andefficiency of the refining process, and cre-ated one of the world’s first multinationalcorporations.38

Standard Oil’s monopoly eventuallybecame so egregious that it led to the government-mandated breakup ofRockefeller’s empire, but it had alreadycreated a new industrial model that hasbeen followed by the energy industry eversince. Although no longer a monopoly,the oil industry is dominated by a dozenlarge corporations, four of which—Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, and Mobil—are“Baby Standards,” offspring of thebreakup. After World War II, large oil dis-coveries were made in increasinglyremote, inhospitable locations such as thedeserts of the Middle East and Alaska’sNorth Slope, all of which favored largemultinational corporations equipped tomount decade-long, multibillion-dollardevelopment projects. Then in the 1960sand 1970s, the nations that are home tothe largest of those reserves—countriessuch as Mexico and Venezuela as well asthe Persian Gulf kingdoms—threw outthe multinationals and formed their ownstate oil monopolies.39

The trend to bigness in the energy


business moved quickly beyond oil. Prior to 1910, scores of small companiesbuilt an array of handmade cars, but the diversity ended in the next decadewith Henry Ford’s pioneering assemblylines, which lowered the cost of produc-tion and spurred a host of others to imitate. Soon auto companies were gob-bling each other up, a trend seen mostclearly in today’s General Motors, whichwas assembled from a half-dozen early-century automakers.40

The electric power business was alsoquickly consolidated, with giant firms con-trolling everything from the power plantto the electric meter. To this day, most U.S.companies are regulated by state govern-ments as legal monopolies. In many othercountries, national and state governmentstook over their electric utility systems,viewing them as strategic industries thatare too important to be left to the vagariesof the marketplace. These huge, centrallyplanned entities seemed to reflect the eco-nomic visions of Lenin rather than AdamSmith, yet for decades these utilities suc-ceeded in building large, reliable powersystems while cutting prices.41

Like the energy sources and technolo-gies to which they are tied, these econom-ic structures have remained largely intactfor much of the twentieth century. Theyhave justified their gargantuan size as ameans to the end of exploiting economiesof scale. According to Rockefeller’s logic,high-volume, low-cost production requiredlarge, sure markets, which led to verticalintegration—and limited competition.42

The energy system that is now emerg-

ing follows a different economic logic,one closer to the precepts of the informa-tion age. Under this economic paradigm,new machines and methods are onceagain being invented, while companiesare restructured. Numerous mainstreamenergy companies, including BritishPetroleum (BP, in solar energy), Enron(solar energy and wind power), andGeneral Electric (fuel cells and micro tur-bines), are investing in these technolo-gies. It remains to be seen whether thesenew devices will eventually be controlledby a dominant group of companies, orwhether a more open, competitive eco-nomic model will prevail.43

Decades of public ownership in theenergy sector have already been sweptaside in many countries in the 1990s, fos-tering a period of unprecedented compe-tition, innovation, and diversity inenergy-related industries. Echoing thechaotic early days of the oil industry, theenergy business is once more opening upto a new generation of entrepreneurs sell-ing revolutionary new devices, such asfuel cells, and services, such as the effi-cient use of combined heat and power, orcogeneration. (See Table 2–2.) Nationaloil companies are being “privatized”; fuelprices are being decontrolled; and theelectric power industry, which has formost of the century been a government-owned or regulated monopoly nearlyeverywhere, is being radically restruc-tured in dozens of countries.44

“Independent power producers,” anew breed of largely unregulated powersuppliers, are increasingly dominating thebusiness in countries such as the UnitedKingdom and the United States, but theyare also being welcomed by governmentsin developing countries where many elec-tric utilities are bankrupt and unable tokeep up with demand growth. There arenow more than 300 independent powercompanies, and they are growing particu-larly rapidly in Asia and Latin America.Firms once limited to regions or countries


The energy business is once moreopening up to a new generation ofentrepreneurs selling revolutionarynew devices.

are building power plants all over theworld, with natural gas turbines the tech-nology of choice. A more competitivepower industry is also likely to diversify itsgeneration base quickly, developing newdecentralized generators that are locatedin customers’ buildings. The businessesbest positioned to compete in this marketmay turn out to be firms that already sellair-conditioning and energy control ser-vices to commercial building owners.Some energy service companies now signcontracts to provide customers with a fullrange of heat, refrigeration, and power—in part by upgrading windows, lighting,air-conditioning, and other systems.45

Changing market conditions have alsospawned a new breed of “virtual utilities”that meet customers’ energy needs with-out owning any of the assets involved.Such companies are essentially intermedi-aries—firms that bring together a rangeof assets to meet needs, free of having toprotect an array of earlier investments.Energy consultant Karl Rábago, whohelped pioneer the concept, describesthe virtual utility as “nimble and fleet offoot, less encumbered with physical assets,exploiting its intelligence and capabili-ties, embracing change and deliveringoutstanding customer satisfaction.”46

A variant of the virtual utility, the“green power” supplier, has emerged inthe last few years. These companies—tak-ing advantage of the opening of retail

electricity markets and many consumers’disdain for electricity generated from coalor nuclear power—offer customers theoption of purchasing power generatedfrom wind, geothermal, or biomass ener-gy. While some of the half-dozen compa-nies that have entered the market inCalifornia are subsidiaries of utilities, oth-ers are new firms that own no actualpower plants—and whose employees areoften thousands of miles from the market.Instead, they are energy brokers, linkingwindfarm owners with electricity cus-tomers willing to pay a little more eachmonth to help keep the air clean. Thoughthe green power market is growing slowlyat first, surveys suggest strong consumerinterest in the concept—and businesseslike Toyota have already signed up.47

Ever since the nineteenth century,energy trends have been dictated in partby a complicated dance between indus-tries and governments, with the formerseeking economic gain and convenienceand the latter focusing on strategic, social,and environmental concerns that themarket is prone to neglect. The U.S. gov-ernment accelerated the rise of coal bysubsidizing rail barons during the nine-teenth century, for instance, and helpedusher in the oil age with contracts to theautomobile industry and massive invest-ments in an interstate highway systemafter World War II.48

Although it is popular in some quarters


Table 2–2. Energy “Microsofts”

Company (Country) Technology Start-up Date Capitalization(million dollars)

Ballard (Canada) Fuel cells 1979 2,360Vestas (Denmark) Wind turbines 1987 204Trigen Energy (United States) Cogeneration 1986 182Energy Conversion Solar PV cells 1960 74

Devices (United States) Electric batteriesSolectria (United States) Electric vehicles 1989 n.a.

SOURCE: Discussions with company representatives, and annual reports at their respective Web sites.

today to think that energy is rapidlybecoming the pure province of the pri-vate sector, this seems unlikely. Much ofthe energy industry is still government-owned or regulated in many countries,and a host of unresolved social and envi-ronmental issues will require a guiding—though relatively light—governmentalhand. As governments retreat from directownership of power companies, they willbe in a better position to encouragegreater reliance on cleaner energysources by using both regulations andfinancial incentives. Just as financial regu-lators are required to have a functioningstock market, so is a degree of regulationessential if we are to have a sustainableenergy market. Governments are respon-sible, for example, for setting the rules forgrid interconnection of generators,supervising price-setting on monopolypower lines, and requiring adequate dis-closure of the sources and emissions asso-ciated with power that is being sold.49

Another energy-related industry inwhich growing competition is being influ-enced by government policies is the auto-mobile business. Decisions by the stategovernment in California in 1992 to man-date zero-emission vehicles and by theU.S. government in 1993 to form a coali-tion with the Big Three automakers topursue a new generation of technologieshave spurred faster innovation in theindustry than at any time since the ModelT was introduced. Today, the dozen com-panies that dominate the global car busi-ness are being challenged by a host ofventure-capital-fueled start-ups that aredesigning cars powered by batteries, fly-wheels, turbines, and fuel cells. Largeauto companies have responded withmultibillion-dollar efforts to develop thenew technologies themselves—and havealso begun to form strategic coalitionswith some of the high-tech start-ups. Oneexample is the $870-million fuel cell part-nership forged between Ballard, a smallCanadian company, and the German auto

giant Daimler-Benz in 1997. Ballard willsupply the new fuel cells, while Daimlerwill build them into new drive trains, andthen assemble and market the cars.50

The energy industry of the next centu-ry is still in its formative years, and it is notyet clear what kinds of companies will bebest able to provide the new technologiesand services. Similar to the shift from themainframe to the personal computer inthe early 1980s, the move to a decentral-ized energy system may make the marketdominance of big players like Exxon andGM a thing of the past, as smaller, moreversatile players attract more business—just as IBM’s control of the computerindustry was loosened by Apple andMicrosoft. One thing seems likely, howev-er: those hoping to survive the upheavalmay need to be, as was said of Rockefellerhimself, “always ready to embracechange.”51

GREAT POWERS, GEOPOLITICAL

PRIZES

In his Pulitzer-Prize winning book ThePrize, historian Daniel Yergin notes animportant turning point in the ascen-dance of petroleum: Lord WinstonChurchill’s decision in 1911, after years ofresistance, to switch Britain’s war fleetfrom coal to oil. Many experts thoughtthe move risky and expensive, butChurchill felt it strategically necessary, asit would provide the speed and powerneeded to defeat the German navy on thehigh seas. Within a few years, coal-fueledvessels had become a rarity, as freightersand passenger ships joined the stampedeto petroleum.52

Energy and geopolitics have becomeclosely intertwined during the past 200years. The British Empire was buttressedby an Industrial Revolution, which was inturn powered by the heavy use of coal.


The twentieth century, called theAmerican century by some historians, hasalso been dubbed the century of oil, withits industry and progeny—mass-producedautomobiles, spreading suburbs, andubiquitous plastics—all “made in theUSA.” Access to petroleum has underlainmany of the twentieth century’s interna-tional conflicts—including the Japaneseattack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and thePersian Gulf war in 1991—and becomevirtually synonymous with the power bal-ances among western economies, theMiddle East, and the developing world.53

Governments have taken a strategicinterest in the energy industry during thepast century for a variety of reasons:advancing national security, reducing oilimport reliance, and promoting techno-logical innovation as a means to economicdevelopment. In the next century, the cli-mate change battle may assume the kindof strategic importance that wars—bothhot and cold—have had during this one.In a call to arms in the journal Nature inOctober 1998, leading scientists arguedthat global climate change could soonbecome the environmental equivalent ofthe cold war. They pointed out that twen-tieth-century wartime and postwarresearch and development have producedsuch advances as commercial aviation,radar, computer chips, lasers, and theInternet. The large-scale deployment ofcarbon-free energy technologies over thenext 50 years, they conclude, may requirean international effort conducted with theurgency of the Apollo space program.54

Unlike the effort in the 1960s to put aman on the moon, the shift to a newenergy system could be led by both publicand private sectors. Indeed, there may bea private-sector parallel to Churchill inthe unexpected decision of BritishPetroleum Chairman John Browne toannounce, as climate negotiations gath-ered momentum shortly before the his-toric Kyoto conference in 1997, that hiscompany now took climate change seri-

ously and would step up its investments insolar energy. Like Churchill, Browne wasat first ridiculed by colleagues. But themonths following the Kyoto agreementwitnessed a string of industry announce-ments of new partnerships, investments,and breakthroughs in new energy tech-nologies. John Smith, Chairman ofGeneral Motors, surprised observers atthe 1998 Detroit Auto Show when he pro-claimed that “no car company will be ableto thrive in the twenty-first century if itrelies solely on internal-combustionengines.”55

National governments are themselvesbeginning to formulate energy-relatedresponses to the climate challenge, manyof them eschewing highly prescriptive“command-and-control” regulation infavor of market incentives. Governmentsin Europe are setting standards for con-necting small-scale power generators tothe local electric system, and determiningthe appropriate price—based on econom-ic as well as environmental costs—to bepaid for the power. Other governments,including those in China and the UnitedKingdom, are improving the efficiency ofenergy markets by getting rid of tens ofbillions of dollars of subsidies to fossilfuels, while Denmark and Sweden are tax-ing carbon emissions as a way to “inter-nalize” environmental costs, encouragingprivate energy users to make decisionsbased on the full costs of their actions.56

The end of the hydrocarbon centurycould redraw a set of international faultlines that have sharply defined the pastfew decades. Oil is unevenly distributed,


In October 1998, leading scientistsargued that global climate changecould soon become the environ-mental equivalent of the cold war.

yielding disproportionate power to thosewith access to these concentrated stocks—particularly the United States, Russia, andthe Middle East. But as petroleum is seenless as a “prize” and more as a dangerousdependence, western economies maybecome less reliant on Middle Eastern oil,and less focused on political develop-ments in the region. The possibility thatthe world economy could be thrown intoanother crisis—today, more than half theworld’s oil is traded internationally—might also be diminished.57

A solar-hydrogen economy would bebased on resources that are more abun-dant and more evenly distributed. Somecountries are better endowed than others:Mexico, India, and South Africa are par-ticularly well positioned to deploy solar energy, while Canada, China, and Russiahave especially large wind resources. Butalthough some countries could exportrenewably generated electricity or hydro-gen, few are likely to depend mainly on imports. The international energy bal-ance might be more like the world foodeconomy today, where some countries are net exporters and others importers, butthe majority produce most of their ownfood. In other words, energy wouldbecome a more “normal” commodity, one not constantly on the verge of inter-national crisis.58

Since renewable energy resources arerelatively evenly spread, leadership in thenew industries is less likely to go to coun-tries with the most resources than to thosewith the know-how, skilled labor force,openness to innovation, efficient finan-cial structures, and strategic foresight toposition themselves for the new era.Today, it is the world’s three leading tech-nological powers—Germany, Japan, andthe United States—that are ahead in thedevelopment of many of the key devices.But nations need not be large or powerfulto find a strategic niche, as demonstratedby Denmark’s preeminence in windpower today. More than half the global

wind power market is now supplied byDanish firms or licensees—an achieve-ment made possible by a two-decade-longstrategic partnership between govern-ment and industry.59

The conditions for an energy transi-tion are particularly ripe in developingcountries, most of which are far betterendowed with renewable energy sourcesthan with fossil fuels. Most of these coun-tries have embryonic energy systems andmassively underserved populations, andtherefore represent a potentially far larg-er market for innovative technologies.Developing nations are in position tobypass or “leapfrog” the twentieth-centu-ry systems that are quickly becoming out-dated—and several of them, includingCosta Rica, the Dominican Republic, andSouth Africa, have already plunged aheadwith some of the new technologies. Giventheir large populations and surging ener-gy demands, China and India are espe-cially well positioned to become leadingcenters of the next energy system. Thiscould mean a reversal in the flow of ini-tiative and innovation between East andWest—and could perhaps precipitate abroader shift in the world’s economic andpolitical center of gravity back to where itwas a millennium ago: Asia. In the NewWorld, Brazil, with its vast supplies ofrenewable resources, could also become amajor player.60

The relatively diffuse nature of renew-able energy sources, and the need toaccelerate their use worldwide, mighthelp diminish international conflict andstimulate cooperation. The evolution ofthe energy system may be determined lessby OPEC cartels and struggles over oilleases than by the ongoing internationalnegotiations to protect the climate, as“de-carbonizing” the world economybecomes a greater “geopolitical impera-tive,” yielding its own prizes. One smallcountry that has already made such astrategic move is Iceland. In 1997 thesmall nation’s Prime Minister announced


a plan to convert Iceland to a “hydrogeneconomy” within 15 to 20 years; the gov-ernment is working with Daimler-Benzand Ballard Power Systems to shift its fish-ing fleet to hydrogen, and its motor vehi-cle fleet to methanol and hydrogen.Icelandic officials are also exploring theprospects for exporting hydrogen toother countries.61

ENERGY AND SOCIETY

In medieval Europe, feudal lords derivedmost of their wealth and privilege fromtheir control over land, forests, and watercourses. Peasant farmers were unable togrind their own grain, and so had nochoice but to sell it unmilled to their land-lords at a low price. But the lords did notown the wind, and when windmills wereintroduced in Europe in the twelfth cen-tury, a struggle ensued over whether thefarmers would be able to build their ownwindmills and use this previouslyuntapped and “free” energy source.62

The peasant farmers eventually wonthis test of wills, and their struggle is a

reminder that energy has long been close-ly tied to questions of power, wealth, andequity. The energy system that has devel-oped in industrial nations over the pastcentury has led to a new generation ofsocietal disparities as well as serious envi-ronmental problems. The question todayis whether societies can use a new genera-tion of revolutionary technologies andpractices to overturn the existing order,just as windmills undermined the powerof the aristocracy in the Middle Ages.63

One legacy of the fossil fuel economy isan unprecedented concentration of eco-nomic wealth. Four offshoots ofRockefeller’s Standard Oil are among theworld’s 50 largest companies. And mea-sured by 1997 revenues, the two giantautomakers—General Motors and Ford—are the world’s largest corporations, withToyota among the top 10. (See Table2–3.) GM’s 1997 revenues of $178 billionexceeded the combined nationaleconomies of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, andPeru. In terms of sheer size, multination-al suppliers of electrical equipment—ABB, General Electric, Mitsubishi,Siemens—are among the world’s largest.In personal terms, five of the world’s


Table 2–3. World’s 12 Largest Corporations, 19971

Company 1997 Revenues Industry(billion dollars)

General Motors 178 AutomobileFord Motor Company 154 AutomobileMitsui & Co., Ltd. 143 TradingMitsubishi Corporation 129 Trading (including automobile)Royal Dutch/Shell Group 128 EnergyItochu Corporation 127 TradingExxon Corporation 122 EnergyWal-Mart Stores, Inc. 119 General MerchandiseMarubeni Corporation 111 TradingSumitomo Corporation 102 TradingToyota Motor Corporation 95 AutomobileGeneral Electric Company 91 Electric power

1Energy, automobile, and electric power companies are indicated by italics.SOURCE: Fortune Magazine, “The Global 500 List,” <http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/global500/index.html>, viewed 26 August 1998.

wealthiest individuals are sheiks, sultans,or princes who have profited from thetwentieth-century oil boom.64

Today’s energy regime has also heavilyconcentrated political clout. Oil, coal,automobile, and electric utility trade asso-ciations are among the world’s most heav-ily funded and influential lobbies.Through groups like the Global ClimateCoalition, multinationals can—in nearanonymity—finance misleading advertis-ing campaigns, defend outdated subsi-dies, and fight international treaties. Liketheir lordly predecessors, German electricutilities campaign to repeal the govern-ment policy that has enabled wind tur-bines to spread across the country.65

But such “fronts” are slowly losinginfluence. Some prominent oil compa-nies have broken off from their fossil fuel brethren who oppose the climatetreaty, while others have joined progres-sive business groups that lobby forchange. And in Bonn, German environ-mentalists organized a large protest in1997 that succeeded in staving off opposi-tion to government supports for renew-able energy. Meanwhile, those with apossible stake in a new energy system—energy efficiency, renewable energy, and insurance companies—are beginningto mobilize and fight for changes in government policy.66

Over time, shifting to a decentralizedenergy system may help distribute rev-enues more equitably and devolve deci-sionmaking to the regional or local level.Danish wind power promotion is basedon a decentralized, community-based

model in which the machines are built bylocal companies, financed by localbankers, and owned and installed by localfarmers. Unlike traditional large energyprojects carried out by corporationsbased halfway around the world, theDanish approach has raised incomes andcreated jobs within communities. Withthe current financial system biasedtoward large-scale, centralized projects,special efforts are required if communi-ties are to obtain the financing needed toput a new system in place.67

In addition to concentrating wealthand power, today’s fossil-fuel-based systemhas engendered large imbalances in ener-gy use and social well-being. Its benefitshave not been extended to roughly 2 bil-lion of the world’s poor—a third of glob-al population—who still rely on biomassfor cooking and lack access to electricity.Today, the richest fifth of humanity con-sumes 58 percent of the world’s energy,while the poorest fifth uses less than 4percent. The United States, with 5 per-cent of the world’s population, uses near-ly one quarter of global energy supplies;on a per capita basis, it consumes twice asmuch energy as Japan and 12 times asmuch as China.68

A more decentralized, renewable-resource-based energy system may have abetter chance of spreading energy servicesmore broadly. In fact, meeting the needsof the 2 billion people who do not havemodern fuels or electricity and of another2 billion who are badly underserved mightbecome a new social imperative—akin tothe push to electrify rural areas of theUnited States in the 1930s. Providingclean, advanced energy services wouldstimulate development in the poorerregions of the world, provide rural employ-ment, and lessen the burden of daily woodgathering that now falls on hundreds ofmillions of women and children. TheWorld Bank, which has devoted tens of bil-lions of dollars to electrifying cities usingcentral power plants over the past several


Meeting the needs of the 2 billionpeople who do not have modern fuelsor electricity might become a newsocial imperative.

decades, has recently undertaken a rangeof initiatives intended to provide decen-tralized, renewable power supplies to hun-dreds of millions of rural people.69

Even with a shift to more energy-effi-cient technologies that rely on renewableresources, societies will have to confrontbasic consumption patterns in order tomake the energy economy sustainable. Inthe United States, the energy efficiencygains of the past quarter-century havebeen overwhelmed by escalating con-sumer demand for energy services. U.S.per capita energy use neared its previous1973 peak in the late 1990s, with gasolineuse per person already at record levels.Increased driving, sports utility vehicles,larger homes, and “killer kitchens” with allthe latest energy-hungry appliances havecreated an insatiable appetite for fuel.70

The mass consumer culture of twenti-eth-century North America—and to aslightly lesser extent, Europe and Japan—has been predicated on a “high-energysociety” that has viewed inexpensive,abundant energy as something of a con-stitutional right. But Americans’ energy-intensive lifestyles, and the U.S.-led globalenergy consumption trend of the pastcentury—a 10-fold increase, with a qua-drupling since 1950—cannot possibly bea sustainable model for a population ofmore than 9 billion in the twenty-first cen-tury. (See Figure 2–5.)71

It will be far easier to meet the energyneeds of the world in coming years if suf-ficiency replaces profligacy as the ethic ofthe next energy paradigm. This willrequire a breakthrough not so much inscience or technology as in values andlifestyles. Modest changes, such as owningsmaller cars and homes, or driving lessand cycling more, would still leave us withlifestyles that are luxurious by historicalstandards but that are far more compati-ble with an energy system that can be sus-tained. Several studies show that societiesthat focus less on absolute consumptionand more on improving human welfare

can meet development goals with muchlower energy requirements. Russia, forexample, has higher per capita energy usebut far lower living standards than Japan,whose economic success of the 1970s and1980s was greatly assisted by its “delink-ing” of energy use and development.72

The energetic challenge facing human-ity is not unlike that confronting Russiansa decade ago: creating a decentralized,demand-oriented system when a centrallyplanned, consumption-oriented economyhas been the industrial norm for threegenerations. Like the Soviet system, thefossil-fuel-based model is losing authorityas people become more aware of its nega-tive social and environmental effects andthe constrained choices that it offers. Andlike the reform movements that sweptCentral Europe in 1989, the new energysystem must be built from the bottom up,by the actions of millions, through democ-ratization of the energy decisionmakingprocess. Only through the efforts of adiverse cast of characters—activistsprotesting air pollution, consumers seek-ing lower energy bills, villagers demand-ing power, and industry captains pursuingprofits—are societies likely to build a sus-tainable energy system.73


1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 20000

2

4

6

8

10

12Trillion Tons of Oil Equivalent

Sources: IIASA, BP

Figure 2–5. World Energy Consumption,1900–97


Designing a new energy system suitablefor the twenty-first century may helpreestablish the positive but too oftenneglected connections between energy,human well-being, and the environment.Rather than treat energy as a commodityto be consumed without regard for itsconsequences, we might instead recover amuch older notion of energy as some-thing to be valued, saved, and used tomeet our needs in ways that respect therealities of the natural world—therebyavoiding the kind of ecological catastro-phe that has befallen civilizations thatoverdrew their environmental endow-ments. The sooner we can bring the fleet-ing hydrocarbon era to a close andaccomplish the historic shift to a civiliza-tion based on the efficient use of renew-able energy and hydrogen, the sooner wecan stop drawing down the natural inher-itance of future generations and begininvesting in a livable planet.74

Utopian dreams, borne of societalmores, are hallmarks of energy futurism.In turn-of-the-century America, oil wasdescribed as “black gold,” and automo-biles were depicted as a cure for urbanwoes. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—itself a Utopian exposition—electricity

had already become a symbol of the com-ing century, a marvel to be spreadthroughout the country as a near-reli-gious crusade. Together with lightweightmetals and high-speed trains, it was one ofthe three most-cited technological mar-vels in the 160 Utopian novels that blan-keted the United States between 1888 and1900. In the most famous of these,Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, themain character travels to an America inthe year 2000 where “electricity…takesthe place of all fires and lighting.”75

The pursuit of energy Utopia couldsoon be revived, as a host of innovationsonce again provide glimpses of a betterfuture. But these wonders represent morethan technological solutions. They alsosymbolize a broader vision—formed byold values and new choices—of creatingan energy system that brings billions ofpeople into the light, treats energy as ameans to a social end, and heeds therequirements of the natural systems thatmake life on Earth possible. Such a visionmight yet inspire us to make the nextenergy transition before it is too late—much as the quest for “black gold” droveour predecessors to accomplish the lastgreat transformation.

NotesChapter 2. Reinventing the EnergySystem

1. Dave Walter, ed., Today Then: America’sBest Minds Look 100 Years Into the Future on theOccasion of the 1893 World’s ColumbianExposition (Helena, MT: American & WorldGeographic Publishing, 1992); David E. Nye,Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a NewTechnology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 1990); Sam H. Schurr and Bruce C.Netschert, Energy in the American Economy,1850–1975 (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1960).

2. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back:Technology and the Revenge of UnintendedConsequences (New York: Vintage Books, 1996);Walter, op. cit. note 1.

3. Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History(Oxford, U.K.: Westview Press, 1994); MarthaHamilton, “Oil Prices Hit Lowest Level in 10Years,” Washington Post, 18 March 1998; GaryMcWilliams, “Living in a World of Cheap Oil,”Business Week, 30 March 1998; Daniel Yergin,“Fueling Asia’s Recovery,” Foreign Affairs,March/April 1998; Ruth Daniloff, “Waiting forthe Oil Boom,” Smithsonian, January 1998; “OilDrums Calling,” The Economist, 7 February1998; Ahmed Rashid and Trish Saywell,“Beijing Gusher,” Far Eastern Economic Review,26 February 1998.

4. Table 2–1 based on InternationalInstitute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)data in Arnulf Grubler, Alan McDonald, andNebojsa Nakicenovic, eds., Global EnergyPerspectives (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1998), on John P. Holdren et al., FederalEnergy Research and Development for the Challengesof the Twenty-First Century, Report of the EnergyResearch and Development Panel of thePresident’s Committee of Advisors on Scienceand Technology (Washington, DC: November1997), on United Nations, Energy StatisticsYearbook 1995 (New York: 1997), and on BritishPetroleum (BP), BP Statistical Review of WorldEnergy 1998 (London: Group Media &Publications, June 1998); Martin V. Melosi,Coping With Abundance: Energy and Environmentin Industrial America (New York: NewberryAward Records, Inc., 1985); Daniel Yergin, ThePrize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

5. Ernst von Weizsacker et al., Factor Four:Doubling Wealth—Halving Resource Use(London: Earthscan Publications, 1996);Thomas B. Johansson et al., eds., RenewableEnergy: Sources for Fuels and Electricity(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); PeterHoffmann, The Forever Fuel: The Story ofHydrogen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981).

6. Smil, op. cit. note 3; Vaclav Smil,General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere andCivilization (New York: John Wiley & Sons,1991).

7. Smil, op. cit. note 3; U.N. DevelopmentProgramme (UNDP), Energy After Rio (NewYork: 1997).

8. Jean-Claude Debeir, In the Servitude ofPower: Energy and Civilization Through the Ages(London: Zed Books, 1991); Martin V. Melosi,“Energy Transitions in the Nineteenth-

Century Economy,” in George H. Daniels andMark H. Rose, eds., Energy and Transport:Historical Perspectives on Policy Issues (London:Sage Publications, 1982).

9. Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; BP, op.cit. note 4; Smil, op. cit. note 3.

10. Colin J. Campbell and Jean H.Laherrere, “The End of Cheap Oil,” ScientificAmerican, March 1998.

11. Ibid.; Figure 2–1 based on U.S.Department of Defense, Twentieth CenturyPetroleum Statistics (Washington, DC: 1945),and on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),Energy Information Administration (EIA),International Energy Database, <http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/contents.html>,viewed 21 August 1998.

12. Campbell and Laherrere, op. cit. note10; Richard A. Kerr, “The Next Oil CrisisLooms Large—and Perhaps Close,” Science, 21August 1998; Scott Baldauf, “World’s Oil MaySoon Run Low,” Christian Science Monitor, 23September 1998; Worldwatch Institute esti-mate based on BP, op. cit. note 4.

13. Smil, op. cit. note 3; UNDP, op. cit.note 7; George Basalla, “Some PersistentEnergy Myths,” in Daniels and Rose, op. cit.note 8; Melosi, op. cit. note 4; World HealthOrganization, U.N. Environment Programme,and Earthwatch Global EnvironmentMonitoring System, Urban Air Pollution inMegacities of the World (Cambridge: MA:Blackwell, 1992); World Bank, Clear Water, BlueSkies: China in 2020 (Washington, DC: 1997);Elisabeth Rosenthal, “China Officially LiftsFilter on Staggering Pollution Data,” New YorkTimes, 14 June 1998.

14. Vaclav Smil, Cycles of Life: Civilizationand the Biosphere (New York: ScientificAmerican Library, 1997); Figure 2–2 and car-bon dioxide data from Thomas A. Boden etal., Trends ’93: A Compendium of Data on GlobalChange (Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge NationalLaboratory, September 1994), from J.T.

Houghton et al., eds., Climate Change 1995: TheScience of Climate Change, Contribution ofWorking Group I to the Second AssessmentReport of the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC) (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1996), and fromC.D. Keeling and T.P. Whorf, “AtmosphericCO2 Concentrations (ppmv) Derived From InSitu Air Samples Collected at Mauna LoaObservatory, Hawaii,” Scripps Institution ofOceanography, La Jolla, CA, August 1998;Robert T. Watson, Marufu C. Zinyowera, andRichard H. Moss, eds., Climate Change 1995:Impacts, Adaptations, and Mitigation of ClimateChange: Scientific-Technical Analyses, Contri-bution of Working Group II to the SecondAssessment Report of the IPCC (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael E.Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K.Hughes, “Global-Scale Temperature Patternsand Climate Forcing Over the Past SixCenturies,” Nature, 23 April 1998.

15. Watson, Zinyowera, and Moss, op. cit.note 14; Molly O’Meara, “The Risks of ClimateChange,” World Watch, November/December1997; James Hansen et al., Goddard Institutefor Space Studies, Surface Air TemperatureAnalyses, “Global Land-Ocean TemperatureIndex,” <http:// www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP>, viewed 25 September 1998; J.Madeleine Nash, “The Fury of El Niño,” U.S.News & World Report, 16 February 1998; MollyMoore, “Fires Devastate Mexico,” WashingtonPost, 12 April 1998; Elisabeth Rosenthal,“Millions Wait for Flood Relief in NorthChina,” New York Times, 31 August 1998; CeliaW. Dugger, “Monsoon Hangs On, SwampingBangladesh,” New York Times, 7 September1998; William K. Stevens, “Warmer, Wetter,Sicker: Linking Climate to Health,” New YorkTimes, 10 August 1998; Sharon Begley, “HellNiño,” Newsweek, 9 March 1998; “The Seasonof El Niño,” The Economist, 9 May 1998; NigelHawkes, “A Sunless Summer? It’s theWeather’s Fault,” The Times (London), 3August 1998; Stevens, op. cit. this note;William K. Stevens, “If the Climate Changes, ItMay Do So Fast, New Data Show,” New York


Times, 27 January 1998; William B. Calvin,“The Great Climate Flip-flop,” Atlantic Monthly,January 1998; Richard B. Alley and Peter B.deMenocal, “Abrupt Climate ChangesRevisited: How Serious and How Likely?” U.S.Global Change Seminar Series, Washington,DC, 23 February 1998.

16. Nebojsa Nakicenovic, “Freeing EnergyFrom Carbon,” in Jesse H. Ausubel and H.Dale Langford, eds., Technological Trajectoriesand the Human Environment (Washington, DC:National Academy Press, 1997); Houghton etal., op. cit. note 14; Joby Warrick, “ReassessingKyoto Agreement, Scientists See LittleEnvironmental Advantage,” Washington Post,13 February 1998; Bert Bolin, “The KyotoNegotiations on Climate Change: A SciencePerspective,” Science, 16 January 1998.

17. Melosi, op. cit. note 8; George Basalla,The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press, 1988).

18. Anne Goodman, “Bringing Down thePower Lines,” Tomorrow, September/October1998.

19. UNDP, op. cit. note 7; DOE, EIA,International Energy Outlook 1998 (Washington,DC: April 1998); Arnold Pacey, Technology inWorld Civilization: A Thousand-Year History(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990); Melosi,op. cit. note 8.

20. Pacey, op. cit. note 19; Basalla, op. cit.note 17.

21. Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; WorldResources Institute (WRI), Taking A Byte Out ofCarbon (Washington, DC: 1998); Barry Fox,“Stand By For Savings,” New Scientist, 11 July1998.

22. DOE, Scenarios of U.S. Carbon Reductions:Potential Impacts of Energy Technologies by 2010and Beyond (Washington, DC: 1997); Holdrenet al., op. cit. note 4.

23. DOE, op. cit. note 22; Nils Borg, “New

Ballast May Start CFL Revolution,”International Association for Energy-EfficientLighting Newsletter, January 1998; MargaretSuozzo, A Market Opportunity Assessment for LEDTraffic Signals (Washington, DC: AmericanCouncil for an Energy-Efficient Economy,April 1998).

24. Pacey, op. cit. note 19; Smil, op. cit.note 3; Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; DOE, op.cit. note 22; Electric Power Research Institute,Renewable Energy Technology Characterizations(Palo Alto, CA: December 1997); $2 billion(Worldwatch estimate) and Figure 2–3 basedon Birger Madsen, BTM Consult, Ringkobing,Denmark, letter to Christopher Flavin, 10January 1998, and on BTM Consult,International Wind Energy Development: WorldMarket Update 1996 (Ringkobing, Denmark:March 1997).

25. Christopher Flavin and Molly O’Meara,“Solar Power Markets Boom,” World Watch,September/October 1998; Daniel McQuillen,“Harnessing the Sun,” Environmental Designand Construction, July/August 1998; Figure 2–4from Paul Maycock, “1997 World Cell/ModuleShipments,” PV News, February 1998, andfrom Paul Maycock, PV News, various issues;Flavin and O’Meara, op. cit. this note; TimothyJ. Coutts and Mark C. Fitzgerald, “Thermo-photovoltaics,” Scientific American, September1998.

26. Anthony DePalma, “The Great GreenHope,” New York Times, 8 October 1997;Hoffmann, op. cit. note 5; Kenneth Gooding,“Fuel Cells More Than a Dream,” FinancialTimes, 3 September 1998; Holdren et al., op.cit. note 4; Stuart F. Brown, “The Automakers’Big-Time Bet on Fuel Cells,” Fortune, 30 March1998.

27. James S. Cannon, Harnessing Hydrogen:The Key to Sustainable Transportation (New York:INFORM, Inc., 1995); Peter Hadfield andRebecca Warden, “Catalysts for Change,” NewScientist, 28 February 1998; Robert F. Service,“A Record in Converting Photons to Fuel,”


Science, 17 April 1998; Oscar Khaselev andJohn A. Turner, “A Monolithic Photovoltaic-Photoelectrochemical Device for HydrogenProduction via Water Splitting,” Science, 17April 1998; Robert F. Service, “The Fast Way toa Better Fuel Cell,” Science, 12 June 1998; ErikReddington et al., “Combinatorial Electro-chemistry: A Highly Parallel, OpticalScreening Method for Discovery of BetterElectrocatalysts,” Science, 12 June 1998;Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4.

28. William J. Abernathy and KennethWayne, “Limits of the Learning Curve,”Harvard Business Review, September-October1974.

29. Melosi, op. cit. note 4; Joseph A. Pratt,“The Ascent of Oil: The Transition from Coalto Oil in Early Twentieth-Century America,” inLewis J. Perelman et al., eds., EnergyTransitions: Long-Term Perspectives (Boulder,CO: Westview Press, 1981); Flavin andO’Meara, op. cit. note 25; James S. Cannon,Clean Hydrogen Transportation: A MarketOpportunity for Renewable Energy, Issue Brief No. 7 (Washington, DC: Renewable EnergyPolicy Project, April 1997); Gerard L. Cler andMichael Shepard, “Distributed Generation:Good Things Are Coming in Small Packages,”E Source Tech Update, November 1996; GerardCler and Nicholas Lenssen, DistributedGeneration: Markets and Technologies inTransition (Boulder, CO: E Source, December1997); Shalom Zelingher, “Sewage and theFuel Cell,” Public Power, January-February1998; Otis Port, “With These Gizmos, YourCell Phone Can Run On Vodka,” Business Week,16 February 1998; Jonathan Beard, “Carry OnTalking,” New Scientist, 7 February 1998; AldenM. Hayashi, “Taking On the Energizer Bunny,”Scientific American, April 1998; DePalma, op.cit. note 26.

30. Cler and Lenssen, op. cit. note 29;Richard F. Hirsch, Technology and Trans-formation in the American Electric Utility Industry(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989);DOE, op. cit. note 22.

31. DOE, op. cit. note 22; WRI, op. cit. note21; Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4.

32. Ken Butti and John Perlin, A GoldenThread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture andTechnology (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,1980); Nye, op. cit. note 1; William D. Siuru,Jr., “Backyard Power Production,” Public Power,July-August 1998; Jacques Leslie, “Dawn of theHydrogen Age,” Wired, October 1997; DOE,op. cit. note 22; von Weizsacker et al., op. cit.note 5; Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4.

33. Michael Shnayerson, The Car ThatCould: The Inside Story of GM’s RevolutionaryElectric Vehicle (New York: Random House,1996); Amory Lovins, “Halfway to Hypercars,”Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter, Spring 1998;Keith Naughton, “Detroit’s ImpossibleDream?” Business Week, 2 March 1998; WilliamJ. Cook, “Piston Engine, R.I.P.?” U.S. News &World Report, 11 May 1998; “Is Toyota’s Hybridfor the U.S. Road?” (editorial), New York Times,1 August 1998; “Toyota Plans Gas/ElectricHybrid for North America, Europe by 2000,”Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, 14 July1998; “Space-age Cabs,” Economist, 1 August1998; Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4.

34. DOE, op. cit. note 22.

35. Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; A.C.Dillon et al., “Storage of Hydrogen in Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes,” Nature, 27 March1997; Cannon, op. cit. note 29; RobertSocolow, ed., Fuels Decarbonization and CarbonSequestration: Report of a Workshop, Report No.302 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Center forEnergy and Environmental Studies,September 1997); David Schneider, “Buryingthe Problem,” Scientific American, January 1998.

36. Adam Serchuk and Robert Means,Natural Gas: Bridge to a Renewable Energy Future,Issue Brief No. 8 (Washington, DC: RenewableEnergy Policy Project, May 1997); DOE, op.cit. note 22; Leslie, op. cit. note 32; MichaelFitzpatrick, “Fuelled for the 21st Century,”Financial Times, 5 October 1998; Pratt, op. cit.note 29.


37. Nye, op. cit. note 1; Schurr andNetschert, op. cit. note 1; Melosi, op. cit. note4; Schurr and Netschert, op. cit. note 1; Nye,op. cit. note 1.

38. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D.Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House,1998).

39. Ibid.; Yergin, op. cit. note 4.

40. James J. Flink, The Automobile Age(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988).

41. Melosi, op. cit. note 4; Hirsch, op. cit.note 30.

42. Chernow, op. cit. note 38.

43. Brad Knickerbocker, “Autos, ‘Big Oil’Get Earth-Friendly,” Christian Science Monitor, 6October 1998; Kate Murphy, “FightingPollution—And Cleaning Up, Too,” BusinessWeek, 9 January 1998; “GE Power Systems, PlugPower Form New Worldwide Fuel Cell JointMarketing Venture,” Hydrogen & Fuel CellLetter, October 1998; Cler and Lenssen, op. cit.note 29.

44. Daniel Yergin, The Commanding Heights:The Battle Between Government and MarketplaceThat Is Remaking the Modern World (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1998); Cler and Lenssen,op. cit. note 29; Thomas R. Casten, TurningOff The Heat: Why America Must Double EnergyEfficiency to Save Money and Reduce GlobalWarming (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,1998); Yergin, op. cit. this note.

45. “The Balance of Power,” The Economist,6 June 1998; UNDP, op. cit. note 7.

46. Shimon Awerbuch and Alistair Preston,eds., The Virtual Utility: Accounting, Technologyand Competitive Aspects of the Emerging Industry(Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997);Karl R. Rábago, “Being Virtual: BeyondRestructuring and How We Get There,” inibid.

47. Lori M. Rodgers, “Green Electricity: It’s

In the Eye of the Beholder,” Public UtilitiesFortnightly, 15 February 1998; Ryan H. Wiserand Steven J. Pickle, Selling Green Power inCalifornia: Product, Industry, and Market Trends(Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory, May 1998); Ryan Wiser, StevenPickle, and Charles Goldman, “RenewableEnergy Policy and Electricity Restructuring: ACalifornia Case Study,” Energy Policy, May 1998;Seth Dunn, “Green Power Spreads toCalifornia,” World Watch, July/August 1998.

48. Pratt, op. cit. note 29.

49. UNDP, op. cit. note 7; David Mosvokitzet al., “What Consumers Need to Know ifCompetition is Going to Work,” The ElectricityJournal, June 1998.

50. Shnayerson, op. cit. note 33; Holdrenet al., op. cit. note 4; CALSTART, ElectricVehicles: An Industry Prospectus (Burbank, CA:1996); Cook, op. cit. note 33; Donald W.Nauss, “Car Mergers Propelled ByTechnology,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1998.

51. David C. Moschella, Waves of Power:Dynamics of Global Technology Leadership,1964–2010 (New York: AMACOM, 1997);Chernow, op. cit. note 38.

52. Yergin, op. cit. note 4.

53. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Povertyof Nations: Why Some Nations Are So Rich andSome So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1998); Mortimer B. Zuckerman, “ASecond American Century,” Foreign Affairs,May/June 1998; Yergin, op. cit. note 4.

54. Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; Martin I.Hoffert et al., “Energy Implications of FutureStabilization of Atmospheric CO

2Content,”

Nature, 29 October 1998.

55. John Browne, “International Relations:The New Agenda for Business,” The 1998Elliott Lecture, St. Antony’s College, OxfordUniversity, 4 June 1998; Knickerbocker, op. cit.note 43; “Detroit Turns a Corner” (editorial),New York Times, 1 January 1998.


56. International Energy Agency (IEA),Renewable Energy Policy in IEA Countries, Vol. I(Paris: 1997); David Malin Roodman, TheNatural Wealth of Nations (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998).

57. John V. Mitchell, The New Geopolitics ofEnergy (London: Royal Institute ofInternational Affairs, 1996); Peter Kassler andMatthew Paterson, Energy Exporters and ClimateChange (London: Royal Institute ofInternational Affairs, 1997); Martha BrillOlcott, “The Caspian’s False Promise,” ForeignPolicy, summer 1998; Holdren et al., op. cit.note 4.

58. Mitchell, op. cit. note 57.

59. Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; SorenKrohn, managing director, Danish WindTurbine Manufacturing Association, discus-sion with Christopher Flavin, 7 November1998.

60. UNDP, op. cit. note 7; Pacey, op. cit.note 19; Felipe Fernandez-Armesto,Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years(New York: Scribner, 1995); Jared Diamond,Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of HumanSocieties (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,1997).

61. Peter Hoffmann, “Iceland and Daimler-Benz/Ballard Start Plans for HydrogenEconomy,” Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Letter, June1998.

62. Debeir, op. cit. note 8.

63. Ibid.; Landes, op. cit. note 53; LangdonWinner, “Energy Regimes,” in Daniels andRose, op. cite note 8.

64. Chernow, op. cit. note 38; FortuneMagazine, “The Global 500 List,” as viewed at<http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/glob-al500/index.html>, viewed 26 August 1998;“Fortune 500 Largest Corporations,” Fortune,27 April 1998; World Bank, 1998 World BankAtlas (Washington, DC: 1998), with compari-son between companies and countries based

on exchange rate values, not purchasingpower parity.

65. Ross Gelbspan, “A Good Climate ForInvestment,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1998; JohnH. Cushman, Jr., “Industrial Group Plans toBattle Climate Treaty,” New York Times, 26 April1998; Shnayerson, op. cit. note 33; SaraKnight, “Bonn Brought to Standstill,”Windpower Monthly, October 1997.

66. Martha M. Hamilton, “Shell LeavesCoalition That Opposes Global WarmingTreaty,” Washington Post, 22 April 1998; JohnH. Cushman, Jr., “New Policy Center Seeks toSteer the Debate on Climate Change,” NewYork Times, 8 May 1998; Knight, op. cit. note 65;Carl Frankel, “Trends and Challenges,”Tomorrow, January/February 1998.

67. Lewis J. Perelman, “Speculations on theTransition to Sustainable Energy,” inPerelman et al., op. cit. note 29; Jan Bentzen,Valdemar Smith, and Mogens Dilling-Hansen,“Regional Income Effects and RenewableFuels,” Energy Policy, April 1998; JesperMunksgaard and Anders Larsen, “Socio-Economic Assessment of Wind Power—Lessons from Denmark,” Energy Policy,February 1998; UNDP, op. cit. note 7.

68. UNDP, op. cit. note 7; UNDP, HumanDevelopment Report 1998 (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998).

69. Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; Nye, op.cit. note 1; UNDP, op. cit. note 68; UNDP, op. cit. note 7; World Bank, Rural Energy andDevelopment: Improving Energy Supplies for Two Billion People (Washington, DC: 1996);Douglas Barnes, Karl Jechowtek, and AndrewYoung, “Financing Decentralized RenewableEnergy: New Approaches?” Energy Issues,October 1998.

70. Smil, op. cit. note 3; IEA, Indicators ofEnergy Use and Efficiency (Paris: 1997); Allen R.Myerson, “U.S. Splurging on Energy AfterFalling Off Its Diet,” New York Times, 22October 1998.


71. David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A SocialHistory of American Energies (Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 1998); Figure 2–5 based onIIASA, op. cit. note 4, and on BP, op. cit. note4.

72. Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power,and Society (New York: John Wiley & Sons,1971); Smil, op. cit. note 3; UNDP, op. cit.note 68.

73. Daniel Yergin, Russia 2010—And WhatIt Means for the World (New York: RandomHouse, 1993).

74. Earl Cook, Man, Energy, Society (NewYork: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1976);Holdren et al., op. cit. note 4; Smil, op. cit.note 6; Jack M. Hollander, ed., The Energy-Environment Connection (Washington, DC:Island Press, 1992); Clive Ponting, A GreenHistory of the World: The Environment and theCollapse of Great Civilizations (New York:Penguin Books, 1991); Smil, op. cit. note 3.

75. Yergin, op. cit. note 4; Basalla, “SomePersistent Energy Myths,” in Daniels and Rose,op. cit. note 8; Nye, op. cit. note 1; EdwardBellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (NewYork: Penguin Books, reissue 1982).


Forging a Sustainable

Materials Economy

Gary Gardner and Payal Sampat

Imagine a truck delivering to your houseeach morning all the materials you use ina day, excluding food and fuel. Piled atthe front door are the wood in your news-paper, the chemicals in your shampoo,and the plastic in the bags that carry yourgroceries home. Metal in your appliancesand your car—just that day’s share ofthose items’ total lives—are also included,as is your daily fraction of shared materi-als, such as the stone and gravel in youroffice walls and in the streets you stroll. Atthe base of the pile are materials younever see, including the nitrogen andpotash used to grow your food, and theearth and rock under which your metalsand minerals were once buried.

If you are an average American, thisdaily delivery is a burdensome load: at101 kilos, it is roughly the weight of alarge man. But your materials tally hasonly begun. Tomorrow, another 101 kilosarrives, and the next day, another. By

month’s end, you have used 3 tons ofmaterial, and over the year, 37 tons. Andyour 270 million compatriots are doingthe same thing, day in and day out.Together, you will devour almost 10 bil-lion tons of material in a year’s time.1

Americans, Europeans, and Japaneseuse far greater quantities of materialstoday than their ancestors did in the nine-teenth century—and far more than peo-ple in developing countries do today.More metal, glass, wood, cement, andchemicals have been used since the turnof the century than in any previous era.Industrial nations are responsible formost of this: Americans alone use about athird of the materials that churn throughthe global economy. Such excessive con-sumption is not required to deliver theservices people want, yet the material-intensive economic model is still used orpursued in most of the world. Indeed, thewidespread human appetite for materialshas defined this century in much thesame way that stone, bronze, and iron didprevious eras.2

3

An expanded version of this chapter appeared asWorldwatch Paper 144, Mind Over Matter: Recastingthe Role of Materials in Our Lives.

Material use this century has been dis-tinctive for two more reasons. Materialsbecame increasingly complex: today’sstock, for example, draws from all 92 nat-urally occurring elements in the periodictable, compared with just 20 or so at theturn of the century. This allowed materi-als scientists to move well beyond the clas-sic material forms of wood, ceramics, andmetals, but it also made recycling difficultand introduced unprecedented toxicityto human and natural habitats. In addi-tion, waste was generated at far greaterrates than in any previous era. Even late inthis century, when interest in recyclinghas surged, most materials movingthrough industrial economies are usedonly once, and then thrown away.3

The features that made this centurymaterially unique also brought unprece-dented damage to human and environ-mental health. Mining has contaminatedthousands of kilometers of rivers andstreams in the United States alone, andlogging threatens vital habitat, often ofendangered species. Air and water pollu-tion from manufacturing plants have sick-ened millions, often shortening lives.Some of the 100,000 synthetic chemicalsintroduced this century are a ticking timebomb, affecting the reproductive systemsof animals and humans even a generationafter initial exposure. And the effort tomake waste disappear—by burying it,burning it, or dumping it in the ocean—has generated greenhouse gases, dioxin,toxic leakage, and other threats to envi-ronmental and human health.4

Given the record of this century, anextraterrestrial observer might concludethat conversion of raw materials towastes—often toxic ones—is the real purpose of human economic activity.Fortunately, such archaic wastefulnessoffers ample room for radical reductionsin materials use. Indeed, researchers andpolicymakers are exploring ways to reduce by 90 percent or more thematerials that flow through industrial

economies, as well as the burden thatthese flows have imposed on the naturalenvironment. This will require an imagi-native rethinking of how to deliver theservices that people want. But it alsooffers the potential to bring economiesinto harmony with the natural world thatsupports them.

CONSTRUCTING A MATERIAL

CENTURY

The intensive use of materials this centu-ry has deep historical roots. Since theIndustrial Revolution, advances in tech-nology and changes in society and in busi-ness practices have fed on each other andbuilt economies that could extract,process, consume, and dispose of tremen-dous quantities of materials. The roots ofthis evolution extend back centuries, butmost of these trends have matured only inthe last 100 years.5

Production of iron, the emblematicmaterial of the Industrial Revolution,illustrates how technological advances fedmaterials use. In 1879, a British policeclerk and his chemist cousin invented aprocess for making high-quality steel—aharder and more durable alloy of iron—from any grade of iron ore, eliminatingthe need for phosphorus-free ore. Thisprocess cut steelmaking costs by some80–90 percent and drove demand sky-ward: between 1870 and 1913, iron oreproduction in Britain, Germany, andFrance multiplied 83-fold. Further inno-vations and robust demand led to a sixfold increase in world productionbetween 1913 and 1995. Today, iron andsteel account for 85 percent of world metals, and a tenth, by weight, of worldmaterials production.6

Similarly, new extractive technologiesmade it possible to mine metal from rela-tively poor veins, a practice known as “low-


grading.” In 1900, for example, it was notfeasible to extract copper from ore thatcontained less than 3 percent of themetal. But technological advances havelowered the extraction threshold to lessthan 0.5 percent, increasing the numberof sites at which mining is viable. Low-grading is one reason that the copperindustry was able to meet the 22-foldgrowth in demand for copper from theautomobile, electrical, and other indus-tries since 1900. Likewise, modern miningand logging equipment have made it easyto reduce tracts of forests into evenlychopped lumber in a matter of hours, orto shear off mountaintops to reach min-eral deposits.7

Meanwhile, transportation and energydevelopments greased the wheels of thematerials boom. Completion of theCanadian Pacific Railway in 1905, forinstance, laid open the country’s richwestern provinces to mineral exploita-tion, while locomotives later helpedempty Liberian mines of iron ore that wassent to Europe. And throughout the cen-tury, the cheap availability of oil—a betterperforming fuel than coal or wood—made materials production more economical than ever. Declining costs for energy and raw materials fueledexpansion in industrial scale and kept thecycle of exploration and production inconstant motion.8

Perhaps the most powerful stimulus to materials extraction throughout thecentury has been the economic incentivesthat governments offered to producers.An 1872 U.S. law, for example—whichregrettably is still in effect—gives minerstitle to federal mining land for just $12 per hectare ($5 an acre), charging no fees for metals extracted from theseholdings. The title also allows the minerto build homes, graze cattle, extract tim-ber, and divert water on this land for no extra fee. This century, governmentsin all parts of the world—includingIndonesia, Ghana, and Peru—have intro-

duced similar incentives, including taxbreaks to attract mining and logging com-panies. These policies are typically uneco-nomical: the U.S. government still spendsmore in building logging roads than itearns from timber sales.9

Subsidized access to materials andenergy, combined with technologicaladvances, increased the scale of industryand prompted new ways of organizingand managing production. Inspired bythe use of standard, interchangeable partsto facilitate large-scale musket productionin the early nineteenth century, HenryFord adopted the concept of mass production in his automobile factories.Ford’s moving assembly line and stan-dardized components slashed productiontime per chassis from 12.5 hours in 1913to 1.5 hours in 1914. Costs also fell: a Ford Model T cost $600 in 1912 but just$265 in 1923, bringing car ownershipwithin reach of many more consumers.And Ford’s total output jumped from 4 million cars in 1920 to 12 million in1925, accounting for about half of all carsmade in the world at the time. Soon thesemass production principles were adoptedby manufacturers of refrigerators, radios, and other consumer goods, withsimilar results.10

As the scale of production ballooned,demographic shifts and new businessstrategies created a market to match it.The U.S. and European labor forcebecame increasingly urbanized, middle-class, and salaried in the first third of thecentury, characteristics that facilitated the

Forging a Sustainable Materials Economy (43)

An extraterrestrial observer mightconclude that conversion of raw mate-rials to wastes is the real purpose ofhuman economic activity.

creation of a consumer class. Business ini-tiatives encouraged and capitalized onthese trends, with Henry Ford once againa leader. In 1914 Ford introduced a dailywage of $5—more than twice the goingrate—thereby augmenting his workers’spending power. He also reduced workinghours, believing, in the words of one ana-lyst, that “an increase in leisure timewould support an increase in consumerspending, not least on automobiles andautomobile travel.” Other employersvociferously opposed shorter workdays,but conceded increases in pay for thesame reason Ford did: to prompt con-sumer spending.11

Prospering workers and their familiesquickly became the targets of sophisticat-ed marketing efforts. Department storesand mail-order catalogs funneled a wealthof goods to the consumer, and consumercredit made those goods affordable: bythe end of the 1920s, 60 percent of cars,radios, and furniture were being pur-chased on credit. Clever strategies werealso used to boost sales: in the 1920sGeneral Motors introduced annual modelchanges for its cars, playing on con-sumers’ desires for social status and nov-elty. Meanwhile, advertisers used insightsfrom the new field of psychology toensure that consumers were “never satis-fied,” in the words of a DuPont vice-presi-dent, linking the consumer’s identity toproducts. The ability of advertising toinfluence purchasing decisions propelledglobal advertising spending over the cen-tury, reaching $435 billion in 1996. Aspeople in developing countries have pros-pered in recent years, advertising spend-ing has grown rapidly there too: by morethan 1,000 percent in China between1986 and 1996, 600 percent in Indonesia,and 300 percent in Malaysia andThailand.12

Increasingly wealthy industrial nationsinvested heavily in materials research,prompting the development of new andversatile materials. Smelting of aluminum

was subsidized for use in tanks, bombers,and fighter planes during World War II.Its use spread quickly to consumer prod-ucts after the war, even for low-valuehousehold items like soda cans, boostingaluminum production 3,000-fold this cen-tury. Plastic, too, quickly became popular,growing sixfold worldwide since 1960 as aseemingly endless array of uses werefound for it. And growth in the use of syn-thetic chemicals this century is nothingshort of spectacular. More than 100,000new chemical compounds have beendeveloped since the 1930s, many of themfor use during World War II, boosting syn-thetic chemicals production 1,000-fold inthe last 60 years in the United Statesalone.13

These new materials often replacedtraditional ones—plastic for metal, forexample—leading to lighter products.But the materials savings from “light-weighting” were nearly always offset byincreased consumption, especially as mili-tary suppliers turned their energies toconsumer goods after World War II. Theshare of Japanese households with refrig-erators grew from 5 to 93 percent in the1960s, for instance. And global ownershipof cars grew 10-fold between 1950 andtoday. Cars are an especially materials-intensive product, claiming a full onethird of U.S. iron and steel, a fifth of itsaluminum, and two thirds of its lead andrubber use.14

Automobile use was facilitated by—anddrove—the expansion of roads, houses,and other infrastructure after mid-centu-ry. This construction boom prompted aneightfold increase in global cementproduction between 1957 and 1995, and atripling of asphalt output worldwide since1950. One third of this asphalt was pouredinto the giant U.S. network of interstatehighways. Where this infrastructure sup-ported extensive rather than intensivedevelopment, as in U.S. suburbs, moresewers, bridges, building foundations,houses, and telephone cables were need-


ed to service a given number of people.15

By the late 1960s, a materials coun-tertrend—recycling—began to develop instep with growing environmental aware-ness. The practice was not new: strategicmaterials were recycled during World WarII, and organic material has been com-posted for centuries. But an attempt toroot the practice more widely encoun-tered difficulty, because industrialeconomies had long been tooled todepend on virgin materials, and marketscould not easily absorb recyclable materi-als. Despite these deep-rooted obstacles,growth in recycling has been steady: inindustrial countries, the share of paperand cardboard recycled grew from anaverage 30 percent in 1980 to 40 percentby the mid-1990s. Glass recycling levelsrose from less than 20 percent to about 50percent in the same period. And theshare of U.S. metals consumption met byrecycling rose from 33 percent in 1970 toalmost 50 percent in 1998.16

Increased recycling, however, has notdampened the growth in world materialsuse. The developing world continues toindustrialize, and more affluent nationsshow no sign of reducing overall materialsconsumption. In 1995, nearly 10 billiontons of materials—industrial and con-struction minerals, metals, wood prod-ucts, and synthetic materials—enteredthe global economy. This is more thantwice as much as in 1963, the first year forwhich global data are available for allmajor categories. (See Table 3–1 andFigure 3–1.) Global data for a true total ofmaterials use—including the billions oftons that never entered the economy butwere left at mine sites or smelters—wouldmore than double this total.17

Production trends in the last half-cen-tury have varied by material and region.Fossil-fuel-based materials, led by plastics,have grown at more than twice the pace ofother major materials categories since1960, largely because of their light weight,versatility, and cheap availability. Metals

grew at a slower pace, but substantiallynonetheless: globally, metals productiondoubled between 1920 and 1950, and hasquadrupled since mid-century. The use ofwood products has marched steadilyupward since 1961 (see also Chapter 4),but in industrial nations the trend is morecomplex: wood has been replaced byother materials in many cases, but paperproduction has surged.18

Perhaps the greatest variation this cen-tury is found across regions. The United


Table 3–1. Growth in World MaterialsProduction, 1960–95

Production Increase OverMaterial in 19951 Early 1960s2

(million tons) (factor of change)

Minerals3 7,641 2.5-foldMetals 1,196 2.1-foldWood 724 2.3-fold

Products3

Synthetics4 252 5.6-fold

All Materials 9,813 2.4-fold1Marketable production only; does not include

hidden flows. 2Minerals and total materials data are for 1963; forest products data are for 1961.3Nonfuel. 4Fossil-fuel-based.SOURCE: See endnote 17.

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Source: Great Britain OverseasGeological Survey, USGS, UN, FAO

Metals

Minerals2

4

6

8

10Billion Tons

Wood Products

Synthetics

Figure 3–1. World Materials Production,1963–95

States was the materials behemoth thiscentury, towering above every othernation in its appetite for raw materials ofall kinds. (See Table 3–2.) Its 18-foldincrease in materials consumption since1900 is globally important in two ways.First, the United States has accounted fora dominating share of the world total,some 43 percent in 1963 and 30 percentin 1995. And its economic and ideologicalpower has made the high-consumption,materials-intensive economic model thedesired development path for dozens ofcountries and billions of people aroundthe world.19

Today residents of Brazil, Chile, andSouth Korea buy new television sets atrates comparable to their industrial-nation counterparts, at about 4–6 sets per100 individuals each year. In China, pur-chases of refrigerators, washing machines,and television sets rose 8–40 timesbetween 1981 and 1985—reminiscent ofJapan’s consumer goods rush in the1960s. On the whole, however, withroughly 20 percent of global population,industrial countries still devour far morematerials and products than developingnations—using, for example, 84 percentof the world’s paper and 87 percent of thecars each year.20

THE SHADOW SIDE OF

CONSUMPTION

In the early 1990s, researchers at theUniversity of British Columbia began tomeasure the land area needed to supplynational populations with resources(including imported ones), and the areaneeded to absorb their wastes. Theydubbed this combined area the “ecologi-cal footprint” of a population. In somecountries, the United States among them,the footprint is larger than the nation’sarea, because of a net dependence onimports or because resources or wasteabsorption capacity are overexploited.Indeed, the researchers determined thatsustaining the entire world at anAmerican or Canadian level of resourceuse would require the land area of threeEarths. Materials use strongly influencesthe size of a population’s footprint: in theU.S. case, materials are conservatively estimated to account for more than a fifthof the total footprint area. (Fossil fuel use and food production are other majorcomponents.) And other research implicates materials even more heavily.When measured by weight, materialsaccount for 44 percent of the U.S.resource use, 58 percent in the case ofJapan, and as much as 68 percent ofGermany’s resource burden.21

More direct evidence of the unsustain-ability of today’s material flows is found inthe environmental damage done by mate-rials extraction, processing, and disposal.Demand for wood and paper products—from construction lumber to packagingmaterial to newsprint—continues to stripforests, with serious environmental conse-quences. Indeed, the World ResourcesInstitute estimates that logging for woodproducts threatens more than 70 percentof the world’s large intact virgin forests.And in many parts of the world, single-species timber plantations have replacedold-growth forests—eroding species diver-


Table 3–2. Growth in U.S. MaterialsConsumption, 1900–95

Consumption,Material Growth 1995

(factor of change) (million tons)

Minerals1 29-fold 2,410Wood

Products1 3-fold 170Metals 14-fold 132Synthetics2 82-fold 131

All Materials 18-fold 2,8431Nonfuel. 2Fossil-fuel-based.

SOURCE: Data supplied by Grecia Matos, Mineralsand Materials Analysis Section, United StatesGeological Survey, Reston, VA, 27 July 1998.

sity, introducing toxic insecticides, anddisplacing local peoples.22

Healthy forests provide vital ecosystemservices, including erosion control, provi-sion of water across rainy and dry seasons,and regulation of rainfall. The loss ofthese services can devastate local water-sheds, as China learned in 1998, whendeforestation reduced the capacity of hill-sides to hold water, leaving the YangtzeRiver basin vulnerable to the worst flood-ing in more than 40 years. Forests alsoprovide habitat to a diverse selection ofplant and animal life; tropical forests, forexample, are home to more than 50 per-cent of the world’s species. The impact ofthe loss of these vital ecosystems wasunderlined in 1998 when a majority ofbiologists polled in the United Statesagreed that the world is in the midst of amass extinction, the first since dinosaursdied out 65 million years ago. The con-nection between these environmentalcalamities and the surging demand forwood and paper products—especially inindustrial countries—is increasingly diffi-cult to ignore.23

Mineral and metals extraction alsoleaves a lasting and damaging environ-mental footprint. Mining requires remov-ing from the earth both metal-bearingrock, called ore, and overburden, the dirtand rock that covers the ore. Very little ofthis material is used: some 110 tons of“overburden” earth and an equal amountof ore are excavated to produce just a tonof copper. (See Table 3–3.) Not surpris-ingly, the quantities of waste generatedare enormous: Canada’s mining wastesare 58 times greater than its urban refuse.Indeed, few newlyweds would guess thattheir two gold wedding rings were respon-sible for six tons of waste at a mining sitein Nevada or Kyrgyzstan. These mind-bog-gling movements of material now exceedthat of natural systems: mining alonestrips more of the Earth’s surface eachyear than the natural erosion by rivers.24

Mines use toxic chemicals, including

cyanide, mercury, and sulfuric acid, toseparate metal from ore. Tailings, thetoxin-laced ore that remains once themetal is separated, are often dumpeddirectly into lakes or rivers, with devastat-ing consequences. Tailings from the OkTedi mine in Papua New Guinea, forinstance, have decimated the fish, croco-diles, crustaceans, and turtles that oncethrived in the 70 kilometers of the OkTedi River downstream. Moreover, themining wastes have changed the courseof the river, which now floods riversidefarms with poisonous waters. And damageto the watershed has disrupted the healthand livelihoods of the indigenousWopkamin people.25

Toxic meltdowns can occur even whentailings are contained rather thandumped. In 1998, a tailings reservoir inSpain collapsed, spewing 5 million cubicmeters of mining sludge onto 2,000hectares of cropland and killing fish andwildlife in the neighboring DoñanaNational Park, a World Heritage Site.Mining is implicated in the contamina-tion of more than 19,000 kilometers ofU.S. rivers and streams, some virtuallypermanently. The Iron Mountain mine innorthern California continues to leachpollutants into nearby streams and theSacramento River more than 35 yearsafter being closed. Water downstream ofthe mine is 10,000 times more acidic than


Table 3–3. World Ore and Waste Productionfor Selected Metals, 1995

Share of Ore ThatMetal Ore Mined Becomes Waste1

(million tons) (percent)

Iron 25,503 60Copper 11,026 99Gold2 7,235 99.99967Lead 1,077 97.5Aluminum 856 70

1 Does not include overburden. 21997 data.SOURCE: See endnote 24.

car battery acid. The area is now aSuperfund site (a high priority forcleanup), but if remediation fails, expertsestimate that leaching at present rates willcontinue for at least 3,000 years beforethe pollution source is depleted. TheU.S.-based Mineral Policy Center esti-mates that the U.S. government will haveto spend $32–72 billion cleaning up thetoxic damage left at thousands of aban-doned mines across the country.26

Industrial activity this century has sentmillions of tons of lead, zinc, and copperinto the environment; global industrialemissions of lead now exceed natural ratesby a factor of 27. The impacts of this pol-lution are grave: the area within 15 kilo-meters of old smelters in the former SovietUnion, for example, is entirely devoid ofvegetation because of metals contamina-tion. Exposure to mercury, which is widelyused by miners in the Amazon Basin andWest Africa, increases cancer risk and candamage kidneys and nervous systems. Andlead, a neurotoxin, is known to stunt chil-dren’s intellectual development.27

Resource extraction and processingalso degrade the environment indirectly.In the United States, materials processingand manufacturing alone claimed 14 per-cent of the country’s energy use in 1994.Most of this energy is generated from theburning of fossil fuels, implicating every-day products in global climate change. Inaddition, cement production contributesabout 5 percent of the world’s emissionsof carbon, again contributing to climatechange.28

This century, modern chemistry intro-duced new synthetic chemicals, often withunknown consequences, into theremotest corners of the world. In 1995,scientists studying the global reach oforganochlorine pesticides reported thatalmost all of those they studied were“ubiquitous on a global scale.” Other evidence supports this conclusion:researchers looking for a control popula-tion of humans free of chemical contami-

nation turned to the native peoples of theCanadian Arctic, only to find that theseremote peoples carried chemical contam-inants at levels higher than people wholive in St. Lawrence, Canada, the originalfocus of the research. Chemicals hadreached the indigenous people throughwind, water, and their food supply.29

Part of the reason for this worryingdevelopment is that many chemicals can-not be controlled once emitted to theenvironment. Chlorofluorocarbons, forinstance, which were long used as refrig-erants and solvents, are implicated in thedecay of stratospheric ozone. A largeshare of pesticides used in agriculture—roughly 85–90 percent—never reach theirtargets, dispersing instead through air,soil, and water and sometimes settling inthe fatty tissues of animals and people.30

Many synthetic chemicals are not justubiquitous but long-lived. Persistentorganic pollutants (POPs), includingthose used in electrical wiring or pesti-cides, remain active in the environmentlong after their original purpose is served.Because they are slow to degrade, POPsaccumulate in fatty tissues as they arepassed up the food chain. They have beenshown to disrupt endocrine and repro-ductive systems—implicated in miniaturegenitals in Florida alligators, for exam-ple—often a generation or more afterexposure. The delay in appearance ofPOPs’ health effects raises questionsabout the wisdom of heavy dependenceon tens of thousands of newly synthesizedchemicals whose effects are poorly under-stood. And the long list of unknowns sur-rounding POPs is just a small indicationof our chemical ignorance. The U.S.National Academy of Sciences reportsthat insufficient information exists foreven a partial health assessment of 95 per-cent of chemicals in the environment.31

The dramatic increase since mid-cen-tury in another dispersed material, nitro-gen fertilizer, along with the increasedcombustion of fossil fuels, has made


humans the planet’s leading producers offixed nitrogen (the form that plants canuse), essentially raising the fertility of theplanet. But this fertility windfall favorssome species at the expense of others.Grasslands in Europe and North America,for instance, are now less biologicallydiverse as nitrogen deposition hasallowed a few varieties—often invasivespecies—to crowd out many others. Andalgae blooms in waterways as diverse asthe Baltic Sea, the Chesapeake Bay, andthe Gulf of Mexico—the result of fertiliz-er runoff—have led to fish and shrimpkills as algae rob other species of thewater’s limited supply of oxygen.Scientists are just beginning to compre-hend the full effects of disrupting theglobal flow of nitrogen, one of four majorelements (along with carbon, sulfur, andphosphorus) that lubricate essential plan-etary systems.32

Mountains of materials have been dis-carded this century, typically in thecheapest way possible. In a 1991 waste sur-vey of more than 100 nations by theInternational Maritime Organization,more than 90 percent of respondingcountries said that uncontrolled dumpingof industrial wastes was a problem. Nearlytwo thirds said that hazardous industrialwaste is disposed of at uncontrolled sites,and nearly a quarter reported dumpingindustrial waste in the oceans. The casualtreatment of industrial waste has had ter-rible environmental, health, and econom-ic consequences in much of the world.One quarter of the Russian population,for example, reportedly lives in areaswhere pollution concentrations exceedstandards by 10 times. In the UnitedStates, some 40,000 locations have beenlisted as hazardous waste “Superfund”sites, and the Environmental ProtectionAgency estimates that cleanup of just the1,400 priority sites will cost $31 billion.33

Finally, municipal solid waste—a rela-tively small, but high-profile waste flow—generates its own set of problems. In

developing countries, this material isoften dumped at sites near cities, some-times within congested neighborhoods,where it draws rats and other vermin thatpose a health threat to nearby residents.In industrial countries, the material is typ-ically landfilled or incinerated, each ofwhich has environmental consequences.Unless they are lined, for example, land-fills often leach acidic juices downward,contaminating groundwater supplies. Androtting organic matter in landfills oftengenerates methane, a greenhouse gas with21 times the global warming potential ofcarbon dioxide. Methane is sometimestapped for energy use, but this is not thetypical practice. Landfills are responsiblefor a third of U.S. methane emissions, and10 percent of methane emissions fromhuman sources worldwide.34

Incineration, a common disposalmethod, also carries a long string of lia-bilities. Municipal waste incinerators arethe single largest source of mercury emis-sions in the northeastern United States,contributing nearly half of all human-induced emissions in that region. And asincineration reduces piles of waste, itincreases emissions of dioxin, a POP, andgenerally concentrates toxicity in theremaining hazardous waste.35

As more countries aggressively applythe materials-intensive economic model,episodes of environmental destructionwill only multiply. Indeed, if the entireworld lived at the materials-intensivenessof the average American, materials usewould grow severalfold, and environmen-tal damage would increase at least corre-spondingly. (See Table 3–4.) In some


The casual treatment of industrialwaste has had terrible environmental,health, and economic consequences.

cases, the increase in damage could out-pace the growth in materials use. To citejust one example, as the quality of oregrades declines into the twenty-first cen-tury, more waste will be generated per tonof metal mined than was the case 100years ago.

A MATERIAL REVOLUTION

The environmental problems associatedwith intensive materials use led to calls inthe early 1990s for a “dematerialization”of industrial countries: a reduction in thematerials needed to deliver the servicespeople want. Using calculations that showglobal, human-induced flows of materialsto be twice as high as natural flows,German researchers recommended in1993 that global materials flows be cut inhalf. But because most developing coun-tries need to increase materials flows justto meet people’s basic needs, theresearchers concluded that the globalreduction in materials use would have tobe shouldered by the world’s heaviest

consumers, industrial nations. Indeed, bythe researchers’ estimates, this responsi-bility implies a 90-percent decrease inmaterials use by industrial nations overthe next half-century.36

This bracing estimate is not meant as aprescription for reductions in all types ofmaterials. Some materials, especially toxicones, may need to be eliminated entirely,while others can be used sustainably atreduction levels short of 90 percent. Butthe estimate is credible enough to betaken seriously by many officials, especial-ly in Europe. Austria has incorporated a“Factor 10” (90 percent) reduction intoits National Environmental Plan, and theDutch and German governments, alongwith the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),have expressed interest in pursuing radi-cal reductions.37

How can such monumental gains beachieved? Some would argue that materi-als reductions will occur naturally as aneconomy matures. Indeed, since 1970,when global materials use was firsttracked, materials use per dollar of grossworld product has fallen by 18 percent.While the drop is quite modest—and wasentirely canceled by increases in totalmaterials use and materials use per per-son—the factors that prompted it do offera foundation for radical reductions in thecoming decades.38

As with most efficiency increases inindustrial economies since the IndustrialRevolution, the modest decrease in mate-rials intensity since 1970 was largely anunplanned spinoff of other economicand social developments. In industrialcountries, roads, houses, bridges, andother major works of infrastructure werelargely completed, lighter materials weresubstituted for heavier ones, recyclingprograms kicked into gear, and servicecompanies like banks, restaurants, andinsurance companies—whose “products”are less materials-intensive than the goodspumped out by factories—grabbed a larg-


Table 3–4. Hypothetical Global Materials Usein 1995, Based on U.S. Per Capita

Consumption Levels

Increase If World Material Consumed at U.S. Levels

(factor of change)

Minerals1 7-foldMetals 2-foldWood Products1 5-foldSynthetics2 11-fold

Total 6-fold1Nonfuel. 2Fossil-fuel-based.

SOURCE: Grecia Matos, Minerals and MaterialsAnalysis Section, USGS, Reston, VA, 27 July 1998;United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 1996Revision (New York: 1996); U.S. Bureau of theCensus, International Data Base, electronic database,Suitland, MD, updated 15 June 1998.

er share of the economy.39

Because materials savings was not thegoal of these initiatives, however, the inci-dental gains made to date only hint at thereduction potential. Infrastructure wasnot designed to last centuries, as castlesand cathedrals once were, and had to bereplaced more often. Materials gains fromlighter products were often offset byother developments, especially increasedconsumption. (See Table 3–5.) Recyclingwas limited to materials that were mostlypure and easily collected, and for which amarket already existed. And service firms,while not heavy producers of materials,often promote materials use either bytrading in or financing it—the case for

retailers or financial institutions—or byconsuming materials voraciously them-selves: the construction industry andwater utilities, for example, use enormousquantities of materials. In short, incre-mental efficiency gains were made, buttotal materials use continued to climb.40

Indeed, it is the absolute levels of mate-rials use that matter from an environmen-tal perspective. Beetles and spidermonkeys in South American forests donot care if the trees lost in their habitatwere pulped into millions instead of thou-sands of newspapers. From their perspec-tive, the loss of habitat is not cushionedby the greater efficiency of material use. Decreases in materials intensity,


Table 3–5. Gains in Materials Efficiency of Selected Products and Factors That Undercut Gains

Product Efficiency Gains Factors That Undercut Efficiency Gains

Plastics in cars Use of plastics in U.S. cars Cars contain 25 chemically incompatibleincreased by 26 percent plastics that, unlike steel, cannot be easilybetween 1980 and 1994, recycled. Thus most plastics in cars wind upreplacing steel in many in landfills.uses, and reducing carweight by 6 percent.

Bottles and Cans Aluminum cans weigh 30 Cans replaced an environmentally superiorpercent less today than product—refillable bottles; 95 percent ofthey did 20 years ago. soda containers were refillable in the

United States in 1960.

Lead batteries A typical automobile battery U.S. domestic battery shipments increasedused 30 pounds of lead in by 76 percent in the same period, more1974, but only 20 pounds in than offsetting the efficiency gains.1994—with improvedperformance.

Radial Tires Radial tires are 25 percent Radial tires are more difficult to retread.lighter, and last twice as long, Sales of passenger car retreads fell by 52as bias-ply tires. percent in the United States between 1977

and 1997.

Mobile Phones Weight of mobile phones Subscribers to cellular telephone servicewas reduced 10-fold jumped more than eightfold in the samebetween 1991 and 1996. period, nearly offsetting the gains from

lightweighting. Moreover, the mobilephones did not typically replace older phones, but were additions to a household’s phone inventory.


while important, are always insufficient if rising consumption offsets them,requiring the continued logging offorests, opening of new mines, and pollu-tion of air and water.

Thus, “natural dematerialization” isunlikely to deliver overall reductions inmaterials use. But even deliberate initia-tives may be insufficient, if they do noth-ing to change existing industrialstructures. The OECD estimates thatunder current market conditions andenvironmental policies, firms in industrialnations can make profitable reductions inmaterials (and energy) use of 10–40 per-cent. It cites a study of 150 businesses inPoland, for example, showing that wastecould be reduced by 30 percent just fromequipment modernization. While wel-come, such reductions would leave indus-trial systems—with their dependence onvirgin materials and massive generationof waste—essentially intact. In the face ofa projected 150-percent expansion of theglobal economy by 2020, and given theneed for developing countries to liftthemselves out of poverty, revolutionarythinking will be required to achieve over-all reductions—not just relative efficiencygains—in materials use.41

For this reason, some analysts predict awholesale remaking of industrialeconomies. Many use as their model thenatural world, and envision economiesthat operate with little virgin material,that introduce no hazardous materialsinto the air, soil, or water, and that gener-ate no waste that cannot be used else-where in the economy or safely and easilyabsorbed by the environment. Whether

such a systematic overhaul can be fullyachieved is unclear, but a series of initia-tives could bring such a world much clos-er to reality.42

A key to radical reductions in materialsuse is to sever its link to economic activity.Perhaps the most revolutionary step inthis direction is to shift to a true serviceeconomy. Unlike today’s service firms,which often fuel materials excesses, lowmaterials throughput would be at thecore of a redesigned service economy.Companies would earn their profits notby selling goods (such as washingmachines or cars) but by providing theservices that goods currently deliver (con-venient cleaning of clothes or transporta-tion). They would be responsible for allthe materials and products used to pro-vide their services as well as for maintain-ing those goods and taking them back atthe end of their useful lives. Service firmswould thus have a strong incentive tomake products that last and that are easi-ly repaired, upgraded, dismantled, andreused or recycled.43

In effect, many service-provider firmswould become lessors rather than sellersof products. The Xerox corporation is awidely cited example. The company nowleases most of its office copy machines aspart of a redefined mission: to providedocument services rather than to sell pho-tocopiers. This arrangement has giventhe company a strong incentive to maxi-mize the use of its machines; between1992 and 1997 Xerox doubled the shareof copiers that are remanufactured—to28 percent—a strategy it says kept 30,000tons of material from returned machinesout of landfills in 1997 alone. Eachremanufactured machine meets the samestandards, and carries the same warranty,as a newly minted one. The company hasonly begun to implement the program; itexpects eventually to boost the remanu-factured share of its machines to 84 per-cent, and the recycled share of itsmaterial to 97 percent.44


A host of infrequently used goods—lawn mowers, for example—might beprovided by a service firm.

Some services would save on materialsby eliminating goods that spend most oftheir time idle. One study estimates thatover a set period, the use of laundry ser-vices rather than home washing machinescould cut resource use per wash between10- and 80-fold, depending on how thematerial is disposed of. If landfilled, forinstance, household machines would be80 times more materials-intensive thancommercial laundry machines; if perfect-ly dismantled and recycled, householdmachines would still use 10 times morematerials per wash. The example alsoillustrates the power of front-end ratherthan the end-of-pipe efforts that havecharacterized recycling to date. Whilewashing may be a function that con-sumers would prefer to retain in theirhome (an option that could still beaccommodated by a service firm, if themachine were leased), a host of otherinfrequently used goods—lawn mowers,for example—might be provided by a service firm.45

In essence, service providers replacesome materials with intelligence or labor.As the computer revolution continues tounfold, digital technology—basicallyembodied intelligence—can be used tobreathe new life into rapidly obsolescentproducts such as cameras and televisions.By upgrading product capabilitiesthrough the replacement of a computerchip, perfectly good casings, lenses, pic-ture tubes, and other components canavoid a premature trip to the landfill.Similarly, labor can be used to extend theuseful life of products: service providersneed workers to disassemble, repair, andrebuild their leasable goods, saving mate-rials and increasing employment at thesame time.

Some questions may need to beresolved before switching to a serviceeconomy, however. There may be unan-ticipated social effects. What happens tolow-income people, for example, whenthe supply of secondhand products dries

up as more and more goods becomeleased? A service economy could takefrom them a key survival strategy, forcingthem to pay monthly lease rates or elimi-nating their durable goods use altogether.But the subsidies that now aid powerfulmaterials producers—fueling wastefulmaterials use—might instead financeaccess to essential services. Another con-cern is that product leasing might edgeout smaller firms in favor of those thatvertically integrate product design, manu-facture, and repair. Forestalling theseinequities is a challenge for societies mak-ing the leap to a services economy.46

Revamped efforts in recycling offer thepossibility of reducing the materials loadof a service economy still further. Thescope of recycling, for example, is beingbroadened as products are designed withrecycling in mind. Computer cases arenow often made with single materials, anduse no glues, paints, or composites thatmight impede recycling. Producers ofcars and television sets increasingly buildtheir products for easy disassembly.Xerox’s ambitious plan to have 84 per-cent of its copiers be remanufactured ispossible because in 1997 the companyshifted to redesigned, easily disassembledmachines. Widespread adoption of these“design for environment” initiatives couldboost recycling rates economy-wide:today, just 17 percent of these durablegoods are recycled in the United States.47

With the right incentives, even greatermaterials reductions are possible. InGermany, a revolutionary packagingwaste ordinance that went into effect inearly 1993 holds producers accountablefor nearly all the packaging material theygenerate. The new law dramaticallyincreased the rate of packaging recycling,from 12 percent in 1992 to 86 percent in1997. Plastic collections, for example,jumped nearly 19-fold, from 30,000 tonsin 1991 to 567,000 tons in 1997. Betteryet, the law gave producers a strong incen-tive to cut their use of packaging, which


dropped 17 percent for households andsmall businesses between 1991 and 1997.Use of secondary packaging—outer con-tainers like the box around a tube oftoothpaste—has especially declined.Several countries, including Austria,France, and Belgium, have adopted simi-lar legislation.48

Other creative initiatives could expandrecycling at the factory level. A cluster ofindustries in Kalundborg, Denmark, haschampioned the concept of industrialsymbiosis, under which unusable dis-charges from each factory become inputsto other factories. Warm water fromKalundborg’s power plant is used by anearby fish farm, sludge from the fishfarm fertilizes farmland, and fly ash fromthe power plant is used to make cement.The scheme saves the firms millions ofkroner in raw materials costs, and annual-ly diverts more than 1.3 million tons ofwaste from landfills or ocean dumping aswell as some 135,000 tons of carbon andsulfur emissions from the atmosphere.Encouragingly, the concept is not limitedto the industrial world. A similar setup inFiji links together a brewery, a mushroomfarm, a chicken raising operation, fishponds, hydroponic gardens, and amethane gas production unit, all small inscale. Other waste-minimizing efforts areunder way in places as diverse as Namibiaand North Carolina.49

As with recycling and waste reuse,materials efficiency can be imaginativelyrethought. If efficiency is measured notjust at the factory gate but across the lifeof a product, characteristics such as dura-

bility and capacity for reuse suddenlybecome important. For example, dou-bling the useful life of a car may involveno increase in materials efficiency at thefactory, but it cuts in half both theresources used and the waste generatedper trip over the car’s life—a clearincrease in resource efficiency.Recognizing this, many companies areincreasing the durability of the productsthey use. Toyota, for example, shifted toentirely reusable shipping containers in1991, each with a potential lifetime of 20years. A similar move at Xerox saved thecompany $2–5 million annually. Advanceslike these, expanded economy-wide,would sharply reduce container and pack-aging waste—which account for some 30percent of inflows to U.S. landfills.50

Product life is also expanded throughthe remanufacture, repair, and reuse ofspent goods. In nearly all cases, thesestrategies are more materials- and energy-efficient, and generate fewer wastes, thanvirgin materials production does. Andremanufacture and repair options createmore jobs than disposing of goods would.The Institute for Local Self-Reliance inWashington, D.C., estimates that comput-er repair and refurbishing create an esti-mated 68 times as many jobs as running alandfill does. Labor costs also make repairand remanufacturing expensive, however;an economy-wide shift to this approachwould probably require a realignment ofthe relative costs of capital and labor.51

Widespread adoption of these “3R”measures would be a nostalgic step forsome consumers. Most grandparents inindustrial countries can remember aneconomy in which milk bottles and otherbeverage containers were reused, shoeswere resoled and clothes mended, andmachines were rebuilt. Some may remem-ber that all but two of the U.S. ships sunkat Pearl Harbor were recovered, over-hauled, and recommissioned, in partbecause of the savings in time and mater-ial that this option offered. That such


Car-sharing operations in Berlin andVancouver make cars available to people wo do not own an auto.

practices seem revolutionary to new gen-erations of consumers is a reflection ofhow far industrial economies have driftedfrom the careful use of materialresources.52

Materials substitution can be madesafer by introducing strict environmentalcriteria into substitution strategies.Because the use of nonrenewable materi-als—especially petrochemicals—is ulti-mately unsustainable, some analystsmaintain that these should be replacedwith biomass-based materials, shiftingeconomies from a “hydrocarbon” base toa “carbohydrate” one. Biodegradablematerials made from plant starches, oils,and enzymes can replace synthetics andeliminate toxic impacts. Enzymes havereplaced phosphates in 90 percent of alldetergents in Europe and Japan, and inhalf of those in the United States.Vegetable oils can replace mineral oils inpaints and inks: three out of fourAmerican daily newspapers now use soy-based, biodegradable inks. And starch orsugar can substitute for petroleum inmaking plastics.53

The feasibility of such a shift remainsquestionable, however, especially becauseof land requirements in a world ofincreasingly scarce cropland. Some ana-lysts argue that agricultural and pulpingwastes can provide sufficient feedstocksneeded to displace petrochemical-basedmaterials. At a minimum, plant-basedmaterials are a promising way to reducemany of the environmental and healthhazards associated with petroleum-basedmaterials.54

As in the past, the efficiency gains of amaterials-light economy could be offsetby increased consumption, resulting incontinued environmental decline. Thus,consumers need to be involved if realreductions in materials use are to occur.One idea that could limit materials con-sumption, build community spirit, savemoney, and meet people’s needs is thesharing of goods. Car-sharing operations

in Berlin, Vancouver, and other citiesmake cars available to people who do notown an auto. Participants rely on publictransportation, cycling, or walking formost of their transportation needs, butuse a car from their co-op for special trips.In Switzerland, where car sharing hasgrown exponentially over the last 10years, thousands have given up their carsand now drive less than half the distancethey did each year before the switch. Theyreport an improved quality of life andgreater flexibility in personal mobility,without the stress of car ownership.Meeting the full market potential of car-sharing would eliminate an estimated6 million cars from European cities.55

Another imaginative sharing initiativeis the “tool libraries” sponsored by thecities of Berkeley, California, and TakomaPark, Maryland, in the United States.Participants have access to a wide range ofpower and hand tools—a materials-lightalternative to owning that makes sense forpeople who use tools only occasionally.56

SHIFTING GEARS

Overhauling materials practices willrequire policies that steer economies awayfrom forests, mines, and petroleum stocksas the primary source of materials, andaway from landfills and incinerators ascheap disposal options. Instead, business-es and consumers need to be encouragedto reduce dependence on virgin materialsand to tap the rich flow of currently wast-ed resources through product reuse,remanufacturing, or sharing, or throughmaterials recycling.

Probably the single most importantpolicy step in this direction is the aban-donment of subsidies that make virginmaterials seem cheap. Whether in theform of direct payments or as resourcegiveaways, assistance to mining and log-ging firms makes virgin materials artifi-


cially attractive to manufacturers. Theinfamous 1872 Mining Law in the UnitedStates continues to give mining firmsaccess to public lands for just $12 perhectare, without requiring payment ofroyalties or the cleanup of mining sites.The effect is to encourage virgin materialsuse at the expense of alternatives such asrecycling. By closing the subsidy spigot forextractive activities, policymakers can earndouble dividends. The environmentalgains would be substantial, because mostmaterials-driven environmental damageoccurs at the extractive stage. And thepublic treasury would be fattened throughpayments from mining and logging opera-tions that remain open.57

Like virgin materials extraction, wastegeneration can also be substantially cur-tailed, even to the point of near-zero wastein some industries and cities. A handful offirms report achieving near-zero waste lev-els at some facilities. The city of Canberra,Australia, is pursuing a “No Waste by2010” strategy. And the Netherlands hasset a national waste reduction goal of70–90 percent. A key instrument for meet-ing such ambitious targets is to tax wastein all its forms, from smokestack emissionsto landfilled solids. Pollution taxes in theNetherlands, for example, were primarilyresponsible for a 72–99 percent reductionin heavy metals discharges into waterwaysbetween 1976 and the mid-1990s. Highlandfill taxes in Denmark have boostedconstruction debris reuse from 12 to 82percent in eight years—heads and shoul-ders above the 4-percent rates seen inmost industrial countries. Such a tax

could bring huge materials savings in theUnited States, for example, where con-struction materials use between 2000 and2020 is projected to exceed total use inthe preceding century.58

At the consumer level, a waste tax cantake the form of higher rates for garbagecollection or, better still, fees that areassessed based on the amount of garbagegenerated. Cities that have shifted to sucha system have seen a substantial reductionin waste generation. “Pay as you throw”programs in which people are charged bythe bag or by volume of trash illustrate thedirect effect of taxes on waste. Dover, NewHampshire, and Crockett, Texas, forinstance, reduced household waste byabout 25 percent in five years after suchprograms were introduced. These initia-tives are most effective when coupled withcurbside recycling programs: as disposal istaxed, people recycle more. Eleven of 17U.S. communities with record-setting recy-cling rates have pay-as-you-throw systems.59

A modified version of a waste tax is therefundable deposit—essentially a tempo-rary tax that is returned to the payerwhen the taxed material is brought back.High deposits for refillable glass bottles inDenmark have yielded huge paybacks:return rates are around 98–99 percent,implying that bottles could be reused50–100 times.60

Some waste is so harmful that regula-tion rather than taxes may be needed toensure that it is controlled. The outlawingin the United States of lead emissions,which were found to be damaging to theintellectual development of children, is acase in point. Likewise, the internationalphaseout of ozone-depleting substanceshas reduced their use substantially—by 88percent in the case of chlorofluorocar-bons, chemicals that were commonplacein refrigerators and air conditioners just afew years ago. And under negotiation isan international phaseout of 12 persistentorganic pollutants. Where the human andenvironmental costs of using particular


Higher targets for recycled content inproducts would ease the pressure onvirgin materials.

materials is just too high, a ban may bethe only way to effectively reduce thethreat they pose.61

As brakes are applied to extraction, towaste disposal, and to toxic emissions, theincentive to shift to new modes of pro-duction and consumption begins toincrease. But other government initiativescan facilitate the shift as well. If produc-ers, for example, were made legallyresponsible for the materials they use overthe entire life of those materials, theywould have a strong incentive to cut usageto a minimum and to make the materialsthey continue to use durable and recy-clable. Some 28 countries have imple-mented “take back” laws for packagingmaterials, 16 have done so for batteries,and 12 are planning similar policies forelectronics. The best-documented ofthese is the 1991 German packaging ordi-nance. Not only did it lead to substantialcuts in packaging, it also prompted theproduction of long-lasting products. TheInternational Fruit Container Organiza-tion, born out of the 1991 law, becamethe leading manufacturer and lessor ofreusable shipping crates, which now carry75 percent of all produce shippedthrough Germany. Expansion of the con-cept of producer responsibility economy-wide could have a profound effect onmaterials use.62

In addition to stepping up recycling,economies can set higher targets for recy-cled content in products. This would easethe pressure on virgin materials, andwould also raise the value of recycledmaterials. In the United Kingdom, theworld’s fifth highest paper consumer, abill under debate would increase the recy-cled content of newspapers from 40 to 80percent. And by making wood panels witha 70-percent recycled content, the UnitedKingdom could reduce primary wood usein panels by up to 20 percent.63

Building codes can also be revised topermit the use of recycled material inconstruction. Out-of-date building codes

often require the use of particular materi-als for a job, rather than specifying a par-ticular standard of performance.Innovations such as drainage pipes madeof recycled plastic are not widely adoptedin the United States, for example, oftenbecause safety and performance stan-dards for their use have not been set.Revision of these codes—after adequatetesting to ensure safety—could open thedoor to safe and extensive use of recycledbuilding materials and alternative build-ing methods.64

Waste exchanges—information cen-ters that help to match suppliers of wastematerial with buyers—can be promotedas a way to increase recycling rates of adiverse set of materials. Authorities inCanberra have set up a regional resourceexchange on the Internet as part of theircampaign to eliminate waste by 2010. Thegovernment encourages local businessesto use the exchange, which handles mate-rial as diverse as organic waste and card-board boxes. A private-sector initiative inthe border region centering onMatamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville,Texas, is even more ambitious. It uses acomputer model to analyze the wasteflows and material needs of hundreds ofbusinesses in the region, identifyingpotential supply matches that businesseswere unaware of.65

Meanwhile, the very purpose of mate-rials consumption is being questioned bysome researchers. A new study from theUniversity of Surrey in the UnitedKingdom indicates that between 1954 and1994, British consumers attempted to ful-fill nonmaterial needs such as affection,identity, participation, and creativity withmaterial goods—despite little evidencethat this is possible. This questionableconsumption pattern thus represents agrossly inefficient use of resources. Civicentities—from religious groups to envi-ronmental organizations—are well suitedto articulate the social and environmentalcosts of these excesses.66


Community and neighborhood-basedorganizations can help develop strategiesfor reducing materials consumption. Oneparticularly successful approach is theEco-Team Program of the internationalorganization Global Action Plan for theEarth (GAP). More than 8,000 neighbor-hood teams in Europe and 3,000 in theUnited States, each consisting of five or six households, meet regularly to dis-cuss ways to reduce waste, use less waterand energy, and buy “green” products.GAP reports that households completingthe program have reduced landfilledwaste by 42 percent, water use by 25 percent, carbon emissions by 16 percent,and fuel for transportation by 15 percent.They also report annual savings of $401per household.67

Religious groups might reflect on therelationship between excessive consump-tion and the modern decline in spiritualhealth. They are well positioned to warnof the dangers of making goods into gods,and their influence in many societies istremendous. They are also qualified todeliver the positive side of the consump-tion message: that healthy consump-tion—moderation in purchasing, with anemphasis on goods and services that fos-ter a person’s growth—feeds the spiritand helps people achieve their fullestpotential.

In addition to these changes in policiesand behaviors—each of which could havean immediate effect on materials use—policymakers need to pay close attentionto the consequences of other decisionswith profound yet indirect materialsimpacts. Indeed, these societal choices—

from the way land is used to the price ofenergy, labor, and materials—can affectlevels of materials use for decades.

Consider, for example, the question of land use. The gangly suburbs of theUnited States use more kilometers ofpavement, more sewer, water, and tele-phone lines, and more schools and policeand fire stations to service a given popu-lation than if development patterns were denser. The Center forNeighborhood Technology in Chicagorecently studied seven counties surround-ing that city and found that low-densitydevelopment was about 2.5 times morematerials-intensive per inhabitant thanhigh-density development.68

While the vast openness around manyU.S. cities makes sprawl possible, it ispolitical choices that activate this patternof resource-intensive development.Zoning laws and building codes, forinstance, encourage low-density develop-ment. And as noted earlier, fossil fuel subsidies make petroleum-based con-struction products—from asphalt to plas-tic water lines—artificially cheap. Morethan $100 billion in subsidies mask thecost of driving in the United States, reduc-ing a natural disincentive to live far fromwork and other important destinations.The full materials implications of thesepolitical decisions and subsidies extendwell beyond heavy infrastructuredemands: distant residential developmentoften makes two cars a necessity, whilelarge homes and yards encourage the pur-chase of more goods to fill them.69

Most urban planners, zoning officials,and politicians are unaware of the materi-als impact—and the full environmentalimpact—of their land use decisions. Butthis is just one of many political decisionsthat heavily influence levels of materialsuse. The relative prices of labor and capi-tal are also important. Key elements of asustainable materials economy, such assorting of recyclable material and disas-sembly of products for recycling, are


Religious groups are well positionedto warn of the dangers of makinggoods into gods.

often labor-intensive and therefore pro-hibitively expensive in an economy basedon high wages and cheap raw materials.In a 1998 survey of U.S. consumers, forexample, half of those who threw outappliances cited the high cost of repairand a third cited the low cost of replace-ment as principal reasons behind theirdecision to junk the goods.70

Other policy choices also have far-reaching effects: it is materially relevant, for example, whether a societychooses cars or a bicycle/rail combina-tion as the center of its transportationsystem. Energy pricing matters too, ascheap energy extends the material base of nearly everything in the economy.

And some analysts worry that workers’limited freedom to choose shorter work-ing hours over pay increases fosters a con-sumer mentality that boosts materials use.Indeed, most economic activities haveprofound materials consequences.71

Recognizing the absurdity of our mate-rials-intensive past is a first step in makingthe leap to a rational, sustainable materi-als economy. Once this is grasped, theopportunities to dematerialize oureconomies are well within reach. Societiesthat learn to shed their attachment tothings and to focus instead on deliveringwhat people need might be remembered100 years from now as creators of themost durable civilization in history.


NotesChapter 3. Forging a SustainableMaterials Economy

1. Based on data from World ResourcesInstitute (WRI) et al., Resource Flows: TheMaterial Basis of Industrial Economies(Washington, DC: WRI, 1997); revised datasupplied by Eric Rodenburg, WRI,Washington, DC, e-mail to Payal Sampat, 10October 1998. The 10 billion tons of materialsused in the United States each year includesboth hidden and economically recorded flows.Hidden flows of materials include “overbur-den” earth that has to be moved to reachmetal and mineral ores, as well as the unusedportion of mined ore. Data throughout thechapter refer only to materials that enter theeconomy (roughly a third of all flows in theUnited States) except where otherwise stated.This includes all nonfuel and nonfood materi-als, namely minerals, metals, wood products,and fossil-fuel-based synthetic substances—such as plastics and asphalt—which arereferred to throughout the chapter as synthet-ic materials. Although central to the discus-sion, global data for hidden flows are not avail-able.

2. U.S. consumption from United StatesGeological Survey (USGS), Mineral Yearbookand Mineral Commodity Summaries (Reston, VA:various years), and from data supplied byGrecia Matos, Minerals and Materials AnalysisSection, USGS, Reston, VA, 27 July 1998.

3. Periodic table from U.S. Congress,Office of Technology Assessment (OTA),Green Products by Design: Choices for a Cleaner

Environment (Washington, DC: U.S Govern-ment Printing Office, September 1992); mate-rials throughput from Robert U. Ayres,“Industrial Metabolism,” in Technology andEnvironment (Washington, DC: NationalAcademy Press, 1989).

4. Mining contamination from MineralPolicy Center (MPC), Golden Dreams, PoisonedStreams (Washington, DC: 1997); syntheticchemicals from European EnvironmentAgency (EEA), Europe’s Environment: TheSecond Assessment (Luxembourg and Oxford,U.K.: Office for Official Publications of theEuropean Communities and Elsevier ScienceLtd., 1998).

5. Peter N. Stearns, The IndustrialRevolution in World History (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1993).

6. Iron and steel technologies from DavidLandes, The Unbound Prometheus: TechnologicalChange and Industrial Development in WesternEurope from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969), fromNathan Rosenberg, “Technology,” in GlennPorter, ed., Encyclopedia of American EconomicHistory: Studies of Principal Movements and Ideas,vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1980), and from Stephen L. Sass, The Substanceof Civilization: Materials and Human History fromthe Stone Age to the Age of Silicon (New York:Arcade Publishing, 1998); historical produc-tion data from Metallgesellschaft AG andWorld Bureau of Metal Statistics,MetallStatistik/Metal Statistics 1985–1995(Frankfurt and Ware, U.K.: 1996), and fromMetallgesellschaft AG, Statistical Tables

(Frankfurt: various years); share of metals andmaterials from Great Britain OverseasGeological Survey, Statistical Survey of theMineral Industry: World Mineral Production,Imports and Exports (London: various years),from USGS, op. cit. note 2, and from Matos,op. cit. note 2.

7. Rosenberg, op. cit. note 6; ClivePonting, A Green History of the World: TheEnvironment and the Collapse of GreatCivilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 1991);ore grades from Daniel Edelstein, CopperCommodity Specialist, USGS, discussions withPayal Sampat, 6 and 19 October 1998.

8. Canada and Liberia from Stearns, op.cit. note 5; oil expansion from Joseph A. Pratt,“The Ascent of Oil: The Transition from Coalto Oil in Early Twentieth-Century America,” inLewis J. Perelman et al., eds., EnergyTransitions: Long-Term Perspectives (Boulder,CO: Westview Press, 1981); declining energyprices from British Petroleum, BP StatisticalReview of World Energy (London: June 1998);materials prices from data supplied by BettyDow, World Bank, Washington, DC, e-mail toPayal Sampat, 8 October 1998.

9. U.S. mining law from CharlesWilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land,Water and the Future of the West (Washington,DC: Island Press, 1992); Indonesia fromCharles Victor Barber, Nels C. Johnson, andEmmy Hafild, Breaking the Logjam(Washington, DC: WRI, 1994); Ghana fromGeorge J. Coakley, “The Mineral Industry ofGhana,” Minerals Information (Reston, VA:USGS, 1996); Peru from Alfredo C.Gurmendi, “The Mineral Industry of Peru,”Minerals Information (Reston, VA: USGS, 1996);logging roads from David Malin Roodman,The Natural Wealth of Nations (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998).

10. Musket-making from Adam Markham,“The First Consumer Revolution,” in A BriefHistory of Pollution (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1994); Ford from Thomas McCraw and

Richard S. Tedlow, “Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan,and the Three Phases of Marketing,” inThomas McCraw, ed. Creating ModernCapitalism (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1997), and from Vaclav Smil,Energy in World History (Boulder, CO: WestviewPress, 1994).

11. Creation of consumer class from W.W.Rostow, “The Age of High MassConsumption,” in B. Hughel Wilkins andCharles B. Friday, eds., The Economists of theNew Frontier (New York: Random House,1963), and from Arthur M. Johnson,“Economy Since 1914,” in Porter, op. cit. note6; Ford wage increase from McCraw andTedlow, op. cit. note 10; historian WitoldRybczynski quoted in Markham, op. cit. note10; opposition of other employers from JulietB. Schor, The Overworked American (New York:Basic Books, 1991).

12. Department stores and catalogs fromMarkham, op. cit. note 10; consumer creditfrom Schor, op. cit. note 11; DuPont vice-pres-ident J.W. McCoy quoted in Jeffrey L. Meikle,American Plastics: A Cultural History (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,1997); global advertising from U.N.Development Programme (UNDP), HumanDevelopment Report 1998 (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998).

13. Aluminum use historically from Smil,op. cit. note 10, and from Ivan Amato, Stuff:The Materials the World is Made Of (New York:Basic Books, 1997); aluminum productionfrom Metallgesellschaft AG and World Bureauof Metal Statistics, op. cit. note 6; plastics pro-duction from United Nations, IndustrialCommodity Statistics Yearbook (New York: variousyears), and from data supplied by Matos, op.cit. note 2; plastics uses from Meikle, op. cit.note 12; chemical compounds from EEA, op.cit. note 4; synthetic chemicals productionfrom Jennifer D. Mitchell, “Nowhere to Hide:The Global Spread of Synthetic, High-RiskChemicals,” World Watch, March/April 1997.


14. Military to consumer products switchfrom Robert Friedel, “Scarcity and Promise:Materials and American Domestic CultureDuring World War II,” in Donald Albrecht,ed., World War II and the American Dream: HowWartime Building Changed a Nation(Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA:National Building Museum and The MITPress, 1995); Japanese consumer goods fromPonting, op. cit. note 7; car ownership fromSeth Dunn, “Automobile Production SetsRecord,” in Lester Brown, Michael Renner,and Christopher Flavin, Vital Signs 1998 (NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998); materi-als use in cars from Gregory A. Keoleian et al.,Industry Ecology of the Automobile: A Life CyclePerspective (Warrendale, PA: Society ofAutomotive Engineers, Inc., 1997).

15. Smil, op. cit. note 10; cement andasphalt from United Nations, op. cit. note 13;extensive development from Sierra Club, TheCosts and Consequences of Suburban Sprawl (SanFrancisco: 1998); materials consequencesfrom Scott Bernstein, Center for Neighbor-hood Technology, Chicago, discussion withGary Gardner, 20 August 1998.

16. Paper and glass recycling fromOrganisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD), OECD EnvironmentalData Compendium 1997 (Paris: 1997); metalsfrom Michael McKinley, Chief, Metals Section,Minerals Information Team, USGS, discussionwith Payal Sampat, 2 November 1998.

17. Table 3–1 and Figure 3–1 from GreatBritain Overseas Geological Survey, op. cit.note 6, from USGS, op. cit. note 2, fromMatos, op. cit. note 2, from United Nations,op. cit. note 13, and from U.N. Food andAgriculture Organization, FAOSTAT StatisticsDatabase, <http://faostat.fao.org/>, viewed 15June 1998.

18. Synthetic materials from UnitedNations, op. cit. note 13; historical metals datafrom Metallgesellschaft AG and World Bureauof Metal Statistics, op. cit. note 6.

19. U.S. historical data supplied by Matos,op. cit. note 2; world total from Great BritainOverseas Geological Survey, op. cit. note 6,from USGS, op. cit. note 2, and from Matos,op. cit. note 2; global model from Richard R.Wilk, “Emulation and Global Consumerism,”in Paul C. Stern et al., eds., EnvironmentallySignificant Consumption (Washington, DC:National Academy Press, 1997).

20. UNDP, op. cit. note 12.

21. Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees,Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impacton the Earth (Philadelphia, PA: New SocietyPublishers, 1996); WRI et al., op. cit. note 1;Rodenburg, op. cit. note 1.

22. Damage to virgin forests from DirkBryant, Daniel Nielsen and Laura Tangley, TheLast Frontier Forests (Washington, DC: WRI,1997); monocultures from Ashley T. Mattoon,“Paper Forests,” World Watch, March/April1998.

23. Services and habitat from NormanMyers, “The World’s Forests and TheirEcosystem Services,” in Gretchen C. Daily, ed.,Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on NaturalEcosystems (Washington, DC: Island Press,1997); China from Neelesh Misra, “Asia FloodsRaise Questions About Man’s Impact onNature,” Associated Press, 19 September 1998;mass extinction from Joby Warrick, “MassExtinction Underway, Majority of BiologistsSay,” Washington Post, 21 April 1998; role of forest products from Bryant, Nielsen, andTangley, op. cit. note 22.

24. Copper ore excavated based on averagegrade from Donald Rogich and Staff, Divisionof Mineral Commodities, U.S. Bureau ofMines, “Material Use, Economic Growth andthe Environment,” presented at theInternational Recycling Congress and REC ’93Trade Fair, Geneva, Switzerland, January 1993;overburden numbers from Jean Moore,“Mining and Quarrying Trends,” in USGS,Minerals Yearbook (Reston, VA: 1996), and fromJean Moore, USGS, discussion with Payal


Sampat, 20 August 1998; Table 3–3 is based onmetals production data from Metall-gesellschaft AG and World Bureau of MetalStatistics, op. cit. note 6, on gold productionfrom Gold Field Mineral Services, “WorldGold Demand up 16 pct in 1997–GFMS,”Reuters, 8 January 1998, and on average gradeinformation from Rogich et al., op. cit. thisnote; Canada’s wastes based on OECD, op. cit.note 16; gold waste based on Earle Amey, GoldCommodity Specialist, USGS, discussion withPayal Sampat, 13 August 1998 (waste does notinclude overburden moved to reach ores);mining and rivers from Frank Press andRaymond Siever, Understanding Earth, 2nd ed.(New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1998), andfrom John E. Young, Mining the Earth,Worldwatch Paper 109 (Washington, DC:Worldwatch Institute, July 1992).

25. MPC, op. cit note 4.

26. “Spanish Authorities Battle TailingsDisaster,” North American Mining, April/May1998; “Funding Pledges Coming in forCleanup, Damages from Toxic Spill fromMine,” International Environment Reporter, 27May 1998; MPC, op. cit. note 4.

27. Jerome Nriagu, “Industrial Activity andMetals Emissions,” in R. Socolow et al, eds.,Industrial Ecology and Global Change(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994); John A Meech et al., “Reactivityof Mercury from Gold Mining Activities inDarkwater Ecosystems,” Ambio, March 1998;Coakley, op. cit. note 9.

28. Energy consumed by materials processing from U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Information Admin-istration, Manufacturing Energy ConsumptionSurvey, <http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/consumption/>, viewed 17 August 1998; totalU.S. energy consumption from DOE, AnnualEnergy Review, <http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/aer/>, viewed 5 October 1998, and from MarkSchipper, Energy Consumption Division,DOE, discussion with Payal Sampat, 6 October1998; cement estimate is for 1995, based on

Henrik G. van Oss, “Cement,” in USGS,Mineral Yearbook 1996 (Reston, VA: 1996), onHenrik van Oss, Cement CommoditySpecialist, USGS, Reston, VA, discussion withPayal Sampat, 6 November 1998, and on SethDunn, “Carbon Emissions Resume Rise,” inBrown, Renner, and Flavin, op. cit. note 14. Ifcarbon emissions from fuel combustion andcalcination are combined, cement productioncontributed some 300 million tons of carbonin 1995, approximately 5 percent of globalemissions that year. This does not include elec-tricity used by cement producers.

29. John Peterson Myers, “Our UntestedPlanet,” Defenders, summer 1996.

30. Chlorofluorocarbons from RobertAyres, “The Life-Cycle of Chlorine, Part I,”Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 1, no. 1 (1997);Robert Repetto and Sanjay S. Baliga, Pesticidesand the Immune System: The Public Health Risks(Washington, DC: WRI, March 1996).

31. Persistence and endocrine disruptionfrom Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, andJohn Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future (NewYork: Dutton Books, 1996); Susan Anderson,“Global Ecotoxicology: Management andScience,” in Socolow et al., op. cit. note 27;Ayres, op. cit. note 30; National Academy ofSciences from Tim Jackson, Material Concerns:Pollution, Profit, and Quality of Life (London:Routledge, 1996).

32. Nitrogen increase from Robert U.Ayres, William H. Schlesinger, and Robert H.Socolow, “Human Impacts on the Carbon andNitrogen Cycles,” in Socolow et al., op. cit.note 27; biological consequences fromWilliam H. Schlesinger, “The Vulnerability ofBiotic Diversity,” in ibid.; major elements fromRobert U. Ayres, “Integrated Assessment of theGrand Nutrient Cycles,” EnvironmentalModeling and Assessment, vol. 2, pp. 107–28(1997).

33. Waste survey from InternationalMaritime Organization, Global Waste Survey:Final Report (London: 1995); V.I. Danilov-


Danilyan, Minister of Environment andNatural Resources, “Environmental Issues inthe Russian Federation,” presented to the All-Russian Congress on Nature Protection,3–5 June 1995; Superfund total sites from“The Facts Speak For Themselves,” <http://www.epa.gov/superfund/accomp/index.htm>, viewed 27 October 1998; Superfundprojected cost from Environmental ProtectionAgency, 1994 Superfund Annual Report toCongress (Washington, DC: 1994).

34. Landfills and U.S. methane emissionsfrom DOE, Annual Energy Review, op. cit. note28.

35. “Mercury Deposition in United States isGlobal Problem,” International EnvironmentReporter, 4 March 1998; dioxin from Ayres, op.cit. note 30.

36. Friends of the Earth Europe, TowardsSustainable Europe (Amsterdam: Friends of theEarth Netherlands, 1995); Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, President, Factor 10 Institute,Carnoules, France, letters to Payal Sampat, 20October and 2 November 1998; FriedrichSchmidt-Bleek and the Factor 10 Club, “MIPSand Factor 10 for a Sustainable and ProfitableEconomy,” unpublished paper, Factor 10Institute, Carnoules, France.

37. Austria from Schmidt-Bleek, op. cit.note 36; Netherlands from Lucas Reijnders,“The Factor X Debate: Setting Targets for Eco-Efficiency,” Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 2,no. 1 (1998); Germany from FederalEnvironmental Agency, Federal Republic ofGermany, Sustainable Development in Germany:Progress and Prospects (Berlin: 1998); OECD,“OECD Environment Ministers Shared GoalsFor Action,” press release (Paris: 3 April 1998),<http://www.oecd.org/news_and_events/release/nw98-39a.htm>.

38. Based on world materials consumptiondata from Matos, op. cit. note 2; global eco-nomic output data from InternationalMonetary Fund, World Economic Outlook(Washington, DC: various years).

39. Oliviero Bernadini and Riccardo Galli,“Dematerialization: Long-term Trends in theIntensity of Use of Materials and Energy,”Futures, May 1993; infrastructure completionfrom Donald Rogich, WRI, Washington, DC,letter to authors, 12 October 1998.

40. Table 3–4 from the following sources:plastics in cars from Keoleian et al., op. cit.note 14; aluminum from OTA, op. cit. note 3;container refilling from Frank Ackerman, Whydo We Recycle? (Washington, DC: Island Press,1997); lead batteries from Chris Hendricksonet al., “Green Design,” presented at NationalAcademy of Engineering, April 1994, andfrom OTA, op. cit. note 3; consumptionincreases from data supplied by Matos, op. cit.note 2; radial tires from Bernadini and Galli,op. cit. note 39; retreading difficulties fromCenter for Neighborhood Technology, BeyondRecycling: Materials Reprocessing in Chicago’sEconomy (Chicago: 1993); passenger carretreads of 33 million in 1977 from HarveyBrodsky, Tire Retread Information Bureau(TRIB), discussion with Gary Gardner, 30September 1998; retread of 16 million in 1997from TRIB Web site, <http://www.retread.org/>; mobile phones from Tim Jackson andRoland Clift, “Where’s the Profit in IndustrialEcology?” Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 2,no. 1 (1998), and from Tim Jackson, e-mail toGary Gardner, 2 October 1998; subscriptionsfrom International TelecommunicationUnion, World Telecommunication Indicators onDiskette (Geneva: 1996).

41. OECD, Eco-Efficiency (Paris: 1998).

42. See, for example, Robert Ayres andUdo Simonis, eds., Industrial Metabolism:Restructuring for Sustainable Development (Tokyo:The United Nations University, 1994); WilliamMcDonough and Michael Braungart, “TheNext Industrial Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly,October 1998; Walter R. Stahel, “TheFunctional Economy: Cultural andOrganizational Change,” in The IndustrialGreen Game (Washington, DC: NationalAcademy Press, 1997); and various articles by


Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek.

43. Walter R. Stahel, “Selling PerformanceInstead of Goods: The Social and Organiza-tional Change that Arises in the Move to aService Economy,” presented at Eco-efficiency:A Modern Feature of EnvironmentalTechnology, Dusseldorf, Germany 2–3 March1998.

44. Braden R. Allenby, Industrial Ecology:Framework and Implementation (Upper SaddleRiver, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999); remanufac-ture statistics from Xerox Web site,< http://www.xerox.com/ehs/1997/sustain.htm>, viewed 18 September 1998; future pro-jections from Christa Carone, XeroxCorporation, Rochester, NY, discussion withGary Gardner, 22 September 1998.

45. Laundry services from Walter R. Stahel,Director, Product-Life Institute, Geneva, letterto Payal Sampat, 12 October 1998, and fromW.R. Stahel and T. Jackson, “OptimalUtilization and Durability—Towards a NewDefinition of the Service Economy,” in TimJackson, ed., Clean Production Strategies (BocaRaton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 1993).

46. Robert Ayres, “Towards Zero Emissions:Is there a Feasible Path? Introduction to ZERIPhase II” (draft) (Fontainebleau, France:European Institute of Business Administra-tion, May 1998).

47. Hendrickson et al., op. cit. note 40;Daniel C. Esty and Michael E. Porter,“Industrial Ecology and Competitiveness,”Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 2, no. 1 (1998);John Carey, “‘A Society That Reuses AlmostEverything’,” Business Week, 10 November1996; World Business Council for SustainableDevelopment and U.N. EnvironmentProgramme (UNEP), Eco-Efficiency and CleanerProduction: Charting the Course to Sustainability(Geneva and Paris: 1996); Xerox from Carone,op. cit. note 44; recycling rate for durablesfrom Franklin Associates, Ltd., Solid WasteManagement at the Crossroads (Prairie Village,KS: December 1997).

48. German recycling from I.V. EdelgardBially, Duales System Deutschland, letter andsupporting documentation to Gary Gardner,28 October and 3 November 1998; secondarypackaging from Ackerman, op. cit. note 40.

49. John Ehrenfeld and Nicholas Gertler,“Industrial Ecology in Practice: The Evolutionof Interdependence at Kalundborg,” Journal ofIndustrial Ecology, vol. 1, no. 1 (1997); HalKane, “Eco-Farming in Fiji,” World Watch,July/August 1997; Ayres, op. cit. note 46.

50. Walter Stahel, “The Service Economy:‘Wealth Without Resource Consumption’?”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ofLondon, vol. 355, pp. 1309–19 (1997); reusablecontainers from Ayres, op. cit. note 46; land-fills from Franklin Associates, op. cit. note 47.

51. Repair versus landfills from Institute for Local Self-Reliance, “The Five MostDangerous Myths About Recycling,” factsheet(Washington, DC: September 1996).

52. Ackerman, op. cit. note 40; Stahel andJackson, op. cit. note 45.

53. David Morris and Irshad Ahmed, TheCarbohydrate Economy: Making Chemicals andIndustrial Materials from Plant Matter(Washington, DC: Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 1992); OTA, Biopolymers: MakingMaterials Nature’s Way (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, September1993).

54. Morris and Ahmed, op. cit. note 53.

55. OECD, op. cit. note 41; 6 million carsfrom Car Free Cities Network, <http://www.bremen.de/info/agenda21/carfree/>, viewed20 October 1998.

56. Gloria Walker Johnson, City of TakomaPark Housing Department, Takoma Park, MD,discussion with Gary Gardner, 2 November1998.

57. Wilkinson, op. cit. note 9.


58. Canberra from ACT government,<http://www.act.gov.au/nowaste/>, viewed 23 October 1998; Netherlands goal from<http://www.netherlands-embassy.org/env_nmp2.htm>, viewed 20 August 1998;Netherlands policy from Roodman, op. cit.note 9; Denmark from European Environ-ment Agency, Environmental Taxes: Implemen-tation and Environmental Effectiveness(Copenhagen: August 1996); U.S. projectionsfrom Thomas Kelly, USGS, “Crushed CementConcrete Substitution for ConstructionAggregates—A Materials Flow Analysis,” 1998,<ht tp ://greenwood.cr.usgs .gov/pub/circulars/c1177/index.html>.

59. Institute for Local Self-Reliance,Cutting the Waste Stream in Half: CommunityRecord-Setters Show How (draft) (Washington,DC: October 1998); Ackerman, op. cit. note40.

60. Ackerman, op. cit. note 40.

61. Chlorofluorocarbons from MollyO’Meara, “CFC Production Continues toPlummet,” in Brown, Renner, and Flavin, op.cit. note 14; UNEP, “Regional WorkshopsHighlight Need for Effective Action AgainstHazardous Chemicals,” press release (Geneva:9 July 1998). The treaty is scheduled to befinalized by 2000.

62. Take-back laws from Michele Raymond,“Will Europe’s Producer ResponsibilitySystems Work?” Resource Recycling, May 1998;crates from Ayres, op. cit. note 46.

63. Friends of the Earth, U.K., “NewRecycling Law Could Save Council Tax PayersMillions,” press release (London: 17September 1998); Duncan McLaren, SimonBullock, and Nusrat Yousuf, Tomorrow’s World:Britain’s Share in a Sustainable Future (London:Earthscan Publications and Friends of theEarth, 1998).

64. Alexander Volokh, How GovernmentBuilding Codes and Construction StandardsDiscourage Recycling, Reason Foundation Policy

Study No. 202, <http://www-civeng.rutgers.edu/asce/recycle.html>, viewed 22October 1998.

65. Canberra from ACT government, op.cit. note 58, and from Tony Webber, ACT gov-ernment, discussion with Gary Gardner, 25October 1998; Matamoros and Brownsvillefrom <http://www.pbs.org/weta/planet/>,viewed 2 November 1998, based on a PBSthree-part television series, “Planet Neighbor-hood,” first broadcast 8 September 1997.

66. British consumers from Tim Jacksonand Nic Marks, “Consumption, SustainableWelfare, and Human Needs,” EcologicalEconomics (forthcoming); Peter Travers andSue Richardson, Living Decently: Material Well-Being in Australia (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1993).

67. Global Action Plan for the Earth,<http://www.globalactionplan.org/ecoteam.htm>, viewed 15 October 1998; OECD, op. cit.note 41.

68. Bernstein, op. cit. note 15.

69. Roodman, op. cit. note 9.

70. “When it Breaks . . . A Smart Guide toGetting Things Fixed,” Consumer Reports, May1998.

71. Schor, op. cit. note 11.


Reorienting the Forest

Products Economy

Janet N. Abramovitz and Ashley T. Mattoon

In the 1850s, massive white pine trees—up to 2 meters in diameter—were soabundant in North America’s Great Lakesregion that tree cutters considered anylog less than a meter in diameter to be“undersized.” Today the trees are harvest-ed at one third that size. Despite predic-tions by chroniclers of the day that theforests were too vast to be depleted, the“limitless” supply of white pines didindeed fall, as did the local industries thathad been built on these invaluableresources.1

Such boom-and-bust patterns beganmillennia ago in ancient Greece andRome. They continue today as the searchfor timber pushes into the world’s last old-growth forest frontiers—from thetemperate and boreal forests of Canada,Russia, and Chile, to the tropical forestsof Brazil, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea,Cambodia, and Cameroon. Nearly half ofthe forests that once covered the Earthare gone. Between 1980 and 1995 alone,at least 200 million hectares of forest werelost—an area larger than Mexico.2

In industrial countries, where most ofthe world’s commercial wood is pro-duced, timber harvest is the primarycause of forest degradation. In develop-ing nations, land clearing for agricultureand grazing combine with timber harvestto reduce forest area. Even there it isoften timber harvesting, accompanied byroads that penetrate the forest and pro-vide access to otherwise inaccessibleplaces, that precipitates land clearing.3

Driving the timber harvest is growingdemand for wood products. In the lastthree decades alone, industrial round-wood use has risen by almost one third,paper consumption has nearly tripled,and fuelwood and charcoal consumptionhave grown by almost two thirds. And asthe world’s most populous nationsbecome more affluent, demand is likelyto continue spiraling upward.4

The world’s forests face other pres-sures as well—invasion by exotic species,air pollution, vast fires, and climatechange. The health and quality of theremaining forests are declining, lessening

4

their ability to support species and ecosys-tem services.5

When forests disappear, we lose morethan just timber. The top 150 nonwoodforests products traded internationally—such as rattan, cork, nuts, oils, and medic-inals—are worth more than $11 billion a year. They provide even greater localbenefits, including employing hundredsof millions of people.6

In addition, forests shelter countlessspecies, including organisms that are use-ful in pollinating crops and controllingdisease-carrying pests. And without forestcover to protect watersheds, rainfallerodes the denuded land; flooding anddrought become more extreme. In 1998,heavy rains brought record-setting floodsto many deforested regions, includingIndia, Bangladesh, and Mexico. Floodingin China’s Yangtze watershed—which haslost 85 percent of its forests to loggingand agriculture—resulted in thousands ofdeaths, dislocated hundreds of millions ofpeople, inundated tens of millions ofhectares of cropland, and cost tens of bil-lions of dollars.7

The apparent abundance of woodproducts in the marketplace may giveconsumers a false sense of complacencyabout the health of forests. Yet becausethe production and consumption ofmajor forest products—timber, paper,and fuel—are principal forces driving theloss and degradation of forests, there ishope that these trends can be reversed bychanging the way we produce and usethese products.

Luckily, public concern about the fateof forests is rising along with demand.Indeed, this has happened in nearly everyage. As ancient Rome’s forests becamescarce, “the value of trees rose in the opin-ion of both philosophers and thieves,”noted John Perlin in his book on the roleof wood in the development of civiliza-tion. While some of Rome’s builders and industries shifted to more-efficientmethods and farmers planted trees to

regain watershed protection services, the government secured timber from abroad and tried to keep supply steadyand prices low in order to quiet discon-tent. Unfortunately, this shortsightedresponse to scarcity continues today.8

THE CHANGING TIMBER

LANDSCAPE

The landscape of timber production,trade, and consumption has changed sig-nificantly during the past century. Thetools of harvesting and processing havechanged from axes and saws to mechani-cal harvesters and high-speed mills. Thedecreasing supply of larger trees and high-er value species has led suppliers to turnto new regions, species, and processes tosatisfy growing demand. And new ways ofusing wood have created a range of prod-ucts—from paper to plywood—that werescarce or unimagined 100 years ago.

By the nineteenth century, most of theaccessible timber in industrial nationshad already been cut for fuel and build-ing purposes. Merchant and military ship-building also consumed vast areas oftimberland—from the ancient civiliza-tions of the Mediterranean and MiddleEast to Britain in the last few hundredyears. When Britain’s native forestsdeclined, shipbuilders, ironsmiths, andthe like looked to Scandinavia, Ireland,and the American colonies for materials.Building one large sixteenth-century war-ship required 2,000 mature oak trees—more than 20 hectares worth. Theexpansion of railroads in the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries also con-sumed enormous volumes of wood forconstruction and fuel. By 1900, U.S. rail-roads, for example, used 20–25 percent ofthe country’s annual timber production.9

While the wood on the market todaycomes from a variety of forest types and

Reorienting the Forest Products Economy (61)

nonforest areas, relatively little comesfrom sustainably managed forests.Although a substantial share of wood stillcomes from primary forests, more nowcomes from secondary stands (those thathave been harvested and regrown), main-ly in the United States and Europe. Eventhough tree plantations are increasing inarea, sometimes at the expense of naturalforests, only 10 percent of today’s indus-trial wood comes from tree farms. Inmany countries, the most valuable prima-ry forests have been exploited, and thereis public sentiment to reduce loggingpressures on what remains.10

About 55 percent of the wood cuttoday is used directly for fuel, while therest goes into industrial products likelumber and paper. (See Table 4–1.)Production of pulp for paper and wood-based panels like fiberboard has expand-ed far faster in recent decades thantraditional products like sawnwood,which require the higher-quality woodthat is in increasingly short supply.11

Almost half of the world’s fuelwood isproduced in five countries—India, China,Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria. And justfive countries produce more than 45 per-cent of the world’s industrial wood harvest. The United States, Canada, andRussia have remained among the top fiveproducers for at least 40 years, whileChina and Brazil joined this group in the1970s. Together, the top 10 (which

includes Sweden, Finland, Malaysia,Germany, and Indonesia) account formore than 71 percent of industrial production.12

The value of the wood trade (legal andillegal) makes this sector a potent eco-nomic force, one that has long influencedhow forests are managed and how nationsinteract. More and more wood productsenter the international market every year, reflecting a general trend towardtrade globalization. (Very little of whatthe U.N. Food and AgricultureOrganization (FAO) classifies as fuelwoodmoves across borders, so trade here refersalmost exclusively to industrial wood.)Worldwide, the share of production thatis exported has doubled since 1970.Between 1970 and 1995, the value of legalforest products exports worldwide almosttripled in constant dollars, to more than$142 billion a year.13

The effort to expand production andtrade has come at a high cost to manynations that are cutting their forests atunsustainable levels. The Philippines pro-vides a cautionary example of the conse-quences of this. In the 1960s and 1970s,the Philippines became one of the topfour timber exporters in the world by liq-uidating 90 percent of its forests. Sincethen, however, the nation has turned intoan importer, and 18 million forestdwellers have become impoverished.Since 1961, Canada more than tripled


Table 4–1. Production of Wood and Wood Products, 1965–95

Type 1965 1980 1995 Increase 1965–95(million cubic meters) (percent)

Roundwood 2,231 2,920 3,331 49Fuelwood and Charcoal 1,099 1,472 1,839 67Industrial Roundwood 1,132 1,448 1,492 32

Sawnwood 384 451 427 11Wood-based Panels 42 101 146 248Pulpwood and Particles 238 370 419 76

(million tons)Paper and Paperboard 98 170 282 189

SOURCE: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT Statistics Database, <http://apps.fao.org>.

production, Brazil and Malaysia expand-ed production more than fivefold, andIndonesia increased output sevenfold.And these nations continue to cut theirforests at unsustainable rates. Not coinci-dentally, Indonesia, Brazil, and Malaysiatogether accounted for 53 percent of theworld’s forest loss during the 1980s.14

A disproportionate share of the world’sindustrial wood is produced and used inindustrial nations. (See Table 4–2.)Although developing countries haveincreased their rate and share of con-sumption in recent decades, these are stillwell below the levels of industrial nations.Indeed, consumption per person inindustrial nations is 12 times higher thanin developing ones. Fuelwood is the onlywood product that developing countriesuse more of, and even then their con-sumption per person is less than twicethat in industrial countries.15

The relative scarcity of large, high-qual-ity timber has caused prices for manysolid wood products to rise in someregions in the last 35 years. Yet the relent-less search by the timber industry for new

sources of cheap raw material to bring tomarket has shielded many consumersfrom these price hikes and kept themunaware of the changes in quality andspecies. For consumers without access toproducts from distant markets, however,such scarcities are keenly felt.16

Rising consumption and decliningforests, combined with economic andsocial pressures, have spurred improve-ments in how efficiently wood is used.Although wood was so abundant in NorthAmerica through the nineteenth centurythat processors used only the straightest,clearest portion of a log and discardedthe rest, such gross wastage is largely athing of the past. Between 1945 and 1990,the amount of raw wood used to makeeach ton of industrial wood products fellby 23 percent. As a result, consumption ofmany finished products (like paper andplywood) has grown faster than the over-all wood harvest.17

In the United States, for example,while population more than tripled since1900, the total amount of wood used grewby just 63 percent. The net result is that


Table 4–2. Population and Industrial Roundwood Consumption in Industrial and DevelopingCountries, 1970 and 1990, With Projections for 2010

Population/Consumption 1970 1990 2010(percent)

PopulationIndustrial countries 27 22 17Developing countries 73 78 83

ConsumptionIndustrial countries 86 77 73Developing countries 14 23 27

(cubic meters per 1,000 people)

Industrial countries 1,091 1,141 1,073Developing countries 84 95 87

World 410 322 259

SOURCE: Population from United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 1996 Revision (New York: 1996); con-sumption from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), FAOSTAT Statistics Database,<http://apps.fao.org/>; 2010 from FAO, Provisional Outlook for Global Forest Product Consumption, Production,and Trade to 2010 (Rome: 1997).

wood use per person has actually declinedthere by 52 percent since 1900. Most ofthe increase in U.S. wood consumption inthis century has occurred since 1950, asusage for buildings and paper exploded.18

The rise in efficiency has been madepossible in part by improvements in forestpractices and by new technologies in harvesting, processing, and recycling.Many mills are now using computer-guided machines to maximize the valueand amount of usable product from eachlog. In industrial countries, 40–50 percentof the wood that enters a sawmill ends up as solid lumber (although in much of the developing world the figure is still only 25–30 percent). Further, inindustrial countries virtually all of theresidues are used for other products likepulp, new composite wood products, or fuel to run the mills. (See Table 4–3.)U.S. timber mills reduced their waste (the material unaccounted for ordumped) from 14 percent in 1970 to just1.5 percent in 1993.19

As large trees have become morescarce and technologies have improved,entirely new wood products have beendeveloped to meet demand. Many ofthese use smaller-diameter trees, formerlyunderused species, or wood waste thatwas once destined for the burn pile.Oriented strand board (OSB), for exam-

ple, is made of layers of small wood chipsglued together. This new panel firstappeared in the 1980s, and alreadyaccounts for almost one third of the grow-ing panel market.20

Some newer products are replacingother wood-based products—like OSB forplywood—while others are substitutingfor nonwood products, as rayon (a fabricmade from wood pulp) does for silk orcotton. Still other wood-based productsare being put to entirely new uses, such ascombining wood fiber and plastic to makestronger automobile door panels. Evenmaking paper from trees, which nowtakes almost one fifth the total timber har-vest, was developed only 150 years ago.21

Wood composites—including panelslike OSB, particleboard, medium-densityfiberboard, laminated veneer lumber, andI-joists—can be used for structural pur-poses in buildings as well as for cabinets,furniture, and doors. Many compositesare actually stronger that their solid woodcounterparts.22

In most timber-processing operations,short pieces of wood are considered wasteand are burned to power the plant orground up for pulp. Many processors,however, have found ways to turn this“trash” into cash by making higher value-added products that do not need longpieces of wood, such as desk organizers,


Table 4–3. United States: Use of Wood Fiber and Roundwood, 1993

Share of Harvest That Goes Share of Wood That IsProduct Directly to Product1 Ultimately Used2

(percent)

Solid wood (lumber,plywood, panels) 48 23

Pulp/paper 26 41Fuelwood 18 27Miscellaneous/unused/exported 8 8

1About 28% of wood that is cut never enters the commercial flow and in not included in these figures.2Accounts for flow of residues from processing.SOURCE: Peter J. Ince, “Recycling of Wood and Paper Products in the United States” (Madison, WI: USDAForest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, January 1996).

mouse traps, and sushi trays. One of themost valuable uses of these scraps is to“finger-joint” short lengths together tocreate long pieces that can be used fordoors, windows, and molding. In theUnited States, scraps used as boiler fuelfetch $14–24 per million board feet; forpapermaking, $50–125; and as shippingpallets, up to $200. But when they areconverted to finger-jointed moldings,they command $1,250–1,350.23

Reduction in the waste and pollutiongenerated by processors is another part ofthe changing timber landscape in the lastfew decades, thanks to technologicaladvances spurred largely by public con-cern and government regulation. Pulpand paper mills in Sweden, for example,have reduced their sulfur emissions byabout 90 percent, and chlorine bleachinghas been eliminated.24

Of course, technology also has negativeeffects. Expensive new machines allowvast areas to be quickly cleared, bundled,and chipped in around-the-clock opera-tions that employ few workers. Mills, too,are now bigger and faster. And as prod-ucts are produced more cheaply, con-sumption is encouraged, feeding into thefalse sense of abundance.25

Consumption increases have been atleast tempered by efficiency improve-ments and recycling, which helps stemdemand for virgin materials. Worldwide,41 percent of all paper and paperboard isrecovered for recycling. Despite this, further expansion of recycling is needed.In the United States, for instance, the volume of municipal solid waste hasdoubled in the last 30 years, disposaloptions are closing down, and costs arerising. Since more than half of the waste(by weight) sent to landfills or incinera-tors is still paper and wood, significantopportunities exist to reclaim this lostresource and at the same time reduce theburdens of waste disposal and ease pres-sures on forests.26

Unfortunately, greater processing effi-

ciency and expanded recycling have notbeen able to keep pace with overallgrowth in consumption—in other words,wood use is still rising. Further reductionsin consumption are needed—from elimi-nating unnecessary purchases to buyingproducts that have less packaging andusing more-sustainable building methods.

THE TREES IN OUR HOMES

Today, about 40 percent of the world’sindustrial roundwood is used to makesawnwood and panels—materials that arelargely used in construction, shipping,and manufacturing. Wood has long beena favored building material because it isaesthetically pleasing, highly workable,widely available, and relatively inexpen-sive. Its production requires less energyand generates fewer toxic pollutants andless waste than does production of metals,concrete, or plastics.27

In the United States, consumer ofnearly one fourth of the world’s industri-al roundwood, at least 40 percent is usedfor construction. Manufacturing of furni-ture and the like uses about 9 percent,and shipping, about 6 percent.Ultimately, about 10 percent of theworld’s industrial wood is used by the U.S.construction industry, and most of thatgoes into home building.28

In virtually every industrial nation overthe last few decades, the size and numberof dwellings has increased and the num-ber of people in each home has declineddue to growing affluence. Single-familyhomes in the United States have morethan doubled in size since 1950, forinstance. As a result of expanding housesize and shrinking family size, the areaoccupied on average by Americans hasincreased by 79 percent in the last threedecades—to more than 72 square metersper person, at least twice the averagespace in Japan. Even in land-starved


Japan, the area per occupant hasincreased by 44 percent since 1970.29

Of course, these larger homes not onlyrequire more material to construct andmaintain, they are also filled with more ma-terials—furniture, floor coverings, appli-ances—much of which is made from woodfiber. In the last three decades, three timesas many homes were built in the UnitedStates as in the preceding 30 years.30

Timber availability and quality havelong influenced construction. When, forexample, ancient civilizations in Knossos,Babylon, Greece, and Rome exhaustedtheir forests, the shortages and expenseof imports brought about changes in thedesign of buildings to minimize theamount of lumber used for constructionand heating. Even the stick frame house,which now dominates construction inwestern societies, was developed in thenineteenth century as an alternative tousing whole logs for construction.31

This pattern of evolving constructiontechnologies and materials efficiency con-tinues. In recent years, higher prices fortraditional solid wood products combinedwith declining quality and availability (aswell as concerns for rapid forest loss) haveled some builders, architects, foresters,and environmentalists to look for otherways to design and build structures thatare resource-efficient, economical, andcomfortable. Alternative products andbuilding techniques are being used morewidely to meet growing demand. Theseinclude engineered and nontraditionalwood products as well as nonwood prod-ucts. Builders are developing new meth-

ods that make optimal use of wood andother materials, and even rediscoveringand adapting old methods such as adobeand rammed earth construction.

Rethinking construction methodsoffers additional opportunities to savematerials. Techniques like optimum valueengineering, or advanced framing, havebeen developed by the NationalAssociation of Home Builders and others.They involve using wood products in stan-dard increments to produce less waste,not using a larger dimension than is actu-ally needed, and spacing studs fartherapart. Building with such an approach toengineering can reduce wood use bynearly 20 percent and cut costs by 8–17percent per house—saving several thou-sand dollars. It also reduces waste andsaves energy.32

Prefabricated components like trussesand building panels can also save materi-als and money. Trusses are constructed ofpieces of wood assembled to form struc-tural members capable of carrying fargreater loads than comparable amountsof solid lumber. They are used to supportroofs and floors. Structural insulated pan-els can incorporate the interior and exte-rior sheathing and insulation as well. Acomparison of standard framing versusprefabricated components found that ahouse built with the new componentsused 26 percent less wood, was built faster,and saved thousands of dollars. Indeed,the U.K. government estimated that theslower adoption of prefabricated compo-nents in that country has meant officebuilding costs are 30 percent above wherethey would be otherwise.33

Another way to reduce materials use isto improve recycling and reuse at eachstage of a building’s life. During construc-tion, 10 percent of the wood used in newbuildings in the United States ends up asconstruction waste. Reusing materials on-site—for example, using plywood con-crete forms several times and then usingthem as roofing—sorting materials to


During construction, 10 percent ofthe wood used in new U.S. buildingsends up as construction waste.

make reuse easier, and selling or donatingwaste materials can cut project costs anddivert substantial amounts of materialfrom landfills to productive uses.34

Proper building maintenance can alsosave materials and money. And a study forFriends of the Earth calculated that onethird of the demand for new homes in theUnited Kingdom could be met by reno-vating existing buildings and reducingvacancy rates.35

Salvaged wood from older structurescan be a valuable resource. In many cases,the beams, rafters, doors, trims, and floor-ing in old buildings are of sizes, species,and quality that are now too costly orimpossible to obtain from forests (forexample, heartwood pine and chestnutfloors, or large redwood timbers).Although this is a small sector of the woodmarket, it illustrates the value and creativepotential embodied in many old structuresslated for demolition or allowed to decay.36

Typically, much of the wood thatcomes from demolition is not of sufficientquality to be remilled and reused directly.But some can be used as the raw materialfor composite wood products or paper, oras mulch or fuel. Demolition wood isalready burned for fuel in many Asiancities, in Sweden, and in the Netherlands,for example.37

When new wood is needed, buildersand manufacturers can turn to certifiedwood products that are produced withless impact on the forests. Productslabeled by the Forest Stewardship Council(the largest and most recognized third-party certifier) as originating in well-man-aged forests are increasingly available,although still only a small portion of themarket. By the end of 1998, nearly 11 mil-lion hectares in 27 countries have beencertified. Networks such as the CertifiedForest Products Council in NorthAmerica and the U.K. 1995 Plus BuyersGroup make it easier for commercial andindividual buyers to locate sources of cer-tified and recycled wood products.38

Using reclaimed and certified woodproducts can be cost-effective and afford-able, especially when combined withwood-efficient building methods. TheNatural Resources Defense Council notedin a recent study that new homes built inCalifornia using these methods cost sever-al thousand dollars less than standardnew homes.39

PAPER: FROM FISHING NETS

TO SILICON

The paper we use today bears little resem-blance to the paper first produced inChina nearly 1,900 years ago, made oftree bark, hemp, old rags, and used fish-ing nets. Papermaking spread to Europeby the end of the ninth century, andbegan in North America in 1690. Wellinto the nineteenth century, the primarysource of fiber for paper in the westernworld was rags and cloth.40

As paper demand started to outstriprag supply in the late eighteenth century,a search for substitutes began. By the mid-1800s the invention of wood pulping tech-niques paved the way for an increasedrole of wood in papermaking. Today,wood fibers account for nearly 91 percentof the fiber used in making paper, morethan one third of which is in the form ofrecycled paper. (See Figure 4–1.) A mere9 percent comes from various nonwoodfibers that were the predominant sourcefor more than 1,700 years.41

As the use of wood in papermakingexpanded by vast proportions over thelast 150 years, so did the use of paperitself. In the United States, for example,paper production rose from a meager 1million tons in 1889 to nearly 85 milliontons in 1997. While paper was once usedalmost solely for printing and writing pur-poses, technological innovations andfalling costs during this century expand-


ed its role in our daily lives. Today thereare more than 450 grades of paper—usedfor purposes as diverse as filtering coffee,covering electrical cables, clothing sur-geons, carrying groceries, and shippinggoods across the globe.42

The virgin wood fiber used to makepaper accounts for close to 18 percent ofthe world’s total annual wood harvest. In1993, 618 million cubic meters of woodwent to making paper. Of this, nearly twothirds came from wood harvested specifi-cally for pulp, and the rest was from man-ufacturing residues such as wood chipsand sawdust. Given this substantial use ofresidues, the share of the world’s woodthat is used to make paper is often under-estimated. Although mill residues havelong been used as a fiber source for paper,their contribution to the world’s pulp sup-ply has grown so much in recent decadesthat they represent a valuable commodityin their own right. Indeed, due to the inte-gration of fiber sources for lumber, ply-wood, and pulp, distinguishing the woodflows among the various sectors is diffi-cult. Today, trees are less likely to be har-vested for one particular purpose.43

During the past century, most of theworld’s wood supply for paper has come

from old-growth and second-growthforests of Canada, the United States,Scandinavia, and the former SovietUnion. Although these areas are stillmajor sources, new players have emergedin recent decades as pulp capacity incountries such as Brazil, New Zealand,Indonesia, and Chile has expanded withthe cultivation of fast-growing eucalyptusand pine plantations. In some cases, theseplantations have replaced natural forests.For example, many of the fires that con-sumed vast swaths of forests in Indonesiain recent years were set to clear land forpulp and palm oil plantations.44

Many paper companies based in theUnited States, Europe, and Japan areinvesting heavily in overseas plantationdevelopment. Warmer climates, availableland, and cheap labor have encouragedthis trend. Forest management for pulphas shifted toward a more agriculturalmodel: genetic strains are carefully bredand selected, and seedlings are plantedand developed into single-species, single-aged stands that are treated with fertiliz-ers and pesticides. Crops are harvested in10–30 year rotations. The uniform, pre-dictable fiber source thus produced isextremely attractive to an industry whoseexpensive machinery requires a steadyflow of easily managed fiber inputs.45

Over the past three decades, interna-tional trade in pulp and paper productshas tripled. Today about one fifth of pulpproduction and one fourth of paper pro-duction is traded internationally, account-ing for roughly 44 percent of the value ofworld forest product exports. Althoughthe world’s pulpwood production is shift-ing south, northern producers continueto dominate the paper industry. In 1995,the world’s largest paper producer—theUnited States—accounted for nearly 30percent of global production. Japan wasranked second, at nearly 11 percent.Japan is somewhat unusual, however, as itsindustry depends substantially on rawmaterial imports. In 1994, Japan imported


Second-Growth Forests (30)

Fast-Growing Plantations (16)

Old Growth Boreal Forests (8)

Tropical and TemperateOld Growth Forests (1)

Recycled Paper (36)

Nonwood (9)100Percent of Fiber Supply

20

40

60

80

Source: IIED, FAO

Figure 4–1. Fiber Sources for Global PaperProduction, Mid-1990s

70 percent of the world’s trade in woodchips and 12 percent of the traded pulp.46

Global consumption of paper is grow-ing faster than use of most other majorwood products. Between 1950 and 1996,paper consumption increased six times,to 281 million tons. By 2010, it is expect-ed to reach nearly 400 million tons.Nearly half of the world’s paper is usedfor packaging, such as cardboard boxesand food containers. Printing and writingpapers account for another 28 percent,newsprint’s share is about 13 percent, andsanitary and household papers use 6 percent.47

Industrial nations use the lion’s shareof the world’s paper—close to 75 percentin 1994—and will continue to do so wellinto the future. But paper consumption isgrowing at a faster rate in developingnations, and by 2010 these countries areexpected to use almost 33 percent, upfrom 15 percent in 1980. In recent years,Southeast Asia has been home to theworld’s fastest-growing paper market,increasing at approximately 10 percent ayear. Due to weakened Asian markets,annual growth in world paper demand isprojected to slow in 1998.48

On a per capita basis, differences inconsumption trends are even more pro-nounced. Per capita consumption inindustrial nations was about 160 kilogramsin 1995, compared with 17 kilograms indeveloping nations. (See Figure 4–2.) Inthe United States, the per capita figure isover 330 kilograms of paper a year—roughly seven times the global average.49

Cycles of overcapacity have helped fuelthe rapid growth in paper production andconsumption. As mill size has grown dur-ing the last century, the industry hasbecome less able to adjust to market sig-nals. New mills can take three to fouryears to come on-line, and once built theymust run almost constantly to pay offinvestments. Supply and demand fall outof sync, as huge quantities of pulp aredumped on the market, creating gluts

and large price swings.50

There are many parts of the world thatneed greater access to paper and the ser-vices it provides. Paper provides a meansfor communication and education as wellas having important sanitary uses. Butmuch of the paper use in industrialnations is excessive, wasteful, and simplyunnecessary. For example, the averageU.S. household receives 553 pieces ofjunk mail each year, a figure that isexpected to triple by 2010. Nearly 10 bil-lion mail-order catalogs are discardedeach year in the United States. Indeed,paper and paperboard account for nearly40 percent of the municipal solid wastegenerated there, and the U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency (EPA) expectsthat paper, paperboard, and wood wastewill continue to grow faster than popula-tion in the future.51

Years ago, when it became clear thatcomputers were going to be informationand communication tools, it was widelybelieved that paper use would drop pre-cipitously. The dream of the “paperlessoffice,” however, has not been realized. Infact, some analysts consider the rise in elec-tronic communications to have been “a


50

100

150

200

250

300

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2010

Kilograms Per Person Per Year

Source: FAO, Census Bureau, IIED

Industrial CountriesDeveloping Countries

Figure 4–2. Trends in Per Capita PaperConsumption in Industrial and Developing

Countries, 1975–2010

great blessing to the paper industry.” It ispossible that new technologies could stillreduce the need for printing and writingpaper—with electronic books and “electricpaper” (made of silicon, and able to bereused up to a million times).52

Paper recycling is considered one ofthe environmental success stories of ourtime. Between 1970 and 1995, the world’suse of wastepaper more than tripled, andrecovered paper now makes up nearly 36percent of the total fiber supply for paper.FAO predicts that by 2010 the share ofrecycled paper in the fiber supply forpaper will increase to 46 percent—whichwould cut wood pulp demand 17 percentbelow what it would otherwise be.53

Expanded recycling has been animportant factor in slowing the growth indemand for woodpulp, but it has servedmore as a supplement than a substitutefor fiber supply to industry. Global paperconsumption is increasing at such a rapidrate that it has overwhelmed many of thegains achieved by recycling, and virginwood pulp consumption continues toexpand roughly 1–2 percent a year. Inaddition, recycled fibers cannot replacevirgin fiber entirely, since paper fibers canonly be recycled five or six times beforethey become too weak for further use.54

The tree bark and fishing nets used forpapermaking 1,900 years ago are nolonger a major constituent in the world’sfiber supply for paper. But as noted earlier,nonwood sources do account for 9 percentof the supply today. There are two maintypes of nonwood fibers for paper: agricul-tural residues from crops such as wheat,rice, and sugarcane, and crops that can begrown specifically for pulp, such as kenafand industrial hemp.55

Developing nations account for 97 per-cent of the world’s nonwood pulp produc-tion and consumption. In the UnitedStates, nonwood fibers account for lessthan 1 percent of the paper industry feed-stock, whereas in China nonwoods—pri-marily straw—make up nearly 60 percent.

In fact, China, the world’s third largestpaper producer, accounts for 75 percentof the world’s nonwood pulping capacity.56

Currently, the world’s nonwood pulpcapacity is centered where there are limit-ed forest resources, such as China, India,and Pakistan. In countries where forestresources seem relatively plentiful andwhere billions of dollars have been invest-ed in wood pulp mills, there is little incen-tive to expand the use of nonwood fibers.Yet a growing body of research suggeststhat a strong case can be made for increas-ing the share of nonwood fibers in paperto as much as 20–30 percent. Much of thisincrease could be met with agriculturalresidues. Although a substantial portion—often about half—of these residues areand should be reincorporated into the soilto maintain soil quality, surplus residuesare often burned in the field, resulting inpolluted air and a wasted resource.57

WOOD ENERGY

Long before wood was used so extensivelyfor purposes such as paper production, itwas used as fuel. Since the discovery ofthe first fire-making technologies,humans have depended on fuelwood andcharcoal to cook food, heat homes, andpower industries. With the emergence offossil fuel as a major energy source in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, therelative role of wood as a fuel supply inindustrial economies steadily declined. Itsprimary uses there today are to heathomes and provide a source of energy forforest products industries that use scrapsfrom mills to fuel their plants.58

Yet wood still remains an importantsource of energy in developing countries,where at least 2 billion people depend onfuelwood or charcoal as their primary orsole source of domestic energy, and whereit powers industry. In developing nations,


fuelwood and charcoal account forapproximately 15 percent of total energyuse (compared with 1–2 percent in indus-trial countries). These numbers maskenormous variations among differentcountries, however. In 40 of the world’spoorest nations, wood meets more than70 percent of energy needs.59

Fuelwood is not simply a developing-country issue, however. For one thing, animportant source of fuelwood in industri-al countries is not usually accounted forin energy and forest product statistics. Incountries with large forest products indus-tries, secondary fuel supplies—such aswood chips, sawdust, and pulpingliquors—are produced as byproducts ofmilling processes. In the United States,lumber and plywood mills meet at least 70percent of their energy needs and papermills meet more than half of theirs withwood residues and pulping liquors. Thesesecondary sources add close to 300 mil-lion cubic meters of wood to the 200 mil-lion that are consumed directly for fuel inindustrial countries.60

A recent study sheds further light onthe often overlooked sources of woodfuel.The European Timber Trends Studyfound that out of Europe’s “total woodenergy” supply in 1990, 44 percent camefrom primary sources of fuelwood, whileprocessing byproducts provided an equalshare. When all these sources areaccounted for, it turns out that fuel is thepredominant use of wood in Europe—accounting for more than 45 percent ofthe region’s total wood consumption.Likewise, in the United States, althoughonly 18 percent of wood is harvesteddirectly for fuel, when residues are includ-ed the proportion used for fuel tops 27 percent.61

Although industrial countries ultimate-ly use more wood for energy than com-monly thought, the dependence isgreatest and scarcity has the largestimpact in developing nations. During the1970s and early 1980s it was widely

believed that the world was headed for a“fuelwood crisis,” and that severe short-ages were in store. This was based on theassumption that fuelwood collection anddeforestation were directly linked andthat increasing fuelwood needs wouldinevitably surpass forests’ ability to meetdemand. In recent years, however, manystudies have reexamined these predic-tions and have improved our understand-ing of the sources of fuelwood in specificregions and the impact on forests. FAO’sState of the World’s Forests 1997 summed upthis new understanding succinctly:“Without doubt, fuelwood shortages andovercutting can have negative economic,environmental and social effects. But, inmost cases, fuelwood collection is not aprimary cause of deforestation. Further-more, it is now clear that fuelwood pro-duction and harvesting systems can be,and often are, sustainable.”62

Much of today’s fuelwood does notcome directly from primary forests. Whatdoes come from these areas is often deadtwigs and branches or trees cut down ini-tially to clear land for agriculture. Othermajor sources of fuelwood include treeplantations and “nonforest areas” such asvillage lands, agricultural land, coconutand rubber plantations, and trees alongroadsides. Recent studies by the RegionalWood Energy Development Programmein Asia (RWEDP) have concluded that inmany of the 15 countries studied, as muchas 50 percent of fuelwood is derived fromnonforest areas.63

In India, recent studies have indicatedthat the role of forests in providing fuel-


Fuel is the predominant use of woodin Europe—accounting for more than 45 percent of the region’s wood consumption.

wood has often been overestimated andthat nonforest resources—especially inmore recent years—are of greater impor-tance. In the state of Kerala, for example,80 percent of wood supply came from“homestead trees” cultivated in conjunc-tion with agricultural crops to providefruit, shade, protection against erosion,and a source of firewood. Another reporton fuelwood sources in India found thatbetween the periods 1978–79 and1992–93, the percentage of householdscollecting firewood from their own farmsincreased from 35 to 49 percent and fromroadside bushes and trees from 24 to 30percent, while the collection from forestsdropped from 35 to 17 percent.64

Deforestation and forest degradationare often more closely associated withurban use of fuelwood than rural use. Inrural areas, fuelwood is gathered locally,and collectors are more conscientiousabout harvesting in a sustainable manner.Fuel suppliers for urban areas, on theother hand, sometimes clearcut wood-land areas and make little attempt to con-serve the resource base.65

In addition to household use, con-sumption of fuelwood by small industriescan account for a large share of fuelwooduse in certain areas. In Zimbabwe, thebrick-making industry consumes the sameamount of wood as is used for cooking inall rural areas of the country. In BurkinaFaso, rural beer brewing industries useabout 1 kilogram of fuelwood for eachliter of beer. And tobacco growers inBrazil use about 5 million cubic meters(enough to fill about 100,000 loggingtrucks) of wood every year just for curingor drying tobacco. In some cases, smallbusinesses obtain their wood from com-mon lands or unprotected forests. Incases where rural industries are requiredto pay for the wood consumed, they maymaintain their own plantations of fast-growing trees to sustain their woodfuelneeds on a consistent basis.66

Although fuelwood collection is no

longer considered to be a major cause ofdeforestation, there are still areas whereits collection does contribute to forest lossand degradation. And in regions of scarci-ty, fuelwood shortages pose a significantproblem for people and for forests. Arecent FAO report estimated that as muchas half of the world’s 2 billion fuelwoodusers face fuel shortages and as many as100 million “already experience virtual‘fuelwood famine’.” Of the 15 Asian coun-tries examined under RWEDP assess-ments, fuelwood consumption exceededpotential sustainable supply inBangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal. The gapbetween demand and potential sustain-able supply is expected to grow wider inthese countries by 2010. Several regions ofsub-Saharan Africa also face fuelwoodshortages, largely due to an increase infuelwood use, expansion of agricultureinto forests and woodlands, and overgraz-ing by growing cattle populations.67

In responding to today’s fuelwoodshortages, analysts frequently call atten-tion to the failures of some of the top-down approaches pursued in the 1970s.Designers of some of these initiatives wereoften not aware of the wide variation inlocal needs, the role of women as primaryusers, and the volume of wood consumedby local industries in some areas.Through close examination of the effortsthat succeeded in recent decades, it hasbecome clear that locally based, commu-nity-generated approaches to fuel supplyare most effective. Fuelwood productioncan be sustainable if it is done throughsmall-scale, carefully managed plantation,woodlot, or agroforestry projects.68

Production of fuelwood can provideboth local and global benefits. As concernabout carbon emissions from the burningof fossil fuels has grown, many scientistsclaim that the substitution of biofuels(such as wood) for fossil fuels could be asubstantial aid in mitigating climatechange. Assuming replanting, the biomassburned is potentially “carbon-neutral” as it


releases gases that it absorbed out of theatmosphere during its growth. As a poten-tial means of easing climate change andimproving supplies to regions where wood-fuel is scarce, this approach is worth care-ful consideration.69

THE FUTURE OF FOREST

PRODUCTS

When the European Forestry Instituterecently examined future prospects forthe world’s wood supply, it asked, Will theworld run out of wood? The answer was,Not likely. Indeed, the more profoundand far-reaching issues to be faced incoming decades are what kind of forestwill remain, at what cost, for whose bene-fit, and will the forests be able support thediversity of life and provide the other ser-vices that people need.70

If current trends continue, accordingto FAO, by 2010 paper consumption willincrease by 49 percent, fuelwood con-sumption will rise by 18 percent, and over-all wood consumption will increase by 20percent. Industrial nations are expectedto continue their already disproportion-ately high levels of consumption, anddeveloping nations are expected toincrease their demand. Some analystshave predicted that in some major timber-producing nations, such as the UnitedStates, growth in consumption may out-strip the production capacity of domestictimberlands in the next decade, and theywill begin “spending down” their forests.71

What might happen if the developingworld reached the high consumption lev-els of industrial nations? If wood use accel-erates to the point where everyoneconsumes as much as the average personin an industrial country does today, by2010 the world would consume more thantwice as much wood as it does today. Andif by 2010 everyone in the world con-

sumed as much paper as the averageAmerican does today, total paper con-sumption would be more than eight timescurrent world consumption. To meet thatdemand, the harvest would have toincrease severalfold—a pressure theworld’s forests are unlikely to withstand ifthey are to continue providing essentialecosystem services.72

Such scenarios are not inevitable oreven reasonable. It is possible to balancepeople’s needs for forest products whilestill sustaining the forests. New tech-niques in sustainable forest management,as well as a broader appreciation offorests’ nontimber services, offerpromise. Furthermore, there are a num-ber of ways that we could meet futuredemand without increasing harvest levels.Indeed, it may be possible to actuallyreduce harvest levels.

There are many ways to reduce wooduse by lowering consumption levels. If, for example, total paper consumption inindustrial countries stayed at current levelsrather than increasing as predicted, worldpaper consumption in 2010 would increaseby 24 percent rather than 49 percent. Ifindustrial nations reduced their predictedconsumption of industrial roundwood by 8 percent, this would offset FAO’s pro-jected rise in developing nations.73

It is also possible to reduce wood use byimproving efficiency at every step of theproduction process. In the United Statesand the United Kingdom, about 30–50percent of the wood that is cut—duringland clearing, the thinning of commercialstands, or logging—never even enters thecommercial flow. While some of it needsto be left in the forest, this “waste” offersopportunities for local industries and forreducing the overall harvest.74

In many developing countries, largeefficiency gains are possible. The amountof finished product that leaves the mills isa fraction of what it is elsewhere, and theresidues (sawdust, scraps, and so on) aregenerally underused. In Brazil, for exam-


ple, two thirds of the wood that is com-mercially harvested is discarded, and onlyone third ends up as sawnwood. By oneestimate, improving equipment mainte-nance and worker training could increaseprocessing efficiency by 50 percent.Combined with better forest managementpractices, Brazil could produce the sameamount of timber while disturbing onethird as much forestland.75

If developing nations increased theirprocessing efficiency to the current levelof industrial nations by using the newesttechnologies, they could nearly meet theirprojected 2010 demands for processedwood without increasing harvest levels.76

Increasing pre- and post-consumerrecovery and recycling could prove to bea fruitful source of materials and couldreduce the waste burden. For example, 10percent of all the wood consumed tobuild new houses in the United Statesends up as construction debris. And,worldwide, more than half of all paper isstill not recycled.77

There are ecologically friendly materi-als that could replace wood in many appli-cations. There is room to expand the useof agricultural residues and other non-woods as a substitute for or supplement towood in paper, construction materials, andfuel. In the United States, for example, 350million tons of agricultural residues areavailable each year, even after 60 percent isreturned to soils. The demand for woodpulp for paper could be almost cut in halfif the fiber supply for paper shifted to 30percent wood pulp (from 56 percenttoday), 50 percent recovered paper, and 20percent nonwood fibers.78

Designing for durability rather thandisposability and extending the useful lifeof finished products could help reducethe demand for more timber. Asdescribed earlier, there are also lessdemanding ways to meet the needs thatforest products now fill.

There are clearly many opportunitiesto bring about a new forest economy.Unfortunately, many of these steps haveyet to be scaled up to the necessary level.Most individuals and institutions do notrecognize the excessive use of wood—a“renewable resource”—as a problem.One of the primary obstacles is inertia.The status quo is comfortable and famil-iar, institutions are heavily invested inexisting technologies and practices, andgovernments are wedded to current poli-cies. Another barrier is the reluctance ofmost industrial nations to even contem-plate a fundamental question: How muchdo we really need?

High-consuming nations have a specialrole to play in reducing the pressure theyare putting on the world’s forests. Notonly do their purchases and habits direct-ly affect forests, but their technologiesand lifestyles are often exported (eitherdirectly or through the media) and adopt-ed by developing countries. So far,European nations have been leaders inenvironmental certification of forestproducts, reducing demand, and increas-ing recycling—all while maintaining ahigh standard of living.

Individual consumers can make a dif-ference through their purchasing deci-sions—or their decisions not to purchase.Their lifestyle decisions—from the typeand size of home they live in to its con-tents—their recycling habits, and the lawsthey support are all part of the forest econ-omy. Educating consumers about theimpacts of their consumption patterns canhelp them make better informed choices.79

In the office, where the speed and easeof computers, printers, and copiers havedramatically increased paper use (and the


Brazil could produce the sameamount of timber while disturbingone third as much forestland.

money spent on paper and mail), thereare opportunities for reduction. Elec-tronic mail and computers still have thepotential to reduce paper use in commu-nications—and save money. One majorinsurance company saves 14 tons of paperyearly by publishing its manuals on-line.In the United States, EPA cut its paperconsumption by 16 percent in just twoyears—by using double-sided copying and increasing the use of computers forcommunication.80

Companies that buy forest products—from builders to publishers to manufac-turers—can also shift the forest economyin a more sustainable direction. Theirdecisions send signals to suppliers and reg-ulators. Commitment by some large con-sumers, like newspapers and magazines,for example, has already begun to havesuch an effect in Germany and the UnitedKingdom. BBC magazines, for one, whichprints 15 trillion pages a year, audits itssuppliers and has stated that it would buypaper certified from sustainable forestrywhen it becomes available in sufficientquantity. The companies in the UK 1995Plus Buyers Group, which the BBCbelongs to, represent about 25 percent ofthe U.K. market for wood products.81

Builders and architects can specifyreclaimed or certified wood, set goals andtargets for purchases and waste recovery,and use efficient and durable designs.They can work to make building regula-tions responsive to the principles of sus-tainable development. Those whocommission buildings can ask builders tofollow these practices. Microsoft, forinstance, directed that construction wasteat its new office complex be recycled. Indoing so the company recycled 78 per-cent of the waste and saved almost$168,000. Although the savings are smallfor such a large company, it demonstratesto others that such an approach is practi-cal and profitable. Perhaps the biggestobstacle to overcome is the reluctance ofbuilders and construction workers to

adopt new techniques.82

In the pulp and paper industry, majorobstacles to change are the capital-inten-sive nature of the industry and scantresearch on alternative fibers. Thus theindustry is inflexible to changes in marketconditions or fiber sources. As noted ear-lier, agricultural residues are an under-used fiber source that could make asubstantial contribution to the feedstockfor paper in some areas. A company inNebraska has recognized the value of this“waste” and in the year 2000 plans to startannual production of 140,000 tons ofhigh-quality paper pulp from corn stalks.83

Some companies are realizing that theway to higher profits is not throughincreasing the volume of wood cut orprocessed but through producing higher-value products. People who make theirliving from the forest also benefit from a volume-to-value shift because more jobs, and higher skilled jobs, are createdper unit of wood in value-added process-ing than in less labor-intensive areas (such as logging and chip mills). (SeeTable 4–4.) Workers and communitiesgain because the forest will be sustained,and with it the jobs.

Of course, not all livelihoods and ben-efits come from these sorts of commercialforest operations. Smaller-scale nonwoodforest product operations, such as rattanharvesting, have long provided a sustain-able stream of goods and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people. Butthese benefits are often lost when forestsare logged.

Job creation is often used as the ratio-nale for increasing harvest levels and gov-ernment subsidies to the forest industry.Ironically, in recent decades there hasbeen a general decline in number of jobsgenerated in extractive forestry, despiterecord harvests. In Sweden, about half ofall jobs in the forest products industryhave been lost since 1980, a time whenproduction increased by more than 17percent largely as a result of increased


mechanization. In Canada, the world’sbiggest timber exporter, the number ofjobs per volume harvested has fallen by 20percent in the last 20 years, despite a sub-stantial rise in harvest levels. There havealso been job declines in other sectorsthat relied on forests that were no longerhealthy—fisheries, for instance.84

Further, many of these extractive indus-tries generate relatively little employment,especially when compared with otheroptions for forest use. For example, theU.S. National Forests are currently man-aged primarily for timber supply, despitethe fact that recreational use of thesewoodlands generates nearly 2.6 millionjobs and adds $97.8 billion to the nationaleconomy. Logging, on the other hand,adds only 76,000 jobs and $3.5 billion.85

The most important reform govern-ments can make is to end long-standingpolicies of encouraging and subsidizinghigh-volume extractive industries underthe assumption that this use of the forests isthe most profitable. Subsidies have helpedcreate unrealistically low prices that do notreflect the true value of forest resourcesand the costs of squandering them. Timbersubsidies also make it difficult for othermaterials (such as recycled or nonwoodfiber for paper) to compete fairly and drivedown prices that private landowners canget for their timber. Overcoming this barrier is essential to creating a sustainableforest economy—and putting a nation’seconomy on a sounder footing.

Underpricing and lost revenue fromtimber harvest on public land can be sosubstantial that governments in effect payprivate interests to take public timber. InCanada, stumpage rates are half what theyare in the United States. And from 1992to 1994 the U.S. timber sales program lost$1 billion in direct costs alone (such asroad-building and mapping), not includ-ing the costs of reforestation, stream ero-sion, and lost fisheries, water supply,recreation, and so on. Similarly,Indonesia lost $2.5 billion in 1990.86

Many publicly funded services to theforest industry evolved to facilitate indus-trial forestry—schools, research, exten-sion, product testing, marketingassistance, sector promotion, and so on. Ifmore of this funding were directed toefforts to develop sustainable forest man-agement, alternative fibers for buildingsand paper, uses for recycled materials,and so forth, it could help shift the forestindustry in a environmentally sustainabledirection while creating jobs and eco-nomic growth.

In many countries, state control offorestland helps extractive industries—and indeed, it was often established to dojust that. Examples include the systemsstarted in India under British colonialrule, in British Columbia earlier in thiscentury, and in modern Indonesia. Whenthe Indonesian government declared in1967 that it had sole legal jurisdictionover the nation’s forests, customary rights


Table 4–4. United States: Employment Created by Various Timber Products

Process Additional Jobs Created

Logs to lumber 3 jobs per million board feetLumber to components

(furniture parts, for example) another 20 jobs per million board feetComponents to high-end consumer

goods (furniture, for example) another 80 jobs per million board feet

SOURCE: Catherine Mater, “Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Forestry,” in Sustainable Forestry WorkingGroup, ed., The Business of Sustainable Forestry: Case Studies (Chicago: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthurFoundation, 1998).


that had evolved as a complex and sus-tainable management system over manygenerations were no longer legally recog-nized. As elsewhere, by removing powerfrom local communities, a real-life“tragedy of the commons” was created—the government, which has the authority,is unable to police the nation’s vastforests, and the communities who are inthe forest have no power to stop exploita-tion by outsiders.87

Control also brought revenues that thegovernment now depends on, creating aconflict of interest. This cozy relationshipis clear in British Columbia, where thegovernment owns 94 percent of theforestland, including First Nations’(indigenous peoples’) land; most of thelong-term leases have been given to ahandful of companies, and the govern-ment sets revenue targets.88

Weak laws or failure to enforce laws haveencouraged vast forest resources to besquandered. Brazil, which finally grantedenforcement authority to its environmentagency in 1998 after stalling for nine years,repealed the authority just a few monthslater. British Columbia, Cambodia, andRussia, to name a few, also have poorrecords of ensuring compliance with weaklaws. In response to 1998’s devastatingfloods, the Chinese government finallybegan enforcing a logging ban in theupper reaches of the Yangtze and reforest-ing the watershed, which has lost 85 per-cent of its forest cover. It acknowledges thatthe water storage value of forests is worththree times as much as the cut timber.89

Domestic and international laws andregulations can be used to spur innova-tion. Some cities, for example, have devel-oped programs and set goals to increaserecycling, foster green building programs,

and establish guidelines for wood-use effi-ciency. A 1994 European Union Directivetargeted a 50–65 percent recovery rate forall packaging waste by 2001. And a 1996law in Japan set a target of 60 percent forconsumption of recovered paper by 2000,to reduce its fiber imports and the amountof waste sent to scarce landfills.90

The U.N. Framework Convention onClimate Change could encourage refor-estation for carbon sequestration, andsustainable woodfuel plantations as a sub-stitute for fossil fuels. Trade rules couldbe reformed to allow nations to halt theimportation of timber known to be ille-gally harvested in the country of origin,and to allow for labeling by species,nation of origin, and method of produc-tion. The World Bank and other lenderscan help ensure that sustainable forestmanagement and efficient processingand energy industries are pursued. TheInternational Monetary Fund, for exam-ple, in its 1998 bailout of the Indonesianeconomy did stipulate that the corruptplywood cartel be abolished. However, italso encouraged the expansion of palmoil plantations—one of the main culpritsin the recent devastating fires.91

While there are many pressures onforestlands, the production and con-sumption of wood products is a majorforce driving forest loss and degradation.And it is the pressure that is perhaps themost amenable to change—where indi-viduals and businesses have a direct roleand where we can see results quickly. It ispossible to envision and achieve a forestproducts economy that provides all thethings people need from forests—goods,livelihoods, and services—and ensuresthat healthy forest ecosystems survive intothe next millennium.

NotesChapter 4. Reorienting the ForestProducts Economy

1. William Cronon, Nature’s MetropolisChicago and the Great West (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1991).

2. John Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Role ofWood in the Development of Civilization (NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989); DirkBryant, Daniel Nielsen, and Laura Tangley,The Last Frontier Forests (Washington, DC:World Resources Institute (WRI), 1997).

3. Janet N. Abramovitz, Taking a Stand:Cultivating a New Relationship with the World’sForests, Worldwatch Paper 140 (Washington,DC: Worldwatch Institute, April 1998).

4. U.N. Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion (FAO), State of the World’s Forests 1997(Oxford, U.K.: 1997).

5. Janet N. Abramovitz, “Valuing Nature’sServices,” in Lester Brown et al., State of theWorld 1997 (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1997); Abramovitz, op. cit. note 3.

6. FAO, “Importance of NWFP,” <http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/FAOINFO/FORESTRY/NWFP/NONWOOD.HTM>, viewed 11February 1998.

7. India from “India flood toll pushes1,800,” Agence France Presse English Wire, 7 September 1998; Bangladesh from“Drowning,” The Economist, 12 September1998; Mexico from “Flooding RampantWorldwide,” CNN Interactive <http://www.

cnn.com./WORLD>, viewed 10 September1998; Yangtze watershed deforestation fromCarmen Revenga et al., Watersheds of the World(Washington, DC: WRI, 1998); other Chinafrom Erik Eckholm, “China Admits EcologicalSins Played Role in Flood Disaster,” New YorkTimes, 26 August 1998, from Erik Eckholm,“Stunned by Floods, China Hastens LoggingCurbs,” New York Times, 27 September 1998,and from Vaclav Smil and Mao Yushi, TheEconomic Costs of China’s EnvironmentalDegradation (Cambridge, MA: AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences, 1998).

8. Perlin, op. cit. note 2.

9. Ibid.; Michael Williams, “IndustrialImpacts of the Forests of the United States,1860–1920,” Journal of Forest History, July 1997;current wood use for railroads from David B.McKeever, “Domestic Market Activity in SolidWood Products (Preliminary Report)”(Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture(USDA), Forest Service, Forest ProductsLaboratory, 1998).

10. Increase in plantations from FAO, op.cit. note 4; Birger Solberg et al., “An Overviewof Factors Affecting the Long-term Trends ofNon-Industrial and Industrial Wood Supplyand Demand,” in Birger Solberg, ed., Long-Term Trends and Prospects in World Supply andDemand for Wood and Implications for SustainableForest Management (Joensuu, Finland:European Forestry Institute, 1996); 10 percentfrom Diana Propper de Callejon et al.,“Sustainable Forestry within an IndustryContext,” in Sustainable Forestry WorkingGroup, ed., The Business of Sustainable Forestry:

Case Studies (Chicago: John D. and CatherineT. MacArthur Foundation, 1998).

11. FAO, op. cit. note 4.

12. Ibid.

13. International trade and volume fromibid.

14. Robin Broad, “The Political Economyof Natural Resources: Case Studies of theIndonesian and Philippine Forest Sectors,”The Journal of Developing Areas, April 1995; production expansion of industrial round-wood and plywood from FAO, op. cit. note 4,and from FAO, Forest Products Yearbook1983–1994 (Rome: 1996); forest loss inIndonesia, Brazil, and Malaysia from WRI,World Resources 1994–1995 (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994).


16. James L. Howard, “U.S. TimberProduction, Trade, Consumption, and PriceStatistics 1965–1994” (Madison, WI: USDAForest Service, Forest Products Laboratory,June 1997); FAO, op. cit note 4; FAO, ForestProducts Prices 1963–1982 (Rome: 1983); FAO,Forest Products Prices 1973–1992 (Rome: 1995).

17. Industrial efficiency from FAO, op. cit.note 4, and from Solberg, op. cit. note 10,based on FAO Yearbooks; Cronon, op. cit. note1; Williams, op. cit. note 9.

18. U.S. Bureau of the Census, HistoricalStatistics of the United States on CD-ROM, ColonialTimes to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1976);Howard, op. cit. note 16.

19. Processing efficiency from Propper deCallejon et al., op. cit. note 10; residue use andU.S. reduction of waste from Iddo K. Wernick,Paul E. Waggoner, and Jesse Ausubel,“Searching for Leverage to Conserve Forests,”Journal of Industrial Ecology, summer 1997;Swedish Forest Industries Association, TheSwedish Forest Industry, Facts and Figures 1997

(Stockholm: 1998).

20. Growth in engineered wood productsfrom “Engineered Wood Product Demandand Production Continue on Record-SettingPace,” press release (Washington, DC: APA-The Engineered Wood Association, 6 March1998); oriented strand board market sharefrom T.M. Maloney, “The Family of WoodComposite Materials,” Forest Products Journal,February 1996.

21. Maloney, op. cit. note 20.

22. David B. McKeever, “Resource Potentialof Solid Wood Waste in the United States,” inForest Products Society, The Use of RecycledWood and Paper in Building Applications(Madison, WI: 1997); Propper de Callejon et al., op. cit. note 10; Kenneth E. Skog et al., “Wood Products Technology Trends:Changing the Face of Forestry,” Journal of Forestry, December 1995; Maloney, op. cit.note 20.

23. Catherine M. Mater, “EmergingTechnologies for Sustainable Forestry,” inSustainable Forestry Working Group, op. cit.note 10.

24. Swedish Forest Industries Association,op. cit. note 19.

25. Ibid.; Solberg, op. cit. note 10;Elizabeth May, At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis inCanada’s Forests (Toronto, ON, Canada: KeyPorter, 1998); Michael M’Gonigle and BenParfitt, Forestopia: A Practical Guide to the NewForest Economy (Madeira Park, BC, Canada:Harbour Publishing, 1994).

26. Recycling rates from Ashley T. Mattoon,“Paper Recycling Climbs Higher,” in Lester R.Brown, Michael Renner, and ChristopherFlavin, Vital Signs 1998 (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998); solid waste fromPeter J. Ince, “Recycling of Wood and PaperProducts in the United States” (Madison, WI:USDA Forest Service, Forest ProductsLaboratory, January 1996), and from


McKeever, op. cit. note 22.

27. FAO, op. cit. note 4; ConstructionSponsorship Directorate, Department of theEnvironment, Timber 2005: A Research andInnovation Strategy for Timber in Construction(London: 1995).

28. Worldwatch calculations based on FAO data and on U.S. data in Richard W.Haynes et al., The 1993 RPA Timber AssessmentUpdate (Fort Collins, CO: USDA ForestService, Rocky Mountain Forest and RangeExperiment Station, 1995), and on McKeever,op. cit. note 9.

29. Robert B. Phelps, “New ResidentialConstruction in the United States by StructureType and Size, 1920–1991,” USDA ForestService, unpublished manuscript, 1993;National Association of Home Builders,“Characteristics of New Single-Family Homes:1975–1997,” <http://www.nahb.com/sf. html>,viewed 29 May 1998; Bureau of Census, op. cit.note 18; Howard, op. cit. note 16; Japan fromManagement and Coordination Agency ofJapan, “Households and Household Membersby Type of Household,” <http://www.stat.go.jp/161106.htm>, viewed 9 July 1998.

30. Phelps, op. cit. note 29.

31. Perlin, op. cit. note 2.

32. Ann Edminster and Sami Yassa, EfficientWood Use in Residential Construction: A PracticalGuide to Saving Wood, Money and Forests (draft)(San Francisco: Natural Resources DefenseCouncil, 1998); Cost-Effective Home Building(Washington, DC: National Association ofHome Builders, 1994); Tracy Mumma et al.,Guide to Resource Efficient Building Elements(Missoula, MT: Center for ResourcefulBuilding Technology, 1997).

33. Edminster and Yassa, op. cit. note 32;Polly Sprenger, “SIPs Face the Skeptics,” HomeEnergy, March/April 1998; “StructuralInsulated Panels: An Efficient Way to Build,”Environmental Building News, May 1998; U.K.estimate from Construction Sponsorship

Directorate, op. cit. note 27.

34. Amount of construction waste fromMcKeever, op. cit. note 22; Edminster andYassa, op. cit. note 32; “10 Building ProjectsFollow System to Reduce Waste,”Environmental Design and Construction,January/February 1998.

35. Construction Sponsorship Directorate,op. cit. note 27; Duncan McLaren, SimonBullock, and Nusrat Yousuf, Tomorrow’s World:Britain’s Share in a Sustainable Future (London:Earthscan Publications, 1998).

36. Robert H. Falk et al., “Recycled Lumberand Timber,” in Masoud Sanayei, ed.,Restructuring: America and Beyond: Proceedings ofStructural Congress 13, 2–5 April 1995, Boston,MA, American Society of Civil Engineers; LisaGeller, “High Value Markets for Decon-structed Wood,” Resource Recycling, August1998; David Eisenberg, Development Centerfor Appropriate Technology, e-mail to JanetAbramovitz, 22 September 1998.

37. Ince, op. cit. note 26; R. Falk, “HousingProducts from Recycled Wood Waste,”Proceedings of the Pacific TimberEngineering Conference, Gold CoastAustralia, 11–15 July 1994; McKeever, op. cit.note 22; Asia and Netherlands from WillemHulscher, Chief Technical Advisor, RegionalWood Energy Development Programme inAsia (RWEDP), e-mail to authors, 23September 1998; Sweden from “ForestProducts Markets Strong in 1997 and 1998,Uncertainty Over the Short Term Outlook,”UN/ECE Timber Committee MarketStatement, 28 September–1 October 1998,<http://www.unece.org/trade/timber>,viewed 20 October 1998.

38. Certified area from Forest StewardshipCouncil, “Forests Certified by FSC-AccreditedCertification Bodies,” August 1998, <http://www.fscoax.org>, viewed 19 October 1998;buyers groups and resources from CertifiedForest Products Council, <http://www.certifiedwood.org>, “Your Guide to Indepen-


dently Certified Forest Products,” <http://www.certifiedproducts.org>, 95 Plus Group,and <http://www.fsc-uk.demon.co.uk/95PlusGroup.html>, all viewed 21 October 1998.

39. Certified Forest Products Council,“Construction Underway on Unique Habitatfor Humanity Home Built with Certified WoodProducts,” press release (Beaverton OR: 19May 1998); California buildings in Edminsterand Yassa, op. cit. note 32.

40. Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, Written on Bambooand Silk, The Beginnings of Chinese Books andInscriptions (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1962); International Institutefor Environment and Development (IIED),Towards a Sustainable Paper Cycle (London:1996).

41. Figure 4–1 from FAO, FAOSTATStatistics Database, <http://apps.fao.org/>(1995 data), with breakdown of major woodpulp sources from IIED, op. cit. note 40 (1993data).

42. Figure for 1889 from Kurt J.Haunreiter, “200th Anniversary of the PaperMachine,” TAPPI Journal, October 1997; figurefor 1997 from FAO, op. cit. note 41; IIED, op.cit. note 40.

43. Figure for 1993, the last time such a cal-culation was made, from Wood ResourcesInternational Ltd., Fiber Sourcing Analysis for theGlobal Pulp and Paper Industry (London: IIED,September 1996); IIED, op. cit. note 40;Maureen Smith, The U.S. Paper Industry andSustainable Production (Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 1997); Ronald J. Slinn, “TheImpact of Industry Restructuring on FiberProcurement,” Journal of Forestry, February1989; Swedish Forest Industries Association,op. cit. note 19; Forest Service, USDA, TimberTrends in the United States (Washington DC:1965).

44. IIED, op. cit. note 40; Propper deCallejon et al., op. cit. note 10; Pulp and Paper

International (PPI), International Fact and PriceBook 1997 (San Francisco, CA: Miller FreemanInc., 1996); Charles W. Thurston, “BrazilUpgrading its Pulp Capacity,” Journal ofCommerce, 8 October 1997; Indonesia fromWorld Wide Fund for Nature, The Year theWorld Caught Fire (Gland, Switzerland:December 1997).

45. Investments from Soile Kilpi, “NewOpportunities in the South American Pulp andPaper Business,” TAPPI Journal, June 1998;“Southern Hemisphere Plantations Turn UpHeat on Traditional Northern Wood FiberSuppliers,” Pulp and Paper Week, 20 December1993; Stephanie Nall and William Armbruster,“U.S. Forest Products Companies Eye NewZealand,” Journal of Commerce, 19 May 1997;Ricardo Carrere and Larry Lohmann, Pulpingthe South (London: Zed Books, 1996); AnitaKerski, “Pulp, Paper and Power—How anIndustry Reshapes its Social Environment,” TheEcologist, July/August 1995; predictability fromPropper de Callejon et al., op. cit. note 10.

46. Increased trade from FAO, op. cit. note4; U.S. share from PPI, op. cit. note 44:Japanese imports from FAO, FAO ForestProducts Yearbook 1983–1994 (Rome: 1996).

47. Figure for 1950 from IIED, op. cit. note40; figure for 1996 from FAO, op. cit. note 41; projection from FAO, Provisional Outlookfor Global Forest Products Consumption,Production, and Trade to 2010 (Rome: 1997);share of different paper grades from IIED, op.cit. note 40.

48. FAO, op. cit. note 47; Southeast Asiafrom Gary Mead, “Tough Year Ahead for Pulpand Paper,” Financial Times, 31 January 1998.

49. Figure 4–2 from FAO, op. cit. note 41,and from U.S. Bureau of the Census,International Data Base, <http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc>, viewed 18 December 1997;projections for 2010 from IIED, op. cit. note40; United States from PPI, op. cit. note 44.

50. Three to four years from IIED, op. cit.


note 40; PPI, North American Fact Book 1997(San Francisco, CA: Miller Freeman, Inc.1996); Kirk J. Finchem, “Top Managers,Analysts Say Paper Industry Slow to Change,”Pulp and Paper, December 1997.

51. Junk mail from Susan Headden, “TheJunk Mail Deluge,” U.S. News and World Report,8 December 1997; mail order catalogs fromNels Johnson and Daryl Ditz, “Challenges toSustainability in the U.S. Forest Sector,” inRoger Dower et al., Frontiers of Sustainability(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997); munici-pal solid waste from Franklin Associates, Ltd.,“Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste inthe United States: 1996 Update,” report pre-pared for U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency (EPA), Municipal and Industrial SolidWaste Division, Office of Solid Waste, June1997.

52. Quote from Gunter Schneider,“Potential Threats Towards Publication andCatalogue Papers,” TAPPI Journal, February1996; electric paper from John B. Horrigan,Frances H. Irwin, and Elizabeth Cook, Takinga Byte Out of Carbon (Washington DC: WRI,1998); W. Wayt Gibbs, “The Reinvention ofPaper,” Scientific American, September 1998.

53. FAO, op. cit. note 41; FAO, op. cit. note47.

54. FAO, op. cit. note 41; FAO, op. cit. note47; Journal of Industrial Ecology, special issue onthe industrial ecology of paper and wood, vol.1, no. 3 (1998); five to six times from IIED, op.cit. note 40.

55. Smith, op. cit. note 43.

56. FAO, op. cit. note 47; China share ofcapacity from Joseph E. Atchison, “Twenty-fiveYears of Global Progress in Nonwood PlantFiber Pulping,” TAPPI Journal, October 1996.

57. Smith op. cit. note 43; David Morrisand Irshad Ahmed, The Carbohydrate Economy:Making Chemicals and Industrial Materials from Plant Matter (Washington, DC: Institute

for Local Self-Reliance, 1992); Institute forLocal Self-Reliance, “The Fiber Revolution,”The Carbohydrate Economy (newsletter), fall 1997; Atchison, op. cit. note 56; Meghan Clancey Hepburn, “AgriculturalResidues: A Promising Alternative to VirginWood Fiber,” in Issues in Resource Conservation,Briefing Series No. 1 (Washington, DC: ResourceConservation Alliance, Center for Study ofResponsive Law, 1998).

58. Relative role from Solberg et al., op. cit.note 10.

59. Estimate of 2 billion from FAO, op. cit.note 4; percentages from Solberg et al., op. cit.note 10; 40 of the world’s poorest nations fromU.N. Environment Programme, EnvironmentalData Report 1993–94 (Oxford, U.K.: BlackwellPublishers 1993).

60. U.S. mill figures from Wernick,Waggoner, and Ausubel, op. cit. note 19; directand indirect woodfuel consumption figuresfrom Solberg et al., op. cit. note 10.

61. FAO, European Timber Trends andProspects Into the 21st Century (New York:United Nations, 1996); U.S. figure from Ince,op. cit. note 26.

62. Gerald Leach and Robin Mearns,Beyond the Woodfuel Crisis (London: EarthscanPublications, 1988); Anil Agarwal, “FalsePredictions,” Down to Earth, 31 May 1998;RWEDP, Regional Study on Wood Energy Todayand Tomorrow in Asia (Bangkok: FAO, October1997); Lars Kristoferson, “Seven Energy andDevelopment Myths—Are They Still Alive?”Renewable Energy for Development, July 1997;Emmanuel N. Chidumayo, “Woodfuel andDeforestation in Southern Africa—A Mis-conceived Association,” Renewable Energy forDevelopment, July 1997; FAO, op. cit. note 4.

63. Leach and Mearns, op. cit. note 62;other sources from RWEDP, op. cit. note 62; B.K. Kaale, “Traditional Fuels,” in Janos Pasztorand Lars A. Kristoferson, Bienergy andEnvironment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,


1990).

64. Agarwal, op. cit. note 62; I. Natarajan,“Trends in Firewood Consumption in RuralIndia,” Margin (National Council of AppliedEconomic Research, New Delhi), October–December 1995, as discussed in ibid.

65. D. Evan Mercer and John Soussan,“Fuelwood Problems and Solutions,” inNarendra P. Sharma, ed., Managing the World’sForests (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/HuntPublishing Company, 1992); Kaale, op. cit.note 63.

66. Mercer and Soussan, op. cit. note 65; P. Bradley and P. Dewees, “IndigenousWoodlands, Agricultural Production andHousehold Economy in the CommunalAreas,” in P.N. Bradley and K. McNamara, eds.,Living with Trees: Policies for Forestry Managementin Zimbabwe (Washington, DC: World Bank,1993); Pasztor and Kristoferson, op. cit. note63; Brazil tobacco from Beauty Lupiya, “All forSmoke,” Down to Earth, 15 November 1997;Chidumayo, op. cit. note 62.

67. Chen Chunmei, “State to Plant Treesfor Fuel,” China Daily, 7 July 1997; FAO, op. cit.note 4; RWEDP, op. cit. note 62; sub-SaharanAfrica from D.F. Barnes, Population Growth,Wood Fuels, and Resource Problems in Sub-SaharanAfrica (Washington, DC: World Bank Industryand Energy Department, March 1990), citedin C.J. Jepma, Tropical Deforestation, (London,U.K.: Earthscan Publications, 1995).

68. Top-down approaches from Leach andMearns, op. cit. note 62; Mercer and Soussan,op. cit. note 65; Kaale, op. cit. note 63; DanielKammen, “Cookstoves for the DevelopingWorld,” Scientific American, July 1995.

69. David O. Hall et al., “Biomass forEnergy: Supply Prospects,” in Thomas B.Johansson et al., eds., Renewable Energy: Sourcesfor Fuels and Electricity (Washington DC: IslandPress, 1993); Sandra Brown et al.,“Management of Forests for Mitigation ofGreenhouse Gas Emissions,” in Robert T.

Watson et al., eds., Climate Change 1995:Impacts, Adaptations and Mitigation of ClimateChange: Scientific-Technical Analyses: Contributionof Working Group II to the Second AssessmentReport of the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996).

70. Solberg et al., op. cit. note 10; FAO, op.cit. note 4.

71. Worldwatch calculations based on FAO,op. cit. note 47; U.S. from Johnson and Ditz,op. cit. note 51.

72. Worldwatch estimates based on FAOdata.

73. Ibid.

74. U.S. estimate from Wernick, Waggoner,and Ausubel, op. cit. note 19; U.K. estimatefrom McLaren, Bullock, and Yousuf, op. cit.note 35.

75. Christopher Uhl et al., “NaturalResources Management in the BrazilianAmazon: An Integrated Research Approach,”Bioscience, March 1997.

76. Worldwatch estimates based on FAOprojections.

77. McKeever, op. cit. note 22.

78. Worldwatch estimates based on FAO,op. cit. note 47; 350 million tons from DavidMorris, Vice President, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, presentation at “Advancing theDemand Reduction Agenda,” Minneapolis,MN, 26 June 1998; potential percentage breakdown from Smith, op. cit. note 43.

79. Co-op America, “WoodWise Consumer”(Washington, DC: 1998); McLaren, Bullock,and Yousuf, op. cit. note 35.

80. Insurance company from McLaren etal., op. cit. note 35; EPA from Horrigan, Irwin,and Cook, op. cit. note 52.

81. UN/ECE Timber Committee, Forest


Products Annual Market Review 1997–1998,<http://www.unece.org/trade/timber/y-rev98.htm>, viewed 20 October 1998; DavidFord, director, Certified Forest ProductsCouncil, discussion with Janet Abramovitz, 20October 1998; Eric Hansen et al., “TheGerman Publishing Industry: ManagingEnvironmental Issues: A Teaching Case Study”(draft) (Corvallis, OR: Oregon StateUniversity, October 1998); BBC from speechby Nicholas Brett, BBC Worldwide Ltd., atForests for Life Conference, San Francisco, 10May 1997; Justin Stead, manager, WWF 1995Plus Group, discussion with Janet Abramovitz,22 October 1998.

82. David Eisenberg, Development Centerfor Appropriate Technology, e-mail to JanetAbramovitz, 22 September 1998; Edminsterand Yassa, op. cit. note 32; Microsoft examplefrom Preston Horne-Brine, “A Wood RecyclingEnterprise: Clean Collection, OptimizedProcessing and Value-Added Manufacturing,”Resource Recycling, June 1998; AmericanInstitute of Architects Committee on theEnvironment, <http://www.e-architect.com>.

83. Smith, op. cit. note 43; Nebraska fromDuke Fuehrer, Chief Operating Officer,Heartland Fibers, discussion with AshleyMattoon, 29 October 1998.

84. Swedish employment from SwedishForest Industries Association, op. cit. note 19;Swedish and Canadian roundwood produc-tion from FAO, op. cit. note 41; Canadianemployment numbers from Natural ResourcesCanada (NRC), “Statistics Canada, LaborForce Survey” (unpublished) (Ottawa, ON,Canada: 1998), received from David Luck,Canadian Forest Service, NRC, e-mail toAshley Mattoon, 2 September 1998;Worldwatch calculations based on FAO andCanadian data.

85. U.S. Forest Service, The Forest ServiceProgram for Forest and Rangeland Resources: ALong-Term Strategic Plan, Draft 1995 RPAProgram, October 1995, cited in Sierra Club,“Ending Timber Sales on National Forests:

The Facts,” report summary, San Francisco,undated.

86. U.S. timber sale losses from Jim Jontz,“Forest Service Indictment: A Mountain ofEvidence,” in Sierra Club, Stewardship orStumps? National Forests at the Crossroads(Washington, DC: June 1997); RandalO’Toole, “Reforming a Demoralized Agency:Saving National Forests,” Different Drummer,vol. 3, no. 4 (1997); “National Forest TimberSale Receipts and Costs in 1995,” DifferentDrummer, vol. 3, no. 4 (1997); Paul Roberts,“The Federal Chain-saw Massacre,” Harper’sMagazine, June 1997; Indonesia from CharlesBarber, Nels C. Johnson, and Emmy Hafild,Breaking the Logjam: Obstacles to Forest PolicyReform in Indonesia and the United States(Washington, DC: WRI, 1994).

87. British Columbia Ministry of Forests(BCMOF), “Timber Tenure System in BritishColumbia” (Victoria, BC, Canada: 1997);Barber, Johnson, and Hafild, op. cit. note 86;Owen J. Lynch and Kirk Talbott, BalancingActs: Community-Based Forest Management andNational Law in Asia and the Pacific(Washington, DC: WRI, September 1995).

88. BCMOF, op. cit. note 87; Cheri Burdaet al., Forests in Trust: Reforming BritishColumbia’s Forest Tenure System for Ecosystem andCommunity Health (Victoria, BC, Canada:University of Victoria, Eco-Research Chair ofEnvironmental Law and Policy, July 1997); BCWild, “Overcut: British Columbia Forest Policyand the Liquidation of Old-Growth Forests”(Vancouver, BC, Canada: BC Wild, 1998).

89. Diana Jean Schemo, “To Fight Outlaws,Brazil Opens Rain Forest to Loggers,” New YorkTimes, 21 July 1997; Diana Jean Schemo,“Brazil, Its Forests Besieged, Adds Teeth toEnvironmental Laws” New York Times, 29January 1998; William Schomberg, “BrazilUnder Fire for Relaxing Environmental Law”,Reuters, 14 August 1998; Sierra Legal DefenseFund (SLDF), “British Columbia ForestryReport Card 1997–98” (Vancouver, BC,


Canada: 1998); SLDF, “Betraying Our Trust: ACitizen’s Update on Environmental Rollbacksin British Columbia, 1996–1998” (Vancouver,BC, Canada: 1998); Ministry of Forests,Province of British Columbia, “Annual Reportof Compliance and Enforcement Statistics forthe Forest Practices Code: June 15, 1996–June16, 1997,” <http://www.for.gov.bc.ca.>, viewed5 November 1997; Global Witness, “JustDeserts for Cambodia? Deforestation & theCo-Prime Ministers’ Legacy to the Country,”June 1997, <http://www.oneworld.org/global-witness>, viewed 23 September 1997; WorldConservation Union–IUCN and World WideFund for Nature, “Illegal Logging in RussianForests,” Arborvitae, August 1997; Yangtzewatershed deforestation from Revenga et al.,op. cit. note 7; Eckholm, “Stunned by Floods,”op. cit. note 7; “Forestry Cuts Down onLogging,” China Daily, 26 May 1998.

90. Building codes from Eisenberg, op. cit.note 82; European Union directive from“Divided EU Agrees on Packaging Directive,Joint Ratification of Climate Change Treaty,”International Environment Reporter, 12 January1994; “Council Agrees on FCP Phase-out,Packaging Recycling, Hazardous Waste List,”International Environment Reporter, 11 January1995; “New Law Sets 60 Percent RecoveredPaper Consumption Guideline in Japan,”Paper Recycler, October 1996.

91. International Monetary Fund, “State-ment by the Managing Director on the IMFProgram with Indonesia,” Washington, DC, 15 January 1998; Sander Thoenes,“Indonesian Wood Cartel Resists IMFReforms,” Financial Times, 13 February 1998.


Charting a New Course

for OceansAnne Platt McGinn

For much of human history the oceanshave been viewed as infinite and free forthe taking. In his inaugural address to the1883 International Fisheries Exhibition inLondon, British scientific philosopherThomas Huxley argued that “all the greatsea-fisheries are inexhaustible.” Huxleyassumed that natural checks—that is, tem-porary population crashes in fish stocks—were strong enough to withstand afull-fledged human assault. Althoughthese opinions were challenged at thetime by a few people, and were couchedin qualifications by Huxley himself, theview of oceans as a resource of unendingbounty and a frontier for exploitationprevailed.1

Today we depend on oceans as asource of food and fuel, a means of tradeand commerce, and a base for cities andtourism. Worldwide, people on averageobtain 16 percent of their animal proteinfrom fish. Ocean-based deposits meet one

fourth of the world’s annual oil and gasneeds, and more than half of world tradetravels by ship. Currently, more than 2 bil-lion people—many of them urbanites—live within 100 kilometers of a shoreline.And millions more crowd the world’sbeaches and coastal areas each year,bringing in billions of dollars in tourismrevenues.2

At its high point in the late 1980s, com-bined spending on fisheries, ocean trans-port, offshore oil and gas drilling, andnavies contributed about $821 billion (in1995 dollars) to the world economy.Although the net worth of these indus-tries has since declined to about $609 bil-lion due to a drop in navy budgets, oilprices, and valuable marine fish stocks, itwill likely increase in the decades aheadwith the development of ocean thermaland tidal energy, further exploration ofuntapped marine resources, and rapidlyexpanding aquaculture.3

More important than these economicfigures, however, is the fact that humansdepend on oceans for life itself.

5

We are grateful to the Curtis and Edith MunsonFoundation for its support of our research onoceanic fisheries.

Harboring a greater variety of animalbody types (phyla) than terrestrial systemsand supplying more than half of the plan-et’s ecological goods and services, theoceans play a commanding role in theEarth’s balance of life. Due to their largephysical volume and density, oceansabsorb, store, and transport vast quanti-ties of heat, water, and nutrients. Theworld’s oceans store about 1,000 timesmore heat than the atmosphere does, forexample. Through processes such asevaporation and photosynthesis, marinesystems and species help regulate the cli-mate, maintain a livable atmosphere, con-vert solar energy into food, and breakdown natural wastes. The value of these“free” services far surpasses that of ocean-based industries: coral reefs alone, forinstance, are estimated to be worth $375billion annually by providing fish, medi-cines, tourism revenues, and coastal pro-tection for more than 100 countries.4

Despite the importance of healthyoceans to our economy and well-being, wehave pushed the world’s oceans perilouslyclose to—and in some cases past—theirnatural limits. The warning signs areclear. The share of overexploited marinefish species, for instance, has jumpedfrom almost none in 1950 to 35 percentin 1996, with an additional 25 percentnearing full exploitation. More than halfof the world’s coastlines and 60 percent ofthe coral reefs are threatened by humanactivities, including intensive coastaldevelopment, pollution, and overfishing.5

Most scientists today reject Huxley’snotion that humans are incapable ofharming the oceans. In January 1998, asthe United Nations was launching theYear of the Ocean, more than 1,600marine scientists, fishery biologists, con-servationists, and oceanographers fromacross the globe issued a joint statemententitled “Troubled Waters.” They agreedthat the most pressing threats to oceanhealth are human-induced, includingspecies overexploitation, habitat degrada-

tion, pollution, introduction of alienspecies, and climate change. The impactsof these five threats are exacerbated bypoorly planned commercial activities andcoastal population growth. One marinescientist has summed up the current stateof affairs simply: “Too much is taken fromthe sea and too much is put into it.”6

Yet many people still consider theoceans as not only inexhaustible, butimmune to human interference. In part,the vast seascape is far removed fromeveryday life and therefore remains sepa-rate and disconnected from the morefamiliar landscape. Much of the oceanenvironment is relatively inaccessible toscientists, let alone the general public.Because scientists have only begun topiece together how ocean systems work,society has yet to appreciate—much lessprotect—the wealth of oceans in itsentirety. Indeed, our current course ofaction is rapidly undermining this wealth.Overcoming ignorance and apathy isnever easy, but educating people aboutour collective dependence on healthyoceans will help build support for marineconservation. And that is just what theoceans need.

ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL

VALUES

From the Greeks in the Mediterranean tothe Chinese on the Yellow Sea, marineenvironments have provided the back-bone for food security, commerce, trade,and transportation for centuries. Ancientcivilizations sprang up on coasts of inlandseas and oceans where fish were abundantand trade was relatively easy to arrange.Archaeological evidence from the west-ern Pacific reveals that Homo erectus beganbuilding boats as far back as 800,000 yearsago, suggesting that people turned to thesea for food long before agricultural

Charting a New Course for Oceans (79)

fields were plowed. Fossilized piles ofshells along coastal Peru indicate thatpeople harvested shellfish from tidalpools some 12,000 years ago.7

Today, on average, people receiveabout 6 percent of total protein and 16percent of their animal protein from fish.Nearly 1 billion people, predominantly inAsia, rely on fish for at least 30 percent oftheir animal protein supply. Most of thesefish come from oceans, but with increas-ing frequency they are cultured on farmsrather than captured in the wild.Aquaculture, based on the traditionalAsian practice of raising fish in ponds, hasbegun to explode in recent years. It nowconstitutes one of the fastest growing sec-tors in world food production.8

In addition to harvesting food fromthe sea, people have traditionally reliedon oceans as a transportation route. Metaltools found along Yemen’s coastal plainand stone tablets uncovered in Egyptreveal a thriving maritime trade in andaround the Mediterranean and Red Seasdating back to the Bronze Age, some5,000 years ago. By harnessing the strongtrade winds and seasonal monsoons in theIndian Ocean, Arabs established long-last-ing trade routes around 100 B.C.9

A far cry from these early centers ofocean commerce, the hubs of modern-day sea trade are dominated by multina-tional companies that are moreinfluenced by the rise and fall of stockprices than by the tides and trade winds.Modern fishing trawlers, oil tankers, air-craft carriers, and container ships follow apath set by electronic beams, satellites,and computers. Of course, technological

change poses challenges as well as poten-tial innovations: two recently constructedocean cruise liners are too large to fitthrough the Panama Canal.10

Society now derives a substantial por-tion of energy and fuel from the sea—atrend that was virtually unthinkable a cen-tury ago. (See Table 5–1.) And in an ageof falling trade barriers and mountingpressures on land-based resources, newocean-based industries such as tidal andthermal energy production promise tobecome even more vital to the workings ofthe world economy. Having increased six-fold between 1955 and 1995, the volumeof international trade is expected to tripleagain by 2020, according to the U.S.National Oceanographic and Atmos-pheric Administration—and 90 percent ofit is expected to move by ocean.11

In contrast to familiar fishing groundsand sea passageways, the depths of theocean were long believed to be a vast waste-land that was inhospitable, if not com-pletely devoid of life. Since the firstdeployment of submersibles in the 1930sand more advanced underwater acousticsand pressure chambers in the 1960s, scien-tific and commercial exploration hashelped illuminate life in the deep sea andthe geological history of the ancient ocean.Mining for sand, gravel, coral, and miner-als (including sulfur and, most recently,petroleum) has taken place in shallowwaters and continental shelves for decades,although offshore mining is severelyrestricted in some national waters.12

Isolated but highly concentrated deepsea deposits of manganese, gold, nickel,and copper, first discovered in the late1970s, continue to tempt investors. Thesevaluable nodules have proved technologi-cally difficult and expensive to extract,given the extreme pressures and depths oftheir location. An international compro-mise on the deep seabed mining provisionsof the Law of the Sea in 1994 has openedthe way to some mining in internationalwaters. But it appears unlikely to lead to


Today, on average, people receive 16 percent of their animal proteinfrom fish.

much soon, as long as mineral pricesremain low, demand is still largely metfrom the land, and the cost of underwateroperations remains prohibitively high.13

Perhaps more valuable than the miner-al wealth in oceans are still undiscoveredliving resources—new forms of life,potential medicines, and genetic materi-al. For example, in 1997 medicalresearchers stumbled across a new com-pound in dogfish that stops the spread ofcancer by cutting off the blood supply totumors. The promise of life-saving curesfrom marine species is gradually becom-ing a commercial reality for bioprospec-tors and pharmaceutical companies asanti-inflammatory and cancer drugs havebeen discovered, for example, and otherleads are being pursued.14

Tinkering with the ocean for the sakeof short-sighted commercial development,whether for mineral wealth or medicine,warrants close scrutiny, however. Givenhow little we know—only 1.5 percent ofthe deep sea has ever been explored, let

alone adequately inventoried—any devel-opment could be potentially irreversiblein these unique environments. Althoughseabed mining is now subjected to somedegree of international oversight,prospecting for living biological resourcesis completely unregulated.15

During the past 100 years, scientistswho work both underwater and amongmarine fossils found high in mountainshave shown that the tree of life has its evolutionary roots in the sea. For some3.2 billion years, all life on Earth wasmarine. A complex and diverse food webslowly evolved from a fortuitous mix thereof single-celled algae, bacteria, and sever-al million trips around the sun. Liferemained sea-bound until some 245 million years ago, when the atmospherebecame oxygen-rich.16

Thanks to several billion years’ worthof trial and error, the oceans today arehome to a variety of species that have nodescendants on land. Thirty-two out of 33animal life forms are represented in


Table 5–1. Ocean-Based Industries, by Trends and Value, 1995

Industry Key Trends Value in 1995

Fisheries Fish catch up fivefold since 1950; global per capita $80 billionsupplies up from 8 kilograms in 1950 to 15 kilogramsin 1996; currently 200 million people rely on fishing for livelihood; 83 percent of fish by value imported to industrial countries.

Seaborne Trade Since 1955, the annual volume of shipments is up six- $155 billionand Shipping fold to 5 billion tons of oil, dry bulk goods, and other

cargo transported in 1995; 27,000 vessels—each largerthan 1,000 gross tons—registered; half of cargo loadedin industrial countries, while three fourths unloaded inindustrial countries.

Navies For years, military spending was larger than other ocean- $242 billiondependent activities combined; has declined due to endof cold war.

Offshore Oil and About 26 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas $132 billionGas Extraction comes from offshore drilling installations in Middle

East, United States, Latin America, North Sea waters.


marine habitats. (Only insects are miss-ing.) Fifteen of these are exclusivelymarine phyla, including those of combjellies, peanut worms, and starfish. Fivephyla, including that of sponges, live pre-dominantly in salt water. Although on anindividual basis marine species count forjust 9 percent of the 1.8 million speciesdescribed for the entire planet, there maybe as many as 10 million species in the seathat have not been classified.17

In addition to hosting a vast array ofbiological diversity, the marine environ-ment performs such vital functions as oxy-gen production, nutrient recycling, stormprotection, and climate regulation—ser-vices that are often taken for granted. Thecoastal zone is disproportionately valu-able: marine biological activity is concen-trated along the world’s coastlines (wheresunlit surface waters receive nutrients andsediments from land-based runoff, riverdeltas, and rainfall) and in upwelling sys-tems (where cold, nutrient-rich deep-water currents run up against continentalmargins). It provides 25 percent of theplanet’s primary biological productivityand an estimated 80–90 percent of theglobal commercial fish catch. One recentstudy estimated that coastal environmentsalone account for 38 percent of the goodsand services provided by the Earth’secosystems, while open oceans contributean additional 25 percent. The value of allmarine goods and services is estimated at

$21 trillion annually, 70 percent morethan terrestrial systems. (See Table 5–2.).18

Oceans are vital to both the chemicaland the biological balance of life. Thesame mechanism that created the presentatmosphere—photosynthesis—continuestoday to feed the marine food chain.Phytoplankton—tiny microscopic plants—take carbon dioxide (CO2) from theatmosphere and convert it into oxygenand simple sugars, a form of carbon thatcan be consumed by marine animals.Other types of phytoplankton processnitrogen and sulfur, and thereby help theoceans function as a biological pump.19

The oceans also serve as a net sink forCO2. Although most organic carbon is con-sumed in the marine food web and eventu-ally returned to the atmosphere viarespiration, the unused balance rains downto the deep waters that make up the bulk ofthe ocean, where it is stored temporarily.Over the course of millions of years, thesedeposits have accumulated to the pointthat most of the world’s organic carbon,some 15 million gigatons, is sequestered inmarine sediments, compared with just4,000 gigatons in land-based reserves. Onan annual basis, about one third of theworld’s carbon emissions—some 2 giga-tons—is taken up by oceans, an amountroughly equal to the uptake by land-basedresources. If deforestation continues todiminish the ability of forests to absorb car-bon, oceans are expected to play a more


Table 5–2. Ecological Goods and Services, by Ecosystem, Area, and Value

Ecosystem Area Total Value Global Flow Value Global Value(million (dollars per hectare (billion dollars (percent)hectares) per year) per year)

Marine 36,302 577 20,949 63Open Ocean 33,200 252 8,381 25Coastal 3,102 4,052 12,568 38

Terrestrial 15,323 804 12,319 37

Global 51,625 — 33,268 100

SOURCE: Robert Costanza et al., “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” Nature, 15May 1997.

important role in regulating the planet’sCO2 budget in the future as human-induced emissions keep rising.20

Perhaps no other example so vividlyillustrates the connections between theoceans and the atmosphere than El Niño.Named after the Christ Child because itusually appears in December, the El NiñoSouthern Oscillation takes place whentrade winds and ocean surface currents inthe eastern and central Pacific Oceanreverse direction. Scientists do not knowwhat triggers the shift, but the aftermathis clear: warm surface waters essentiallypile up in the eastern Pacific and blockdeep, cold waters from upwelling, while alow pressure system hovers over SouthAmerica, collecting heat and moisturethat would otherwise be distributed atsea. This produces severe weather inmany parts of the world—increased pre-cipitation, heavy flooding, drought, fire,and deep freezes—which in turn haveenormous economic impact. During the1997–98 El Niño, for example, Argentinalost more than $3 billion in agriculturalproducts due to these ocean-climate reac-tions, and Peru reported a 90-percentdrop in anchovy harvests compared withthe previous year.21

Fortunately, the scientific map of theocean realm is becoming more accurate.But we still have a lot to learn about marinelife. And the more we learn, the better weunderstand the role of oceans in sustaininghumanity, and how human beings areunwittingly undermining this role.

A SEA OF PROBLEMS

As noted earlier, the primary threats tooceans—overfishing, habitat degrada-tion, pollution, alien species, and climatechange—are largely human-induced andsynergistic. Fishing, for example, has dras-tically altered the marine food web and

underwater habitat areas. Meanwhile, theocean’s front line of defense—the coastalzone—is crumbling from years of degra-dation and fragmentation, while its watershave been treated as a waste receptaclefor generations. The combination of over-exploitation, the loss of buffer areas, anda rising tide of pollution has essentiallysuffocated marine life and the livelihoodsbased on it in some areas. Upsetting themarine ecosystem in these ways has, inturn, given the upper hand to invasivespecies and changes in climate.22

The health of marine fisheries is animportant yardstick for the health of theoceans. On the surface, all appears well.World fish production—wild catches andfarmed fish combined—reached an all-time high in 1996 of 120 million tons, upsixfold from 1950. But beneath the sur-face, things are not so bright. Years ofrelentless exploitation in the oceans havetaken their toll: 11 of the world’s 15 mostimportant fishing areas and 70 percent ofthe major fish species are either fully oroverexploited, according to the U.N. Foodand Agriculture Organization (FAO).23

This apparent contradiction can beexplained by two factors. The appearanceof steadily growing aquaculture prod-ucts—from 7 million tons of fish in 1984to 23 million tons in 1996—masks sharpdeclines in most of the world’s valuablefish stocks. Sharks—heir to an ancient lin-eage of vertebrates dating back some 400million years—are at their lowest point ofall time. Their longevity and low rates ofreproduction make sharks especially vul-nerable to overexploitation. Other topmarine predators, including tuna, sword-fish, and cod, are suffering a similar fate.24

In the course of depleting prizedspecies, fishers are taking smaller fish thattend to reproduce at a younger age, andare generally less commercially valuable.During the 1980s, for instance, five low-value open-sea species—the Peruviananchovy, South American pilchard,Japanese pilchard, Chilean jack mackerel,


and Alaskan pollock—accounted for 73percent of the increase in world landings.But unless the volume of fishing is reduced, the cycle of overfishing soonrepeats itself with new prey: excessive fishing can trigger abrupt declines inthese lower-level species, leaving fishersonly steps away from the base of the food chain.25

Fishers are now so efficient that theycan—and do—wipe out entire popula-tions of fish and then move on either to adifferent species or to a fishing area insome other part of the world. Followingthe decline of groundfish stocks in thelate 1980s and early 1990s, for instance,fishers still working in the Grand Banksregion off the Atlantic coast of Canadastarted catching dogfish (a type of shark),skate, monkfish, and other species onceconsidered trash. And in the SouthPacific, the catch of orange roughy—nomatch against modern vessels and high-tech gear—plummeted by 70 percent injust six years.26

Overfishing poses a serious biologicalthreat to ocean health. For one, theresulting reductions in the genetic diver-sity of the spawning populations make itmore difficult for the species to adapt tofuture environmental changes. Speciessuch as the orange roughy, for instance,may have been fished down to the pointwhere future recoveries are impossible.Second, declines in one species can alterpredator-prey relations and leave ecosys-tems vulnerable to invasive species. Theoverharvesting of triggerfish and puffer-fish for souvenirs on coral reefs in theCaribbean has sapped the health of the

entire reef. As these fish declined, popu-lations of their prey—sea urchins—exploded, damaging the coral by grazingon the protective layers of algae and hurt-ing the local reef-diving industry.27

These trends have enormous socialconsequences as well. The welfare ofmore than 200 million people around theworld who depend on fishing for theirincome and food security is severelythreatened. As the fish disappear, so toodo the coastal communities that dependon fishing for their way of life.Subsistence and small-scale fishers, whocatch nearly half of the world’s fish, sufferthe greatest losses as they cannot afford tocompete with large-scale vessels or chang-ing technology. Furthermore, the healthof more than 1 billion poor consumerswho depend on minimal quantities of fishin their diets is at risk as a growing shareof fish—83 percent by value—is exportedto industrial countries each year.28

Despite a steadily growing humanappetite for fish, large quantities are wast-ed each year because the fish are under-sized or a nonmarketable sex or species,or because a fisher does not have a permitto catch them and must therefore throwthem out. FAO estimates that discards offish alone—not counting marine mam-mals, seabirds, and turtles—total 20 mil-lion tons, equivalent to one fourth of theannual marine catch. Many of these fishdo not survive the process of gettingentangled in gear, being brought on-board, and then tossed back to sea. Theresulting loss of biodiversity is particularlystriking in shrimp fisheries. Working withfine-mesh nets and in areas of high speciesdiversity, shrimp trawlers on average take 5kilograms of innocent bystanders for everykilogram of shrimp they keep.29

In addition to causing overexploitationand waste, careless fishing practices alsodamage the very areas that fish rely on fortheir most vulnerable stages of life—breeding, spawning, and maturation.Tropical coral reefs of Southeast Asia bear


In the South Pacific, the catch oforange roughy plummeted by 70 per-cent in just six years.

the scars from fishers who squirt sodiumcyanide poison at fish to stun them, mak-ing it easier to trap them alive. Almostunheard of 15 years ago, cyanide poisonfishing is now reported in reef fisheriesfrom Eritrea to Fiji. Though it involvestoo little poison to harm people who latereat the fish, over time this practice can killmost reef organisms and convert a pro-ductive community into a graveyard.30

Another threat to habitat areas stemsfrom trawling, the process in which netsand chains are dragged across vast areasof mud, rocks, gravel, and sand, essential-ly sweeping—in some cases, mining—everything in the vicinity. By recentestimates, all the ocean’s continentalshelves are trawled by fishers at least onceevery two years, with some areas hit sever-al times a season. Now considered a majorcause of habitat degradation, trawling dis-turbs benthic (bottom-dwelling) commu-nities as well as localized species diversityand food supplies.31

The conditions that make coastal areasso productive for fish—proximity to nutri-ent flows and tidal mixing and their placeat the crossroads between land andwater—unfortunately also make them vulnerable to human assault. Today, near-ly 40 percent of the world lives within 100kilometers of a coastline. Moreover, twothirds of the world’s largest cities arecoastal. Population densities in China’s 11coastal provinces average more than 600people per square kilometer, for example,and in the rapidly growing city ofShanghai, more than 2,000 people crowdinto each square kilometer of land alongthe sea. To keep up with demand forhousing, buildings, and industries, coastalland in China that used to be cultivated isnow developed.32

A similar situation is occurring world-wide, as more people move to coastalareas and further stress the seams betweenland and sea. Not surprisingly, coastalecosystems are losing ground. (See Table5–3.) Between 1983 and 1994, more than

90,000 hectares of seagrasses weredestroyed worldwide. Data from just fourcountries—Malaysia, the Philippines,Thailand, and Viet Nam—reveal a cumu-lative loss of about 7,500 square kilome-ters of mangroves, many of which werecleared to make way for shrimp ponds andtourism developments. This represents 10percent of all remaining mangrove forestsin South and Southeast Asia.33

Human activities on land also cause alarge portion of offshore contamination.An estimated 44 percent of marine pollu-tion comes from land-based pathways,flowing down rivers into tidal estuaries,where it bleeds out to sea; an additional33 percent is airborne pollution that iscarried by winds and deposited far off-shore. From nutrient-rich sediments, fertilizers, and human waste to toxicheavy metals and synthetic chemicals, theoutfall from human society ends up circu-lating in the fluid and turbulent seas.34

Excessive nutrient loading has leftsome coastal systems looking visibly sick.Seen from an airplane, the surface watersof Manila Bay in the Philippines resemblegreen soup due to dense carpets of algae.Of course, nitrogen and phosphorus arenecessary for life, and in limited quanti-ties they can help boost plant productivi-


Table 5–3. Status of Coral Reefs, by Region,Mid-1990s

Share of TotalTotal at High or

Region Reef Area Medium Risk(square kilometers) (percent)

Middle East 20,000 61Caribbean 20,000 61Atlantic 3,100 87Indian Ocean 36,100 54Southeast Asia 68,100 82Pacific 108,000 41

Global 255,300 58

SOURCE: World Resources Institute et al., Reefs AtRisk: A Map-Based Indicator of Threats to the World’sCoral Reefs (Washington, DC: 1998).

ty. But too much of a good thing can bebad. Excessive nutrients build up and cre-ate conditions that are conducive to out-breaks of dense algae blooms, also knownas “red tides” for their colorful displays,which actually range from green to brownor red depending on the species of phy-toplankton. The blooms block sunlight,absorb dissolved oxygen, and disruptfood-web dynamics. Large portions of theGulf of Mexico are now considered a bio-logical “dead zone” due to algal blooms.35

Although these are a naturally occur-ring phenomenon, the frequency andseverity of red tides has increased in thepast couple of decades, as has the appear-ance of novel toxic species. Some expertslink the recent outbreaks to increasingloads of nitrogen and phosphorus fromnutrient-rich wastewater and agriculturalrunoff in poorly flushed waters. Between1976 and 1986, the population living inthe vicinity of Tolo harbor, Hong Kong,increased sixfold, for instance, whilenutrient loadings rose 2.5-fold and theannual incidence of red tides jumpedeightfold. In other cases, red tides followin the footsteps of fish farms, thriving onthe waste- and feed-infested waters.Concerted efforts to contain aquaculturalwaste have helped, but poorly managedoperations still offer an effective conduit.Whatever the cause, the public health andeconomic costs of red tides are substan-tial. (See Table 5–4.) Between 1970 and1990, the incidence of paralytic shellfishpoisoning doubled worldwide, forinstance, as the plankton carrying theresponsible toxin spread from the north-ern to southern hemisphere.36

Unlike red tides, which date back toBiblical times, organochlorines are a fair-ly recent addition to the marine environ-ment. But they, too, are proving to havepernicious effects. First manufactured inthe 1930s, synthetic organic compoundssuch as chlordane, DDT, and PCBs areused for everything from electrical wiring to pesticides. Indeed, one reason

they are so difficult to control is that theyare ubiquitous. The organic form of tin (tributyltin), for example, is used in mostof the world’s marine paints to keep bar-nacles, seaweed, and other organismsfrom clinging to ships. Once the paint isdissolved in the water, it accumulates inmollusks, scallops, and rock crabs, whichare consumed by fish and marine mam-mals. Recent sea otter die-offs inCalifornia have been linked to theimmune system suppression effect of hav-ing several milligrams of tributyltin in theanimal’s liver. North Sea waters alonereceive about 68 tons of this substanceevery year.37

As part of a larger group of chemicalsknown collectively as persistent organic


Table 5–4. Economic Losses from Red Tidesin Fisheries and Aquaculture Facilities

Year Location Species Loss(milliondollars)

1972 Japan Yellowtail ~471977 Japan Yellowtail ~201978 Japan Yellowtail ~221978 Korea Oyster 4.61979 Maine Many species 2.81980 New Many species 7

England1981 Korea Oyster >601985 Long Island, Scallops 2

NY1986 Chile Red salmon 211987 Japan Yellowtail 151988 Norway, Salmon 5

Sweden1989 Norway Salmon, rain- 4.5

bow trout1989– Puget Salmon farms 4–5

90 Sound, WA1991 Washington Oysters 15–20

state1991– Korea 133

921996 Texas Oysters 241998 Hong Kong Farmed fish 32


pollutants (POPs), these compounds aredifficult to control because they do notdegrade easily. (POPs include both chlo-rinated and brominated chemicals.)Highly volatile in warm temperatures,POPs tend to circulate toward colderenvironments where the conditions aremore stable, such as the Arctic Circle.Moreover, they do not dissolve in water,but are lipid-soluble, which means thatthey accumulate in the fat tissues of fishthat are then consumed by predators at amore concentrated level. Thus scientistshave found accumulations of 100 to 1,000times the input level in species at the topof the food chain—from seabirds andseals to polar bears and people.38

A recent survey on Baffin Island,Canada, of Inuit people who consumelarge quantities of walrus and seal meatand blubber found blood levels 20 timeshigher than the tolerable daily intake oftoxaphene and chlordane, two insecti-cides that have been banned in the UnitedStates for more than 15 years. POPs havebeen implicated in a wide range of animaland human health problems—from sup-pression of immune systems, leading tohigher risk of illness and infection, to dis-ruption of the endocrine system, which islinked to birth defects and infertility.Their continued use in many parts of theworld poses a threat to marine life and fishconsumers everywhere.39

Heavy metal contamination is anotherlasting legacy of the industrial age. In theBaltic Sea, concentrations of mercuryhave increased fivefold during the last 50years, largely due to the air depositionresulting from fossil fuel burning. Manyfish in the Baltic are blacklisted becausethey contain too much mercury for safehuman consumption. A similar trend hasoccurred in the U.S. Great Lakes.40

Heavily stressed aquatic environmentsare more susceptible to rapidly colonizingspecies. Already weakened by a combina-tion of overfishing, coastal habitat degra-dation, and increasing agricultural and

industrial pollution, the Black Sea, forinstance, was ripe for an exotic speciesintroduction in the 1980s. With no natur-al enemies in the Azov and Black Seas, and with a taste for fish eggs, larvae,and other zooplankton, the Atlanticcomb jelly—probably released in a ship’sballast water—helped wipe out life in the Black Sea. An estimated 85 percent ofthe marine species there—including amajority of commercial fish stocks—havedisappeared.41

Globally, several thousand species areestimated to be in ships’ ballast tanks atany given time. U.S. waters alone arethought to receive at least 56 million tonsof discharged ballast water a year. Thecombination of ships in motion and regu-lar flushing means that species get a freeone-way ticket to a foreign destination,such as the Black Sea. In San FranciscoBay, for instance, researchers catalogued234 exotic species, concluding that oneforeign species takes hold in the bay every14 weeks, often through ships’ ballastwater. Based on sampling in these andother areas, the researchers identifymarine bioinvasions as “a major globalenvironmental and economic problem.”42

Because marine species are extremelysensitive to changes in temperature,changes in climate and atmospheric con-ditions pose high risks to them. Recentevidence shows, for example, that thethinning ozone layer above Antarctica hasallowed more ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radia-tion to penetrate the waters. This hasaffected photosynthesis and the growth ofphytoplankton and macroalgae. But theeffects are not limited to the base of thefood chain: increased intensity of UV-Bradiation damages the larval develop-ment of crabs, shrimp, and some fish. Bystriking aquatic species during their mostvulnerable stages of life and reducingtheir food supply at the same time,increases in UV-B could have devastatingimpacts on world fisheries production.43

Among the early signs of human-


induced climate change in the oceans arecoral bleaching, stronger storms, sea levelrise, and ice cap melting. When corals aresubjected to any number of stresses, suchas warmer water or lower than normaltides, they expel symbiotic zooxanthellae(tiny plants). This gives them a brightwhite or bleached look, first documentedin the mid-1980s, and also means that thecorals cannot grow or reproduce. Inspring 1998, marine scientists reported amassive area of bleached coral through-out the tropics, including, for the firsttime, reefs in the Indian Ocean. Scientistshave linked the latest bleaching events toan increase in sea surface temperature of1 degree Celsius due to El Niño, althoughother instances are related to a complexmix of monsoonal, oceanographic, andclimatic variables.44

Because higher temperatures causewater to expand, a warming world maytrigger more frequent and damagingstorms. In 1995, scientists recorded thehighest sea surface temperature in thenorth Atlantic Ocean ever, the same yearthe region was hit with 19 tropicalstorms—twice the previous 49-year aver-age. Ironically, the coastal barriers, sea-walls, jetties, and levies that are designedto protect human settlements from stormsurges likely exacerbate the problem ofcoastal erosion and instability, as they cre-ate deeper inshore troughs that boostwave intensity and sustain winds.45

Depending on the rate and extent ofwarming, global sea levels may rise 5–95centimeters by 2100—up to five times asmuch as during the last century. Theeffects of this shoreline migration wouldbe dramatic: a 1-meter rise would floodmost of New York City, including the entiresubway system and all three major airports.Economic damages and losses could costthe global economy up to $970 billion in2100, according to the Organisation forEconomic Co-operation and Develop-ment. Of course, the human costs wouldbe unimaginable, especially in the low-

lying, densely populated river deltas ofBangladesh, China, Egypt, and Nigeria.46

These damages could be just the tip ofthe iceberg. Warmer temperatures willlikely accelerate polar ice cap melting andcould boost this rising wave by severalmeters. Just four years after a large portionof Antarctica melted, another large icesheet fell off into the Southern Sea inFebruary 1998, rekindling fears that globalwarming could ignite a massive thaw thatwould flood coastal areas worldwide.Because oceans play such a vital role in reg-ulating the Earth’s climate and maintain-ing a healthy planet, minor changes inocean circulation or in its temperature orchemical balance could have repercus-sions many orders of magnitude largerthan the sum of human-induced wounds.47

While understanding past climatic fluc-tuations and predicting future develop-ments is an ongoing challenge forscientists, there is clear and growing evi-dence of the overuse—indeed abuse—that many marine ecosystems and speciesare currently suffering from directhuman actions. And the situation is prob-ably much worse than these snapshotswould have us believe, for many sourcesof danger are still unknown or poorlymonitored. The need to take preventiveand decisive action on behalf of oceans ismore important than ever.48

OCEAN GOVERNANCE

Military personnel have long realized thepractical aspects of controlling the oceans.“Armies have little to fight for unless theycontrol the sea,” noted the ancient Greekphilosopher Thucydides. For centuries,controlling the ocean frontier meantexploiting it for economic and militarygain. Indeed, a mere 30 years known asthe European Age of Exploration, from1492 to 1522, virtually ensured that the


next 500 years would be ones of mountingsocietal dependence on oceans for trans-portation, commerce, and food.49

Triggered by the blockade of the port ofConstantinople in 1453, which signaledthe fall of the Byzantine Empire, Europeanmerchants were forced to find new traderoutes to the East. In the process, theyopened the world to the modern era ofglobal trade, travel, cultural exchange, andcolonization. The voyages of Vasco daGama to India, Christopher Columbus tothe “New World,” and Ferdinand Magellanaround the world showed that oceanscould serve as a vital link to unexploredlands and resources. What had previouslybeen identified as terra incognito onEuropean maps now became a bit morefamiliar. The notion that oceans providelimitless resources and are something tobe conquered and controlled has persistedever since.50

The frontier mentality also played itselfout in legal doctrine. In 1604, the Dutchattorney Hugo Grotius wrote MareLiberum (Freedom of the Seas) on behalfof a Dutch trading company. Angered byPortuguese and Spanish exclusive claimsto trade with the Spice Islands, Grotiusargued in favor of open and free accessfor all, especially the Dutch: “The sea iscommon to all, because it is so limitlessthat it cannot become a possession ofone…whether…from the point of view ofnavigation or of fisheries.” This conceptdates back to early Roman law and waslong practiced in Asian maritime soci-eties. Indeed, the reason that thePortuguese and Dutch had the dispute inthe first place is that Asian societies wel-comed all who sought peaceful trade.51

Although Grotius did not originate theconcept, the arguments he made onbehalf of seventeenth-century mercantileinterests dominate maritime law nearly tothis day. In part this is because the nationsthat advanced colonialism—Britain,Spain, Portugal, and later Germany—relied on navigational freedom to control

people and resources. As long as the seawas the primary means of transportingarmed forces, these countries tried tolimit other nations’ territorial waterclaims to the recognized 3–12 miles off-shore well into this century. More impor-tant, the oceans themselves were notconsidered a source of wealth until afterWorld War II.52

By the early twentieth century, fisheriesalready showed signs of strain, rapidlychanging technology expanded the usesof oceans and accelerated the rate atwhich damage could occur, and morenations and interest groups becameinvolved in disputes over access rights.The difficult question was—andremains—how to limit access.

In 1945, the United States was the firstcountry to extend its control from the tra-ditional 12-mile territorial zone to thecontiguous high seas. Under the TrumanProclamation, U.S. officials justified themove as a way to protect fisheries better,establish conservation zones, and exploitseabed minerals of the continental shelf.Many fishing-dependent countries soonfollowed suit, triggering a global “seagrab.” Within a decade several LatinAmerican countries, including Argentina,Peru, Chile, and Honduras, had extendedtheir jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles toprotect their fisheries from outside intru-sions and to claim resources of the conti-nental shelf.53

What began as an isolated trend in the1950s and 1960s quickly grew into a glob-al phenomenon. By 1973, nearly 35 per-cent of the ocean’s area—equal to theEarth’s entire land mass—was claimed bycoastal states, many of them developingcountries. These claims led to the 1982U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea(UNCLOS), although the treaty did notformally enter into force until 60 coun-tries had ratified it in November 1994.54

Known as the “constitution of theoceans,” this U.N. treaty marked the endof an era: resources in the 200 nautical


miles closest to shore were now undernational jurisdiction; only the high seasremained open to all. Under UNCLOS,coastal nations were granted rights to useand develop fisheries within a 200-nauti-cal-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).With the privilege of controlling accesscame the responsibility to protect andconserve marine resources. In part, the1982 convention merely formalized whatwas already accepted as customary inter-national law—most notably, the right ofnational claims over the EEZ. But it alsowent far beyond existing practices.55

By redistributing control away from pow-erful fishing nations to coastal countriesworldwide, the Law of the Sea reallocatedworld marine resources. In the early 1950s,for example, about 80 percent of theworld’s fish catch was taken by industrialcountries. Forty years later, 64 percent ofthe catch was in the hands of developingcountries. UNCLOS also established a com-prehensive framework governing oceanuse and set such use in the context of envi-ronmental protection. Rather than tryingto address individual concerns, the conven-tion recognized the need for parties tonegotiate additional complementary andmore specific agreements. Despite thesebenefits, the process of nationalizing watersconflicted with the multinational realitycreated by transboundary pollution prob-lems. And it neither solved the issue ofoverfishing nor simplified the protection ofmarine resources.56

In 1967, well before the final UNCLOStext was approved, the Liberian oil tankerTorrey Canyon ran aground off Britain’ssouthwest coast, dumping 120,000 tons of

crude oil (three times as much as the infa-mous Exxon Valdez spilled in Alaska 22years later). The largest in a series of high-ly visible disasters during the 1960s, thisincident brought the horror of marinepollution to headlines worldwide andhelped spark international action.Working with national governments, theU.N. International Maritime Organiza-tion (IMO) imposed strict safety and envi-ronmental regulations on the growingtanker industry during the 1970s and1980s in an effort to stop ocean dumpingand ship-based discharges, and to preventaccidental spills. Thanks to new rulesrequiring double-hulled construction,improved cargo handling procedures,and cautious operations at port and atsea, the volume of oil spilled into theoceans has dropped 60 percent since1981, even though the amount of oilshipped has almost doubled. But industryrepresentatives and government regula-tors have only begun to contain the dam-ages from more routine shipping andtanker operations.57

The IMO is slowly becoming an oceansteward by recognizing the risks of bio-logical and genetic pollution from ship-ping. To address the role of ballast waterin the spread of alien species, the IMO’sMarine Environment Protection Com-mittee is drafting a legally binding Annexto the 1973 International Convention forthe Prevention of Pollution from Shipsthat is expected to call for open-water ballast exchange.58

In similar fashion, other key interna-tional organizations, including FAO, theU.N. Environment Programme (UNEP),and even the World Trade Organization(WTO), have recently become involved inmarine biological diversity issues.Traditionally an advocate for fisheriesdevelopment, FAO has become a voice ofconcern about the effects of overexploita-tion and habitat degradation on fisheriesproduction. A landmark FAO study in1992 argued that, 10 years after UNCLOS,


A landmark FAO study in 1992 arguedthat the global fishing industry waslosing $54 billion a year.

many fisheries were at risk of biologicalcollapse, the global fishing industry waslosing $54 billion a year, and people werelosing jobs and food. The reportdescribed the role that subsidies, overin-vestment and excessive capacity, andother economic trends play in overfish-ing. FAO has since initiated a series ofconsultations on particular aspects of theglobal overfishing problem—from subsi-dies and overcapacity to shark mortality—that can provide useful consensusstatements, albeit without enforcementprovisions.59

During the 1990s, UNEP has support-ed efforts to move toward ecosystem-based management of oceans. Countryrepresentatives at a November 1995 meet-ing of the UNEP-sponsored GlobalProgram of Action for the Protection ofthe Marine Environment from Land-Based Activities strongly supported a glob-al but nonbinding ban on persistentorganic pollutants. Advocates of the banhave singled out 12 POPs for elimination,several of which are already restricted insome countries; others will be added inthe future. A global ban would helpensure that such chemicals are eliminatedfrom use completely, rather than trying tocontain damages later. Indeed, a globalban on POPs could do for the marineenvironment what the oil spill regulationsof the 1970s and 1980s did—it could shiftthe burden of proof away from “innocentuntil proven guilty” toward a more pre-cautionary approach that puts the burdenof proof on the user.60

International trade rules are likely tobecome more widely used for purposes ofmarine conservation, although they arealso the subject of some controversy. TheUnited States, for example, has enactedlaws that restrict or prohibit the importa-tion of fish and wildlife products fromother countries that do not meet certainenvironmental criteria. Two of them—theMarine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA)and the Sea Turtle Conservation

Amendments to the the U.S. EndangeredSpecies Act—illustrate how trade restric-tions can be used to promote the conser-vation of marine resources.61

The MMPA prohibits imports of yel-lowfin tuna into the United States fromcountries whose tuna fishing vessels oper-ating in the eastern Pacific Ocean do notmeet U.S. dolphin protection standards.Trade embargoes resulting from MMPAled to two separate challenges before dis-pute resolution panels of the GeneralAgreement on Tariffs and Trade—byMexico in 1991 and by the EuropeanUnion in 1993. In each case, the panelruled in favor of foreign tuna fishers, hold-ing that trade regimes (particularly unilat-eral ones) do not permit distinctionsbetween otherwise “like” products on thebasis of how they were produced.Although neither decision was implement-ed, the cases prompted the United Statesand 11 other countries whose vessels fishin the region to negotiate a multilateralagreement establishing an InternationalDolphin Conservation Program, overseenby the Inter-American Tropical TunaCommission. The new agreement setscommon standards for dolphin protectionand provides for comprehensive monitor-ing and observation of the fishery. U.S. legislation has since been changed to coin-cide with this agreement.62

The law protecting sea turtles prohibitsU.S. imports of shrimp captured in waysthat harm these animals, requiring the useof turtle excluder devices or some compa-rable gear. Embargoes resulting from thislaw have encouraged some LatinAmerican and Asian countries that wish tokeep selling their shrimp in the lucrativeU.S. market to improve sea turtle protec-tion measures. India, Malaysia, Pakistan,and Thailand have challenged the law inthe World Trade Organization. In October1998, the Appellate Board of the WTOruled that the particular way in which theUnited States was implementing the lawwas discriminatory. One of the WTO’s


concerns was that it is preferable for envi-ronmental standards—such as those relat-ing to the protection of sea turtles—to beestablished on a multilateral basis, ratherthan unilaterally.63

Although the WTO frowns on usingtrade restrictions to promote environ-mental goals, it also takes a dim view ofsubsidies. Its Committee on Trade andthe Environment issued a policy state-ment on fishing subsidies in March 1998,a topic receiving increasing scrutiny fromnational governments, regional organiza-tions, and the FAO. The possibility thusexists to use WTO rules to push for theremoval of subsidies that promote over-fishing. At the very least, member statescan press the WTO to make global fishingsubsidies data public.64

Having witnessed the effects of fisherystock collapses and resource degradationwhen the oceans are seen as a frontier forexploitation, we now need to move rapid-ly into an era of precautionary manage-ment based on an ecosystem approach.Policymakers, commercial interests, indi-vidual resource users, and the public atlarge need to come to terms with the real-ity that oceans are both a resource to beused and an environment to be protect-ed. Fortunately, a series of UNCLOS-relat-ed agreements have begun to lay thegroundwork for this new course. (SeeTable 5–5.)65

Further progress toward an ecologicallybased approach comes from the endorse-ment of the Global Environment Facility(GEF) and World Bank of a conservationsystem based on regions known as largemarine ecosystems. Based on their biolog-

ical, chemical, and physical characteris-tics, 49 of these ecosystems have been designated worldwide. The GEF haspledged $200–300 million to supportcountry-specific projects dealing withtransboundary international waters issues.To date, 58 developing countries have sub-mitted proposals, each with the approvalof their Ministers of Environment,Fisheries, and Finance. The U.S. Con-gress, the Ecological Society of America,and North Sea environment ministershave called for a similar approach tomarine ecosystem protection.66

Although recent policy initiatives helpfill the void in international law, what hasreplaced the freedom of the seas neverthe-less falls short of what is needed to protectocean resources and systems. Comple-mentary actions at the regional andnational levels are still lacking in manyareas, as are more localized and site-specif-ic programs. As they did 400 years ago,commercial interests and merchant indus-tries still hold powerful sway over the termsof ocean governance. Scientists’ calls forprecaution and protective measures arelargely ignored by policymakers, who focuson enhancing commerce, trade, and mar-ket supply and who look to extract as muchfrom the sea as possible, with little regardfor the effects on marine species or habi-tats. Overcoming the interest groups thatfavor the status quo will require engagingall potential stakeholders and reformulat-ing the governance equation to incorpo-rate the stewardship obligations that comewith the privilege of use.

BUILDING POLITICAL WILL

Fortunately, a new sea ethic is emerging.From tighter dumping regulations torecent international agreements, policy-makers have made some initial progresstoward the goal of cleaning up our act.


What has replaced freedom of theseas falls short of what is needed toprotect ocean resources.

But much more is needed in the way ofpublic education to build political sup-port for marine conservation. To boostongoing efforts, two key principles areimportant. First, any dividing up of thewaters should be based on equity, fairness,and need as determined by dependenceon the resource and the best available sci-

entific knowledge, not simply on econom-ic might and political pressure. In a simi-lar vein, resource users should beresponsible for their actions, with deci-sionmaking and accountability shared bystakeholders and government officials.Second, given the uncertainty in our sci-entific knowledge and management capa-


Table 5–5. Strengths and Weaknesses of International Oceans Policies in the 1990s

Policy Strength Weakness

U.N. Global Outside of a few areas, use of drift- Fishers use longlines andDriftnet nets has ended on the world’s oceans. other damaging fishingMoratorium, 1991 methods to evade the

specifics of the mora-torium, often with similar effects on marine wildlife.

Oceans Chapter in Addresses the sustainable use and conserva- Language with respectAgenda 21, 1992 tion of marine resources and habitat areas; to conservation is weak;Earth Summit U.N. Commission on Sustainable Develop- lacks specific

ment to address oceans and seas in 1999. commitments.

FAO High Seas Global binding agreement; countries with Not yet in force, as only Fishing Vessel vessels on the high seas must ensure that they 12 of necessary 25Compliance Agree- do not undermine agreed fishing rules; countries have ratified it.ment, 1993 requires countries to provide FAO with com-

prehensive information about vessel operation.

U.N. Convention Global agreement; comprehensive framework Conservation obligationson the Law of the for ocean development; calls for balance weak.Sea, 1982 (entered between use and conservation; ratified byinto force, 1994) more than 60 nations.

FAO Code of Agreed to by more than 60 fishing nations; Voluntary code; no Conduct for contains principles for sustainable fisheries punishment for ignoringResponsible management and conservation; highlights it; no mention ofFisheries, 1995 aquaculture, bycatch, and trade. of subsidies.

U.N. Agreement Prescribes precautionary approach to fishery Not yet in force, as fallson Straddling Fish management both inside and outside EEZ; short of the required 30Stocks and Highly vessel inspection rights in accordance with ratifications; ratifiedMigratory Fish regional agreements; provides binding by only 4 of the top 20Stocks, 1995 dispute resolution. fishing nations.

Jakarta Mandate, Adopted guidelines and general principles on General guidelines only.Convention on the protection of marine biological diversityBiological Diversity, and sustainable use of marine and coastal1995 resources; puts ocean use in broader context of

biological and social goals.


bilities, we must err on the side of cautionand take a precautionary approach.67

One tool that can help engage peoplein problem-solving is integrated coastalmanagement (ICM). Through communi-ty-based planning, ICM brings togetherdiverse groups of people—fishers, politi-cians, tourism operators, traders, and thegeneral public—to identify shared problems and goals and to define solu-tions that build on their common inter-ests. Discussions, mapping exercises, andsite visits all help people make the connections between land and water useand the health of the marine environ-ment. Active involvement in defining theproblem, proposing solutions, and over-seeing implementation is critical to making sure people are committed to thesuccess of a project.68

Replanting mangroves and construct-ing artificial reefs are two concrete stepsthat help some fish stocks rebound quick-ly while letting people witness firsthandthe results of their labors. Once peoplesee the immediate payoff of their work,they are more likely to stay involved inlonger-term protection efforts, such asmarine sanctuaries, which involve remov-ing an area from use entirely.

Marine protected areas are an impor-tant tool to help marine scientists andresource planners incorporate a moreholistic, ecologically based approach tooceans protection. By limiting accessibili-ty and easing pressures on the resource,these areas allow stocks to rebound andprofits to return. Globally, more than

1,300 marine and coastal sites have someform of protection. But most lack effec-tive on-the-ground management.69

Furthermore, efforts to establishmarine refuges and parks lag far behindsimilar efforts on land. The WorldHeritage Convention, which identifiesand protects areas of special significanceto humankind, identifies only 31 sites thatinclude either a marine or a coastal com-ponent, out of a total of 522. John Waugh,Senior Program Officer of the WorldConservation Union–U.S. and othersargue that the World Heritage List couldbe extended to a number of marinehotspots and should include representa-tive areas of the continental shelf, thedeep sea, and the open ocean. Settingthese and other areas aside as off-limits tocommercial development can helpadvance scientific understanding ofmarine systems and provide refuge forthreatened species.70

To address the need for better data,coral reef scientists have recently enlistedthe help of recreational scuba divers.Sport divers who volunteer to collect dataare given basic training to identify andsurvey fish and coral species and to con-duct rudimentary site assessments. Thedata are then compiled and put into aglobal inventory that policymakers use tomonitor trends and to target interven-tion. More efforts like these—that engagethe help of concerned individuals andvolunteers—could help overcome fund-ing and data deficiencies and buildgreater public awareness of the problemsplaguing the world’s oceans.71

Promoting sustainable ocean use alsomeans shifting demand away from envi-ronmentally damaging products andextraction techniques. To this end, mar-ket forces, such as charging consumersmore for particular fish and introducingindustry codes of conduct, can be helpful.In April 1996, the World Wide Fund forNature teamed up with one of the world’slargest manufacturers of seafood prod-


Pressure from consumers, watchdoggroups, and conscientious businessleaders can help develop voluntarycodes of conduct and standard indus-try practices.


ucts, Anglo-Dutch Unilever, to create eco-nomic incentives for sustainable fishing.Implemented through an independentMarine Stewardship Council, fisheriesproducts that are harvested in a sustain-able manner will qualify for an ecolabel.Similar efforts could help convince indus-tries to curb wasteful practices and couldgenerate greater consumer awareness ofthe need to choose products carefully.72

Away from public oversight, companiesengaged in shipping, oil and gas extrac-tion, deep sea mining, bioprospecting,and tidal and thermal energy represent acoalition of special interests whose activi-ties help determine the fate of the oceans.It is crucial to get representatives of theseindustries engaged in implementing anew ocean charter that supports sustain-able use. Their practices not only affectthe health of oceans, they also helpdecide the pace of a transition toward amore sustainable energy economy, whichin turn affects the balance between cli-mate and oceans.

Making trade data and industry infor-mation publicly available is an importantway both to build industry credibility and to ensure some degree of public oversight. While regulations are animportant component of environmentalprotection, pressure from consumers,watchdog groups, and conscientious business leaders can help develop volun-tary codes of action and standard industrypractices that help move industrial sectorstoward cleaner and greener operations.Economic incentives targeted to particu-lar industries, such as low-interest loans for thermal projects, can help com-panies make a quicker transition to sus-

tainable practices.The fact that oceans are so central to

the global economy and to human andplanetary health may be the strongestmotivation for protective action. Foralthough the range of assaults and threatsto ocean health are broad, the benefitsthat oceans provide are invaluable andshared by all. These huge bodies of waterrepresent an enormous opportunity toforge a new system of cooperative, inter-national governance based on sharedresources and common interests.Achieving these far-reaching goals, how-ever, begins with the technically simplebut politically daunting task of overcom-ing several thousand years’ worth ofingrained behavior. It requires us to seeoceans not as an economic frontier forexploitation but as a scientific frontier forexploration and a biological frontier forcareful use.

For generations, oceans have drawnpeople to their shores for a glimpse of thehorizon, a sense of scale and awe atnature’s might. Today, oceans offer care-ful observers a different kind of awe: awarning that our impacts on the Earth areexceeding natural bounds and in dangerof disrupting life. Unfortunately, protec-tion efforts already lag far behind what isneeded. How we choose to react willdetermine the future of the planet.Precisely because so little is known aboutthe condition of the oceans, we mustapproach the challenge with precautionand care. Oceans are not simply one moresystem under pressure—they are criticalto our survival. As Carl Safina writes in TheSong for the Blue Ocean, “we need theoceans more than they need us.”73

NotesChapter 5. Charting a New CourseFor Oceans

1. Huxley cited in Tim D. Smith, ScalingFisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects ofFishing, 1855–1955 (Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press, 1994).

2. Share of animal protein from fish fromU.N. Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO), Marine Fisheries and the Law of the Sea: ADecade of Change, FAO Fisheries Circular No.853 (Rome: 1993); oil and gas fromIndependent World Commission on Oceans(IWCO), The Ocean…Our Future: The Report ofthe Independent World Commission on the Oceans(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);world trade from Magnus Ngoile, “TheOceans: Diminishing Resources, DegradedEnvironment and Loss of Biodiversity,”Connect (Paris: UNESCO) vol. 12, no. 3/4(1997); Joel E. Cohen et al., “Estimates ofCoastal Populations,” Science, 14 November1997.

3. Ocean industries value of $821 billionin 1995 dollars is Worldwatch Institute esti-mate based on late 1980s estimate of $750 bil-lion from Michael L. Weber and Judith A.Gradwohl, The Wealth of Oceans (New York:W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), citing JamesBroadus, Woods Hole OceanographicInstitution, and from world commodity priceindex from International Monetary Fund,International Financial Statistics Yearbook(Washington, DC: 1998); current fisheriesvalue from Matteo Milazzo, Subsidies in WorldFisheries: A Reexamination, World Bank

Technical Paper No. 406, Fisheries Series(Washington, DC: World Bank, April 1998);ocean transport from United NationsConference on Trade and Development(UNCTAD), Review of Maritime Trade (NewYork: 1997); oil and gas drilling fromAmerican Petroleum Institute (API), BasicPetroleum Data Book (Washington, DC: 1995);naval expenditures based on 0.3 percent ofworld military expenditures, according toJames Broadus in Weber and Gradwohl, op.cit. this note; 1995 world military expendituresfrom Michael Renner, “Military ExpendituresContinue to Decline,” in Lester R. Brown,Michael Renner, and Christopher Flavin, VitalSigns 1998 (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1998).

4. Phyla from Elliott A. Norse, ed., GlobalMarine Biological Diversity: A Strategy for BuildingConservation into Decision Making (Washington,DC: Island Press, 1993); goods and servicesfrom Robert Costanza et al., “The Value of theWorld’s Ecosystem Services and NaturalCapital,” Nature, 15 May 1997; heat storagefrom “Ocean Research: Clarifying Ocean Rolein Global Climate,” <http://gk2.jamstec.go.jp/jamstec/ocean.html>, viewed on 21 July1998; services from Melvin N.A. Peterson, ed.,Diversity of Oceanic Life: An Evaluative Review,Significant Issues Series (Washington, DC:Center for Strategic and International Studies,1992); value of coral reefs from WorldResources Institute (WRI) et al. , Reefs At Risk:A Map-Based Indicator of Threats to the World’sCoral Reefs (Washington, DC: 1998).

5. FAO, The State of World Fisheries and

Aquaculture, 1996 (Rome: 1997); threatenedcoastlines from Don Hinrichsen, Coastal Watersof the World: Trends, Threats and Strategies(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998); reefsfrom WRI et al., op. cit. note 4.

6. Marine Conservation Biology Institute,“Troubled Waters: A Call to Action,”(Redmond, WA: January 1998); quote fromDr. M. Patricia Morse, Biology Department,Northeastern University, Boston, MA,“Statement on Release of ‘Troubled Waters: ACall to Action’,” 8 January 1998, <http://www.mcbi.org>, viewed on 7 May 1998; ScottSonner, “Scientists: Sorry State of World’sOceans Are a Warning to Humans,” Corvallis(OR) Gazette-Times, 25 January 1998.

7. Harold V. Thurman, ed., IntroductoryOceanography, 5th ed. (Columbus, OH: MerrillPublishing Company, 1988); Thor Heyerdahl,“Ocean Highways,” Our Planet, vol. 9, no. 5(1998); “Homo Erectus May Have BeenSeafarer,” Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin, 12March 1998; John Noble Wilford, “In Peru,Evidence of an Early Human MaritimeCulture,” New York Times, 22 September 1998.

8. Share of animal protein from FAO, op. cit. note 2; Meryl Williams, The Transitionin the Contribution of Living Aquatic Resources to Food Security, Food, Agriculture, and the Environment Discussion Paper 13(Washington, DC: International Food PolicyResearch Institute, April 1996).

9. Heather Pringle, “Yemen’s StonehengeSuggests Bronze Age Red Sea Culture,” Science,6 March 1998; Egyptian stone tablets fromThurman, op. cit. note 7; Arabs from IWCO,op. cit. note 2.

10. John Greenwald, “Cruise Lines GoOverboard,” Time, 11 May 1998.

11. Table 5–1 based on the following: fish-eries data from FAO, op. cit. note 5, fromWilliams, op. cit. note 8, from Milazzo, op. cit.note 3, from Michael Strauss, “Fish Catch Hitsa New High,” in Brown, Renner, and Flavin,

op. cit. note 3, and from FAO, Fishery StatisticsYearbook: Commodities, vol. 81 (Rome: 1997);trade data from UNCTAD, op. cit. note 3;cargo unloaded from “Making Waves,” South,March 1997; naval expenditures fromBroadus, op. cit. note 3, and from Renner, op.cit. note 3; oil and gas from API, op. cit. note3. Future trade estimate from Office of theChief Scientist, National Oceanic andAtmospheric Administration (NOAA), Year ofthe Ocean Discussion Papers, prepared by U.S.Federal Agencies with Ocean-relatedPrograms (Washington, DC: NOAA, March1998).

12. Submersibles and acoustics from SylviaA. Earle, Sea Change (New York: G.P. Putnam’sSons, 1995); William J. Broad, The UniverseBelow: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1997); K.O. Emeryand J.M. Broadus, “Overview: Marine MineralReserves and Resources—1988,” MarineMining, vol. 8, no. 1 (1989).

13. Dick Russell, “Deep Blues: TheLowdown on Deep-Sea Mining,” AmicusJournal, winter 1998; William J. Broad,“Undersea Treasure, and Its Odd Guardians,”New York Times, 30 December 1997; UnitedNations General Assembly, Report of theSecretary-General on His Consultations onOutstanding Issues Relating to the Deep SeabedMining Provisions of the United NationsConvention on the Law of the Sea, 9 June 1994;United Nations, Division for Ocean Affairsand the Law of the Sea, “International SeabedAuthority Meets,” Go Between, October/November 1997.

14. Stephanie Pain, “Mud, Glorious Mud,”in Stephanie Pain, ed., Unknown Oceans, NewScientist Supplement, November 1996; RichardA. Kerr, “Life Goes to Extremes in the DeepEarth—and Elsewhere?” Science, 2 May 1997;Gregory Beck and Gail S. Habicht, “Immunityand Invertebrates,” Scientific American,November 1996; Andy Coghlan, “SharkChokes Human Cancers,” New Scientist, 26April 1997; Russell, op. cit. note 13.


15. Hjalmar Thiel, “Deep-Ocean MiningNeeds Careful Study,” Forum for AppliedResearch and Public Policy, Spring 1994; WesleyS. Scholz, “The Law of the Sea Convention andthe Business Community: The Seabed MiningRegime and Beyond,” Georgetown InternationalEnvironmental Law Review, spring 1995; figureof 1.5 percent from Edward Carr, “The DeepGreen Sea,” The Economist, 23 May 1998.

16. Brad Matsen and Ray Troll, PlanetOcean: Dancing to the Fossil Record (Berkeley,CA: Ten Speed Press, 1994); 245 million yearsfrom Norse, op. cit. note 4.

17. Norse, op. cit. note 4; Boyce Thorne-Miller and John Catena, The Living Ocean:Understanding and Protecting Marine Biodiversity,The Oceanic Society of Friends of theEarth–U.S. (Washington, DC: Island Press,1991).

18. Goods and services from Costanza etal., op. cit. note 4; rates of marine biologicalproductivity from different areas of the oceanfrom D. Pauly and V. Christensen, “PrimaryProduction Required to Sustain GlobalFisheries,” Nature, 16 March 1995; 80–90 per-cent of fish catch from John Cordell,“Introduction: Sea Tenure,” in John Cordell,ed. A Sea of Small Boats (Cambridge, MA:Cultural Survival, Inc., 1989).

19. W. Jeffrey, M. Vesk, and R.F.C.Mantoura, “Phytoplankton Pigments: Win-dows into the Pastures of the Sea,” Nature &Resources, vol. 33, no. 2 (1997); Gillian Malin,“Sulphur, Climate and the Microbial Maze,”Nature, 26 June 1997; pump mechanism fromPaul G. Falkowski et al., “BiogeochemicalControls and Feedbacks on Ocean PrimaryProductivity,” Nature, 10 July 1998; globalnutrient cycles from Peter M. Vitousek et al.,“Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems,”Science, 25 July 1997.

20. Michael S. McCartney, “Oceans &Climate: The Ocean’s Role in Climate andClimate Change,” Oceanus, fall/winter 1996;sequestered rate from Falkowski et al., op. cit.

note 19; current rate of uptake from David S.Schimel, “The Carbon Equation,” Nature, 21May 1998; future uptake from Jorge Sarmientoet al., “Simulated Response of the OceanCarbon Cycle to Anthropogenic ClimateWarming,” Nature, 21 May 1998.

21. Lewis M. Rothstein and Dake Chen,“The El Niño/Southern OscillationPhenomenon,” Oceanus, fall/winter 1996;“The Season of El Niño,” The Economist, 9 May1998; Gary Mead, “El Niño Wreaks Havoc onFish Meal Industry,” Financial Times, 28 May1998.

22. John S. Gray, Marine Biodiversity:Patterns, Threats and Conservation Needs, JointGroup of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection(GESAMP) (London: International MaritimeOrganization, 1997).

23. Production data for 1984–96 fromMaurizio Perotti, fishery statistician, FisheryInformation, Data and Statistics Unit (FIDI),Fisheries Department, FAO, Rome, letter toauthor, 22 March 1998; 1950–84 world pro-duction from FAO, Yearbook of Fishery Statistics:Catches and Landings (Rome: 1967–91); figureof 11 out of 15 is a Worldwatch estimate basedon data from Maurizio Perotti, FIDI, FAO,Rome, e-mail to author, 14 October 1997; 70percent from FAO, op. cit. note 5.

24. Estimate for 1984 from FAO,Aquaculture Production Statistics, 1984–1993,FAO Fisheries Circular No. 815, Revision 7(Rome: 1995); 1996 aquaculture estimatefrom Perotti, 22 March 1998; Carl Safina, Songfor the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World’sCoasts and Beneath the Seas (New York: HenryHolt and Company, Inc., 1997); Marjorie L.Mooney-Seus and Gregory S. Stone, TheForgotten Giants: Giant Ocean Fishes of the Atlanticand Pacific (Washington, DC: Ocean WildlifeCampaign, 1997); Lisa Speer et al., Hook, Lineand Sinking: The Crisis in Marine Fisheries (NewYork: Natural Resources Defense Council,February 1997).


25. S. M. Garcia and C. Newton, “CurrentSituation, Trends, and Prospects in WorldFisheries,” in E.K. Pikitch, D.D. Huppert, andM.P. Sissenwine, eds., Global Trends: FisheriesManagement, American Fisheries Society (AFS)Symposium 20 (Bethesda, MD: AFS, 1997);Daniel Pauly et al., “Fishing Down MarineFood Webs,” Science, 6 February 1998.

26. Groundfish from Speer et al., op. cit.note 24; orange roughy from David Malakoff,“Extinction on the High Seas,” Science, 25 July1997.

27. Orange roughy from Malakoff, op. cit.note 26; Callum M. Roberts, “Effects of Fishingon the Ecosystem Structure of Coral Reefs,”Conservation Biology, October 1995.

28. Williams, op. cit. note 8; figure of 83percent is Worldwatch estimate based on FAO,op. cit. note 11.

29. Discards of 20 million tons from DavidWilmot, Director, Ocean Wildlife Campaign,Washington, DC, e-mail to author, 12 February1998, and from American SportfishingAssociation and Ocean Wildlife Campaign,“Slaughter at Sea,” press release (Washington,DC: 12 January 1998); bycatch and shrimpsfrom Dayton L. Alverson et al., A GlobalAssessment of Fisheries Bycatch and Discards, FAOFisheries Technical Paper 339 (Rome: FAO,1994).

30. Charles Victor Barber and Vaughan R.Pratt, Sullied Seas: Strategies for CombatingCyanide Fishing in Southeast Asia and Beyond(Washington, DC: WRI and InternationalMarinelife Alliance, August 1997).

31. Janet Raloff, “Fishing for Answers:Deep Trawls Leave Destruction in TheirWake—But for How Long?” Science News, 26October 1996; Dick Russell, “Hitting Bottom,”Amicus Journal, winter 1997; global estimatefrom Elliott A. Norse, “Bottom-Trawling: TheUnseen Worldwide Plowing of the Seabed,”The NEB Transcript (Beverly, MA: New EnglandBiolabs, Inc.), January 1997.

32. Cohen et al., op. cit. note 2; China pop-ulation data Hinrichsen, op. cit. note 5.

33. Seagrasses from IWCO, op. cit. note 2;mangrove data from Mark D. Spalding, “TheGlobal Distribution and Status of MangroveEcosystems,” Intercoast Network, March 1997,and from Elizabeth J. Farnsworth and AaronM. Ellison, “The Global Conservation Status ofMangroves,” Ambio, September 1997.

34. GESAMP, The State of the MarineEnvironment, U.N. Environment ProgrammeRegional Seas Reports and Studies No. 115(Nairobi: 1990).

35. Tina Adler, “The Expiration ofRespiration,” Science News, 10 February 1996;Dick Russell, “Underwater Epidemic,” AmicusJournal, spring 1998; David Malakoff, “Deathby Suffocation in the Gulf of Mexico,” Science,10 July 1998.

36. General discussion and shellfish poi-soning data from G.M. Hallegraeff, “A Reviewof Harmful Algal Blooms and Their ApparentGlobal Increase,” Phycologia, vol. 32, no. 2,(1993); Christine Mlott, “The Rise in ToxicTides: What’s Behind the Ocean Blooms?”Science News, 27 September 1997; Ted Smayda,University of Rhode Island, Graduate Schoolof Oceanography, “The Toxic Sea: The GlobalEpidemic of Harmful Red Tides,” presented atNaval War College, Newport, RI, 11 August1998; Theodore J. Smayda, “Novel andNuisance Phytoplankton Blooms in the Sea:Evidence for a Global Epidemic,” Toxic MarinePhytoplankton: Proceedings of the FourthInternational Conference on Toxic MarinePhytoplankton, Held June 26–30 in Lund, Sweden(New York: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1990);toxic and nontoxic blooms from Donald M.Anderson, “Red Tides,” Scientific American,August 1994; Jonas Gunnarsson et al.,“Interactions Between Eutrophication andContaminants: Towards a New ResearchConcept for the European Aquatic Environ-ment,” Ambio, September 1995. Table 5–4based on the following: Smayda, “Novel and


Nuisance Phytoplankton Blooms,” op. cit. thisnote; Maine and New England from LindaKanamine, “Scientists Sound Red Alert OverHarmful Algae,” USA Today International, 15November 1996; Puget Sound andWashington State from Donald F. Boesch etal., Harmful Algal Blooms in Coastal Waters:Options for Prevention, Control and Mitigation,NOAA Coastal Ocean Program, DecisionAnalysis Series No. 10 (Silver Spring, MD:NOAA, February 1997); Texas from “GrowingRed Tide Imperils Shellfishing Along TexasGulf Coast,” New York Times, 13 October 1996;John Ridding, “HK Fishermen Fear Drowningin ‘Red Tide’,” Financial Times, 15 April 1998.

37. Biblical reference from Hallegraeff, op.cit. note 36; tributyltin from “Chemicals inShip Paints May Have Contributed toCalifornia Sea Otter Deaths,” Oceans Update(Washington, DC: SeaWeb), April 1998; Ian M.Davies, Susan K. Bailey, and Melanie J.C.Harding, “Tributyltin Inputs to the North Seafrom Shipping Activities, and Potential Risk ofBiological Effects,” ICES Journal of MarineSciences, February 1998.

38. Janet Raloff, “Something’s Fishy,”Science News, 2 July 1994; Theo Colborn,Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers,Our Stolen Future (New York: Penguin Group,1996); Jennifer D. Mitchell, “Nowhere toHide: The Global Spread of High-RiskSynthetic Chemicals,” World Watch, March/April 1997; spread to higher latitudes fromHal Bernton, “Russian Revelations IndicateArctic Region Is Awash in Contaminants,”Washington Post, 17 May 1993, and from JerzyFalandysz et al., “Organochlorine Pesticidesand Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Cod-liverOils: North Atlantic, Norwegian Sea, NorthSea and Baltic Sea,” Ambio, July 1994.

39. Inuit from “Pollutants Threaten ArcticWildlife, Inuit,” OceanUpdate, September 1997,and from Mark Bourrie, “Global WarmingEndangers Arctic,” InterPress Service, 14October 1998; health effects from “POPs andHuman Health,” PSR Monitor (Washington,

DC: Physicians for Social Responsibility),February 1998.

40. Heavy metals from William C. Clark,“Managing Planet Earth,” Scientific American,September 1989; Rolf O. Hallberg. “Environ-mental Implications of Metal Distribution inBaltic Sea Sediments,” Ambio, November 1991;David Carpenter, “Great Lakes Contaminants:A Shift in Human Health Outcomes,” Health& Environment Digest, July 1996; John Tilden etal., “Health Advisories for Consumers of GreatLakes Sport Fish: Is the Message BeingReceived?” Environmental Health Perspectives,December 1997; Amy D. Kyle, ContaminatedCatch: The Public Health Threat from Toxics inFish (New York: Natural Resources DefenseCouncil, 1998).

41. Broad ecological trends from LaurenceD. Mee, “The Black Sea in Crisis: A Need forConcerted International Action,” Ambio, June1992; current status from “The Black Sea inCrisis,” Environmental Health Perspectives,December 1997, and from Elliott Norse,President, Marine Conservation BiologyInstitute, Redmond, WA, e-mail to author, 22April 1998.

42. James T. Carlton, “Bioinvaders in theSea: Reducing the Flow of Ballast Water,”World Conservation, April 1997-January 1998;global estimate from Lu Eldredge,“Transboundary: Shipping/Pollution,” Connect,vol. 22, no. 3–4 (1997); 56 million tons fromPeter Weber, Abandoned Seas: Reversing theDecline of Oceans, Worldwatch Paper 116(Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute,November 1993); San Francisco Bay and quotefrom Andrew N. Cohen and James T. Carlton,“Accelerating Invasion Rate in a HighlyInvaded Estuary,” Science, 23 January 1998.

43. “Fish Damage Linked to UV,” New YorkTimes, 18 March 1997; Donat-P. Häder et al.,“Effects of Increased Solar UltravioletRadiation on Aquatic Ecosystems,” Ambio, May 1995.

44. NOAA, “El Niño Causing Coral


Bleaching in Panama,” press release(Washington, DC: 14 April 1998); NOAA,“1998 Coral Reef Bleaching in Indian OceanUnprecedented, NOAA Announces,” pressrelease (Washington, DC: 1 July 1998);International Society for Reef Studies, “ISRSStatement on Global Coral Bleaching in1997–1998,” posted on the Global Coral ReefMonitoring network <[email protected]>, 13 October 1998.

45. Thermal expansion from DavidSchneider, “The Rising Seas,” ScientificAmerican, March 1997; William K. Stevens,“Storm Warning: Bigger Hurricanes and Moreof Them,” New York Times, 3 June 1997.

46. Schneider, op. cit. note 45; risks andpast rise from Molly O’Meara, “The Risks ofDisrupting Climate,” World Watch, November/December 1997; New York City from “AtlanticSea Level Rise: Double the Average?” AtlanticCoastWatch, April 1998; estimate of $970 billionfrom David Pugh, “Sea Level Change: Meetingthe Challenge,” Nature & Resources, vol. 33, no.3-4 (1997); Bangladesh from John Pernetta,“Rising Seas and Changing Currents,” People &the Planet, vol. 7, no. 2 (1998); Colin Woodard,“Surf’s Up—Way Up: Oceans Begin to SloshOver World’s Vulnerable Low-Lying Islands,”Christian Science Monitor, 15 July 1998.

47. Michael Oppenheimer, “GlobalWarming and the Stability of the WestAntarctic Ice Sheet,” Nature, 28 May 1998;“Antarctic Ice Shelf Loses Large Piece,” ScienceNews, 9 May 1998; Judy Silber, “New Find MayProvide Insight Into Rising Seas,” ChristianScience Monitor, 3 July 1998.

48. W. Jackson Davis, “Controlling OceanPollution: The Need for a New Global OceanGovernance System,” in Jon M. Van Dyke,Durwood Zaelke, and Grant Hewison, eds.,Freedom for the Seas in the 21st Century: OceanGovernance and Environmental Harmony(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993).

49. Thucydides quote cited in David L.Giles, “Faster Ships for the Future,” Scientific

American, October 1997.

50. Thurman, op. cit. note 7; IWCO, op.cit. note 2.

51. Grotius quote and discussion from R.P.Anand, “Changing Concepts of Freedom ofthe Seas: A Historical Perspective,” in VanDyke, Zaelke, and Hewison, op. cit. note 48.

52. Moana Jackson, “Indigenous Law andthe Sea,” in Van Dyke, Zaelke, and Hewison,op. cit. note 48; oceans not considered aswealth from Elisabeth Mann Borgese andDavid Krieger, “Introduction,” in ElisabethMann Borgese and David Krieger, eds., TheTides of Change: Peace, Pollution, and Potential ofthe Oceans (New York: Mason/Charter, 1975).

53. Anand, op. cit. note 51.

54. Ibid.

55. Law of the Sea from Terry D. Garciaand Jessica A. Wasserman, “The U.N.Convention on the Law of the Sea: Protectionand Preservation of the Marine Environment,”Renewable Resources Journal, spring 1995; DavidM. Dzidzornu, “Coastal State Obligations andPowers Respecting EEZ EnvironmentalProtection Under Part XII of the UNCLOS: ADescriptive Analysis,” Colorado Journal ofInternational Environmental Law and Policy, no.2, 1997.

56. Sebastian Mathew, “CoastalCommunities and Fishworkers: Factors inFisheries Laws and Management,” presenta-tion at the Law of the Sea Institute, 30thAnnual Conference, Al-Ain, United ArabEmirates, 20 May 1996, citing C. Sanger,Ordering the Oceans: The Making of the Law of theSea (London: Zed Books, 1986); Garcia andWasserman, op. cit. note 55; Dzidzornu, op.cit. note 55.

57. Torrey Canyon from Wesley Marx, TheFrail Ocean (New York: Ballantine Books,1967); Maria Gavouneli, Pollution from OffshoreInstallations, International Environmental Lawand Policy Series (Norwell, MA: Kluwer


Academic Publishers Group, 1995); ThomasHöfer, “Tankships in the Marine Environ-ment,” Environmental Science and PollutionResearch, vol. 5., no. 2 (1998); Joanna Pegum,“Cleaning Up the Seas,” South, March 1997;Janet Porter, “Tanker Oil Spill Figures Slip to aRecord Low,” Journal of Commerce, 12 July 1996;Hans Rømer et al., “Exploring EnvironmentalEffects of Accidents During Marine Transportof Dangerous Goods by Use of AccidentDescriptions,” Environmental Management, vol.20, no. 5 (1996).

58. Carlton, op. cit. note 42; InternationalMaritime Organization Committee from JohnWaugh, “The Global Policy Outlook forMarine Biodiversity Conservation,” GlobalBiodiversity, vol. 6, no. 1, 1995.

59. FAO, op. cit. note 2; FAO, Report of theFAO Technical Working Group on the Managementof Fishing Capacity, La Jolla, United States ofAmerica, 15–18 April 1998 (preliminary ver-sion) (Rome: 1998).

60. Land-based activities from Omar Vidaland Walter Rast, “Land and Sea,” Our Planet,vol. 8, no. 3 (1998); Waugh, op. cit. note 58;“International Effort Would Phase Out 12Toxins,” PSR Monitor (Washington, DC:Physicians for Social Responsibility), February1998; Janet Raloff, “Persistent Pollutants FaceGlobal Ban,” Science News, 4 July 1998.

61. David A. Balton, Director, Office ofMarine Conservation, U.S. Department ofState, Washington, DC, e-mail to author, 21 October 1998; Richard J. McLaughlin,“UNCLOS and the Demise of the UnitedStates’ Use of Trade Sanctions to ProtectDolphins, Sea Turtles, Whales, and OtherInternational Marine Living Resources,”Ecology Law Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1 (1994).

62. Suzanne Iudicello, “Protecting GlobalMarine Biodiversity,” in William J. Snape III,ed., Biodiversity and the Law (Washington, DC:Island Press, 1996); Balton, op. cit. note 61;James Joseph, “The Tuna-Dolphin Contro-versy in the Eastern Pacific Ocean: Biologic,

Economic and Political Impacts,” OceanDevelopment and International Law, vol. 25, no. 1(1994); Michael D. Scott, “The Tuna-DolphinControversy,” Whalewatcher, 1996; Martïn A.Hall, “An Ecological View of the Tuna-DolphinProblem: Impacts and Trade-offs,” Reviews inFish Biology and Fisheries, vol. 8, 1998; signato-ries of the 1995 declaration that created theInternational Dolphin Conservation Programfrom Joshua R. Floum, “Defending Dolphinsand Sea Turtles: On the Front Lines in an ‘Us-Them’ Dialectic,” Georgetown InternationalEnvironmental Law Review, spring 1998.

63. Balton, op. cit. note 61; AnneSwardson, “Turtle-Protection Law Overturnedby WTO,” Washington Post, 13 October 1998.

64. World Trade Organization, Committeeon Trade and Environment, GATT/WTO Ruleson Subsidies and Aids Granted in the FishingIndustry (Geneva: 9 March 1998); ChristopherD. Stone, “The Crisis in Global Fisheries: CanTrade Laws Provide a Cure?” EnvironmentalConservation, vol. 24, no. 2 (1997); GarethPorter, “Natural Resource Subsidies andInternational Policy: A Role for APEC,”Journal of Environment & Development,September 1997.

65. Elisabeth Mann Borgese, OceanGovernance and the United Nations (Halifax, NS,Canada: Dalhousie University, Center forForeign Policy Studies, August 1996). Table5–5 based on the following: Elisabeth MannBorgese, “The Process of Creating anInternational Ocean Regime to Protect theOcean’s Resources,” in Van Dyke, Zaelke, andHewison, op. cit. note 48; Clif Curtis, PolicyAdvisor, Greenpeace, Washington, DC,“Abstract of Environmental/ConservationCommunity Statement in Support of U.S.Accession to the Law of the Sea Convention,”8 June 1995; United Nations, The Law of theSea: Official Text of the U.N. Convention on theLaw of the Sea with Annexes and Index (New York:U.N. Publications, 1983); James Carr andMatthew Gianni, “High Seas Fisheries, Large-Scale Drift Nets, and the Law of the Sea,” in


Van Dyke, Zaelke, and Hewison, op. cit. note48; U.N. General Assembly, “Environment andSustainable Development: Large-scale PelagicDrift-net Fishing and Its Impacts on the LivingMarine Resources of the World’s Oceans andSeas,” Forty-Ninth Session, Agenda Item 89, 5October 1994; pockets of resistance and use ofdriftnets from David J. Doulman, “AnOverview of World Fisheries: Challenges andProspects for Achieving Sustainable ResourceUse,” presentation at the Law of the SeaInstitute, 30th Annual Conference, Al-Ain,United Arab Emirates, 20 May 1996; U.N.Conference on Environment and Develop-ment, “Protection of the Oceans, All Kinds ofSeas, Including Semi-Enclosed Seas, andCoastal Areas and the Protection, Rational Useand Development of their Living Resources,”Agenda 21, final advanced copy, adopted 14June 1992; U.N. Department for PolicyCoordination and Sustainable Development,“Programme for the Further Implementationof Agenda 21: Adopted by the Special Sessionof the General Assembly, 23–27 June 1997,”advanced unedited text, 1 July 1997; “SpecialSession of U.N. Should Address Oceans’Sustainable Use, UNCED Official Says,”International Environment Reporter, 30 April1997; vessel compliance agreement fromBalton, op. cit. note 61; FAO, Code of Conductfor Responsible Fisheries (Rome: 1995); DeborahHargreaves, “Environmental Groups AttackVoluntary Fishing Code,” Financial Times, 17 March 1995; no mention of subsidies inFAO code from Porter, op. cit. note 64; U.N.Non-Governmental Liaison Service, “UNConference on Straddling and HighlyMigratory Fish Stocks: Final NegotiatingSession,” Environment and Development File (NewYork: August 1995); Satya N. Nandan, “UNTakes a Big Step to Conserve Fish Stocks,”Environmental Conservation, autumn 1995;Moritaka Hayashi, “Enforcement by Non-Flag States on the High Seas Under the 1995 Agreement on Straddling and HighlyMigratory Fish Stocks,” Georgetown InternationalEnvironmental Law Review, fall 1996; vesselinspection and binding dispute from GiselleVigneron, “Compliance and International

Environmental Agreements: A Case Study ofthe 1995 United Nations Straddling Fish Stocks Agreement,” Georgetown InternationalEnvironmental Law Review, winter 1998; rati-fications from Michael Sutton, “Top FishingNations Drag Feet on UN Fish StocksAgreement,” press release (Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund, 25 November 1997); Jakarta Mandate from A. Charlotte de Fontaubert, David R. Downes, and Tundi Agardy, Biodiversity in the Seas:Implementing the Convention on Biological Diversityin Marine and Coastal Habitats, IUCNEnvironmental Policy and Law Paper No. 32,Marine Conservation and DevelopmentReport, published jointly by the Center forInternational Environmental Law, WorldConservation Union–IUCN, and World WideFund for Nature, 1996; Waugh, op. cit. note 58.

66. Kenneth Sherman, Director, NortheastFisheries Science Center, National MarineFisheries Service, NOAA, Washington, DC, letter to author, 13 October 1998; GlobalEnvironment Facility, Operational Program #8:Water-Based Operational Program (Washington,DC: 1996); Kenneth Sherman, InternationalWaters Assessments and Large Marine Ecosystems;A Global Perspective on Resource Development andSustainability, Narragansett LaboratoryReport, March 1998; Global EnvironmentFacility, Valuing the Global Environment: Actionsand Investments for a 21st Century (Washington,DC: 1998); for general discussion, seeKenneth Sherman, Lewis M. Alexander, andBarry D. Gold, eds., Large Marine Ecosystems:Patterns, Processes and Yields (Washington, DC:American Association for the Advancement ofScience, 1990).

67. Svein Jentoft and Bonnie McCay, “UserParticipation in Fisheries Management:Lessons Drawn from InternationalExperiences,” Marine Policy, no. 3, 1995;accountability from Evelyn Pinkerton andMartin Weinstein, Fisheries That Work:Sustainability through Community-BasedManagement (Vancouver, BC, Canada: DavidSuzuki Foundation, July 1995).


68. Robert S. Pomeroy et al., “ImpactEvaluation of Community-Based CoastalResource Management Projects in thePhilippines” (Manila: Fisheries Co-manage-ment Project at International Center forLiving Aquatic Resource Management(ICLARM) and North Sea Center, June 1996);for further discussion of Philippines, seeDepartment of Environment and NaturalResources et al., Legal and JurisdictionalGuidebook for Coastal Resource Management in thePhilippines (Manila: Coastal ResourceManagement Program, 1997).

69. Waugh, op. cit. note 58.

70. Ibid.

71. J.W. McManus et al., ReefBase AquanautSurvey Manual (Manila: ICLARM, 1997).

72. Michael Sutton, “The MarineStewardship Council: New Hope for MarineFisheries,” NAGA, The ICLARM Quarterly, July 1996; Ehsan Masood, “Fish Industry BacksSeal of Approval,” Nature, 29 February 1996.

73. Safina, op. cit. note 24.


Appreciating theBenefits of Plant

Biodiversity

John Tuxill

At first glance, wild potatoes are not tooimpressive. Most are thin-stemmed,rather weedy-looking plants that under-ground bear disappointingly small tubers.But do not be deceived by initial appear-ances, for these plants are key allies inhumankind’s ongoing struggle to controllate blight, a kind of fungus that thriveson potato plants. It was late blight that, inthe 1840s, colonized and devastated thegenetically uniform potato fields ofIreland, triggering the infamous faminethat claimed more than a million lives.The disease has been controlled this cen-tury largely with fungicides, but in themid-1980s farmers began reporting out-breaks of fungicide-resistant blight. Thesenewly virulent strains have cut globalpotato harvests in the 1990s by 15 percent, a $3.25-billion yield loss; in some regions, such as the highlands of Tanzania, losses to blight haveapproached 100 percent. Fortunately, sci-entists at the International Potato Centerin Lima, Peru, have located genetic resis-tance to the new blight strains in the gene

pools of traditional Andean potato culti-vars and their wild relatives, and now seehope for reviving the global potato crop.1

Wild potatoes are but one manifesta-tion of the benefits humans gain frombiological diversity, the richness and com-plexity of life on Earth. Plant biodiversity,in particular, is arguably the single great-est resource that humankind has gar-nered from nature during our long cul-tural development. Presently, scientistshave described more than 250,000 speciesof mosses, ferns, conifers, and floweringplants, and estimate there may beupwards of 50,000 plant species yet to bedocumented, primarily in the remote, lit-tle-studied reaches of tropical forests.2

Within just the hundred-odd species ofcultivated plants that supply most of theworld’s food, traditional farmers haveselected and developed hundreds of thou-sands of distinct genetic varieties. Duringthis century, professional plant breedershave used this rich gene pool to create thehigh-yielding crop varieties responsiblefor much of the enormous productivity of

6

modern farming. Plant diversity also pro-vides oils, latexes, gums, fibers, dyes,essences, and other products that clean,clothe, and refresh us and that have manyindustrial uses. And whether we are in the20 percent of humankind who open a bot-tle of pills when we are feeling ill, or in the80 percent who consult a local herbalistfor a healing remedy, a large chunk of ourmedicines comes from chemical com-pounds produced by plants.3

Yet the more intensively we use plantdiversity, the more we threaten its long-term future. The scale of human enter-prise on Earth has become so great—weare now nearly 6 billion strong and con-sume about 40 percent of the planet’sannual biological productivity—that we areeroding the very ecological foundations ofplant biodiversity and losing unique genepools, species, and even entire communi-ties of species forever. It is as if humankindis painting a picture of the next millen-nium with a shrinking palette—the worldwill still be colored green, but in increas-ingly uniform and monocultured tones. Of course, our actions have produced ben-efits: society now grows more food thanever before, and those who can purchase ithave a material standard of living unimag-inable to earlier generations. But the unde-niable price that plant diversity and theecological health of our planet are payingfor these achievements casts a shadow over the future of the development paththat countries have pursued this century.To become more than a short-term civi-lization, we must start by maintaining bio-logical diversity.4

INTO THE MASS EXTINCTION

Extinction is a natural part of evolution,but it is normally a rare and obscureevent; the natural or “background” rate ofextinction appears to be about 1–10

species a year. By contrast, scientists esti-mate that extinction rates have accelerat-ed this century to at least 1,000 speciesper year. These numbers indicate we nowlive in a time of mass extinction—a globalevolutionary upheaval in the diversity andcomposition of life on Earth.5

Paleontologists studying Earth’s fossilrecord have identified five previous massextinction episodes during life’s 1.5 bil-lion years of evolution, with the mostrecent being about 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period,when the dinosaurs disappeared. Earliermass extinctions hit marine invertebratesand other animal groups hard, but plantsweathered these episodes with relativelylittle trouble. Indeed, flowering plants,which now account for nearly 90 percentof all land plant species, did not begin their diversification until theCretaceous—relatively recently, in evolu-tionary terms.6

In the current mass extinction, howev-er, plants are suffering unprecedentedlosses. According to a 1997 global analysisof more than 240,000 plant species coor-dinated by the World ConservationUnion–IUCN, one out of every eightplants surveyed is potentially at risk ofextinction. (See Table 6–1.) This tallyincludes species already endangered orclearly vulnerable to extinction, as well asthose that are naturally rare (and thus atrisk from ecological disruption) orextremely poorly known. More than 90percent of these at-risk species areendemic to a single country—that is,found nowhere else in the world.7

The United States, Australia, andSouth Africa have the most plant speciesat risk (see Table 6–2), but their highstanding is partly due to how much better-known their flora is compared with that ofother species-rich countries. We have agood idea of how many plants havebecome endangered as the coastal sagescrub and perennial grasslands ofCalifornia have been converted into sub-

Appreciating the Benefits of Plant Biodiversity (97)

urban homes and cropland, for example.But we simply do not know how manyspecies have dwindled as the cloud forestsof Central America have been replaced bycoffee plots and cattle pastures, or as thelowland rainforests of Indonesia andMalaysia have become oil palm and pulp-wood plantations.

Increasingly, it is not just individualspecies but entire communities andecosystems of plants that face extinction.The inter-Andean laurel and oak forestsof Colombia, the heathlands of westernAustralia, the seasonally dry forest of thePacific island of New Caledonia—all havebeen largely overrun by humankind. Inthe southeast corner of Florida in theUnited States, native plant communities,such as subtropical hardwood hammocksand limestone ridge pinelands, have beenreduced to tiny patches in a sea of subur-ban homes, sugarcane fields, and citrusorchards. These irreplaceable remnantsare all that is left of what southeast Floridaonce was—and they are now held togeth-er only with constant human vigilanceto beat back a siege of exotic plants, such as Brazilian pepper and Australiancasuarina.8

Biodiversity is also lost when genepools within species evaporate. The clos-est wild ancestor of corn is a lanky, sprawl-ing annual grass called teosinte, native to

Mexico and Guatemala, where it occurs ineight separate populations. BotanistGarrison Wilkes of the University ofMassachusetts regards seven of these pop-ulations as rare, vulnerable, or alreadyendangered—primarily due to the aban-donment of traditional agricultural prac-tices and to increased livestock grazing inthe field margins and fallow areas favoredby teosinte. Overall, teosinte is not yetthreatened with extinction. But because


Table 6–1. Threatened Plant Species, 1997

Status Total Share(number) (percent)

Total Number of Species Surveyed 242,013

Total Number of Threatened Species 33,418 14Vulnerable to Extinction 7,951 3In Immediate Danger of Extinction 6,893 3Naturally Rare 14,505 6Indeterminate Status 4,070 2

Total Number of Extinct Species 380 <1

SOURCE: Kerry S. Walter and Harriet J. Gillett, eds., 1997 IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants (Gland, Switzerland:World Conservation Union–IUCN, 1997).

Table 6–2. Top 10 Countries with the Most Threatened Plants

Percentage ofCountry’s Total

Country Total Flora Threatened(number)

United States 4,669 29Australia 2,245 14South Africa 2,215 11.5Turkey 1,876 22Mexico 1,593 6Brazil 1,358 2.5Panama 1,302 13India 1,236 8Spain 985 19.5Peru 906 5

SOURCE: Kerry S. Walter and Harriet J. Gillett, eds.,1997 IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants (Gland,Switzerland: World Conservation Union–IUCN,1997).

the plant hybridizes readily with domesti-cated corn, every loss of a unique teosintepopulation reduces genetic diversity thatmay one day be needed to breed better-adapted corn plants.9

OF FOOD AND FARMERS

Nowhere is the value of biodiversity moreevident than in our food supply. Roughlyone third of all plant species have ediblefruits, tubers, nuts, seeds, leaves, roots, orstems. During the nine tenths of humanhistory when everyone lived as hunter-gatherers, an average culture would havehad knowledge of several hundred edibleplant species that could provide suste-nance. Today, wild foods continue to sup-plement the diet of millions of rural poorworldwide, particularly during seasonalperiods of food scarcity. Tuareg women inNiger, for instance, regularly harvestdesert panic-grass and shama millet whilemigrating with their animal herdsbetween wet and dry-season pastures. Inrural northeast Thailand, wild foods gath-ered from forests and field margins makeup half of all food eaten by villagers dur-ing the rainy season. In the city of Iquitosin the Peruvian Amazon, fruits of nearly60 species of wild trees, shrubs, and vinesare sold in the city produce markets.Residents in the surrounding countrysideare estimated to obtain a tenth of theirentire diet from wild-harvested fruits.10

For the last 5–10 millennia, we haveactively cultivated the bulk of our food.Agriculture arose independently in manydifferent regions, as people graduallylived closer together, became lessnomadic, and focused their food produc-tion on plants that were amenable torepeated sowing and harvesting. In the1920s the legendary Russian plant explor-er Nikolai Vavilov identified geographiccenters of crop diversity, including

Mesoamerica, the central Andes, theMediterranean Basin, the Near East, high-land Ethiopia, and eastern China. He alsoinferred correctly that most centers cor-respond to where crops were first domes-ticated. For instance, native Andean farm-ers not only brought seven differentspecies of wild potatoes into cultivation,they also domesticated common beans,lima beans, passion fruit, quinoa andamaranths (both grains), and a host of lit-tle-known tuber and leaf crops such asoca, ulluco, and tarwi—more than 25species of food plants in all.11

Over the millennia, farmers havedeveloped a wealth of distinctive varietieswithin crops by selecting and replantingseeds and cuttings from uniquely favor-able individual plants—perhaps one thatmatured slightly sooner than others, wasunusually resistant to pests, or possessed adistinctive color or taste. Subsistencefarmers have always been acutely attentiveto such varietal diversity because it helpsthem cope with variability in their envi-ronment, and for most major crops, farm-ers have developed thousands of folk vari-eties, or “landraces.” India alone, forinstance, probably had at least 30,000 ricelandraces earlier this century.12

On-farm crop selection remains vital indeveloping countries, where farmers con-tinue to save 80–90 percent of their ownseed supplies. In industrial nations, bycontrast, the seed supply process hasbecome increasingly centralized duringthis century, as professional plant breed-ers have taken up the job of crop improve-ment and as corporations have assumedresponsibility for supplying seeds. Thepower and promise of scientifically basedplant breeding was confirmed by the1930s, when the first commercial hybridcorn was marketed by the Pioneer Hi-Bred Company. Hybrids are favored byseed supply companies because they tendto be especially high-yielding (the bottomline for commercial farming) andbecause “second-generation” hybrid seeds


do not retain the traits of their parents.This means that farmers must purchasehybrid seed anew from the supplierrather than saving their own stock. Somefarmers have also been legally disenfran-chised from seed-saving; under EuropeanUnion law, it is now illegal for farmers tosave and replant seed from plant varietiesthat have been patented by breeders.13

Although farmers can now purchaseand plant seeds genetically engineeredwith the latest molecular techniques, theproductivity of our food supply stilldepends on the plant diversity main-tained by wildlands and traditional agri-cultural practices. Wild relatives of cropscontinue be used by breeders as sourcesof disease resistance, vigor, and othertraits that produce billions of dollars inbenefits to global agriculture. Imaginegiving up sugarcane, strawberries, toma-toes, and wine grapes; none of these cropscould be grown commercially without thegenetic contribution of their respectivewild relatives. With the rescue mission oftheir wild kin now under way, we can alsoplace potatoes on this list.14

Traditional crop varieties are equallyindispensable for global food security.Subsistence farmers around the worldcontinue to grow primarily either land-races or locally adapted versions of pro-fessionally bred seed. Such small-scaleagriculture produces 15–20 percent ofthe world’s food supply, is predominantlyperformed by women, and provides thedaily sustenance of roughly 1.4 billionrural poor. Moreover, landraces have con-tributed the genetic infrastructure of theintensively bred crop varieties that feedthe rest of us. More than one third of the

U.S. wheat crop owes its productivity tolandrace genes from Asia and otherregions, a contribution worth at least$500 million annually.15

As we enter the next millennium, agri-cultural biodiversity faces an uncertainfuture. The availability of wild foods andpopulations of many wild relatives ofcrops is declining as wildlands are con-verted to human-dominated habitats andas hedgerows, fallow fields, and other sec-ondary habitats decline within traditionalagricultural landscapes. In the UnitedStates, two thirds of all rare and endan-gered plants are close relatives of cultivat-ed species. If these species go extinct, apool of potentially crucial future benefitsfor global agriculture will also vanish.16

There is also grave concern for the oldcrop landraces. By volume, the world’sfarmers now grow more sorghum,spinach, apples, and other crops than everbefore, but they grow fewer varieties ofeach crop. Crop diversity in industrialnations has undergone a massive turnoverthis century; the proportion of varietiesgrown in the United States before 1904but no longer present in either commer-cial agriculture or any major seed storagefacility ranges from 81 percent for toma-toes to over 90 percent for peas and cab-bages. Figures are less comprehensive fordeveloping countries, but China is esti-mated to have gone from growing 10,000wheat varieties in 1949 to only 1,000 bythe 1970s, while just 20 percent of thecorn varieties cultivated in Mexico in the1930s can still be found there—an alarm-ing decline for the cradle of corn.17

Crop varieties are lost for many reasons.Sometimes an extended drought destroysharvests and farmers must consume theirplanting seed stocks just to survive. Long-term climate change can also be a prob-lem. In Senegal, two decades of below-nor-mal rainfall created a growing season tooshort for traditional rice varieties to pro-duce good yields. When fast-maturing ricecultivars became available through devel-


Traditional crop varieties are indis-pensable for global food security.

opment aid programs, women farmersrapidly adopted them because of thegreater harvest security they offered.18

In the majority of cases, however, farm-ers voluntarily abandon traditional seedswhen they adopt new varieties, changeagricultural practices, or move out offarming altogether. In industrial coun-tries, crop diversity has declined in con-cert with the steady commercializationand consolidation of agriculture this cen-tury: fewer family farmers, and fewer seedcompanies offering fewer varieties forsale, mean fewer crop varieties planted infields or saved after harvest. The seed sup-ply industry is now dominated by multi-national corporations; increasingly, thesame companies that sell fertilizers andpesticides to farmers now also promoteseeds bred to use those products.19

In most developing countries, diversitylosses were minimal until the 1960s, whenthe famed international agriculturaldevelopment program known as theGreen Revolution introduced new high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, corn, andother major crops. Developed to boostfood self-sufficiency in famine-pronecountries, the Green Revolution varietieswere widely distributed, often with gov-ernment subsidies to encourage theiradoption, and displaced landraces frommany prime farmland areas.20

In areas where agriculture is highlymechanized and commercialized, cropsnow exhibit what the U.N. Food andAgriculture Organization (FAO) politelycalls an “impressively uniform” geneticbase. A survey of nine major crops in theNetherlands found that the three mostpopular varieties for each crop covered81–99 percent of the respective areasplanted. Such patterns have also emergedon much of the developing world’s primefarmland. One single wheat variety blan-keted 67 percent of Bangladesh’s wheatacreage in 1983 and 30 percent of India’sthe following year.21

The ecological risks we take in adopt-

ing such genetic uniformity are enor-mous, and keeping them at bay requiresan extensive infrastructure of agriculturalscientists and extension workers—as wellas all too frequent applications of pesti-cides and other potent agrochemicals. Aparticularly heavy burden falls on profes-sional plant breeders, who are nowengaged in a relay race to develop evermore robust crop varieties before thosealready in monoculture succumb to evolv-ing pests and diseases, or to changingenvironmental conditions.22

Breeders started this race earlier thiscentury with a tremendous geneticendowment at their disposal, courtesy ofnature and generations of subsistencefarmers. Despite major losses, this well-spring is still far from empty—estimatesare that plant breeders have used only asmall fraction of the varietal diversity pre-sent in crop gene banks (facilities thatstore seeds under cold, dry conditionsthat can maintain seed viability fordecades). At the same time, we can neverbe sure that what is already stored willcover all our future needs. When grassystunt virus began attacking high-yieldingAsian rices in the 1970s, breeders locatedgenetic resistance to the disease in only asingle collection of one population of awild rice species in Uttar Pradesh, India—and that population has never beenfound again since. Conserving and rein-vigorating biodiversity in agriculturallandscapes remains essential for achiev-ing global food security.23

OF MEDICINES AND

MATERIAL GOODS

In a doctor’s office in Germany, a mandiagnosed with hypertension is prescribedreserpine, a drug from the Asian snakerootplant. In a small town in India, a womancomplaining of stomach pains visits an


Ayurvedic healer, and receives a soothingand effective herbal tea as part of her treat-ment. In a California suburb, a headachesufferer unseals a bottle of aspirin, a com-pound originally isolated from Europeanwillow trees and meadow herbs.24

People everywhere rely on plants forstaying healthy and extending the qualityand length of their lives. One quarter ofthe prescription drugs marketed in NorthAmerica and Europe contain active ingre-dients derived from plants. Plant-baseddrugs are part of standard medical proce-dures for treating heart conditions, child-hood leukemia, lymphatic cancer, glauco-ma, and many other serious illnesses.Worldwide, the over-the-counter value ofthese drugs is estimated at more than $40billion annually. Major pharmaceuticalcompanies and institutions such as theU.S. National Cancer Institute implementplant screening programs as a primarymeans of identifying new drugs.25

The World Health Organization esti-mates that 3.5 billion people in develop-ing countries rely on plant-based medi-cine for their primary health care.Ayurvedic and other traditional healers inSouth Asia use at least 1,800 differentplant species in treatments and are regu-larly consulted by some 800 million peo-ple. In China, where medicinal plant usegoes back at least four millennia, healersemploy more than 5,000 plant species. Atleast 89 plant-derived commercial drugsused in industrial countries were original-ly discovered by folk healers, many ofwhom are women. Traditional medicineis particularly important for poor andrural residents, who typically are not wellserved by formal health care systems.Recent evidence suggests that when eco-nomic woes and structural adjustmentprograms restrict governments’ abilitiesto provide health care, urban and evenmiddle-class residents of developingcountries also turn to more affordable tra-ditional medicinal experts.26

Traditional herbal therapies are grow-

ing rapidly in popularity in industrialcountries as well. FAO estimates thatbetween 4,000 and 6,000 species of medi-cinal plants are traded internationally,with China accounting for about 30 per-cent of all such exports. In 1992, thebooming U.S. retail market for herbalmedicines reached nearly $1.5 billion,and the European market is even larger.27

Despite their demonstrable value,medicinal plants are declining in manyareas. Human alteration of forests andother habitats all too often eliminatessites rich in wild medicinal plants. Thiscreates an immediate problem for folkhealers when they can no longer find theplants they need for performing certaincures—a problem commonly lamented byindigenous herbalists in eastern Panama,among others. Moreover, strong con-sumer demand and inadequate oversightof harvesting levels and practices meanthat wild-gathered medicinal plants arecommonly overexploited.28

In Cameroon, for example, the bark ofthe African cherry is highly esteemed bytraditional healers, but most of the coun-try’s harvest is exported to WesternEurope, where African cherry is a princi-pal treatment for prostate disorders. Inrecent years Cameroon has been the lead-ing supplier of African cherry bark tointernational markets, but clearance ofthe tree’s montane forest habitat, com-bined with the inability of the govern-ment forestry department to manage theharvest, has led to widespread, wantondestruction of cherry stands.29

In addition to the immediate losses,every dismantling of a unique habitat rep-resents a loss of future drugs and medi-cines, particularly in species-rich habitatslike tropical forests. Fewer than 1 percentof all plant species have been screened bychemists to see what bioactive compoundsthey may contain. The nearly 50 drugsalready derived from tropical rainforestplants are estimated to represent only 12percent of the medically useful compounds



waiting to be discovered in rainforests.30

Most tragically of all, many rural soci-eties are rapidly losing their culturalknowledge about medicinal plants. Incommunities undergoing accelerated west-ernization, fewer young people are inter-ested in learning about traditional healingplants and how to use them. From Samoato Suriname, most herbalists and healersare elderly, and few have apprentices study-ing to take their place. Ironically, as thisdecline has accelerated, there has been aresurgent interest in ethnobotany—thestudy of how people classify, conceptualize,and use plants—and other fields of studyrelated to traditional medicinal plant use.Professional ethnobotanists surveyingmedicinal plants used by different culturesare racing against time to document tradi-tional knowledge before it vanishes with itslast elderly practitioners.31

For the one quarter of humanity wholive at or near subsistence levels, plantdiversity offers more than just food secu-rity and health care—it also provides aroof over their heads, cooks their food,provides eating utensils, and on averagemeets about 90 percent of their materialneeds. Consider palms: temperate zonedwellers may think of palm trees primari-ly as providing an occasional coconut orthe backdrop to an idyllic island vacation,but tropical peoples have a different per-spective. The babassu palm from the east-ern Amazon Basin has more than 35 dif-ferent uses—construction material, oiland fiber source, game attractant, even asan insect repellent. Commercial extrac-tion of babassu products is a part or full-time economic activity for more than 2million rural Brazilians.32

Indigenous peoples throughout tropi-cal America have been referred to as“palm cultures.” The posts, floors, walls,and beams of their houses are made fromthe wood of palm trunks, while the roofsare thatched with palm leaves. They usebaskets and sacks woven from palm leavesto store household items, including

food—which may itself be palm fruits,palm hearts (the young growing shoot ofthe plant), or wild game hunted withweapons made from palm stems andleaves. At night, family members will like-ly drift off to sleep in hammocks wovenfrom palm fibers. When people die, theymay be buried in a coffin carved from apalm trunk.33

Palms are exceptionally versatile, butthey are only part of the spectrum of use-ful plants in biodiverse environments. Innorthwest Ecuador, indigenous culturesthat practice shifting agriculture usemore than 900 plant species to meet theirmaterial, medicinal, and food needs;halfway around the world, Dusun andIban communities in the rainforests ofcentral Borneo use a similar total ofplants in their daily lives. People who aremore integrated into regional and nation-al economies tend to use fewer plants, butstill commonly depend on plant diversityfor household uses and to generate cashincome. In India, at least 5.7 million peo-ple make a living harvesting nontimberforest products, a trade that accounts fornearly half the revenues earned by Indianstate forests.34

Those of us who live in manicured sub-urbs or urban concrete jungles may meetmore of our material needs with metalsand plastics, but plant diversity stillenriches our lives. Artisans who craftmusical instruments or furniture, forinstance, value the unique acoustic quali-ties and appearances of the different trop-ical and temperate hardwoods that theywork with—aspects of biodiversity that

One quarter of the prescription drugsmarketed in North America andEurope contain active ingredientsderived from plants.

ultimately benefit anyone who listens toclassical music or purchases handcraftedfurniture. Among the nonfood plantstraded internationally on commercial lev-els are at least 200 species of timber trees,42 plants producing essential oils, 66species yielding latexes or gums, and 13species used as dyes and colorants.35

As with medicinals, the value that plantresources have for handicraft production,industrial use, or household needs hasoften not prevented their local or region-al decline. One of the most valuable nontimber forest products is rattan, aflexible cane obtained from a number of species of vine-like palms that can growup to 185 meters long. Asian rattan palms support an international furniture-making industry worth $3.5–6.5 billionannually. Unfortunately, rattan stocks aredeclining throughout much of tropicalAsia because of the loss of native rain-forest and overharvesting. In the past few years, some Asian furniture makershave even begun importing rattan sup-plies from Nigeria and other centralAfrican countries.36

On a global level, declines of wildplants related to industrial crops such ascotton or plantation-grown timber couldone day limit our ability to cultivate thosecommodities by shrinking the gene poolsneeded for breeding new crops. Morelocally, declines of materially usefulspecies mean life gets harder and tougherin the short term. When a tree speciesfavored for firewood is overharvested,women must walk longer to collect theirfamily’s fuel supply, make due with aninferior species that does not burn as well,or spend scarce money purchasing fuelfrom vendors. When a fiber plant collect-ed for sale to handicraft producersbecomes scarce, it is harder for collectorsto earn an income that could help payschool fees for their children. Whether weare rich or poor, biodiversity enhancesthe quality of our lives—and many peoplealready feel its loss.

BIO-UNIFORMITY RISING

The cumulative effects of human activitieson Earth are evident not just in declinesin particular species, but in the increas-ingly tattered state of entire ecosystemsand landscapes—and when large-scaleecological processes begin to break down,conservation and management becomeall the more complicated. Take the prob-lem of habitat fragmentation, whenundisturbed wildlands are reduced topatchwork, island-like remnants of theirformer selves. Natural islands in oceans orlarge lakes tend to be impoverished inspecies; their smaller area means theyusually do not develop the ecologicalcomplexity and diversity characteristic ofmore extensive mainland areas. More-over, when an island population of aspecies is eradicated, it is harder for adja-cent mainland populations to recolonizeand replace it.37

As a result, when development—large-scale agriculture, settlements, roads—sprawls across landscapes, remaining habi-tat fragments usually behave like theislands they have become: they lose species.In western Ecuador, the Río PalenqueScience Center protects a square-kilometerremnant of the lowland rainforest that covered the region a mere three decadesago; now the center is an island amid cattlepasture and oil palm plantations. Twenty-four species of orchids, bromeliads, andother plants at Río Palenque have alreadysuccumbed to the “island effect” and canno longer be found there. One vanishedspecies, an understory shrub, has neverbeen recorded anywhere else and is presumed extinct.38

Even with these drawbacks, small areasof native habitat can have enormous con-servation value when they are all that isleft of a unique plant community or rarehabitat. But waiting to protect them untilonly patches remain carries an unmistak-able tradeoff: smaller holdings require


more-intensive management than largerones. In smaller reserves, managers oftenmust simulate natural disturbances (suchas prescribed burns to maintain fire-adapted vegetation); provide pollination,seed dispersal, and pest control servicesin place of vanished animals; reintroducedesirable native species when they disap-pear from a site (perhaps due to a seriesof poor breeding seasons); and performother duties the original ecosystem oncedid free of charge. Governments and soci-eties that are unwilling or unable to shoul-der these management costs will soonfind that the biodiversity they intended toprotect with nature reserves has vanishedfrom within them.39

Invasive species that crowd out nativeflora and fauna are one of the biggestheadaches for managing biodiversity indisturbed landscapes. In certain suscepti-ble habitats, such as oceanic islands andsubtropical heathlands, controlling inva-sives may be the single biggest manage-ment challenge. South Africa has one ofthe largest invasive species problems ofany nation, and has a great deal at stake:the fynbos heathlands and montane for-est of the country’s Cape region holdmore plant species—8,600, most of themendemic—in a smaller area than any-where else on Earth. Fortunately, SouthAfricans are increasingly aware of thethreat that exotics pose, and in 1996 thegovernment initiated a program to fightinvasives with handsaw and hoe. Some40,000 people are employed to cut andclear Australian eucalypts, CentralAmerican pines, and other unwantedguests in natural areas. It is a measure ofthe scale and severity of the invasive prob-lem that this effort is South Africa’s singlelargest public works program.40

Large-scale ecological alterations alsohave great potential to combine theireffects in unpredictable and damagingways. For instance, much of the world isnow saturated in nitrogen compounds(an essential element required by all

plants for growth and development)because of our overuse of nitrogen-basedsynthetic fertilizers and fossil fuels.Studies of North American prairies foundthat the plants that responded best toexcess nitrogen tended to be weedy inva-sives, not the diverse native prairie flora.Likewise, plant and animal speciesalready pressed for survival in fragmentedlandscapes may also have to contend withaltered rainfall patterns, temperatureranges, seasonal timing, and other effectsof global climate change.41

Already, scientists are detecting whatcould be the first fingerprints of analtered global atmosphere on plant com-munities. Data from tropical forestresearch plots worldwide indicate that therate at which rainforest trees die andreplace each other, called the turnoverrate, has increased steadily since the1950s. This suggests that the forests understudy are becoming “younger,” increas-ingly dominated by faster-growing, short-er-lived trees and woody vines—exactlythe kinds of plants expected to thrive in acarbon dioxide–rich world with moreextreme weather events. Without majorreductions in global carbon emissions,forest turnover rates will likely rise fur-ther, and over time could push to extinc-tion many slower-growing tropical hard-wood tree species that cannot compete ina carbon-enriched environment.42

Global trends are shaping a botanicalworld that is most striking in its greateruniformity. The richly textured mix ofnative plant communities that evolved


Scientists are already detecting whatcould be the first fingerprints of analtered global atmosphere on plantcommunities.

over thousands of years is increasinglyfrayed, replaced by extensive areas underintensive cultivation or heavy grazing,lands devoted to settlements or industrialactivities, and secondary habitats—partially disturbed areas dominated byshorter-lived, “weedy,” often non-nativespecies. A 1994 mapping study by the organization Conservation Inter-national estimated that nearly three quar-ters of our planet’s habitable land surface (that which is not bare rock, drift-ing sand, or ice) already is either partiallyor heavily disturbed. Moreover, withinhuman-dominated landscapes, relativelydiverse patchworks of small-scale culti-vation, fallow fields, seasonal grazingareas, and managed native vegetation are being replaced by large, uniformfields or by extensive denuded anddegraded areas.43

The mixtures of species in differentregions are becoming more similar aswell. Lists of endangered plants are dominated by endemic species—thosenative to a relatively restricted area suchas a country or state, an isolated mountain range, or a specific soil type.When endemic plants vanish, the remaining species pool becomes moreuniform. Finally, the spectrum of distinctpopulations and varieties within plantspecies is shrinking, a problem mostadvanced in our endowment of domesti-cated plants.44

Countries that emerged in a worldfilled with biodiversity now must gain andmaintain prosperity amid increasing bio-uniformity. We are conducting anunprecedented experiment with the secu-rity and stability of our food supply, ourhealth care systems, and the ecologicalinfrastructure upon which both rest. Toobtain the results we desire, we must con-serve and protect the plant biodiversitythat remains with us, and manage our useof natural systems in ways that restore bio-diversity to landscapes worldwide.

STORED FOR SAFEKEEPING

Broad recognition of the need to safe-guard plant resources is largely a twenti-eth century phenomenon. The first warn-ings about the global erosion of plantdiversity were voiced in the 1920s by sci-entists such as Harry Harlan of theUnited States and Nikolai Vavilov, whorealized the threat posed by farmers’abandonment of landraces in favor ofnewer varieties that were spreading wide-ly in an increasingly interconnectedworld.45

The dominant approach to conservingplant varieties and species has involvedremoving them from their native habitator agricultural setting and protecting themat specialized institutions such as botanicalgardens, nurseries, and gene banks. Mostoff-site collections of wild species and orna-mental plants are in the custody of theworld’s 1,600 botanical gardens. Com-bined, they tend representatives of tens ofthousands of plant species—nearly 25 per-cent of the world’s flowering plants andferns, by one estimate.46

Most botanical gardens active todaywere established by European colonialpowers to introduce economically impor-tant and ornamental plants throughoutthe far-flung reaches of empires, and topromote the study of potentially usefulplants. Nowadays many botanical gardenshave reoriented their mission towardspecies preservation, particularly in theirresearch and education programs. Sincethe late 1980s, botanical gardens havecoordinated efforts through an interna-tional conservation network, which helpsensure that the rarest plants receive pri-ority for propagation and, ultimately,reintroduction.47

Gene banks have focused almost exclu-sively on storing seeds of crop varietiesand their immediate wild relatives. (Theprincipal exception is the Royal BotanicGarden’s Millennium Seed Bank in


England, which holds more than 4,000wild species and is expanding toward acollection of one quarter of the world’sflora.) Gene banks arose from plantbreeders’ need to have readily accessiblestocks of breeding material. Their conser-vation role came to the forefront in the1970s, following large losses linked togenetic uniformity in the southern U.S.corn crop in 1970 and the Soviet winterwheat crop of 1971–72.48

In 1974, governments and the UnitedNations established the InternationalBoard for Plant Genetic Resources (nowknown as the International Plant GeneticResources Institute, or IPGRI), which cob-bled together a global network of genebanks. The network includes universitybreeding programs, government seedstorage units, and the Consultative Groupon International Agricultural Research(CGIAR), a worldwide network of 16 agri-cultural research centers originally estab-lished to bring the Green Revolution todeveloping countries, and funded primar-ily by the World Bank and internationalaid agencies.49

The number of unique seed samples or“accessions” in gene banks now exceeds 6million. The largest chunk of these, morethan 500,000 accessions, are in the genebanks of CGIAR centers such as theInternational Rice Research Institute inthe Philippines and the InternationalWheat and Maize Improvement Center(CIMMYT) in Mexico. At least 90 percentof all gene bank accessions are of foodand commodity plants, especially theworld’s most intensively bred and eco-nomically valuable crops. (See Table6–3.) By the late 1980s, IPGRI regarded anumber of these crops, such as wheat andcorn, as essentially completely collected;that is, nearly all of the known landracesand varieties of the crop are already rep-resented in gene banks. Others have ques-tioned this assessment, however, arguingthat the lack of quantitative studies ofcrop gene pools makes it difficult to ascer-

tain whether even the best-studied cropshave been adequately sampled.50

There are additional reasons for inter-preting gene bank totals conservatively.The total annual cost of maintaining allaccessions currently in gene banks isabout $300 million, and many facilities,hard-pressed for operating funds, cannotmaintain seeds under optimal physicalconditions. Seeds that are improperlydried or kept at room temperature ratherthan in cold storage may begin to lose via-bility within a few years. At this point, theymust be “grown out”—germinated, plant-ed, raised to maturity, and then reharvest-ed, which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity when repeated for


Table 6–3. Gene Bank Collections forSelected Crops

Estimated ShareAccessions of Landraces

Crop in Gene Banks Collected(number) (percent)

Wheat 850,000 90Rice 420,000 90Corn 262,000 95Sorghum 168,500 80Soybeans 176,000 70Common

Beans 268,500 50Potatoes 31,000 80–90Cassava 28,000 35Tomatoes 77,500 90Squashes,

Cucumbers,Gourds 30,000 50

Onions, Garlic 25,000 70Sugarcane 27,500 70Cotton 48,500 75

SOURCE: Donald L. Plucknett et al., Gene Banks andthe World’s Food (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1987); Brian D. Wright, Crop Genetic ResourcePolicy: Toward A Research Agenda, EPTD DiscussionPaper 19 (Washington, DC: International FoodPolicy Research Institute, 1996); U.N. Food andAgriculture Organization, The State of the World’sPlant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Rome:1996).

thousands of accessions per year. Theseproblems suggest that an unknown frac-tion of accessions is probably of question-able viability.51

Only 13 percent of gene-banked seedsare in well-run facilities with long-termstorage capability—and even the crownjewels of the system, such as the U.S.National Seed Storage Laboratory, have attimes had problems maintaining seed via-bility rates. For extensively gene-bankedcrops (primarily major grains andlegumes) where large collections areduplicated in different facilities, the oddsof losing the diversity already on depositare reduced. But for sparsely collectedcrops whose accessions are stored at justone or two sites, the possibility of geneticerosion remains disquietingly high.52

Despite such drawbacks, off-site facili-ties remain indispensable for conserva-tion. In some cases, botanical gardens andgene banks have rescued species whosewild populations are now gone. They canalso help return diversity to its properhome through reintroduction programs.Although the uplands of East Africa arenot the center of domestication for com-mon beans, the farmers of the regionadopted them as their own several cen-turies ago, and have developed theworld’s richest mix of local bean varieties.When Rwanda was overwhelmed by civilconflict in 1994, the height of the genoci-dal violence occurred during theFebruary-to-June growing season, greatlyreducing harvests and raising theprospect of widespread famine. Amid therelief contributions that flowed into thecountry once the situation had stabilizedwere stocks of at least 170 bean varietiesthat had been previously collected inRwanda and stored in gene banks world-wide. These supplies helped ensure thatRwandan farmers had stocks of high-qual-ity, locally adapted beans for planting inthe subsequent growing season.53

Still, even the most enthusiastic boost-ers of botanical gardens and gene banks

recognize that such facilities, even whenimpeccably maintained, provide only onepiece in the conservation puzzle. Off-sitestorage takes species out of their naturalecological settings. Wild tomato seeds canbe sealed in a glass jar and frozen for safe-keeping, but left out of the cold are theplant’s pollinators, its dispersers, and allthe other organisms and relationshipsthat have shaped the plant’s unique evo-lution. Gene banks and botanical gardensonly save a narrow—albeit valuable—sliceof plant diversity. When stored seeds aregrown out over several generations off-site, in time they can even lose their nativeadaptations and evolve to fit instead theconditions of their captivity.54

KEEPING DIVERSITY IN PLACE

In the end, plant diversity can be securelymaintained only by protecting the nativehabitats and ecosystems where plants haveevolved. Countries have safeguarded wild-lands primarily through establishingnational parks, forest reserves, and otherformally protected areas. During this cen-tury, governments have steadily increasedprotected area networks, and they nowencompass nearly 12 million square kilo-meters, or about 8 percent of the Earth’sland surface. Many protected areas guardirreplaceable botanical resources, such asMalaysia’s Mount Kinabalu National Park,which safeguards the unique vegetationof southeast Asia’s highest peak. A fewreserves have been established specificallyto protect useful plants, such as the Sierrade Manantlan biosphere reserve inMexico, which encompasses the onlyknown populations of perennial wildcorn.55

Yet current protected area networksalso have major limitations. Many highlydiverse plant communities, such as tropi-cal deciduous forests, are greatly under-


protected. In addition, many protectedareas officially decreed on paper are min-imally implemented by chronically under-funded and understaffed naturalresource agencies. But perhaps the mostfundamental limitation of national parks,wilderness areas, and similarly strict desig-nations arises when they conflict with thecultural and economic importance thatplants hold for local communities.56

A great deal of the natural wealth thatconservationists have sought to protect isactually on lands and under waters longmanaged by local people. Indigenoussocieties worldwide have traditionally pro-tected prominent landscape features likemountains or forests, designating them assacred sites and ceremonial centers. Inparts of West Africa, sacred groves holdsome of the last remaining populations ofimportant medicinal plants. On Samoaand other Pacific islands, communitiesmanage forests to produce wild foods andmedicines, raw materials for canoes andhousehold goods, and other benefits.57

Not surprisingly, actions such as evict-ing long-term residents from newly desig-nated forest reserves, or denying themaccess to previously harvested plantstands, have generated a great deal of illwill toward protected areas worldwide.Fortunately, workable alternatives areemerging in a number of cases wherelong-term residents have been madeequal partners in managing protectedlands. In the Indian state of West Bengal,320,000 hectares of semi-deciduous salforest is managed jointly by villagers andthe state forestry department, with vil-lagers taking primary responsibility forpatrolling nearby forest stands. Sincejoint management began in 1972, the sta-tus of the sal forests has improved, andregenerating stands now provide villagerswith medicines, firewood, and wild-gath-ered foodstuffs. Medicinals also featureprominently in a 4,000-hectare rainforestreserve in Belize, which is government-owned but managed by the Belize Associa-

tion of Traditional Healers.58

Such collaboration between locals andprofessional resource managers is alsocrucial to reversing the overexploitationof valuable wild plants. Very few commer-cially marketed wild species are harvestedsustainably, in ways or at levels that do notdegrade the plant resource. Despite thelack of progress, however, the foundationsof sustainability are becoming increasing-ly clear. Secure and enforceable tenure isessential—either in the form of rights toharvest a plant or tenure over the land itgrows on. Harvesters also need enougheconomic security to be able to afford thetradeoffs involved in not harvesting every-thing at once. Access to fair and openmarkets is important, as is having tech-nology appropriate for the harvestingtask. Information about the ecology andproductivity of a plant can make a big dif-ference. Consumers willing to pay a pre-mium for well-harvested products alsohelp—like those generated through certi-fication programs for “environmentallyfriendly” products.59

Few wild harvests meet all these crite-ria, but a growing number of initiativesare coming close. In Mexico, ancientcone-bearing plants called cycads havebeen heavily exploited for their ornamen-tal value, both for sale domestically andfor horticultural export to the UnitedStates, Japan, and Europe. Most cycadsare wild-harvested by uprooting or cut-ting, but a botanical garden in the state ofVeracruz is working with local villagers toreduce pressures on several overexploitedspecies. In one community, MonteOscuro, residents set aside a communalplot of dry forest to protect a relict popu-lation of cycads in exchange for help withbuilding a community plant nursery.Seeds are collected from the wild plants,then germinated and tended in the nurs-ery by villagers who have received train-ing in basic cycad propagation. Some ofthe young cycads are returned to the for-est to offset any potential downturn in the


wild population from the seed harvest.The rest are sold and the profits deposit-ed in a community fund.60

Presently the largest hurdle is findinggood markets for the young plants thecommunities are producing; cycads areslow-growing, and horticultural buyersprefer larger plants. Better monitoringand enforcement of the internationalornamental plant trade would help, forMexican cycad species are listed with theConvention on International Trade inEndangered Species of Wild Fauna andFlora (CITES) of 1973, which provides apowerful legal tool for controlling inter-national trade in threatened plants andanimals. CITES is generally regarded asone of the more effective internationalenvironmental treaties. It prohibits tradein the most highly endangered species(listed in the Treaty’s Appendix I), andkeeps watch on vulnerable species (listedin Appendix II) by requiring that coun-tries issue a limited number of permits forthe species’ export and import betweensignatory countries. Although CITES pro-vides powerful tools for enforcing sustain-able harvests, it is still up to the countriesinvolved to use them.61

Combining local and internationalstrengths also is crucial for sustaining thegenetic diversity of our food supply. Whatis needed most is agricultural develop-ment that strengthens rather than simpli-fies plant diversity to meet the needs andgoals of farmers—especially subsistencefarmers in developing countries who stillmaintain diverse agricultural landscapes.

Meeting this challenge requires under-standing the particular cultural, econom-

ic, and technological reasons why farmersmaintain elements of traditional farming,such as unique crop variety mixtures. Forinstance, native Hopi communities in thesouthwest United States maintain indige-nous corn and lima bean varietiesbecause the germinating seeds are indis-pensable for religious ceremonies. Mendefarmers in Sierra Leone continue to grownative red-hulled African rice for thesame reason. Andean peasant farmers stillgrow pink and purple potatoes, big-seedcorn, quinoa, and other traditional cropsbecause that is what they themselves pre-fer to eat; the commercial varieties theygrow are strictly to sell for cash income.62

One option to help farmers maintaincrop diversity could involve supportingfarmers’ informal networks of seedexchange and procurement, so as toimprove their access to diverse seedsources. In some rural communities inZimbabwe, villagers contribute seedsannually to a community seed stock. Atthe start of the planting season, the seedsare redistributed to all community mem-bers, a step that gives villagers access tothe full range of varietal diversity presentin the immediate vicinity and ensures thatno one goes without seeds for planting.Grassroots organizations in Ethiopia,Peru, Tonga, and many other countrieshave sponsored community seed banks,regional agricultural fairs, seed collectiontours, demonstration gardens, and similarprojects to promote informal seedexchange between farmers, increase theiraccess to crop diversity, and help themreplenish seed stocks after poor harvests.63

Another approach to maintaining vari-etal diversity involves reorienting formalplant breeding toward the local needs offarmers. Typically plant breeders createuniform, widely adaptable “pure-bred”varietal lines, and only toward the end ofthe process are the lines evaluated withfarmers. Participatory plant breedingmethods involve farmers at all stages. Inthe most advanced programs, breeders


In some rural communities inZimbabwe, villagers contribute seedsannually to a community seed stock.

and farming communities work togetherover several crop generations to evaluate,select, combine, and improve a widerange of varieties, both those availablelocally and those from other regions. Inthis way, participatory plant breeding canimprove the suite of locally preferred varieties without resorting to varietal uni-formity; this approach maintains—orpotentially even enhances—the geneticdiversity present in farmers’ fields.64

Participatory plant breeding has beenpioneered primarily by grassroots devel-opment organizations and innovativenational plant breeding programs indeveloping countries; it has not beentaken up by commercial seed producers,perhaps because its benefits tend to bediffuse and not easily appropriated forcommercial gain. The CGIAR centers areexploring participatory approaches, butalso remain heavily involved in standardbreeding programs. For instance, thecorn and wheat center CIMMYT recentlycollaborated with university breeders andseed companies to develop better-yieldingcorn varieties targeted for highlandMexico—areas where corn landraces con-tinue to be grown by small-scale farmersunder diverse environmental conditions.In doing so, CIMMYT chose to focus onhybrid corn varieties. If well tailored tothe environmental and economic con-straints facing highland Mexican farmers,the new hybrids could boost crop yields—but farmers will be unable to save theirseeds and adapt them further to localconditions. The seed companies involvedwill surely benefit, but past experiencesuggests that local plant biodiversity maypay the price.65

As this last example shows, the mostfundamental changes to be made in pro-tecting crop genetic diversity—and plantbiodiversity in general—involve changingpolicies. Governments are often biasedtoward promoting intensive agriculturedependent on high inputs and genetical-ly uniform crops. Farmers in most south-

ern African countries, for instance, areonly eligible for government agriculturalcredit programs if they agree to plantmodern improved varieties. Internationaldevelopment aid and structural adjust-ment policies commonly promote nontra-ditional export crops, which can triggerhabitat conversion (erasing wild plantdiversity) and replace indigenous cropmixtures. Until fundamental policychanges are taken to heart by govern-ments, international lenders, and relatedinstitutions, the path to sustaining plantbiodiversity—wild or domesticated—willremain difficult.66

SHARING THE BENEFITS

Governments can begin to chart a newcourse by resolving the most prominentpolicy issue affecting plant diversity today:how to distribute biodiversity’s economicbenefits fairly and equitably. Establishinga system of intellectual property rights toplant resources has proved contentiousbecause of a simple pattern—plant diver-sity (both wild and cultivated) is heldmostly by developing countries, but theeconomic benefits it generates are dispro-portionately captured by industrialnations. For most of this century, plantdiversity has been treated as the “com-mon heritage” of humankind, freely avail-able to anyone who can use it, with pro-prietary ownership only granted viapatent law to individuals who demon-strate trade secrets or uniquely improve acrop variety or other plant.67

Since the early 1980s, however, therehas been widening agreement that indige-nous people and traditional farmersdeserve compensation for their long-standing generation, management, andknowledge of biodiversity. Grassrootsadvocates argue that indigenous peopledeserve “traditional resource rights” tothe plants they cultivate and know how to


use, rights that would have the same inter-national legal standing as that afforded topatent rights. Recognition of such rightsrequires, at a minimum, negotiating equi-table benefit-sharing agreements at thecommunity level whenever plants orindigenous knowledge about them is col-lected by researchers. An additional way toacknowledge the world’s debt to ruralcommunities who safeguard plant bio-diversity would be to establish an interna-tional fund supporting continued localmanagement of plant resources. Such astep appears the most practical means ofcompensation for the large amount ofplant biodiversity that is already in thepublic domain (such as the millions ofseed accessions in gene banks or plantswidely used as herbal medicines), sinceestablishing exactly who deserves compen-sation for commercial innovations fromthese plant resources is a Herculean task.68

To date, formal agreements for sharingthe benefits of plant diversity have beennegotiated most extensively in the searchfor new pharmaceuticals from plants inbiodiversity-rich developing countries.The first such “bioprospecting” agree-ment was announced in 1991 betweenMerck Pharmaceuticals and Costa Rica’snongovernmental National Institute ofBiodiversity (InBio), in which Merck paidInBio $1.1 million for access to plant andinsect samples, and promised to share anundisclosed percentage of royalties fromany commercial products that resulted.69

There are now at least a dozen bio-prospecting agreements in place world-wide, involving national governments,indigenous communities, conservationgroups, start-up companies, and estab-lished corporate giants. Most legitimateagreements have followed the Merck-InBio model, with a modest up-front pay-ment and a promise to return betweenone quarter of 1 percent and 3 percent(depending on the project) of any futureroyalties to the biodiversity holders.Bioprospecting proponents argue that

with the huge cost ($200–350 million) ofbringing a new drug to market, compa-nies cannot afford to share a higher per-centage of royalties. Critics, however, sus-pect many bilateral bioprospectingagreements are not negotiated on aneven footing; when a biotechnology firmapproached the U.S. government aboutprospecting for unique microbes inhabit-ing the geysers and hot springs ofYellowstone National Park, for instance,the Park Service negotiated a royaltyshare of 10 percent. Moreover, not all bio-prospecting agreements automaticallyuphold traditional resource rights; manyhave been negotiated on a national ratherthan community level, involving govern-ments who many indigenous people thinkdo not adequately represent—indeed,sometimes actively undermine—theirinterests.70

In contrast with bioprospecting, resolv-ing who owns the world’s crop geneticresources is being negotiated multilateral-ly, in factious diplomatic arenas. In 1989FAO adopted a Farmers’ Rights proposalthat would compensate farmers for theircontribution to biodiversity via an inter-national trust fund to support the conser-vation of plant genetic resources. The1992 Convention on Biological Diversityalso called for incorporating Farmers’Rights, subsequent to further internation-al negotiations. There has been no offi-cial endorsement of this concept, howev-er, from the industrial nations who wouldprovide the compensation, and the fundhas remained unimplemented. Duringthe most recent round of internationalnegotiations, in June 1998, the EuropeanUnion appeared ready to supportFarmers’ Rights, but Australian, U.S., andCanadian diplomats continued tostonewall the issue.71

Meanwhile, the intellectual propertyagenda of industrial countries is beingadvanced by the World Trade Organi-zation (WTO). All countries acceding tothe General Agreement on Tariffs and


Trades are required to establish a systemfor protecting breeders’ rights throughplant variety patents. They can eitheradopt the system of administering patentsand breeders’ rights followed by industri-al nations under the International Unionfor the Protection of New Varieties ofPlants (UPOV), or instead design theirown unique system. The UPOVConvention was established in 1978 andsubstantially revised in 1991; initially itgave farmers the right to save commercialseed for their own use, but the 1991 ver-sion allowed signatory countries to revokethis right. Some countries, includingIndia, are looking at structuring theirown plant patent systems to also acknowl-edge farmers’ rights, but it is unclearwhether the WTO will approve sucharrangements.72

Despite the foot-dragging in interna-tional arenas, de facto boundaries areemerging for what will and will not be tol-erated in the expropriation of crop genet-ic resources. In May 1997, two Australianagricultural centers applied for propri-etary breeders’ rights on two varieties of chickpeas. Their application sparked aninternational uproar because theAustralian breeders had obtained bothvarieties from a CGIAR gene bank, whichhad provided the seeds with the under-standing they were to be used for researchand not for direct financial gain.Moreover, the Australians did little breed-ing to improve the two chickpeas, one ofwhich was a landrace widely grown byIndian farmers, and they even appeared tobe laying the groundwork to market thechickpeas in India and Pakistan.Ultimately, the Australian governmentbowed to international pressure andrejected the patent application. TheCGIAR subsequently called for a moratori-um on all claims for proprietary breedingrights involving germplasm held in trust byCGIAR or FAO-sponsored gene banks.73

While blatant gene grabs like that ofthe Australians may now be beyond the

international pale, the current situationremains far from ideal. The lack of a clear,multilateral system of intellectual proper-ty rights for plant genetic resources dis-tracts governments from the task of con-serving these resources for futuregenerations. The right of subsistencefarmers to save and adapt the seeds theyplant—arguably the most importantmechanism for sustaining crop geneticdiversity in fields—still has not been rec-ognized by many governments. Withoutclear ground rules established, institu-tions and industries that depend directlyon biodiversity for their well-being havelittle incentive to invest in strategies tohelp sustain plant diversity in the fieldsand wildlands where it originates. Allcountries must redouble their efforts tosurmount the political logjam over plantgenetic resources, for continued delayputs biodiversity at risk, and ultimatelyserves no one’s interest.74

For all of human history, we havedepended on plants and the rest of biodi-versity for our soul and subsistence. Nowthe roles are reversed, and biodiversity’sfate depends squarely on how we shapeour own future. From reducing over-exploitation of wild plants to establishingtraditional resource rights for biodiversitystewards, many options are available fordeveloping cultural links that supportplant diversity rather than diminish it.Such steps are not just about meetinginternational treaty obligations or estab-lishing new protected areas, but ratherare part of a larger process of shaping


The right of subsistence farmers tosave and adapt the seeds they plantstill has not been recognized by manygovernments.

ecologically literate civil societies that arein balance with the natural world. Tomaintain biodiversity’s benefits, what matters most is how well we meet the chal-lenges of living sustainably with our deedsas well as our words.


NotesChapter 6. Appreciating the Benefitsof Plant Biodiversity

1. Wild potato descriptions based on J.G.Hawkes, The Potato: Evolution, Biodiversity andGenetic Resources (Washington, DC: Smith-sonian Institution Press, 1990); Irish potatofamine from Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney,Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of GeneticDiversity (Tucson, AZ: University of ArizonaPress, 1990); resurgent potato blight informa-tion from Kurt Kleiner, “Save Our Spuds,” NewScientist, 30 May 1998, from Pat Roy Mooney,“The Parts of Life: Agricultural Biodiversity,Indigenous Knowledge and the Third System,”Development Dialogue, nos. 1–2, 1996, from“Potatoes Blighted,” New Scientist, 21 March1998, and from International Potato Center,“An Opportunity for Disease Control,”<http://www.cgiar.org/cip/blight/lbcntrl.htm>, viewed 23 September 1998.

2. Plant species total from Vernon H.Heywood and Stephen D. Davis, “Introduc-tion,” in S.D. Davis et al., eds., Centers of PlantDiversity: Volume 3, The Americas (Oxford, U.K.:World Wide Fund for Nature, 1997).

3. Cultivated plant total from Robert andChristine Prescott-Allen, “How Many PlantFeed the World?” Conservation Biology,December 1990; other agricultural informa-tion from Fowler and Mooney, op. cit. note 1;medicinal information from Michael J. Balickand Paul Alan Cox, Plants, People and Culture:The Science of Ethnobotany (New York: ScientificAmerican Library, 1996).

4. Global human population from U.N.

Population Division, World PopulationProjections to 2150 (New York: United Nations,1998); use of Earth’s biological systems fromPeter M. Vitousek et al., “Human Dominationof Earth’s Ecosystems,” Science, 25 July 1997.

5. Calculations of background extinctionrates from David M. Raup, “A Kill Curve forPhanerozoic Marine Species,” Paleobiology, vol.17, no. 1 (1991). Raup’s exact estimate is onespecies extinct every four years, based on apool of 1 million species; the range here of1–10 species per year is based on current esti-mates of total species worldwide. Estimates forcurrent rates of extinction are reviewed byNigel Stork, “Measuring Global Biodiversityand Its Decline,” in Marjorie L. Reaka-Kudla,Don E. Wilson, and Edward O. Wilson, eds.,Biodiversity II: Understanding and Protecting OurBiological Resources (Washington, DC: JosephHenry Press, 1997), and by Stuart L. Pimm etal., “The Future of Biodiversity,” Science, 21 July1995. Rates translated into whole numbersbased on an assumption of a total pool of 10million species.

6. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

7. Endangerment information fromKerry S. Walter and Harriet J. Gillett, eds.,1997 IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants (Gland,Switzerland: World Conservation Union–IUCN, 1997).

8. Andean Colombia community endan-germent from Andrew Henderson, Steven P.Churchill, and James L. Luteyn, “NeotropicalPlant Diversity,” Nature, 2 May 1991, from D.

Olson et al., eds., Identifying Gaps in BotanicalInformation for Biodiversity Conservation in LatinAmerica and the Caribbean (Washington, DC:World Wildlife Fund, 1997), and from J.Orlando Rangel Ch., Petter D. Lowy C., andMauricio Aguilar P., Colombia: DiversidadBiotica II (Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia:Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, UniversidadNacional de Colombia, 1997); westernAustralia from Wilson, op. cit. note 6; NewCaledonia from J.M. Veillon, “Protection ofFloristic Diversity in New Caledonia,”Biodiversity Letters, May/July 1993; SoutheastFlorida habitats from Florida Natural AreasInventory, county summaries, <http://www.fnai.org/dade-sum.htm> and <http://www.fnai.org/natcom.htm>, viewed 3 September1998, and from Lance Gunderson, “Vegetationof the Everglades: Determinants ofCommunity Composition,” in Steven M. Davisand John C. Ogden, eds., Everglades: TheEcosystem and Its Restoration (Delray Beach, FL:St. Lucie Press, 1994).

9. H. Garrison Wilkes, “Conservation ofMaize Crop Relatives in Guatemala,” in C.S.Potter, J.I. Cohen, and D. Janczewski, eds.,Perspectives on Biodiversity: Case Studies of GeneticResource Conservation and Development(Washington, DC: AAAS Press, 1993).

10. Total edible plant species fromTimothy M. Swanson, David W. Pearce, andRaffaello Cervigni, The Appropriation of theBenefits of Plant Genetic Resources for Agriculture:An Economic Analysis of the AlternativeMechanisms for Biodiversity Conservation, FAOCommission on Plant Genetic Resources(Rome: U.N. Food and Agriculture Organi-zation (FAO), 1994); hunter-gatherer plantuse from Fowler and Mooney, op. cit. note 1;wild grass harvesting from U.S. NationalResearch Council (NRC), Lost Crops of Africa:Volume I, Grains (Washington, DC: NationalAcademy Press, 1996); Thailand informationfrom P. Somnasang, P. Rathakette, and S.Rathanapanya, “The Role of Natural Foods inNortheast Thailand,” RRA Research Reports(Khon Khaen, Thailand: Khon Khaen

University—Ford Foundation Rural SystemsResearch Project, 1988); Iquitos informationfrom Rodolfo Vasquez and Alwyn H. Gentry,“Use and Misuse of Forest-Harvested Fruits inthe Iquitos Area,” Conservation Biology, January1989, and from Alwyn Gentry, “NewNontimber Forest Products from WesternSouth America,” in Mark Plotkin and LisaFamolare, eds., Sustainable Harvest andMarketing of Rain Forest Products (Washington,DC: Island Press, 1992).

11. Origins of agriculture from Fowler andMooney, op. cit. note 1; centers of crop diver-sity from N.I. Vavilov, “The Origin, Variation,Immunity, and Breeding of Cultivated Plants,”Chronica Botanica, vol. 13, no. I/6 (1949–50);potato species total from Karl S. Zimmerer,“The Ecogeography of Andean Potatoes,”Bioscience, June 1998; Andean crops domesti-cated from Margery L. Oldfield, The Value ofConserving Genetic Resources (Washington, DC:U.S. Department of Interior, National ParkService, 1984), and from Mario E. Tapia andAlcides Rosa, “Seed Fairs in the Andes: AStrategy for Local Conservation of PlantResources,” in David Cooper, Renée Vellvé,and Henk Hobbelink, eds., Growing Diversity:Genetic Resources and Local Food Security(London: Intermediate Technology Publi-cations, 1991).

12. Landrace utility from MichaelLoevinsohn and Louise Sperling, “JoiningDynamic Conservation to DecentralizedGenetic Enhancement: Prospects and Issues,”in Michael Loevinsohn and Louise Sperling,eds., Using Diversity: Enhancing and MaintainingGenetic Resources On-Farm (New Delhi, India:International Development Research Centre,1996); India landrace estimate from Swanson,Pearce, and Cervigni, op. cit. note 10.

13. Developing-country seed saving fromMark Wright et al., The Retention and Care ofSeeds by Small-scale Farmers (Chatham, U.K.:Natural Resources Institute, 1994), and fromV. Venkatesan, Seed Systems in Sub-SaharanAfrica: Issues and Options, World Bank


Discussion Paper 266 (Washington, DC: WorldBank, 1994); hybrid seeds from Jack R.Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The PoliticalEconomy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1988), andfrom Fowler and Mooney, op. cit. note 1; ille-gality of seed saving from Tracy Clunies-Ross,“Creeping Enclosure: Seed Legislation, PlantBreeders’ Rights and Scottish Potatoes,” TheEcologist, May/June 1996, and from JohnGeadelmann, “Three Main Barriers: WeakProtection for Intellectual Property Rights,Unreasonable Phytosanitary Rules, andCompulsory Varietal Regulation,” in DavidGisselquist and Jitendra Srivastava, eds., EasingBarriers to Movement of Plant Varieties forAgricultural Development, World BankDiscussion Paper 367 (Washington, DC: WorldBank, 1997).

14. FAO, The State of the World’s Plant GeneticResources for Food and Agriculture (Rome: 1996);Fowler and Mooney, op. cit. note 1.

15. FAO, op. cit. note 14; population esti-mate for rural poor supported by subsistenceagriculture originally calculated in Edward C.Wolf, Beyond the Green Revolution: NewApproaches for Third World Agriculture,Worldwatch Paper 73 (Washington, DC:Worldwatch Institute, 1986) and reverified byWorldwatch using 1997 data from FAO, FAO-STAT Database, <http://faostat.fao.org>; wheatlandrace from Rural Advancement Founda-tion International (RAFI), The Benefits ofBiodiversity: 100+ Examples of the Contribution byIndigenous & Rural Communities in the South toDevelopment in the North, RAFI OccasionalPaper Series (Winnipeg, MN, Canada: March1994).

16. Oliver L. Phillips and Brien A. Meilleur,“Usefulness and Economic Potential of theRare Plants of the United States: A StatisticalSurvey,” Economic Botany, vol. 52, no. 1 (1998).


18. Senegal example from Tom Osborn,Participatory Agricultural Extension: Experiences

from West Africa, Gatekeepers Series No. SA48(London: International Institute forEnvironment and Development, 1995).

19. FAO, op. cit. note 14; Fowler andMooney, op. cit. note 1; RAFI, “The LifeIndustry 1997,” RAFI Communiqué,November/December 1997.

20. NRC, Managing Global Genetic Resources:Agricultural Crop Issues and Policies(Washington, DC: National Academy Press,1993).

21. FAO, op. cit. note 14; NRC, op. cit. note20; Netherlands study from Renée Vellvé,Saving the Seed: Genetic Diversity and EuropeanAgriculture (London: Earthscan Publications,1992).

22. Donald L. Plucknett et al., Gene Banksand the World’s Food (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1987); NRC, op. cit. note 20.

23. FAO, op. cit. note 14; Brian D. Wright,Crop Genetic Resource Policy: Toward A ResearchAgenda, EPTD Discussion Paper 19(Washington, DC: International Food PolicyResearch Institute, 1996); grassy stunt resis-tance from International Rice ResearchInstitute, “Beyond Rice: Wide Crosses Broadenthe Gene Pool,” <http://www.cgiar.org/irri/Biodiversity/widecrosses.htm>, viewed 9September 1998.

24. Balick and Cox, op. cit. note 3.

25. WHO figure cited in ibid.; Manjul Bajajand J.T. Williams, Healing Forests, HealingPeople: Report of a Workshop on Medicinal Plantsheld on 6–8 February, 1995, Calicut, India (NewDelhi: International Development ResearchCentre, 1995); over-the-counter drug valuefrom Kenton R. Miller and Laura Tangley,Trees of Life: Saving Tropical Forests and TheirBiological Wealth (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,1991).

26. Balick and Cox, op. cit. note 3; Chinafigures from Pei-Gen Xiao, “The ChineseApproach to Medicinal Plants,” in O. Akerele.


V. Heywood, and H. Synge, eds., Conservationof Medicinal Plants (Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ayurvedicfigures from Bajaj and Williams, op. cit.note25, and from S.K. Jain and Robert A.DeFilipps, Medicinal Plants of India, Vol. I(Algonac, MI: Reference Publications, 1991);importance of traditional medicine for ruralpoor from John Lambert, Jitendra Srivastava,and Noel Vietmeyer, Medicinal Plants: Rescuinga Global Heritage (Washington, DC: WorldBank, 1997), and from Gerard Bodeker andMargaret A. Hughes, “Wound Healing,Traditional Treatments and Research Policy,”in H.D.V. Prendergast et al., eds., Plants forFood and Medicine (Kew, U.K.: Royal BotanicGardens, 1998).

27. International medicinal trade detailsfrom M. Iqbal, Trade Restrictions AffectingInternational Trade in Non-Wood Forest Products(Rome: FAO, 1995); U.S. medicinal marketfrom Jennie Wood Shelton, Michael J. Balick,and Sarah A. Laird, Medicinal Plants: CanUtilization and Conservation Coexist? (New York:New York Botanical Garden, 1997).

28. Lambert, Srivastava, and Vietmeyer, op.cit. note 26; A.B. Cunningham, AfricanMedicinal Plants: Setting Priorities at the InterfaceBetween Conservation and Primary Health Care,People and Plants Working Paper 1 (Paris:UNESCO, 1993); Panama information fromauthor’s fieldnotes, Darién province, Panama,1998.

29. A.B. Cunningham and F. T. Mbenkum,Sustainability of Harvesting Prunus africanaBark in Cameroon: A Medicinal Plant inInternational Trade, People and Plants WorkingPaper 2 (Paris: UNESCO, 1993).

30. Number of plants assessed from Balickand Cox, op. cit. note 3; estimates of undis-covered drugs from Robert Mendelsohn andMichael J. Balick, “The Value of UndiscoveredPharmaceuticals in Tropical Forests,” EconomicBotany, April-June 1995.

31. Lack of healer apprentices from Balickand Cox, op. cit. note 3, and from MarkPlotkin, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice (NewYork: Viking Press, 1994).

32. Percentage of material needs met byplants from the Crucible Group, People, Plants,and Patents: The Impact of Intellectual Property onTrade, Plant Biodiversity and Rural Society(Ottawa, Canada: International DevelopmentResearch Centre, 1994); babassu uses fromPeter H. May, “Babassu Palm Product Markets,”in Plotkin and Famolare, op. cit. note 10;babassu economic importance from AnthonyB. Anderson, Peter H. May, and Michael J.Balick, The Subsidy from Nature: Palm Forests,Peasantry, and Development on an Amazon Frontier(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

33. Palm cultures from AndrewHenderson, Gloria Galeano, and RodrigoBernal, Field Guide to the Palms of the Americas(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1995).

34. Ecuador information from Anders S.Barfod and Lars Peter Kvist, “ComparativeEthnobotanical Studies of the AmerindianGroups in Coastal Ecuador,” Biologiske Skrifter,vol. 46, 1996; Borneo information fromHanne Christensen, “Palms and People in theBornean Rain Forest,” Society for EconomicBotany annual meetings, Aarhus, Denmark,July 1998; India information from Food andNutrition Division, “Non-Wood ForestProducts and Nutrition,” in Report of theInternational Expert Consultation on Non-WoodForest Products (Rome: FAO, 1995).

35. Timber tree total calculated from tradestatistics of the International Tropical TimberOrganization, <http://www.itto.or.jp/timber_situation/timber1997/appendix.html#app3>,viewed 7 September 1998; essential oil totalfrom J.J.W. Coppen, Flavours and Fragrances ofPlant Origin (Rome: FAO, 1995); gum andlatex total from J.J.W. Coppen, Gums, Resinsand Latexes of Plant Origin (Rome: FAO, 1995);dye total from C.L. Green, Natural Colourantsand Dyestuffs (Rome: FAO, 1995).


36. Terry Sunderland, “The Rattan Palmsof Central Africa and Their EconomicImportance,” Society for Economic BotanyAnnual Meetings, Aarhus, Denmark, July1998; regional status of rattan resources fromInternational Network for Bamboo andRattan, “Bamboo/Rattan Worldwide,” INBARNewsletter, vol. 4 (no date) and vol. 5 (1997).

37. Biological dynamics of fragmentedhabitats from William S. Alverson, WalterKuhlmann, and Donald M. Waller, Wild Forests:Conservation Biology and Public Policy(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); islandand area effects were first synthesized byRobert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson,The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).

38. Río Palenque details from C.H. Dodsonand A.H. Gentry, “Biological Extinction inWestern Ecuador,” Annals of the MissouriBotanical Garden, vol. 78, no. 2 (1991), andfrom Gentry, op. cit. note 10.

39. Richard B. Primack, Essentials ofConservation Biology (Sunderland, MA: SinauerAssociates, 1993).

40. Heywood and Davis, op. cit. note 2;Donald G. McNeil, Jr., “South Africa’s NewEnvironmentalism,” New York Times, 15 June1998.

41. Nitrogen overload effects from AnneSimon Moffatt, “Global Nitrogen OverloadProblem Grows Critical,” Science, 13 February1998; climate change synergies from ChrisBright, “Tracking the Ecology of ClimateChange,” in Lester R. Brown et al., State of theWorld 1997 (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1997).

42. Oliver L. Phillips and Alwyn H. Gentry,“Increasing Turnover Through Time inTropical Forests,” Science, 18 February 1994.

43. Conservation International study sum-marized in Lee Hannah et al., “A PreliminaryInventory of Human Disturbance of WorldEcosystems,” Ambio, July 1994, and from Lee

Hannah, John L. Carr, and Ali Lankerani,“Human Disturbance and Natural Habitat: ABiome Level Analysis of a Global Data Set,”Biodiversity and Conservation, vol. 4, 1995.

44. Walter and Gillett, op. cit. note 7;Zimmerer, op. cit. note 11.

45. Plucknett et al., op. cit. note 22.

46. Botanic Gardens Conservation Inter-national, “Introduction: Botanic Gardens &Conservation,” <http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/BGCI/babrief.htm>, viewed 17 June 1998.

47. Plucknett et al., op. cit. note 22;Botanical Gardens Conservation Interna-tional, op. cit. note 46.

48. Fowler and Mooney, op. cit. note 1;Plucknett et al., op. cit. note 22; MillenniumSeed Bank information from R.D. Smith, S.H.Linington, and G.E. Wechsberg, “TheMillennium Seed Bank, The Convention onBiological Diversity and the Dry Tropics,” inH.D.V. Prendergast et al., eds., Plants for Foodand Medicine (Kew, U.K.: Royal BotanicalGardens, 1998).

49. Plucknett et al., op. cit. note 22;Mooney, op. cit. note 1.

50. FAO, op. cit. note 14; Plucknett et al.,op. cit. note 22; Wright, op. cit. note 23; land-race coverage in gene banks is questioned by Fowler and Mooney, op. cit. note 1, and byPablo Eyzaguirre and Masa Iwanaga, “Farmer’sContribution to Maintaining Genetic Diversityin Crops, and Its Role Within the Total GeneticResources System,” in P. Eyzaguirre and M.Iwanaga, eds., Participatory Plant Breeding:Proceedings of a Workshop on Participatory PlantBreeding, 26–29 July 1995, Wageningen, TheNetherlands (Rome: International PlantGenetic Resources Institute, 1996).

51. Total annual cost for accession mainte-nance calculated from figure of $50 per acces-sion from Stephen B. Brush, “Valuing CropGenetic Resources,” Journal of Environment &Development, December 1996; Plucknett et al.,


op. cit. note 22; FAO, op. cit. note 14; Fowlerand Mooney, op. cit. note 1.

52. FAO, op. cit. note 14; Plucknett et al.,op. cit. note 22; Fowler and Mooney, op. cit.note 1.

53. Louise Sperling, “Results, Methods,and Institutional Issues in ParticipatorySelection: The Case of Beans in Rwanda,” inEyzaguirre and Iwanaga, op. cit. note 50.

54. Gary P. Nabhan, Enduring Seeds: NativeAmerican Agriculture and Wild PlantConservation (San Francisco, CA: North PointPress, 1989).

55. Global protected area total from IUCN,<http://www.iucn.org/info_and_news/index.html>, viewed 20 September 1998; Mt.Kinabalu from Heywood and Davis, op. cit.note 2; Manantlan from Hugh H. Iltis,“Serendipity in the Evolution of Biodiversity:What Good Are Weedy Tomatoes?” in EdwardO. Wilson, ed., Biodiversity (Washington, DC:National Academy Press, 1988).

56. Carel van Schaik, John Terborgh, andBarbara L. Dugelby, “The Silent Crisis: TheState of Rain Forest Nature Preserves,” inRandall Kramer, Carel van Schaik, and JulieJohnson, eds., Last Stand: Protected Areas and theDefense of Tropical Biodiversity (New York:Oxford University Press, 1997).

57. P. Ramakrishnan, “Conserving theSacred: From Species to Landscapes,” Nature& Resources, vol. 32, no. 1 (1996); West Africadetails from Aiah R. Lebbie and Raymond P.Guries, “Ethnobotanical Value and Conser-vation of Sacred Groves of the Kpaa Mende inSierra Leone,” Economic Botany, vol. 49, no. 3(1995); Pacific Islander information fromBalick and Cox, op. cit. note 3.

58. India information from MarkPoffenberger, Betsy McGean, and ArvindKhare, “Communities Sustaining India’sForests in the Twenty-first Century,” in MarkPoffenberger and Betsy McGean, eds., VillageVoices, Forest Choices: Joint Forest Management in

India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1996), and from Payal Sampat, “India’sChoice,” World Watch, July/August 1998; Belizeinformation from Balick and Cox, op. cit. note3, and from Rosita Arvigo, Sastun: MyApprenticeship with a Maya Healer (New York:Harper Collins, 1994).

59. Oliver Phillips, “Using and Conservingthe Rainforest,” Conservation Biology, March1993; Jason W. Clay, Generating Income andConserving Resources: 20 Lessons from the Field(Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund, 1996);Plotkin and Famolare, op. cit. note 10; CharlesM. Peters, Sustainable Harvest of Non-timberPlant Resources in Tropical Moist Forest: AnEcological Primer (Washington, DC: USAIDBiodiversity Support Program, 1994).

60. A.P. Vovides and C.G. Iglesias, “AnIntegrated Conservation Strategy for theCycad Dioon edule Lindl,” Biodiversity andConservation, vol. 3, 1994; Andrew P. Vovides,“Propagation of Mexican Cycads by PeasantNurseries,” Species, December 1997.

61. Vovides and Iglesias, op. cit. note 60;Vovides, op. cit. note 60; “CITES and the RoyalBotanic Gardens Kew,” <http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/ksheets/cites.html>, viewed 17 June1998.

62. Karl S. Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes:Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in thePeruvian Andes (Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996); Hopi example fromNabhan, op. cit. note 54; Mende examplefrom NRC, op. cit. note 10.

63. Zimbabwe example from Seema vanOosterhout, “What Does In Situ ConservationMean in the Life of a Small-Scale Farmer?Examples from Zimbabwe’s CommunalAreas,” in Loevinsohn and Sperling, UsingDiversity, op. cit. note 12; other informationfrom Loevinsohn and Sperling, Using Diversity,op. cit. note 12, and from Eyzaguirre andIwanaga, op. cit. note 50.

64. J.R. Whitcombe and A. Joshi, “The


Impact of Farmer Participatory Research onBiodiversity of Crops,” in Loevinsohn andSperling, Using Diversity, op. cit. note 12; JohnWhitcombe and Arun Joshi, “Farmer Parti-cipatory Approaches for Varietal Breeding andSelection and Linkages to the Formal SeedSector,” in Eyzaguirre and Iwanaga, op. cit.note 47; K.W. Riley, “Decentralized Breedingand Selection: Tool to Link Diversity andDevelopment,” in Loevinsohn and Sperling,Using Diversity, op. cit. note 12.

65. Eyzaguirre and Iwanaga, op. cit. note50; Swanson, Pearce, and Cervigni, op. cit.note 10; G.M. Listman et al., “Mexican andCIMMYT Researchers ‘Transform Diversity’ ofHighland Maize to Benefit Farmers with High-Yielding Seed,” Diversity, vol. 12, no. 2 (1996).

66. FAO, op. cit. note 14; RAFI, The LeipzigProcess: Food Security, Diversity, and Dignity in the Nineties, RAFI Occasional Paper Series(Winnipeg, MN, Canada: June 1996); Swanson,Pearce, and Cervigni, op. cit. note 10.

67. Mooney, op. cit. note 1; Brush, op. cit.note 51.

68. Mooney, op. cit. note 1; Darrell A.Posey, Traditional Resource Rights: InternationalInstruments for Protection and Compensation forIndigenous Peoples and Local Communities(Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 1996); John Tuxilland Gary Paul Nabhan, Plants and ProtectedAreas: A Guide to In Situ Management (London:Stanley Thornes Publishers, 1998); Brush, op.cit. note 51.

69. InBio details from Michel P. Pimbertand Jules Pretty, Parks, People and Professionals:Putting “Participation” Into Protected AreaManagement, UNRISD Discussion Paper #57(Geneva: United Nations Research Institutefor Social Development, 1995), and fromAnthony Artuso, “Capturing the ChemicalValue of Biodiversity: Economic Perspectivesand Policy Prescriptions,” in Francesca Grifoand Joshua Rosenthal, Biodiversity and HumanHealth (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997).

70. Drug development cost estimates fromShelton, Balick, and Laird, op. cit. note 27;bioprospecting details from Pimbert andPretty, op. cit. note 69, and from RAFI,“Biopiracy Update: The Inequitable Sharingof Benefits,” RAFI Communiqué, September/October 1997; traditional resource rights fromPosey, op. cit. note 68.

71. Crucible Group, op. cit. note 32;Swanson, Pearce, and Cervigni, op. cit. note10; Bees Butler and Robin Pistorius, “HowFarmers’ Rights Can Be Used to Adapt PlantBreeders’ Rights,” Biotechnology and Develop-ment Monitor, September 1996; Henry L.Shands, “Access: Bartering and BrokeringGenetic Resources,” in June F. MacDonald,ed., Genes for the Future: Discovery, Ownership,Access, NABC Report #7 (Ithaca, NY: NationalAgricultural Biotechnology Council, 1995);RAFI, Repeat the Term! Report on FAO’s GeneCommission in Rome June 8–12, 1998, RAFIOccasional Paper Series (Winnipeg, MN,Canada: July 1998).

72. Butler and Pistorius, op. cit. note 71;Crucible Group, op. cit. note 32; José LuisSolleiro, “Intellectual Property Rights: Key toAccess or Entry Barrier for DevelopingCountries,” in MacDonald, op. cit. note 71.

73. RAFI, “The Australian PBR Scandal,”RAFI Communiqué, January/February 1998;“Foreign Invasion,” Down to Earth, 28 February1998.

74. RAFI, op. cit. note 71.


Feeding Nine Billion

Lester R. Brown

When this century began, each Americanfarmer produced enough food to feedseven other people in the United Statesand abroad. Today, a U.S. farmer feeds 96people. Staggering gains in agriculturalproductivity in the United States and else-where have underpinned the emergenceof the modern world as we know it. Just asthe discovery of agriculture itself set thestage for the emergence of early civiliza-tion, these gains in agricultural productiv-ity have facilitated the emergence of ourmodern global civilization.1

This has been a revolutionary centuryfor world agriculture. Draft animals havelargely been replaced by tractors; tradi-tional varieties of corn, wheat, and ricehave given way to high-yielding varieties;and world irrigated area has multipliedsixfold since 1900. The use of chemicalfertilizers—virtually unheard of in 1900—now accounts for an estimated 40 percentof world grain production.2

Technological advances have tripledthe productivity of world cropland duringthis century. They have helped expandthe world grain harvest from less than 400million tons in 1900 to nearly 1.9 billiontons in 1998. Indeed, farmers haveexpanded grain production five times asmuch since 1900 as during the preceding10,000 years since agriculture began.3

A CENTURY OF GROWTH

The advances in agriculture that haveunderpinned the near quintupling of thegrain harvest during the twentieth centu-ry have come from essentially five tech-nologies, four of which were availablebefore 1900. Irrigation, one of the keycontributors, goes back several thousandyears, but the other advances are histori-cally much more recent. In 1847 Justusvon Leibig, a German agriculturalchemist, demonstrated that all the nutri-

7

We are grateful to the Winslow Foundation for itssupport of our research on the world food prospect.

ents that plants take from the soil couldbe replaced in mineral form. This secondadvance set the stage for the worldwideuse of chemical fertilizer to boost landproductivity by ensuring that nutrientshortages did not restrict yields.4

In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel, anAustrian monk breeding garden peas dis-covered the basic principles of genetics.This third advance laid the groundworkfor the spectacular gains in plant breed-ing of this century. And fourth, theJapanese succeeded in dwarfing cereals inthe 1880s, which eventually led to thehighly productive short-strawed wheatsand rices that are widely used throughoutthe world today.5

The fifth major technology that hascontributed to major advances in grainproduction is the development of hybridcorn, a breakthrough that came in 1917 atthe University of Connecticut AgriculturalExperiment Station. This highly produc-tive hybrid grown throughout the worldtoday helped make corn one of the bigthree cereals, along with wheat and rice.While wheat and rice are consumed large-ly by humans, most of the world’s cornharvest is fed to livestock and poultry.6

Another source of agricultural growthin this century is the exchange of cropsbetween the Old World and the New thatwas set in motion by ChristopherColumbus. Wheat and other small grainswere introduced into the New World bythe early European settlers. Corn, whichwas domesticated by the New World farm-ers, is now grown on every continent. The

potato, first domesticated by the Incans inthe Andes, is today a food staple in nearlyall temperate-zone countries. The soy-bean, which has surpassed the wheat cropin value in the United States, was intro-duced from China. Meanwhile in China,the production of corn has expanded to120 million tons per year, only slightly lessthan its 135-million-ton rice harvest.7

With livestock and poultry, the flow waspretty much one way, since the only resi-dent of the farmyard that was domesticat-ed in the New World is the turkey. Allother livestock and poultry—cattle,sheep, goats, pigs, horses, chickens, andducks—came from the Old World. Thisexchange of crops and livestock thatbegan five centuries ago contributes bothto the productivity of world agricultureand to the diversity of modern diets.8

This impressive century of growthunfortunately has not translated into ade-quate food supplies for all the Earth’sinhabitants. An estimated 841 millionpeople remain hungry and undernour-ished, a number that approaches the pop-ulation of the entire world when ThomasMalthus warned about the race betweenfood and people some 200 years ago.Unless the world can move quickly to sta-bilize population, the ranks of the hungryand undernourished could increase asthe new millennium unfolds.9

Historically, we have depended onthree basic systems for our food supply:oceanic fisheries, rangelands, and crop-lands. With oceanic fisheries and range-lands, two essentially natural systems, theworld appears to have “hit the wall.” Afterincreasing nearly fivefold since mid-cen-tury, the oceanic fish catch appears to beat or near its sustainable yield limit.Overfishing is now the rule, not theexception. The same can be said aboutthe world’s rangelands: after tripling from1950 to 1990, the production of beef andmutton has increased little in recent yearsas overgrazing has lowered rangelandproductivity in large areas of the world.10


The health effects of being overfedand underfed are the same—increased susceptibility to illness,reduced life expectancy, and reducedproductivity.

Continued population growth is thedominant source of mounting pressureon these natural systems. Some countries,such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan,are projected to nearly triple their popu-lations by 2050. Nigeria is expected tohave 339 million people in 2050—morethan there were in all of Africa in 1950.Ethiopia, controlling a large share of theheadwaters of the Nile, which is in effectthe food lifeline for the Sudan and Egypt,is projected to increase its populationfrom 62 million at present to 213 millionin the year 2050. India, a country withnearly a billion people and water tablesfalling almost everywhere, is due to addanother 600 million by 2050. And China,even with its efforts to slow populationgrowth, is still slated to add some 300 mil-lion people, more than currently live inthe United States, before its populationstabilizes in 2040.11

OVERFED AND UNDERFED

We live today in a nutritionally dividedworld, one where some people eat toomuch and others too little. Both areforms of malnutrition. Ironically, thosewho are overfed and overweight andthose who are underfed and underweightface similar health problems. And thehealth effects are the same—increasedsusceptibility to illness, reduced lifeexpectancy, and reduced productivity.

Worldwide, the number of overweightpeople could total 600 million. In theUnited States, the world’s largest industrialcountry, 97 million adults now fall into thiscategory, representing 55 percent of those20 years of age or older. Other countrieswith a particularly large share of over-weight people include Russia, at 57 per-cent, and the United Kingdom, at 51percent; other European societies are notfar behind. There are also substantial num-

bers of overweight people within somedeveloping countries. In Brazil, for exam-ple, more than 30 percent of the popula-tion is overweight. For China and India, incontrast, the figures are 8 and 7 percent,and for Ethiopia, a meager 2 percent.12

Unfortunately, the share of the popula-tion that is overweight in industrial soci-eties has increased in recent decades aslifestyles have become more sedentary. Insimplest terms, obesity occurs when foodenergy intake exceeds energy use. It canresult from too much food, too little exer-cise, or both. In the United States, theshare of those overweight is highestamong minority groups—those with lowincomes and limited education, whosediets are often high in fat and sugar.13

U.S. government researchers reportthat being overweight raises the risk ofmortality from high blood pressure, coro-nary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, andvarious forms of cancer. In the UnitedStates, obesity is the second leading causeof preventable deaths after smoking. Dr.Robert Eckel, speaking for the AmericanHeart Association, says that “obesity isbecoming a dangerous epidemic.”14

At the other end of the scale are thosewho get too little to eat. The U.N. Foodand Agriculture Organization, usingnational nutritional surveys, estimates that841 million people living in developingcountries suffer from basic protein-energymalnutrition—they do not get enoughprotein, enough calories, or enough ofboth. Infants and children lack the foodthey need to develop their full physicaland mental potential. Most of the adultsand children in this group do not have theenergy to maintain normal levels of physi-cal activity.15

As the world has become more eco-nomically integrated, the face of faminehas changed. Whereas famine was oncegeographically defined by poor harvests,today it is also economically defined by lowproductivity and incomes. It is foundamong those who are on the land but can-

Feeding Nine Billion (117)

not produce enough food or who are inthe cities and cannot buy enough. Famineconcentrated among the poor is less visi-ble than the more traditional geographi-cally focused version, but it is no less real.Malnutrition weakens the body’s immunesystem to the point where common child-hood ailments such as measles and diar-rhea are often fatal. Each day 19,000children die as a result of malnutritionand related illnesses.16

The world’s hungry children are con-centrated in two areas: the Indian sub-continent, where three fifths of allchildren suffer from malnutrition, andsub-Saharan Africa, where the equivalentfigure is 30 percent. Malnutrition amonginfants and children is of particular con-cern because anything that stunts theirphysical development may also stunt theirmental development. Malnutrition notonly exacts a high social cost, as measuredin human suffering, it also depreciates acountry’s human capital, its most valuableresource.17

Many developing countries have social-ly damaging levels of malnutrition, asmeasured by the share of children underage five that are underweight. (See Table7–1.) Among major countries, Bangla-desh and India are at the top of the list.Other populous countries with a largepercentage of underweight children areViet Nam, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Pakistan,and Nigeria.

Over the last half-century, the share ofthe world that is malnourished hasdeclined substantially. More than any-thing else, this has been due to risingfood production per person. Using grainproduction per person as the indicator,the world has made substantial progressin raising food consumption since 1950.There has been, however, a loss ofmomentum since 1984. World grain con-sumption per person, which averaged 247kilograms in 1950, had climbed to 342kilograms by 1984, a gain of 38 percent.(See Figure 7–1.) During the 14 years

since then it has declined to 319 kilo-grams, a drop of 7 percent. Althoughthere are obvious limitations to usingaverage grain supply as a measure, it isnonetheless much easier in a low-incomesociety to eliminate malnutrition whengrain production per person is rising thanwhen it is falling. Since more people areinvolved in grain production than in anyother economic activity in developingcountries, a rise in grain output per per-son means gains in both productivity andconsumption.18

This rising global tide of grain produc-tion from 1950 to 1984 lifted food con-sumption for many to a nutritionallyadequate level, but the extent of the risevaried widely by country and region of theworld. The trends in the two populationgiants—China and India—that togethercontain 35 percent of humanity contrastsharply. Although India has made impres-sive progress in raising grain production,the growth in output has been largely off-set by that of population, leaving nearlytwo thirds of its children malnourished.


Table 7–1. Share of Children Under FiveYears of Age Who Are Underweight in

Selected Countries

Country Share of Underweight(percent)

Bangladesh 66India 64Viet Nam 56Ethiopia 48Indonesia 40Pakistan 40Nigeria 36Philippines 33Tanzania 29Thailand 26China 21Zimbabwe 11Egypt 10Brazil 7

SOURCE: World Health Organization, Global Databaseon Child Growth, Geneva, 1997, based on nationalsurveys taken between 1987 and 1995.

As a result, the annual grain harvest perperson is still slightly less than 200 kilo-grams per person, providing the averageIndian with little more than a starch-dom-inated subsistence diet. At 200 kilograms,or roughly one pound per day, nearly allgrain must be consumed directly just tosatisfy basic food energy needs, leaving lit-tle to convert into animal protein.19

In China, by contrast, the impressiveprogress in boosting agricultural outputafter the economic reforms of 1978, com-bined with a dramatic slowing of popula-tion growth, raised grain production perperson from roughly 200 to nearly 300kilograms. This increase, accompanied byrecord gains in income, let China bothraise the amount of grain consumeddirectly and convert substantial quantitiesof grain into pork, poultry, and eggs, thuseliminating much of the protein-caloriemalnutrition of two decades ago. Whilethe share of underweight children in Indiaremains at 64 percent, that in China haddropped to 21 percent by the late 1980s,when the last nutritional surveys weretaken in these two countries. Given thedoubling of incomes in China during the1990s, continuing impressive gains in agri-culture, and the latest life expectancy esti-

mate of 71 years, the portion of childrenmalnourished has likely dropped muchfurther. Many of those still malnourishedin China live in the interior of the country,often in semiarid regions where rainfall isso low that modern agricultural technolo-gies can make only a modest contributionto raising food output.20

Grain consumption per person varieswidely by country (see Table 7–2), provid-ing a rough indicator of nutritional ade-quacy. The annual consumption figure,including grain consumed indirectly inthe form of livestock products, rangesfrom just under 200 kilograms to morethan 900 kilograms. Ironically, the health-iest people in the world are not those atthe top of this ladder, but rather those inthe middle. Life expectancy in Italy, forexample, where on average people get 400kilograms of grain per year, is higher thanin the United States, which uses twice asmuch grain and has much higher healthcare expenditures per person. The healthof those who live too high on the foodchain often suffers from excessive con-sumption of fat-rich livestock products.21

The continued existence of hungertoday is largely the result of low productiv-ity, which manifests itself in low incomesand poverty. For the world as a whole,incomes have risen dramatically over thelast century, climbing from $1,300 per person in 1900 to more than $6,000 perperson in 1998 (in 1997 dollars). This ris-ing economic tide has lifted most ofhumanity out of poverty and hunger, butunfortunately it has been uneven, leavingmany still suffering from poverty and fromhunger and malnutrition.22

The World Bank estimates that 1.3 bil-lion people live in absolute poverty, withincomes of $1 a day or less. Most of thesepeople live in rural areas. Many try to gaina livelihood from plots of land that havebeen divided and subdivided as popula-tion has increased. Others have too littleland to make a living because landowner-ship is concentrated in the hands of a


1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 20000

100

200

300

400Kilograms

Source: USDA

Figure 7–1. World Grain Production PerPerson, 1950–98

small segment of the population. Stillanother group consists of rural landless—those who have no land of their own butwho work on that of others, often on aseasonal basis. For other individuals, soilerosion and other forms of land degrada-tion are undermining rural livelihoods.Perhaps the fastest growing segment ofthe absolute poor are those who live inthe squatter settlements that ring so manyThird World cities.23

Consumers the world over have bene-fited from declining real grain prices overthe last half-century, but there is now apossibility that this trend could bereversed as aquifer depletion spreads,shrinking irrigation water supplies. This isparticularly important in major countriessuch as China and India, which rely onirrigated land for half or more of theirfood and where groundwater depletionwill inevitably lead to irrigation cutbacks.There are also scores of smaller countriesfaced with aquifer depletion, many ofthem in North Africa and the MiddleEast, where most of the food comes fromirrigated land.

Fortunately for those on the lowerrungs of the global economic ladder, thedeclining real price of grain created anideal environment for easing hunger andmalnutrition. If this twentieth-centurytrend of falling grain prices is reversed as

we enter the new millennium, as nowseems likely, it could impoverish morepeople in a shorter period of time thanany event in history.

If a strategy to eliminate hunger is tosucceed, it must simultaneously focus onaccelerating the shift to smaller families inorder to stabilize population sooner ratherthan later, raise investment in the ruralareas where poverty is concentrated, anddesign economic policies to distributewealth more equitably. Any strategy thatdoes not focus on the social investmentneeds in education and health and in newinvestments that create productive employ-ment is not likely to accomplish its goal.

LAND: A FINITE RESOURCE

The option of expanding world grain production by cultivating more land hasvirtually disappeared. The world’s grainharvested area increased from 587 millionhectares in 1950 to the historical high of732 million hectares in 1981, a gain of 25percent. Since then, however, the grainarea has shrunk to 690 million hectares, a6-percent drop, as it was converted to non-farm uses, abandoned because of soil ero-sion, or shifted to other crops such as


Table 7–2. Annual Per Capita Grain Use and Consumption of Livestock Products in Selected Countries, 1998

ConsumptionCountry Grain Use1 Beef Pork Poultry Mutton Milk2 Eggs

(kilograms) (kilograms) (number)

United States 900 44 31 47 1 264 284Italy 400 25 35 19 2 215 215China 300 5 35 10 2 6 289India 200 1 — 1 1 75 30

1Rounded to nearest 100 kilograms. 2Total consumption, including that used to produce cheese, yogurt,and ice cream.SOURCE: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Production, Supply, and Distribution, electronic database, Washington,DC, updated October 1998.

soybeans. During the next half-centurythe grain harvested area is not expectedto change much, with gains and lossesessentially offsetting each other.24

Gains in the grain harvested area inthe last 50 years have come from clearingnew land for agriculture and fromexpanding irrigation, which both allowedarid land to be brought under cultivationand also facilitated an increase in multi-ple cropping. In the Indian Punjab, forexample, irrigation and earlier-maturingvarieties have made the double croppingof winter wheat and rice commonplace.Similarly, large areas of central Chinagrow winter wheat and corn as a summercrop. These gains have partly offset landlosses from the conversion to nonfarmuses and from soil erosion and otherforms of degradation.

In the next 50 years, some furthergains in cultivated area are likely. If grainprices rise in Brazil, for instance, parts ofthe cerrado—a semiarid region in theeast central part of the country—will like-ly be brought under the plow. In Africa,there are opportunities for expanding thecultivated area in the Congo River basin,particularly on its outer fringes. And inAsia, the outer islands of Indonesia offersome opportunities for increasing cultiva-tion, although as in Brazil, the additionalland is typically marginal in nature. Theinherent fertility of nearly all this land islow, requiring special efforts to maintainproductivity.

Heavy cropland losses during the nexthalf-century are expected in countriessuch as India, where the construction ofhousing alone will claim a substantial areaof cropland. Other countries are losingcropland because of degradation.Kazakhstan, for example, abandonednearly half its grainland between 1980and 1998 as a result of soil erosion andother forms of land degradation, letting itrevert to rangeland. Other countries inCentral Asia, North Africa, and theAndean countries of Latin America are

also losing cropland to degradation.25

Between 1950 and 1998, the grain har-vested area per person worldwide shrankfrom 0.23 hectares to 0.12 hectares. (SeeFigure 7–2.) For most countries this wasnot a problem because unprecedentedrises in land productivity more than offsetthe shrinkage. Given the marked loss ofmomentum in raising land productivitysince 1990, however, there is reason todoubt whether future increases can offsetthe projected shrinkage in cropland perperson to 0.07 hectares by 2050.26

A look at this situation for individualcountries is both illuminating and worry-ing. Assume, for purposes of projection,that India’s cropland area will not changeby 2050; the addition of 600 million peo-ple there and the land they need for hous-ing and to meet other nonfood needs,plus land required for industrialization,will almost certainly reduce cropland areaper person below 0.07 hectares. (SeeTable 7–3.) India—which has alreadytripled its wheat yields and doubled itsrice yields—will find it difficult to sustainthe rises in land productivity needed tooffset the continuing shrinkage in percapita grain area.27

China is in a somewhat better position


0.05

0.10

0.15

0.20

0.25Hectares

Source: USDA

1950 1970 1990 2010 2030 2050

Figure 7–2. Grain Area Per Person, 1950–98,With Projections to 2050


because its projected population growthis much lower than that of India. Its grain-land per person is expected to shrinkfrom 0.07 to 0.06 hectares. The questionfor China is not so much whether its landand other agricultural resources willenable it to feed 1.5 billion people, butwhether it can feed 1.5 billion affluentpeople who are consuming large quanti-ties of livestock products.

The countries likely to be in the mosttrouble over the next half-century arethose in the second tier in terms of size—nations that are projected to surpass the300 million mark before 2050 (Pakistan,Nigeria, and Indonesia), plus Ethiopia,which will cross the 200 million threshold.Pakistan—with 357 million people in2050, more than live in the United Statesand Canada combined today—will see itsgrain harvested area shrink to 0.03hectares per person, or less than onetenth of an acre. Every seven Pakistaniswill have just one fifth of a hectare or halfan acre on which to produce their entirefood supply—less than a typical suburbanbuilding lot in the United States. Nigeria,

whose current population of 115 millionis projected to expand to 339 million, willsee its grainland per person shrink to 0.05hectares.28

Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Iran are alsofacing shrinkages of their grain harvestedarea per person to dangerously smallareas. Egypt, too, will be facing a difficult situation. As its population climbsto 114 million, its grainland per person willshrink from 0.04 hectares to 0.02 hectares.Since it is already importing nearly half itsgrain, its dependence on grain fromabroad seems certain to climb.29

Aside from the loss of grainland tononfarm uses and to soil erosion andother forms of degradation, a substantialarea of grainland is being lost to oilseeds,importantly the soybean. As incomes haverisen in lower-income countries, thedemand for vegetable oil for cooking hasescalated. This, combined with the rapid-ly rising demand for soybean meal amongthe more affluent as a protein supple-ment for livestock and poultry feeds, hasincreased the demand for soybeans near-ly ninefold since 1950. Because soybeansare a legume and therefore not as respon-sive as grains are to applications of nitro-gen fertilizer, their yield per hectare hasrisen much more slowly. To satisfy thisenormous growth in the global appetitefor soybeans, the area planted in this crophas jumped from 14 million hectares in1990 to 69 million hectares in 1997, withmuch of the growth coming at theexpense of grain. (See Figure 7–3.)30

In the last 50 years, world agriculturehas been dominated by surplus capacity.As a result, farmers in the United Stateswere paid to idle part of their croplandunder commodity supply-managementprograms until 1995, when the programswere dismantled. A much smaller areaidled in Europe beginning in the early1990s has now been largely returned toproduction. One of the legacies of thislong-standing surplus production capaci-ty is that land is often thought of as a sur-

Table 7–3. Grain Harvested Area Per Personin Selected Countries in 1950, With

Projections for 2000 and 20501

Country 1950 2000 2050(hectares)

United States 0.41 0.23 0.19Brazil 0.34 0.11 0.08India 0.28 0.10 0.07Bangladesh 0.29 0.10 0.06China 0.16 0.07 0.06Iran 0.61 0.13 0.06Nigeria 0.52 0.13 0.05Indonesia 0.18 0.07 0.04Ethiopia 0.39 0.11 0.03Pakistan 0.31 0.08 0.03

11998 grain area used for all years.SOURCE: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Production,Supply, and Distribution, electronic database,Washington, DC, updated October 1998; UnitedNations, World Population Prospects: The 1996 Revision(New York: 1996).

plus commodity. Given this prevailing psychology, the world may have difficultycoming to grips with the prospect of aworldwide scarcity of cropland, and of theneed to protect this resource from con-version to nonfarm uses.31

The effects of the acute croplandscarcity emerging in some countriescould affect many other areas of humanactivity. For example, it could fundamen-tally alter transportation policy, favoringthe development of more land-efficientbicycle-rail transport systems at theexpense of the automobile. It could affectthe conversion of cropland to recreation-al uses, such as golf, one of the more land-intensive sports. Indeed, Viet Nam hasalready banned the construction of moregolf courses because of land scarcity.

WATER: EMERGING CONSTRAINTON GROWTH

The first farmers were concerned aboutthe amount of grain produced relative tothe amount that they sowed. For them,seed was the scarce resource. Later it was

the availability of fertile land to till thatconstrained growth in output. As landbecame scarce, farmers began to calculateyield in terms of the grain produced perunit of land cultivated, and grain yieldstoday are routinely reported in tons perhectare or bushels per acre. As we moveinto the new millennium, with waterscarcity emerging as the dominant con-straint on efforts to expand food produc-tion, we may see another shift in the focusof yield calculations—namely to theamount of water required per ton of grainproduced.

From the beginning of irrigated agri-culture several thousand years ago in theMiddle East until 1900, the world’s irri-gated area expanded to an estimated 48million hectares. Then growth in irriga-tion began to accelerate, nearly doublingby 1950 to 94 million hectares. But the biggrowth has come during the last half ofthis century as the irrigated areaincreased to some 260 million hectares,nearly tripling the mid-century level. Now40 percent of world food productioncomes from irrigated land. The growth inirrigation has permitted the expansion ofagriculture into arid regions, increasedmultiple cropping in monsoonal climatesby facilitating cropping during the dryseason, and allowed a substantial expan-sion in fertilizer use.32

The remarkable growth in irrigatedagriculture since mid-century divides intotwo distinct eras—from 1950 to 1978,when irrigation was expanding faster thanpopulation, and since 1978, when itsgrowth has fallen behind that of popula-tion. The irrigated area per personreached a historic high in 1978 of 0.047hectares. (See Figure 7–4.) It then beganto decline slowly, falling to 0.044 hectaresin 1997, a drop of 6 percent.33

Irrigated agriculture is concentrated inAsia, which has some of the world’s greatrivers—the Indus, the Ganges, theYangtze, the Yellow, and the Brahma-putra. Originating at high elevations and


1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 20000

20

40

60

80Million Hectares

Source: USDA

Figure 7–3. World Soybean Harvested Area,1950–98

traveling long distances, they provide anabundance of opportunities for dams andthe diversion of water into networks ofgravity-fed canals and ditches. Two thirdsof the world’s irrigated area is in Asia.Roughly 70 percent of the grain harvest inChina comes from irrigated land, whilethe equivalent figure in India is 50 percentand in the United States, 15 percent.34

As the 1990s have unfolded, evidenceof water scarcity is mounting. Water tablesare falling on every continent—in thesouthern Great Plains of the UnitedStates, the southwestern United States,much of North Africa and the MiddleEast, most of India, and almost every-where in China that the land is flat. A sur-vey covering 1991 to 1996, for instance,indicates that the water table under thenorth China plain is dropping an averageof 1.5 meters, or roughly 5 feet, a year.Since this area accounts for nearly 40 per-cent of China’s grain harvest, this is a mat-ter of some concern to the leaders inBeijing.35

A similar situation exists in India.David Seckler and his colleagues at theInternational Irrigation ManagementInstitute in Sri Lanka estimate that under-ground water withdrawals in India are at

least double the rate of aquifer recharge.They report that water tables are falling at1–3 meters (3–10 feet) per year almosteverywhere in India. Seckler describesIndia as being on a free ride, expandingits agriculture by depleting undergroundwater reserves. At some point, he says, this“house of cards” will collapse. When itdoes, India’s grain harvest could fall by asmuch as 25 percent. In a country wherethe supply and demand for food is alreadyprecariously balanced, and where 18 mil-lion people are added each year, this isnot a happy prospect.36

Many major rivers run dry before theyreach the sea. Some have disappearedentirely. In the southwestern UnitedStates, the Colorado River rarely everreaches the Gulf of California. In CentralAsia, the Amu Darya, one of the two riversfeeding the Aral Sea, is drained dry byUzbek and Turkmen cotton farmers longbefore it gets to the sea. As a result, theAral Sea is shrinking and may eventuallydisappear, known to future generationsonly from old maps.37

The Yellow River, the cradle of Chinesecivilization, ran dry for the first time inChina’s 3,000-year history in 1972, failingto reach the sea for some 15 days. Overthe next dozen years, it ran dry intermit-tently, but since 1985 has run dry for partof each year. In 1997, it failed to reach thesea for seven months out of the year.Originating on the Tibetan Plateau, theYellow River flows through eightprovinces en route to the sea. The last ofthese, Shandong Province, whichaccounts for a fifth of China’s corn har-vest and a seventh of its wheat harvest,gets half of its irrigation water from theYellow River. The remaining half comesfrom irrigation wells.38

With hundreds of major projectsplanned in upstream provinces to with-draw water for industrial and urban use,for power projects, and for irrigation, theYellow River could one day become aninland river, never reaching the sea.


0.010

0.020

0.030

0.040

0.050Hectares

Source: FAO, Census Bureau

1900 1930 1960 1990 2020 2050

Figure 7–4. World Irrigated Area Per Person,1900–98, With Projections to 2050

Official policy stresses the need to devel-op the economically depressed interiorprovinces, and Beijing is letting theseprojects continue even though it maymean the eventual sacrifice of irrigatedagriculture in the lower reaches of theYellow River basin.

Little water from the Nile makes it tothe Mediterranean, and the Ganges bare-ly makes it to the Bay of Bengal in the dryseason. With the collective population ofEthiopia, the Sudan, and Egypt—thethree dominant countries in the NileRiver basin—projected to grow from 157million today to 388 million over the nexthalf-century, competition for the Nilewaters is certain to intensify. The samecan be said about the Ganges, wherethere is keen rivalry between India andBangladesh for water.39

Historically, land scarcity traditionallyshaped grain trade patterns. Now waterscarcity is beginning to shape them aswell. North Africa and the Middle East, aregion where every country faces watershortages, has become the world’s fastestgrowing grain import market during the1990s. To import a ton of wheat is toimport 1,000 tons of water. In effect, forcountries facing water shortages, the mostefficient way to import water is to importgrain. In 1997, the water required to pro-duce the grain and other farm productsimported into North Africa and theMiddle East was roughly equal to theannual flow of the Nile River.40

Worldwide, roughly 70 percent of allwater diverted from rivers or pumpedfrom underground is used for irrigation,while 20 percent goes to industry, and 10percent to residential uses. As countriespush up against the limits of their watersupplies, the contest between these threeend-use sectors intensifies. A thousandtons of water can be used in agriculture toproduce a ton of wheat worth $200, or itcan be used in industry to expand outputby $14,000—70 times as much. Similarly,if the goal is to produce jobs, using scarce

water in industry is far more productivethan using it for irrigation. Because theeconomics of water use do not favor agri-culture, this sector almost always loses.41

In an effort to assess the water prospectin China more precisely, Dennis Engi atSandia National Laboratory has modeledthe supply/demand balances of all theriver basins in the country, projectingthem into the future. His figures showhuge water deficits developing in some keyriver basins. The combination of aquiferdepletion and diversion of irrigation waterto nonfarm uses indicates that irrigatedagriculture may be phased out in some ofthe more water-short regions of China. By2010, for example, irrigated agriculturecould virtually disappear in China’s Hairiver basin as growing urban and industri-al water demand in Beijing, Tianjin, andother cities in the basin absorbs the waternow used in agriculture.42

Perhaps more than anything else,growing water shortages may hamstringfuture efforts to expand food production.Water used for irrigation raises land pro-ductivity both directly and indirectly, byraising the potential for using fertilizer.And in arid regions it determines theamount of land that can be cultivated.The bottom line is that if we are facing afuture of water scarcity, we are also facinga future of food scarcity.

RAISING LAND PRODUCTIVITY

When the last half of this century began,the average world grain yield per hectarewas just over one ton—1.06 tons, to beprecise. By 1998, it had climbed to 2.73tons per hectare. Grain yields vary widelyamong countries. But in a world wherefarmers everywhere are drawing on thesame backlog of agricultural technology,the variations that were once explainedlargely by uneven levels of economic


development are today explained largelyby differences in natural conditions, suchas temperature, rainfall, day length, solarintensity, and inherent soil fertility.43

Take wheat, for example. Three devel-oping countries—Egypt, Mexico, andChina—are in the top five listed in Table7–4 in wheat yield per hectare. And twoindustrial countries—Canada andAustralia—are in the bottom five. This isbecause Egypt, Mexico, and China irri-gate most of their wheat, while in Canadaand Australia the wheat is rainfed andgrown in areas of low rainfall.

The threefold yield difference betweenthe United Kingdom and the UnitedStates is also largely a difference in rain-fall. Soil moisture conditions are simplymuch more favorable in the UnitedKingdom. The two countries at the top ofthe list—the United Kingdom andFrance—are blessed with fertile soils,good rainfall, and, because of theirnortherly latitude, long days during thesummer growing season.

By contrast, Kazakhstan—at the bot-tom of the list—relies on some of themost marginal cropland in the world. Itwas the site of the Soviet Virgin LandsProject in the 1950s, a project that pushedcultivation into a semiarid grasslandregion that could neither produce highyields nor sustain cultivation over the longterm. Much of the land plowed in the1950s is so vulnerable to wind erosion thatit is being given over to grazing sheep.Although Kazakhstan has since 1980abandoned almost half its grainland (themore marginal land), the average yield onthe land that remains in cultivation, themore productive land, is only 0.7 tons perhectare.44

Solar intensity is another explanationof differences in yields. For example, riceyields even in an agriculturally advancedcountry like Japan are scarcely 5 tons perhectare, even though all the rice there isirrigated. The principal constraint onyields in Japan, and indeed in much ofthe rest of Asia, is solar intensity. Becauserice is grown during the summer mon-soon season, there is extensive cloudcover during the growing season. Thishelps explain why rice yields in Californiaare 30 percent higher than those inJapan. It is not that California’s farmersare more skilled at growing rice; they justhave the advantage of intense sunlightthroughout the entire growing season.45

The three keys to the rises in land pro-ductivity since mid-century are plantbreeding, the spread of irrigation, andgrowth in the use of fertilizers. The prin-cipal contribution of plant breeders hasbeen to increase the share of photosyn-thate, the product of photosynthesis, thatgoes into seed production. Originallydomesticated wheats converted roughly20 percent of photosynthate into seed,with the remainder used to sustain leaves,stem, and roots. With the more produc-tive modern wheat varieties now convert-ing more than 50 percent ofphotosynthate into seed, there is not


Table 7–4. Wheat Yield Per Hectare in KeyProducing Countries, 19971

Country Tons

United Kingdom 7.7France 7.2Egypt 5.7Mexico 4.1China 3.8Poland 3.4United States 2.7Ukraine 2.6India 2.6Argentina 2.4Canada 2.3Pakistan 2.1Australia 2.0Russia 1.4Kazakhstan 0.7

1Yield shown for 1997 is the average of 1996–98.SOURCE: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Production,Supply, and Distribution, electronic database,Washington, DC, updated October 1998.

much remaining potential for increase,since scientists estimate that the absoluteupper limit is 62 percent. Anythingbeyond that would begin to deprive therest of the plant of the energy needed tofunction, thus reducing yields. Whethereven 60 percent can be reached in prac-tice remains to be seen.46

A lack of understanding of the physiol-ogy of increasing crop yields has led someobservers to conclude that biotechnologycould yield another generation of high-yielding varieties—ones that could againdouble or triple yields of existing vari-eties. Unfortunately, traditional plantbreeders have done most of the thingsthat are physiologically possible to raisethe yield potential of the principal cropssuch as wheat, corn, and rice. The maincontribution of genetic engineering toagriculture in the future is likely to be inthe breeding of disease- and insect-resis-tant varieties. This will contribute to addi-tional production only if these biologicalpest controls are more effective than thechemical controls now used.47

Another area in which biotechnologymight be able to contribute to greaterproduction is in breeding crop varietiesthat are more drought-resistant or salt-tol-erant. In each of these, however, theremay be some physiological constraints onhow far genetic engineers can go. This iscertainly true with increasing the waterefficiency of crops, since water use is tiedso directly to the basic physiologicalprocesses of plants, such as photosynthe-sis, nutrient uptake, and plant tempera-ture regulation.

Some of the natural constraints onland productivity can be alleviated. Forexample, soil moisture can be increasedby irrigation. Soil fertility can beincreased by fertilization. Indeed, oneconstraint, the availability of nutrients,has been eliminated in much of the worldby fertilizer use. Between 1950 and 1998,world fertilizer use increased from 14 mil-lion tons to roughly 130 million tons, an

increase of more than ninefold. But inmany agriculturally advanced countriesfertilizer use is leveling off as the responseto additional applications diminishes. Insome countries—including the UnitedStates, Japan, and most of those inWestern Europe—fertilizer use hasplateaued, and it may soon do so inChina. In a country like the United States,where fertilizer use has not increasedsince 1980, applying more fertilizer haslittle or no effect on yields.48

In assessing the future prospect forraising land productivity, it is useful tocontrast conditions at the middle of thiscentury with those as we prepare to beginthe next half-century. In 1950, farmerswere gaining access to new high-yieldingvarieties, including hybrid corn, followedshortly thereafter by widely adapted dwarfwheats and rices. Since then, as noted,world irrigated area nearly tripled andfertilizer use increased ninefold. Theshare of photosynthate going to seed wasraised to more than half in the most pro-ductive varieties. New varieties and rapid-ly expanding irrigation and fertilizer useenabled many countries to double ortriple their yields of wheat, corn, and rice.

In looking ahead at the next 50 years,there is little potential for further increas-ing the share of photosynthate going toseed. World irrigated area is not expectedto grow very much, if at all, since it seemscertain to shrink in some countries. Andworld fertilizer use will continue to grow,albeit much more slowly, with the remain-ing growth concentrated in the Indiansubcontinent, Africa, and Latin America.The net effect of these conditions is that


California’s rice farmers have theadvantage of intense sunlightthroughout the entire growing season.

the rise in land productivity that hasslowed so dramatically in the 1990s willprobably slow further as the next centurygets under way. Already some countrieshave experienced a plateauing or nearplateauing of the rise in yields, such aswith wheat in the United States and ricein Japan. Some developing countries,such as Mexico with wheat and SouthKorea with rice, are also seeing their yieldrises taper off.49

An analysis of the trend in world grainyield from 1950 through 1998 shows thishalf-century span dividing into two dis-tinct eras. Between 1950 and 1990, the yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 per-cent a year, but during the 1990s it hasincreased by only 1.1 percent a year. (SeeTable 7–5.)

History will likely see the four-decadespan from 1950 to 1990 as the golden agein raising world cropland productivity.But the slowdown since then does notcome as a surprise, given the inability ofscientists to develop a second generationof high-yielding grain varieties that willagain double or triple yields. With theshare of photosynthate going to seedalready quite high and approaching thephysiological limit in some situations, rais-ing yields becomes ever more difficult.The key question the world must now faceis, Will the deceleration in the rise ingrainland productivity that has beenunder way since 1990 continue, falling

further and further behind populationgrowth as we move into the next century?

CHANGING COURSE

As we prepare for the new millennium,there is a rising tide of concern about thelong-term food prospect. This can be seenin the frustration of plant breeders whoare running into physiological constraintsas they attempt to develop the new high-er-yielding varieties needed to restorerapid growth in the world food supply.And it can be seen in the apprehensive-ness of political leaders in countrieswhere the food supply depends heavily onirrigation but the aquifers are beingdepleted.

This mounting concern is also evidentin the intelligence community inWashington, where the National Intelli-gence Council (NIC), the umbrella overall U.S. intelligence agencies, has commis-sioned a major interdisciplinary assess-ment of China’s food prospect by aprominent group of scientists. Thisresearch effort was triggered by the real-ization that if China were to turn to theworld market for massive quantities ofgrain, it could drive world grain prices upto a level that would create unprecedent-ed political instability in Third Worldcities. The NIC study—the most compre-hensive interdisciplinary assessment everundertaken of China’s food prospect—concluded in its “most likely” scenario thatby 2025 China would need to import 175million tons of grain. This quantity, whichapproaches current world grain exports of200 million tons, could overwhelm thecapacity of exporting countries.50

Two major food issues face the world asit enters the twenty-first century. One ishow to feed adequately those who sufferfrom chronic hunger and malnutrition,people who do not get enough proteinand energy to develop their full physical


Table 7–5. World Grain Yield Gains, 1950–90and 1990–97

Yield1 Annual Increase(tons per hectare) (percent)

1950 1.061990 2.48 2.11997 2.70 1.1

1Yields for 1990 and 1997 are three-year averages.SOURCE: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Production,Supply, and Distribution, electronic database,Washington, DC, updated October 1998.

and mental potential. The second is howto maintain the price stability needed inworld grain markets if economic progressis not to be disrupted.51

The worst mistake political leaders canmake entering the new millennium is tounderestimate the dimensions of the foodchallenge. To begin with, oceanic fish-eries and rangelands—the two leadingsources of growth in the animal proteinsupply over the last half-century—haveboth apparently reached their limits. Thismeans that all future growth in the worldfood supply must come from croplands,but irrigation water supplies may notexpand much further and the response toadditional fertilizer is diminishing inmany countries. The backlog of unusedtechnology to raise land productivity isshrinking. This does not mean that foodproduction cannot be increased. It can beand it will. But it is becoming much moredifficult to sustain the rapid growth need-ed to keep up with increased demand.

Given these challenging new dimen-sions of the food prospect, governmentsfacing continuing population growthneed to calculate their future populationcarrying capacity by projecting the landavailable for crops, the amount of waterthat will be available for irrigation overthe long term, and the likely yield ofcrops, based on what the most agricultur-ally advanced countries with similar grow-ing conditions have achieved. This willprovide the basis for a public dialogue onpopulation policy. Once projections offuture food supplies are completed, soci-eties can consider what combination ofpopulation size and consumption levelsthey want, recognizing that there aretradeoffs between the two.

Supply-side initiatives are still impor-tant in achieving an acceptable balancebetween food and people. But victory inthe battle to eradicate hunger and mal-nutrition may now depend heavily ondemand-side initiatives. The world stillneeds to invest more in agricultural

research, in agricultural infrastructure,and in providing credit to small farmers,especially women in agriculture. But inaddition, there is now a need for substan-tial demand-side initiatives in slowingpopulation growth and using grain andwater more efficiently.

The most recent U.N. population pro-jections show the world adding 3.3 billionpeople during the first half of the nextcentury. All these people will be added inthe developing world, with a dispropor-tionate share being added in countriesthat are already densely populated. Areview of the U.N. projections shows someof the biggest increases slated for theIndian subcontinent and sub-SaharanAfrica—the two regions where most of theworld’s hungry people are concentrated.As noted earlier, India is projected to add nearly 600 million people to its current population during the next half-century. Pakistan, meanwhile, will gofrom 148 million to 357 million by 2050. In Africa, Nigeria will go from 122million at present to 339 million, whileEthiopia will more than triple its population, going from 62 million to 213 million.52

Given the limits to the carrying capaci-ty of each country’s land and waterresources, every national governmentneeds a carefully articulated and ade-quately supported population policy, onethat takes into account the country’s car-rying capacity at whatever consumptionlevel citizens decide on. As Harvard biol-ogist Edward O. Wilson observes in his


Once projections of future food supplies are completed, societies canconsider what population size andconsumption levels they want.

landmark book The Diversity of Life, “Everynation has an economic policy and a for-eign policy. The time has come to speakmore openly of a population policy.… what, in the judgment of its informedcitizenry, is the optimal population?”53

Making sure that couples everywherehave access to family planning is one keystep in achieving an acceptable balancebetween food and people. The Inter-national Conference on Population andDevelopment held in Cairo in 1994 con-cluded that providing quality reproductivehealth care services to all those in need indeveloping countries would cost about $17billion in the year 2000. By 2015, thiswould climb to $22 billion. The agreementwas for donor countries to provide onethird of the funds, with developing coun-tries providing the remaining two thirds.Unfortunately, industrial countries—mostimportantly, the United States—havereneged on this commitment.54

Educating young females is a key toaccelerating this shift to smaller families.In every society for which data are avail-able, the more education women have,the fewer children they have. Closelyrelated to the need for education ofyoung females is the need to provideequal opportunities for women in allphases of national life.55

Another demand-side initiative tolighten pressure on world food supplies isfor those who are consuming health-dam-aging quantities of fat-rich livestock prod-ucts to move down the food chain. Asnoted earlier, the healthiest people in theworld are not those whose diets are domi-nated by livestock products but those who

consume livestock products in modera-tion, thus satisfying needs for protein in away that does not damage their health. Insocieties with a high incidence of obesity,such as the United States, a government-sponsored nutritional education programto encourage the obese to eat less meatand other foods rich in fats could improvehealth, increase life expectancy, andreduce health care costs.

A closely related demand-side initiativethat can help alleviate long-term pres-sures on land and water resources is toaccelerate the shift to more-efficientmeans of converting grain into animalprotein. Now that there is little prospectof increasing the animal protein yield ofoceanic fisheries and rangelands, nearlyall future gains must come from feeding,whether it be fish in ponds or cattle infeedlots. At this point, relative conversionefficiencies come into play. For cattle in feedlots, an additional kilogram of live weight requires roughly 7 kilogramsof grain. For pork, it is close to 4 kilo-grams of grain per kilogram of liveweight. For poultry, it is just over 2, and for the leading species used for fishfarming, such as carp, catfish, and tilapia,it is less than 2.56

Water scarcity is becoming a more cen-tral constraint than land scarcity onefforts to expand food production. Thereis a lot of land, including deserts, thatcould be made to bloom if water wereavailable for irrigation, but the potentialfor developing new water resources is solimited that future gains in irrigation nowdepend more on increasing the efficiencyof water use than on increasing supply.This means both using more water-effi-cient irrigation technologies and shiftingto more water-efficient food staples. Insome countries, for example, this maymean eating more wheat and sorghumand less rice. And since water efficiency ineffect equals grain efficiency, respondingto water scarcity also argues for encourag-ing the production of poultry and fish


Restructuring the world water econo-my holds the key to eliminatinghunger.


over beef and pork—trends that arealready in evidence. If poultry and fishproduction are twice as grain-efficient aspork production, they are also twice aswater-efficient, since grain equals water.

Thus, restructuring the world watereconomy holds the key to eliminatinghunger. One of the most frequently pro-posed remedies for water scarcity is waterpricing—charging users enough for waterto ensure that it is used efficiently.Although there is wide agreement amongwater analysts of the need to shift to thissystem, few governments have adoptedeffective water pricing policies. Waterpricing would enhance the use of irriga-tion practices such as sprinklers, whichcan substantially boost efficiency over thetraditional flood or furrow irrigation nowwidely used, especially in Asia. Drip irri-gation, a technology pioneered in Israel,is not economical for use on grain, but onhigh-value fruit and vegetable crops it cancut water use by up to 70 percent.57

The risk for countries that are likely tobecome heavily dependent on grainimports for their food supply is perhapsgreater than most realize simply becausethe collective import needs of potentiallygrain-deficit countries promises to over-whelm the capacity of exporters. A littlenoticed change that affects the prospectsfor eradicating hunger is the leveling offsince 1980 of grain exports among theprincipal exporting countries, whichaccount for 85 percent of world exports.(See Figure 7–5.) After climbing from 60million tons in 1950 to 200 million tons in1980, there has been little gain since then.U.S. grain production during the last 18years has increased roughly 1 percentannually, the same or slightly less than thegrowth in domestic demand. Unable toraise land productivity faster than thegrowth in demand, the exportable surplushas not increased. The United States,which supplies roughly half of the world’s200 million tons of grain exports, is pro-jected to add 74 million people to its pop-

ulation over the next 50 years, so it willtake some effort to expand productionfast enough merely to satisfy its growingdomestic needs—much less the escalatingneeds of the rest of the world.58

Two of the other five major exporters—Canada and Australia—are severelyrestricted in their efforts to expand pro-duction by the lack of soil moisture. Littlegrowth can be expected from them. Forthe European Union, where yields arealready at record levels, the potential forfurther gains appears to be limited. Theonly one of the major exporters thatmight be able to expand grain exportssubstantially is Argentina. Its currentexports, running around 20 million tons ayear, could conceivably double. Still, thiswould be a rather minor increase in aworld where the need for imported graincould easily jump from 200 million to 400million tons in the decades ahead. Oneregion not now contributing in a majorway is Eastern Europe. Countries such asPoland, the Ukraine, Hungary, andRomania can expand their grain exports,at least modestly, if they adopt the eco-nomic policies needed to realize their full

50

100

150

200

250Million Tons

Source: USDA

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Figure 7–5. Grain Exports from Argentina,Australia, Canada, European Union, and the

United States, 1960–97

agricultural potential.59

Adequately feeding the projectedincreases in population poses one of themost difficult challenges that modern civ-ilization faces. With little prospect ofachieving an acceptable balance betweenfood and people by supply-side initiativesalone, the time has come to focus on the

demand side of the food equation as well.This means finding ways to accelerate theshift to smaller families, particularly inthose countries where many are alreadyhungry and malnourished, and it meansmoving down the food chain for thosewho are consuming unhealthily largeamounts of livestock products.


NotesChapter 7. Feeding Nine Billion

1. People fed per farmer from U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA), <http://www.usda.gov/history2/text4.htm>; completedata set, 1900–90, from Eldon Ball, USDA,Washington, DC, discussion with BrianHalweil, Worldwatch Institute, 3 October1998.

2. Estimated irrigation area in 1900according to K.K. Framji and I.K. Mahajan,Irrigation and Drainage in the World: A GlobalReview (New Delhi, India: Cexton Press PrivateLimited, 1969); share of grain harvest depen-dent on fertilizer is author’s estimate based onnational fertilizer use and grain productiondata.

3. Grain production in 1900 is author’sestimate based on world population in 1900and the assumption that grain consumptionper person remained roughly the samebetween 1900 and 1950; current grain produc-tion from USDA, Production, Supply, andDistribution, electronic database, Washington,DC, updated October 1998.

4. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird,Secrets of the Soil (New York: Harper & Row,1989).

5. Clive Ponting, A Green History of theWorld (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

6. Jack Doyle, Altered Harvest (New York:Viking Penquin, 1985).

7. Ponting, op. cit. note 5; USDA, op. cit.

note 3.


9. U.N. Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion (FAO), The Sixth World Food Survey (Rome:1996); U.S. Bureau of the Census,International Programs Center, “HistoricalEstimates of World Population,” <http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html>, 1998.

10. Maurizio Perotti, fishery statistician,Fishery Information, Data and Statistics Unit,Fisheries Department, FAO, Rome, e-mail toWorldwatch, 11 November 1997; USDA, op.cit. note 3.

11. United Nations, World PopulationProspects: The 1996 Revision (New York: 1996).

12. World Health Organization (WHO),World Health Report 1998 (Geneva: 1998);Maggie Fox, “New Standards Mean MostAmericans Overweight,” Reuters, 4 June 1998;number of overweight people is Worldwatchestimate based on “Obesity: Preventing andManaging the Global Epidemic,” report of aWHO consultation on obesity, Geneva, 3–5June 1997.

13. National Heart, Lung, and BloodInstitute, “Clinical Guidelines for the Identi-fication, Evaluation and Treatment ofOverweight and Obesity in Adults” (Bethesda,MD: National Institutes of Health, June 1998).

14. “It’s Official—Obesity Causes HeartDisease,” Reuters, 2 June 1998.


16. WHO, “Child Malnutrition,” Fact SheetNo. 119 (Geneva: November 1996).

17. FAO, op. cit. note 9; M. de Onis et al.,“The Worldwide Magnitude of Protein-EnergyMalnutrition: An Overview from the WHOGlobal Database on Child Growth,” WHO,January 1998.

18. FAO, op. cit. note 9; Figure 7–1 fromUSDA, op. cit. note 3; population data from U.S. Bureau of the Census, InternationalData Base, electronic database, Suitland, MD,updated 15 June 1998.

19. De Onis et al., op. cit. note 17; USDA,op. cit. note 3; Population Reference Bureau(PRB), “1998 World Population Data Sheet,”wall chart (Washington, DC: June 1998).

20. De Onis et al., op. cit. note 17; USDA,op. cit. note 3; PRB, op. cit. note 19; lifeexpectancy from United Nations, op. cit. note11.

21. USDA, op. cit. note 3; PRB, op. cit. note19.

22. Worldwatch update of AngusMaddison, The World Economy in the TwentiethCentury (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1989).

23. World Bank, Food Security for the World,statement prepared for the World FoodSummit by the World Bank, 12 November 1996.


25. Ibid.

26. Figure 7–2 from ibid., and from PRB,op. cit. note 19; United Nations, op. cit. note11.

27. Population to be added from UnitedNations, op. cit. note 11.

28. Ibid.

29. USDA, op. cit. note 3; United Nations,op. cit. note 11.

30. Figure 7–3 from USDA, op. cit. note 3.

31. Idled land from USDA, EconomicResearch Service, “AREI Updates: CroplandUse in 1997,” No. 5, Washington, DC, 1997.

32. Estimated irrigated area in 1900 fromFramji and Mahajan, op. cit. note 2; FAO, FAO-STAT Statistics Database, <http://www.apps.fao.org>, Rome, viewed 4 October 1998.

33. Figure 7–4 from FAO, op. cit. note 32,and from Bureau of Census, op. cit. note 18.


35. David Seckler, David Molden, andRandolph Barker, “Water Scarcity in theTwenty-First Century” (Colombo, Sri Lanka:International Water Management Institute, 27July 1998); Liu Yonggong and John B. Penson,Jr., “China’s Sustainable Agriculture andRegional Implications,” paper presented tothe symposium on Agriculture, Trade andSustainable Development in Pacific Asia:China and its Trading Partners, Texas A&MUniversity, College Station, TX, 12–14February 1998.

36. Seckler, Molden, and Barker, op. cit.note 35; PRB, op. cit. note 19.

37. Sandra Postel, Last Oasis, rev. ed. (NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).

38. Wang Chengshan, “What Does theYellow River Tell?” Openings, No. 4, winter1997; McVean Trading and Investments,Memphis, TN, discussion with author, 24September 1998.

39. Postel, op. cit. note 37; United Nations,op. cit. note 11.

40. USDA, op. cit. note 3; figure of 1,000tons of water for one ton of wheat from FAO,Yield Response to Water (Rome: 1979).

41. I.A. Shiklomanov, “World Fresh WaterResources,” in Peter H. Gleick, ed., Water inCrisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources


(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);“Water Scarcity as a Key Factor Behind GlobalFood Insecurity: Round Table Discussion,”Ambio, March 1998.

42. Dennis Engi, China InfrastructureInitiative, Sandia National Laboratory, <http://mason.igaia.sandia.gov/igaia/china/water.html>, viewed 3 November 1998.


44. Ibid.

45. Thomas R. Sinclair, “Limits to CropYield?” in American Society of Agronomy,Crop Science Society of America, and SoilScience Society of America, Physiology andDetermination of Crop Yield (Madison, WI:1994).

46. L.T. Evans, Crop Evolution, Adaptationand Yield (Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993).

47. Prabhu Pingali et al., Asian Rice Bowls:The Returning Crisis? (New York: CABInternational, 1997); P.L. Pingali and P.W.Heisey, “Cereal Crop Productivity inDeveloping Countries: Past Trends and FutureProspects,” conference proceedings, GlobalAgricultural Science Policy for the 21st Century,Melbourne, Australia, 26–28 August 1996.

48. K.G. Soh and K.F. Isherwood, “ShortTerm Prospects for World Agriculture andFertilizer Use,” presentation at IFA EnlargedCouncil Meeting, International FertilizerIndustry Association, Monte Carlo, Monaco,18–21 November 1997; FAO, Fertilizer Yearbook(Rome: various years); Mark W. Rosegrant andClaudia Ringler, “World Food Markets into the21st Century: Environmental and ResourceConstraints and Policies,” revision of paperpresented at the RIRDC-sponsored plenarysession of the 41st Annual Conference of theAustralian Agricultural and ResourceEconomics Society, Queensland, Australia,22–25 January 1997.


50. MEDEA Group, China Agriculture:Cultivated Land Area, Grain Projections, andImplications, Summary report, prepared for theU.S. National Intelligence Council (Washing-ton, DC: November 1997).



53. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993).

54. “Broken Promises: U.S. Public Fundingfor International and Domestic ReproductiveHealth Care” (draft), prepared by theMobilizing Resources Task Force, U.S. NGOsin Support of the Cairo Consensus,Washington, DC, 15 July 1998.

55. Nancy E. Riley, “Gender, Power, andPopulation Change,” Population Bulletin, May1997.

56. Grain-to-poultry ratio derived fromRobert V. Bishop et al., The World PoultryMarket—Government Intervention and Multi-lateral Policy Reform (Washington, DC: USDA,1990); grain-to-pork ratio from LelandSouthard, Livestock and Poultry Situation andOutlook Staff, Economic Research Service(ERS), USDA, Washington, DC, discussionwith author, 27 April 1992; grain-to-beef ratiobased on Allen Baker, Feed Situation andOutlook Staff, ERS, USDA, Washington, DC,discussion with author, 27 April 1992.

57. Postel, op. cit. note 37.

58. Figure 7–5 from USDA, op. cit. note 3;United Nations, op. cit. note 11.



Exploring a New Vision

for Cities

Molly O’Meara

“It was a town of unnatural red and blacklike the painted face of a savage,” wroteCharles Dickens in his 1854 novel HardTimes. “It was a town of machines and tallchimneys, out of which interminable ser-pents of smoke trailed themselves for everand ever, and never got uncoiled.”Although Dickens showed a brighter sideto urban life in some of his earlier work,from the 1850s onward his characterswere increasingly worn down by theindustrial city’s untamed filth.1

This shift in Dickens’s stories coincid-ed with a turning point in the history ofcities. In 1850, the United Kingdombecame the first nation to have a mainlyurban population, and it was followed bya score of industrial countries in Europe,then North America, and later Japan.Booming industrial cities requiredtremendous quantities of water, food,fuels, and building materials. Pollutionand waste were evident everywhere, asDickens so vividly described.2

As the nineteenth century came to aclose, the ills of the industrial city prompt-

ed visions of a new urban form. Engineerswere already building bigger water andwaste systems. And innovations such as thetelephone, automobile, and skyscraperinspired futuristic thinking. Among themost influential visionaries was EbenezerHoward, a British stenographer-turned-reformer. “Ill-ventilated, unplanned,unwieldy, and unhealthy” cities, Howarddeclared in 1902, had no place in a morehumane future. Instead, a network ofclean, self-sufficient “garden cities” wouldmarry the best social aspects of city life tothe beauty of nature. French architect LeCorbusier, a generation after Howard, wasalso offended by the industrial cities of histime: “They are ineffectual, they use upour bodies, they thwart our souls.” LeCorbusier envisioned gleaming skyscrap-ers surrounded by parks and wide motor-ways that would shape a “radiant city”worthy of the new century.3

Today, cities around the world havesome of the forms prescribed by Howardand Le Corbusier but not the functionthey intended: sustaining a more equi-

8

table society in harmony with nature.Chaotic suburban development in theUnited States, for instance, is a caricatureof Howard’s garden city ideal. Gatedenclaves and congested roads havedegraded rather than enhanced publicspace. Towering office blocks, LeCorbusier’s “islands in the sky,” were sup-posed to allow more room for naturebelow. But most skyscrapers tend to bebuilt without regard to the local environ-ment—heating or air conditioning mustmake up for shortfalls in design—and sotake a heavy toll on natural resources.4

Twentieth-century cities fail to meetthe needs of the present while at the sametime compromising the ability of futuregenerations to meet their own needs—the exact opposite of “sustainable devel-opment” as defined by the BrundtlandCommission’s 1987 landmark report, OurCommon Future. Plato’s observation in 400B.C. that “any city, however small, is in factdivided into two, one the city of the poor,the other of the rich” holds true today.And the most basic requirements of theurban poor, particularly in the developingworld, go unfulfilled. At least 1.1 billionchoke on unhealthy levels of air pollu-tion, 220 million lack clean drinkingwater, 420 million do not have access tothe simplest latrines, and 600 million donot have adequate shelter.5

At the same time, resource use by therich threatens the security of future gener-ations. Although cities have always reliedon their hinterlands, wealthy urbanitestoday draw more heavily on far-flungresources—quickening the pace of climatechange, deforestation, soil erosion, and lossof biological diversity worldwide. London,for example, now requires roughly 58 timesits land area just to supply its residents withfood and timber. Meeting the needs ofeveryone in the world in the same way thatthe needs of Londoners are met wouldrequire at least three more Earths.6

The search for a new vision for citieshas even more urgency now. In 1900, only

160 million people, one tenth of theworld’s population, were city dwellers. Byshortly after 2000, in contrast, half theworld (3.2 billion people) will live inurban areas—a 20-fold increase in num-bers. The challenge for the next centurywill be to improve the environmental con-ditions of cities themselves while reducingthe demands that they make on Earth’sfinite resources.7

AN URBANIZING WORLD

Although urban areas have existed formillennia, we still do not have a good def-inition of “the city” because its shape androle keeps changing from place to placeand over time. Around 4000 B.C., farmingvillages in Mesopotamian river valleysgrew into the world’s first cities. These set-tlements culminated in the Sumerian city-state—with its elaborate temples,stratified social classes, advanced technol-ogy, extended trade, and military fortifi-cations. Many of these early cities hadwalls that formally set the town off fromthe countryside. Over the years, thesewalls were often rebuilt to accommodatelarger populations, as rural dwellerssought a better life in the city and asbirths within the city began to outnumberdeaths.8

The Industrial Revolution brought thenext major urban transformation. By theeighteenth century, industrializing citiesin Europe were spilling over their con-fines. In the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, western urban popu-lations surged beyond administrative lim-its as well. In many cities in Europe andNorth America, the number of people liv-ing within the political boundaries ofmajor city centers declined, particularlyafter 1950, but roads and buildings con-tinued to pave over surrounding forestand farmland. New technologies and gov-ernment policies helped create this


sprawl. The most extreme examples ofwidely dispersed suburban “edge cities”are found in the United States. Between1950 and 1990, for instance, greaterChicago’s population grew by 38 percentbut spread over 124 percent more land;metro Cleveland’s population increasedby 21 percent during these years, but thecity ate up 112 percent more land.9

As the shape of cities has changed, sohave notions about what constitutes an“urban area.” Today, cities swell not onlyfrom an influx of newcomers and birthswithin the city but also from reclassifica-tion of rural areas. Urban population sta-tistics may correspond to the politicalboundaries of an old city center or extendto some part of the greater metropolitanregion, which may have numerous cen-ters of employment. Thus, depending onwhere the lines are drawn, Tokyo’s popu-lation ranges from 8 million to 39 millionand Mexico City’s from 2 million to 18million. This chapter uses the U.N. defin-ition for “urban agglomerations,” whichincorporates the population in a city ortown plus the adjacent suburban fringe.10

Economic forces underlie the ongoingchanges in the role of cities. In the pasthalf-century, many cities in the develop-

ing world have grown as industrializationhas brought both the prospect of urbanjobs and the degradation of rural areas.In the 1950s, most of the world’s jobs werein agriculture; by 1990, most were in ser-vices—an outgrowth of industrialization.Cities still provide a marketplace for foodand other items produced in the sur-rounding region, but a growing numberalso serve as global bazaars. Telephones,satellites, and computer links are amongthe technologies that allow today’s net-work of “global” cities to reach beyondtheir immediate hinterlands. Elites inSeoul and Stockholm may have more incommon with each other than with theirrural compatriots.11

Much modern urban infrastructurewas built in response to nineteenth-centu-ry problems in the western industrial city,which dominated history for a briefmoment. In 1800, just 3 of the 10 largestcities were in Europe (see Table 8–1); by1900, 9 were in Europe or North America;but by 2000, there will only be 2. Asia,which led world urbanization between800 and 1800, again today has half of the10 largest cities. India’s urban populationalone—256 million—could constitute theworld’s fourth most populous nation.12

Exploring a New Vision for Cities (135)

Table 8–1. Population of World’s 10 Largest Metropolitan Areas in 1000, 1800, and 1900, With Projections for 2000

1000 1800 1900 2000(million)

Cordova 0.45 Peking 1.10 London 6.5 Tokyo 28.0Kaifeng 0.40 London 0.86 New York 4.2 Mexico City 18.1Constantinople 0.30 Canton 0.80 Paris 3.3 Bombay 18.0Angkor 0.20 Edo (Tokyo) 0.69 Berlin 2.7 São Paulo 17.7Kyoto 0.18 Constantinople 0.57 Chicago 1.7 New York 16.6Cairo 0.14 Paris 0.55 Vienna 1.7 Shanghai 14.2Bagdad 0.13 Naples 0.43 Tokyo 1.5 Lagos 13.5Nishapur 0.13 Hangchow 0.39 St. Petersburg 1.4 Los Angeles 13.1Hasa 0.11 Osaka 0.38 Manchester 1.4 Seoul 12.9Anhilvada 0.10 Kyoto 0.38 Philadelphia 1.4 Beijing 12.4

SOURCE: 1000–1900 from Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston,NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987); 2000 from United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 1996 Revision (NewYork: 1998).

With North America, Europe, andJapan already highly urbanized, most citygrowth will continue to occur in develop-ing countries. The pace of urbanizationtoday in places such as Lagos and Bombayechoes that of Chicago and New York acentury ago. The big difference lies in theabsolute population increase, however,which is much higher. (See Table 8–2.)Between 1990 and 1995, 263 million peo-ple were added to the cities of the devel-oping world—the equivalent of anotherLos Angeles or Shanghai forming everythree months. Indeed, populationincrease in developing-country cities willbe the distinguishing demographic trendof the next century, accounting for nearly90 percent of the 2.7 billion people dueto be added to world population between1995 and 2030.13

Regional variations within the ThirdWorld are striking. Some 73 percent ofLatin Americans now live in cities, making

the region roughly as urbanized asEurope and North America. Thus, themost explosive growth in the future isexpected in Africa and Asia, which arestill only 30–35 percent urbanized. (SeeTable 8–3.) In many parts of the develop-ing world, particularly Southeast Asia andWest Africa, urban numbers are hard togauge as “circular” migrants—people whomove to the city temporarily—elude cen-sus takers. In general, cities with morethan 1 million people are often calledlarge, while membership in the “megaci-ty” club generally requires a population of10 million. By this definition, Africa hasjust one megacity, Lagos. But burgeoningAfrican cities of several hundred thou-sand are “mega-villages” that are growingtoo fast for local authorities to manage.14

As urban numbers swell, cities presentnot only problems but also opportunities.For millennia, cities have been the cultur-al centers and engines of creativity thatadvance civilization. They remain mag-nets that draw people and ideas. Urbanenvironmental stewardship can improvelocal conditions, resulting in clean publicspaces, services, and access to places ofemployment—all of which help easeinequities between rich and poor. Thesheer size and reach of cities means that


Table 8–2. Rate and Scale of PopulationGrowth in Selected Industrial Cities,1875–1900, and Developing Cities,

1975–2000

Annual Population PopulationCity Growth Added

(percent) (million)

Industrial Cities (1875–1900)Chicago 6.0 1.3New York 3.3 2.3Tokyo 2.6 0.7London 1.7 2.2Paris 1.6 1.1

Developing Cities (1975–2000)Lagos 5.8 10.2Bombay 4.0 11.2São Paolo 2.3 7.7Mexico City 1.9 6.9Shanghai 0.9 2.7

SOURCE: Industrial cities from Tertius Chandler, FourThousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987); develop-ing cities from United Nations, World UrbanizationProspects: The 1996 Revision (New York: 1998).

Table 8–3. Percentage of Population Livingin Urban Areas, by Region, 1950–95, With

Projections for 2015

Region 1950 1975 1995 2015

Africa 14.6 25.2 34.9 46.4Asia1 15.3 22.2 33.0 45.6Latin

America 41.4 61.2 73.4 79.9Industrial

Countries2 54.9 69.9 74.9 80.0

World 29.7 37.8 45.3 54.41Excluding Japan. 2Europe, Japan, Australia, New

Zealand, and North America excluding Mexico.SOURCE: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects:The 1996 Revision (New York: 1998).

they will have a profound effect on theglobal environment—for better or worse.Today’s cities take up 2 percent of theworld’s surface but consume 75 percentof its resources. Thus, increased efficiencyin a relatively small part of the worldwould yield big results. The remainder ofthis chapter provides examples ofchanges in urban water, waste, transporta-tion, and buildings that can benefit bothpeople and the planet.15

IMPROVING WATER SUPPLY AND

QUALITY

Most human settlements have been sitedto take advantage of water for agricultureand transportation. The world’s earliestcities arose in the valleys of great rivers:the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus,and the Yellow. But the rivers and streamsthat provide drinking water also receivehousehold and industrial wastes, so theflow of water into a city and the flow ofwastes out are intimately linked.16

Nineteenth-century engineers con-structed vast water and sewer systems inindustrial countries. The goal wastwofold: to meet growing water demandby boosting supplies, and to channelwastewater and rainwater away from peo-ple as quickly as possible. These systemswere an unquestionable boon to health.With better water and sanitation, lifeexpectancy in French cities, for instance,shot up from 32 years in 1850 to 45 yearsby 1900.17

But large, costly projects have failed toreach many rural areas and poor urbandistricts. Despite gains during the 1980s,which was designated by the UnitedNations as the International Water Supplyand Sanitation Decade, 25 percent of thedeveloping world remains without cleanwater and 66 percent lacks sanitation.Waterborne diarrheal diseases, which

arise from poor water and waste manage-ment, are the world’s leading cause of ill-ness. Each year, 5 million children diefrom diarrheal ailments; most come frompoor urban families.18

Moreover, technologies designed topromote health now contribute to broad-er environmental ills. The first class ofproblems occurs in bringing water intocities. The architect Vitruvius wrote in thefirst century B.C. that finding water wasthe first step in planning a new city. Buthis contemporary colleagues todayassume water is a secondary considera-tion, relying instead on engineers todivert rivers or pump water over great dis-tances. Thus, cities have extended theirreach for water, destroying fragile ecosys-tems and reducing the water available forcrops. Prime examples include the west-ern United States, where water battles arebeing waged, and northern China, where108 cities report shortages. Since the turnof the century, municipal use of waterworldwide has grown 19 times and indus-trial use has grown 26 times while agricul-tural use has increased only 5 times.19

Another set of damaging effects occursas water is hurried away from cities. Whenrainwater is channeled through pipes andgutters, less water infiltrates the soil torecharge underground supplies. Roadsalso prevent water from seeping into theground. Thus rain runs off pavementstraight into channels, where it speedsinto rivers and streams, causing moresevere floods than would occur if plantsor soil soaked up some of the deluge.Moreover, without enough water torecharge underground supplies, the landmay subside, causing rail tracks to buckle,water pipes to burst, and building foun-dations to crack. And in coastal areas, saltwater may leak into wells, ruining drink-ing supplies.20

A dramatic image of subsidenceappears in a 1995 report on Mexico City’swater supply. At first, the photo of a smallboy apparently leaning against a tele-


phone pole looks out of place in a bookabout water. But the pole is actually a wellcasing that was once underground.Excessive withdrawal of groundwater hascaused parts of Mexico City to sink morethan 9 meters in the last century, so nowthe pipe towers some 7 meters aboveground. Local children reportedly marktheir height on it to see if they grow fasterthan the ground sinks.21

Water-short cities in the next centurywill be pressed to slake their thirst in waysthat cause less ecological destruction andrequire less money. Conservation may bea large part of the solution. Unlike ener-gy, water has yet to become a major targetfor efficiency gains. Complementaryapproaches include restricting develop-ment near drinking water sources andusing low-cost methods of wastewatertreatment.22

Metropolitan Boston provides anexample of successful water conservation.Since 1987, the Massachusetts WaterResources Authority has managed toavoid diverting two large rivers to aug-ment supply, as engineers had initiallyprescribed. For a third to half the cost ofthe diversions, the government hasreduced total water demand by 24 per-cent by repairing leaky pipes, installingwater-saving fixtures, and educatingeveryone from schoolchildren to plantmanagers on water-saving measures.23

Conservation is not only for the rich;developing countries also stand to savemoney. In the Third World, as much as 60percent of water is lost through leakypipes and theft. In Manila, for example,58 percent of the drinking water is for-feited to leaks or illegal tapping, whereasSingapore, where pipes are better main-tained, loses only 8 percent.24

A key to water conservation is remov-ing incentives for profligate use. Lack ofmeters, inordinately low prices, andprices that decline as use increases allencourage wastefulness. As underpricingcauses excessive use, the problem feeds

on itself. With the cash-strapped wateragency unable to maintain its pipes, morewater is lost to leaks. This causes theagency to lay claim to additional watersupplies, diverting them from agriculture.And as farms fail without irrigation, morepeople migrate to cities, raising thedemand for water. Bogor, Indonesia, tookits first steps to break this cycle in 1988,when it installed meters and hiked pricesto encourage households to conserve.Demand initially fell by one third, allow-ing the utility to connect more families tothe system.25

Although pricing the poor out of wateris a concern, artificially low prices mayhurt this group even more. Prices that donot reflect the true cost of water discour-age utilities from extending service. Itwould be a losing proposition. Thus manyof the poor in developing countries endup paying much more for water from pri-vate vendors, who charge anywhere from4 to 100 times the public rate that wealthycitizens pay. In Istanbul, water from ven-dors is 10 times the public rate; inBombay, it is 20 times higher.26

Making better use of rainwater isanother conservation technique that dou-bles as a flood-control strategy. Metro-politan Tokyo, with 82 percent of its landsurface covered by asphalt or concrete,suffers from torrential runoff that causesfloods and depletes underground watersupplies. The city has thus turned to rain-water as a supplemental source. Tanksatop 579 city buildings capture this freeresource for use in washrooms, gardens,air-conditioning systems, and fire hoses.Now rain that falls on the giantKokugikan sumo wrestling stadium sup-plies 70 percent of the water in the build-ing that is not used for drinking.27

Other forms of water recycling alsohold potential to enhance city water sup-plies. Municipal wastewater can be usedinstead of high-quality drinking water toflush toilets or to water lawns. If treated, itmay be used to irrigate some types of crops


or to raise fish. Some 70 percent of Israeliwastewater is recycled in this way.Treatment is made easier if wastewaterfrom industry is kept separate from theresidential flow. In most countries, theflows are combined, however. Thus ascities in developing countries build sewageinfrastructure, they will save money andwater if they keep flows separate.28

Just as conservation of water can boostwater supplies, conservation of land canprotect water quality. A number of citiesare finding that cooperating with neigh-boring regions, industries, and agricul-ture to protect watersheds is ultimatelyless costly than trying to make pollutedwater safe for drinking. New York City, forinstance, plans to buy $300 million worthof land upstate to protect the watershedsthat deliver the city’s drinking water. Thetactic is part of a comprehensive water-shed protection strategy that, while costlyat $1.4 billion, will save the city from hav-ing to pay $3–8 billion for a new filtrationsystem.29

Limiting development near importantwater sources not only preserves waterquality, it also prevents floods and pro-vides a connection to nature. In the 1880s,landscape architect Frederick LawOlmsted persuaded Boston that keepingbuildings away from floodplains by estab-lishing riverfront parks would ultimatelyprove cheaper than keeping floods awayfrom buildings through huge public worksprojects. The result was the verdant BackBay Fens, a park that protected the neigh-borhood from flooding. In contrast, LosAngeles has paid for failing to heed simi-lar warnings made by Olmsted’s son in the1930s—the city has little parkland andfaced $500 million in damages from threemajor floods in the early 1990s alone.30

In addition to improving water supplyand quality, cities can also treat waste-water at lower economic and environ-mental cost. One time-honored biologicalapproach—wetlands treatment—usesmore land but is also much less expensive

and does not produce toxic sludge.Vegetation in stabilization ponds or mod-ified wetlands extracts contaminants suchas nitrates and mercury, while bacteriaand other organisms break down toxiccompounds. Phoenix, Arizona, is creatingwetlands to clean a portion of its sewagebecause the option is much cheaper thana $625-million upgrade of its wastewatertreatment plant.31

Where cities have been unable orunwilling to extend sewers to the poorestpeople, some communities have steppedinto the breach with low-cost solutions.The most famous example is in theOrangi district of Karachi, Pakistan, hometo nearly 1 million “squatters.” In theearly 1980s, Akhter Hameed Khan, adynamic community organizer, formed anongovernmental research institutecalled the Orangi Pilot Project. Between1981 and 1996, this group helped neigh-borhoods to organize, collect money, andmanage construction of sewers that servesome 90 percent of Orangi’s residents.32

Increasingly, cities are looking to tapthe resources of the private sector, as gov-ernments alone will be unable to come upwith the billions of dollars needed overthe next decade for reliable water systems.Water privatization is most extensive inthe United Kingdom and France, andcompanies from these countries arebeginning to ply their trade abroad. Only5 percent of the financing for waterworldwide comes from private sources,but privatization, in various degrees, is agrowing trend. Between 1990 and 1997,the number of private water projects indeveloping countries increased more


Many of the poor in developing coun-tries end up paying much more forwater from private vendors.

than 10-fold, mainly in Latin America andEast Asia. In Buenos Aires, for instance,an international consortium led by theFrench firm Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumezrenovated thousands of kilometers ofpipes in the water system, expanding cov-erage and lowering rates.33

Still, privatization is not a panacea.Water supply and sanitation are impor-tant public services, so some form of pub-lic control or regulation will always beneeded to make sure that quality andprices are reasonable. Unfortunately, fewcities have regulations in place yet tomake privatization work fairly.

MINING URBAN WASTE

Remains from some of the earliest citiessuggest that residents there at first took alaissez-faire approach to waste disposal,simply raising the roofs of their houses asmounting garbage caused street levels torise. In eighteenth-century Boston, whenrefuse threatened to impede industrialprogress, the city’s first “paved” roadswere built: wooden planks placed on topof the garbage. A century later, CharlesDickens spoke to both the water andwaste problems of nineteenth-centuryNew York when he referred to it as “a citywithout baths or plumbing, lighted by gasand scavenged by pigs.”34

Today, garbage is most voluminous inrich countries but most visible in cities ofdeveloping countries. In the 1950s,Manila began to dump much of itsgarbage in a poor neighborhood, layingthe foundation for what would becomethe city’s most striking topographical fea-ture—“Mount Smoky.” Methane from therotting refuse burned in an acrid haze,lending the summit its name. Until anewly elected Philippine president razedthe garbage mountain in the early 1990s,it towered 40 meters above sea level inManila Bay and was home to some 20,000

people who made a living from scaveng-ing the refuse.35

Like water, waste profoundly affectshuman health. Hazards are most pro-nounced in the developing world, wherebetween one third and half of city trashgoes uncollected. Open piles of garbageattract disease-carrying rats and flies, andoften wash into drainage channels, wherethey contribute to floods and waterbornedisease. And even the most expensivemethods of waste disposal—high-tech“sanitary” landfills and incinerators—arenot completely free of health risks. Toxinsfrom landfills can leach into groundwater,and heavy metals, chlorine compounds,and dioxin are among the hazards inincinerator ash.36

City waste has many broader environ-mental implications. Just as storm drainsshort-circuit the water cycle, urban wastedisposal systems designed to speed wastesaway from people actually interrupt thenutrient cycle. Trucks, planes, and trainshaul food into cities from great distances,but the nutrients rarely make it back tofarmland. Roughly half of the 20,000 tonsof food that New York City receives eachday is transformed into human energy;the other half is shunted to sewers ortrucked to increasingly remote landfills.Not only does this add to the waste dis-posal burden, it also heightens thedemand for manufactured fertilizer, amajor source of nitrogen pollution, whichis a growing global threat.37

Moreover, throwing items away insteadof reusing or recycling them increases thedemand for new resources obtained byenvironmentally destructive mining andlogging. (See also Chapter 3.) In 1895,George Waring, New York City’s commis-sioner of street cleaning, recognized thatthe “out of sight, out of mind” approachto trash “is an easy one to follow, but it isnot an economical one, nor a decent one,nor a safe one.” His prescient warningwent unheeded. In the industrial world,waste collection has improved public


health, but the problem of waste genera-tion has only worsened. Urbanites inindustrial countries generate up to 100times more refuse per person than theircounterparts in developing countries.38

But cities have the potential to shiftfrom being repositories of waste to greatsources of raw materials. The farms,forests, and mines of the twenty-first cen-tury may well be found in our urban cen-ters—in the form of city gardens andrecycling plants. Local authorities canspur the transition by providing incen-tives for composting, recycling, and waste-based industries.

Organic waste—paper, food scraps,lawn clippings, and even human waste—isa valuable resource. In industrial coun-tries, food and yard waste alone accountfor some 36 percent of the municipalwaste stream. European cities are leadinga trend toward composting, which trans-forms this organic waste into a productthat invigorates agricultural soils. Cities inseven countries—Austria, Belgium,Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, theNetherlands, and Switzerland—collectthese wastes separately, recovering morethan 85 percent of them.39

Composting can also boost urban foodsecurity by enriching city gardens. TheU.N. Development Programme (UNDP)estimates that 800 million urban farmersharvest 15 percent of the world’s foodsupply. In parts of Africa, urban agricul-ture is a survival strategy. Some 68 percentof families in Dar es Salaam, Tanzaniagrow vegetables or raise livestock. Cityfarmers also tend 80,000 gardens in Berlinas well as crops in Buenos Aires that meetone fifth of that city’s nutritional needs.40

To keep paper and inorganic materialssuch as metals, glass, and plastics fromlandfills, a number of cities have foundways to promote recycling and waste-basedindustries. They can charge a fee for thecollection of unsorted garbage, for exam-ple, while picking up for free refuse thathas been separated for recycling. By

adopting “pay-as-you-throw” systems, atleast 11 U.S. cities have boosted recyclingrates to the 45–60 percent range, wellabove the national average of 27 percent.41

Some cities have gone a step further, toengage the industries that create dispos-able goods or generate waste. In 1997,Tokyo municipal officials—looking fornew waste disposal options in land-shortJapan—announced that they wouldrequire makers and distributors of plasticbottles to recover and recycle their prod-ucts. And Graz, Austria, has created alabeling program to spur small- and medi-um-sized industries to reduce waste: com-panies receive the city’s Ecoprofit label ifthey reduce solid waste by 30 percent andhazardous waste by 50 percent.42

While the private sector is a newcomerto water supply and sanitation, it has along history in waste collection and dis-posal. In some developing-country cities,local authorities have struck recyclingdeals with private companies and evenself-employed wastepickers. (See Table8–4.) City officials in Bandung, Indonesia,are working with a local nongovernmen-tal organization (NGO) to employ agroup of scavenger families. The familiesreceive financial and technical support toseparate recyclables more safely and effi-ciently, compost organic wastes, and cre-ate businesses that use the wastes theycollect as raw materials. They makemoney—and the city reduces the cost ofwaste management.43

A handful of cities are moving beyondrecycling to “industrial symbiosis,” whereone company’s waste becomes another’sinput. (See Chapter 3.) The first eco-industrial park began to evolve more than20 years ago in Kalundborg, Denmark.Today, waste gases from an oil refinerythere are burned by a power plant, wasteheat from the plant warms commercialfish ponds, and other companies usebyproducts of combustion to make wall-board and concrete. According to onecalculation, Kalundborg’s waste-saving


approach translates into $120 million insavings and revenues on a $60-millioninvestment over a five-year period. Since1993, more than 20 U.S. cities hoping torevive stagnant economies haveannounced plans for similar parks.44

MOVING PEOPLE AND GOODS

Transportation shapes cities. While walk-ing distances constrained life in the earli-est cities, by the end of the nineteenthcentury electric trolley and rail tracksstretched growing industrial cities intoradial spokes. Early twentieth-century“streetcar suburbs” in North America andEurope were initially compact, with hous-es a short walk from the stations.45

The automobile allowed the city tospread out in a more random fashion

than ever before—a trend the UnitedStates was quickest to adopt. By the 1930s,developers were building houses androads between the rail spokes for peoplewith cars. Bangkok has experienced aspeeded-up version of this phenomenon.As recently as 1959, a group of U.S. con-sultants noted: “To a person accustomedto Western standards, [Bangkok] isremarkable for its compactness. A vigor-ous walker can traverse it from north tosouth in three hours or less.” But as pop-ulation soared and a city built for canaltraffic became a city dominated by motor-ized vehicles, Bangkok’s built-up areamushroomed from 67 square kilometersin 1953 to 426 square kilometers in 1990.Today even the most vigorous walkerwould probably not contemplate a cross-city voyage on foot; in fact, it can takethree hours to cross Bangkok by car.46

The shape of a city, in turn, influenceslivability and demands on natural


Table 8–4. Community Waste-Based Industries

Location Description

Santos, Brazil Calculating that scavengers were collecting about 1,200 tons of recyclablematerials per month, compared with the city’s 200, Santos authorities began topay scavengers to collect recyclables; the scavengers also share in the profits from sale of the materials.

Dakar, Senegal Dakar officials divided the city into collection zones with subsectors and invitedcompanies to bid for contracts to collect waste from a maximum of three zones.Companies must subcontract in each sector with community groups that collectgarbage from inaccessible areas and educate their neighbors. The new system costs less, covers 80 percent of the city (15 percent more than before), and provides 1,000 new jobs.

Cairo, Egypt The Zabbaleen have been garbage pickers since they began coming to Cairo in mid-century. With the help of aid agencies, the city and the community launched a program in 1981 to improve city collection service and boost the Zabbaleen’s income and standard of living. Today, the Zabbaleen sew rags into quilts and compost animal waste to sell to farmers.

SOURCE: International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), “Santos, Brazil: Recycling, Dignity,and Citizenhood,” Members in Action, 1996–1997 (Toronto: 1997); ICLEI, Urban Community of Dakar, Senegal:Participatory Solid Waste Management, Case Study 45 (Toronto: January 1997); Richard Gilbert et al., MakingCities Work: The Role of Local Authorities in the Urban Environment (London: Earthscan, 1996); Akhtar Badshah,Our Urban Future (London: Zed Books, 1996).

resources. Sprawling conurbations threat-en both human and environmentalhealth. By the mid-1920s, Le Corbusierwas lamenting the destruction wrought bycar fumes: “On the Champs Elysees, halfthe chestnuts lining the avenue have theirleaves withered….Our lungs absorb thesedangerous gases. But the martyred treescry out, ‘Beware!’” Today, vehicle exhaustis often the dominant ingredient in urbanair pollution, which takes at least 3 mil-lion lives worldwide each year.47

Roads designed to hasten the speed ofcars are often dangerous. Traffic acci-dents kill some 885,000 people eachyear—equivalent to 10 fatal jumbo jetcrashes per day—and injure many timesthis number. Another health threat is lessobvious: by replacing short trips thatcould be made by bicycle or on foot, carspromote sedentary lifestyles. Even in theUnited Kingdom’s most hostile traffic,the health benefits of cycling—reductionin coronary heart disease, obesity, andhypertension—outweigh the risks of acci-dents by around 20 to 1, according to theBritish Medical Association.48

Car dependency also breeds socialinequities. One third of the U.S. popula-tion is too young, too old, or too poor todrive. Some 98 percent of Boston’s wel-fare recipients live within walking dis-tance of public transit, but only 32percent of potential employers are thatclose to a transit station. In the develop-ing world, as much as 80 percent of thepopulation can afford a bicycle, but only5–10 percent earn enough to buy a car.49

Some technical fixes, already adoptedin most industrial nations, are urgentlyneeded in many developing countries.The reduced health risks and car mainte-nance costs that follow from removinglead from gasoline and requiring catalyticconverters far outweigh the expense. TheWorld Bank estimates that in Manila,basic improvements in vehicles and fuels alone would save more than 2,000lives and at least $200 million a year in

avoided health costs. Even more efficientcars and cleaner fuels are on the hori-zon—in the form of ultra-efficient carspowered by emissions-free hydrogen fuel cells, for instance. (See Chapter 2.)While promising, these innovations willstill only address pollution, leaving acci-dents, congestion, and social inequitiesuntouched.50

Greater reliance on cars in cities can-not be sustained. In the United States,suburban roads and houses supplantmore than 1 million hectares of farmlandeach year. According to government esti-mates, some 200,000 hectares of arableland in China disappear each year undercity streets and developments in China.Today, transportation accounts for 15–20percent of the annual 6 billion tons of car-bon emissions from human activities thatare leading to climate change. By 2030,China is expected to have 828 million citydwellers. If they were to drive as much asthe average American, the carbon emis-sions from transportation in urban Chinaalone would exceed 1 billion tons, rough-ly as much as released from all trans-portation worldwide today.51

Transportation and land-use decisionsby city officials can shape an alternative tothe car-reliant city: a cleaner, greener, andmore equitable urban form. Some of thebest examples come from Western Europeand Scandinavia. The Netherlands has128 cars per square kilometer, one of thehighest densities in the world. But nation-wide spatial planning gives priority to bikepaths, allowing Dutch cities to achievesome of the world’s highest rates of bicycleuse. Some 30 percent of all urban tripsthere are made by bike, compared withless than 1 percent in U.S. cities. InStockholm, the city council has orchestrat-ed “transit villages” around suburban rail stations, allowing homes to sproutonly a short walk from offices and stores.The walkability of these neighborhoodsprompted car trips to fall by 229 kilo-meters per person between 1980 and 1990


as transit use rose.52

Curitiba, Brazil, is famous for both itsbusways and its bikeways. In the early1970s, the city designated several mainroadways radiating from the city center asstructural axes for busways. Through zon-ing laws, the city encouraged construc-tion of high-density buildings along thesetransit corridors. Since then, innovationssuch as extra-large buses for popularroutes and tube-shaped shelters wherepassengers pay their fares in advance haveadded to the system’s speed and conve-nience. The bus stations link to a 150-kilo-meter network of bike paths. AlthoughCuritiba has one car for every three peo-ple, two thirds of all trips in the city aremade by bus. Car traffic has declined by30 percent since 1974, even as the popu-lation doubled.53

In cities where public support for tran-sit and cycling is strong, some interestingprivate initiatives are beginning to flour-ish. Car-sharing networks, for example,have grown in popularity in Europe sincethe late 1980s. Each member pays for acard that opens the lockers that hold keysto cars parked around the city. Memberswho call the network to reserve a car aredirected to the closest one. The EuropeanCar Sharing Network now has more than100,000 participants in 40 organizationsin 230 cities in Germany, Austria,Switzerland, and the Netherlands. One ofthe largest groups is Stattauto, headquar-tered in Berlin, which estimates that eachof their vehicles replaces five private cars;altogether the fleet eliminates 510,000kilometers of driving each year.54

The private sector has been involved infinancing city transport for a long time. Inthe late nineteenth century, private com-panies would foot the bill for urban railconstruction in return for developmentrights near the stations. Public funds havepaid for such construction in recent years.But now a company in Portland is negoti-ating construction of a light rail track tothe airport in exchange for a lease to air-

port land. At the same time, an elevatedrail system through Bangkok will getmuch of its revenue from property devel-opment under the route, and numerousother projects are under way elsewhere.The private sector can help operate pub-lic transit as well. In Curitiba, private com-panies pay for bus operating costs; the citypays for the roads, lighting, bus stops, andstaff to monitor the companies.55

Copenhagen has even extended thepublic-private partnership idea to bicy-cles. The city maintains a fleet of bikes forpublic use that is financed through adver-tising on the wheel surfaces and bicycleframes. The system is popular: organizersestimate that the 2,300 bicycles are usedon average once every 8 minutes.56

BUILDING BETTER

NEIGHBORHOODS

The layout of neighborhoods goes hand-in-hand with transportation in shapingcities. By building roads, rail lines, or bikepaths, cities decide not only how peoplewill move around, but where the accessi-ble and desirable buildings will be andwhere new services will be needed. Andby mandating where new buildings can bebuilt and what kind of uses—residential,retail, industrial—are allowed, land-useand zoning laws influence how far peoplemust travel to get to work, buy food, andgo about their daily business.57

Responding to pollution and over-crowding in the early twentieth century,local governments in the United Statesadopted zoning laws that limited residen-tial density and placed restrictions onland use that separated houses from busi-nesses. The car helped make such landuse possible, and ever greater distancesbetween houses, stores, and jobs madethe car more essential. That feedbackeffect has helped to make U.S. cities


among the least compact and most car-dependent in the world. (See Table 8–5.)

Much of the chaotic urban develop-ment in developing countries occursbecause 30–60 percent of city populationslive in squatter settlements and 70–95 per-cent of new housing is technically outsidethe law. In Cairo, to cite just one case,informal settlements have grown rapidly,turning a cemetery in the city’s easternsection into the “City of the Dead,” wherepoor families squeeze into the small care-takers’ rooms in the tombs. At the sametime, more than a half-million apartmentsstand empty because the poor cannotafford the public housing and because theprivate sector caters to the upper class.58

The arrangement of buildings helpsdetermine the livability of a city. Streetscome alive with pedestrians when shops,factories, offices, and houses are all with-in walking distance of each other. And citygreenery and parks between buildingscool streets and soothe the spirit. In con-trast, public life diminishes when archi-tects design office parks and shoppingmalls to be enjoyed from the inside, andgaping parking lots to welcome cars butnot pedestrians. Crime often plagues frag-mented cities, which isolate the poor indistinct pockets. Brazilian scholar RaquelRolnick has exposed the link between ter-

ritorial exclusion and violence in citieswithin the state of São Paulo. On theother hand, urban analyst Jane Jacobsnoted an advantage to diverse street lifewhen she wrote about Manhattan in theearly 1960s: many “eyes on the street”deter crime.59

Neighborhood layout also influencesthe resource demands of a city. Changesin the layout can lower energy demandsfrom transportation by a factor of 10. Andtrees that block buildings from the sun orwind lower the energy the residents needfor heating and cooling. Moreover, whenneighborhoods are spread out at low den-sity, they require more water, sewer pipes,power lines, and roads. Sprawling citiesalso use more building materials.Buildings, which consume roughly 40 per-cent of materials in the global economy,represent one fourth of the demand forwood worldwide.60

Economic concerns are forcing a num-ber of local authorities in the UnitedStates to face up to these realities. ARutgers University study found that com-pact growth instead of sprawl-as-usualwould save New Jersey taxpayers $1.3 bil-lion in infrastructure costs over 20 years.Similarly, another study predicted that ifrapid suburban development continuedapace in Maryland between 1995 and2020, the new sewers, water pipes,schools, and roads to support it wouldcost about $10 billion more than if popu-lation growth were accommodated bymore condensed development. And theU.S. Forest Service estimated that plant-ing 95,000 trees in metropolitan Chicagowould yield a net benefit of $38 million inenergy savings over 30 years.61

A few cities are beginning to rein inrapacious development, boost parkland,and even improve the quality of buildingsthat do get constructed. Their toolsinclude regulations or incentives that pushdevelopers to build on vacant land withinthe city rather than outlying green areas,setting aside land for informal settlements,


Table 8–5. Population Density and Car Use inSelected Cities, by Regional Average, 1990

Location Population Private Car Useof Cities Density Per Capita

(persons per (kilometershectare) driven per

person)

United States 14.7 10,870Canada 26.2 6,946Europe 49.9 4,519Wealthy Asia 163.9 1,487Developing Asia 162.8 1,611

SOURCE: Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy,Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming AutomobileDependence (Washington, DC: Island Press, in press).

and changing city building codes.The U.S. city with the most success at

stemming sprawl is Portland, Oregon. A1973 state law requires the metropolitanarea to demarcate an urban growthboundary to allow for future growth with-out encroaching too far into agriculturalor forestland. Planners are now trying toreduce the need for cars within theboundary. New rules require 85 percentof new building to be within a five-minutewalk of a transit stop. Revised codes allowfor mixed-use development of apartmentsabove stores and forbid “snob zoning”that prohibits the denser type of hous-ing—townhouses and apartment build-ings—that can support transit.62

Compact cities need not be forbiddingconcrete jungles. Portland has fortified itsties to nature by removing freeways thatblocked access to the Willamette Riverand requiring buildings to step down asthey approach the city’s eastern edge, inorder to protect “view corridors” ofMount Hood. And because suburbandevelopment is confined, Portlanders donot have to travel far to enjoy the wilder-ness. Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy,Australian researchers who have analyzedtransportation in cities extensively, pointout that some of the most population-dense and least car-reliant Europeanhubs, such as Paris and Vienna, areamong the most aesthetically pleasingcities in the world.63

To reduce fringe development, a num-ber of older industrial cities are offering

incentives to redevelop vacant or aban-doned parcels of land within the metro-politan area. Some of the mostsought-after new housing in southernEngland, for instance, is on such “infill”sites. One concern, however, is that a for-mer occupant may have been an industri-al polluter who left the landcontaminated. By offering tax credits andfunds for environmental cleanup, citiesand higher forms of government canentice buyers to take the risk—a strategythat benefits the region in the long term.Following the U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Agency’s announcement of afederal “brownfields” initiative, some 228pilot redevelopment efforts have beenproposed in U.S. cities.64

Increasingly, local authorities in devel-oping countries recognize the truth of apoint made a decade ago by researchersJorge Hardoy and David Satterthwaite:“the unnamed millions who build, orga-nize and plan illegally are the most impor-tant organizers, builders and planners ofThird World cities.” Those who cannotafford a house on the formal market seekout the most precarious slopes and rivervalleys. Squatters are unlikely to receivean eviction notice—but they probably willnever see water pipes and electricity lineseither. However, most cities containplaces where low-income sites could bedeveloped, at lower cost, because they arealready close to transportation and ser-vices. In Curitiba, the city set aside suchtracts for informal settlements.65

Not only can neighborhoods be laidout better, buildings themselves can beconstructed better. Buildings—whichhave their own water, waste, and energyflows—are actually microcosms of the city.They are particularly well suited to use thenew decentralized energy technologiessuch as solar panels that generate electric-ity and natural gas turbines that generateboth heat and electricity. (See Chapter 2.)Cities can support green construction bysetting codes that require buildings to be


In Kimberly, South Africa, a privatedeveloper teamed up with local residents to replace shacks with a low-cost “solar neighborhood” for 200families.

energy-efficient, and by requiring greendesign for public construction. TheDanish Planning Institute has published aguide to urban ecology in Copenhagenthat highlights 45 projects in the city thatuse much less water and energy than con-ventional buildings and that contain facil-ities to compost organic waste.66

In the much less affluent city ofKimberly, South Africa, a private develop-er teamed up with local residents toreplace tin and mud shacks with a low-cost “solar neighborhood” for 200 fami-lies. Based on that success, the developeris planning a similar project for the small-er town of Ugie, where homes using pas-sive solar design and solar ovens will beclustered in groups of six to share gar-dens. Household organic waste, compost-ed on-site, will be used in the gardens, aswill filtered wastewater. The basic homecosts no more than the $3,200-govern-ment subsidy for first-time home buyers—a state-assisted “self-help” programdesigned to address the legacy ofapartheid. Costs stay low because resi-dents do the construction themselves.67

REALIZING THE VISION

At the end of her classic 1984 book on theurban environment, The Granite Garden,Anne Whiston Spirn reminds us that “inthe present lies not only the nightmare of what the city will become if currenttrends continue, but also the dream ofwhat the city could be.” Taking today’surban problems to an apocalyptic conclu-sion, Spirn envisions an “infernal city”that has disintegrated following uprisingsby city dwellers denied adequate food,water, and work. Social and environmen-tal ills have followed those fleeing citiesinto a countryside ravaged by suburbandevelopment.68

The innovations in water, waste, trans-portation, and neighborhoods described

in this chapter help shape an alternative“sustainable city” vision. It is a city with aunique sense of place. Architects andengineers design buildings and trans-portation systems in response to citizens’requests and local climate. Rich and pooralike share clean air and water and vibrantpublic spaces. John Eberhard of theMassachusetts Institute of Technologysuggests that just as the industrial city sup-planted the preindustrial, a “third genera-tion” of urban systems will arise. In thesustainable city, these new systems mimicthe metabolism of nature. Rather thandevouring water, food, energy, andprocessed goods and belching out theremains as noxious pollutants, the citycontrols its appetites and puts its waste touse. Rainwater and filtered wastewater areused to water gardens. Food scrapsbecome compost that sustains the city’svegetable crops. Roofs are adorned withwater tanks, vegetation, and solar panels.69

In June 1996, representatives from 171nations and 579 cities met in Istanbul forthe second U.N. Conference on HumanSettlements (Habitat II) to endorse thebroad outlines of the sustainable cityvision: “the universal goals of ensuringadequate shelter for all and makinghuman settlements safer, healthier andmore livable, equitable, sustainable andproductive.” Delegates signed on to aHabitat Agenda that complemented thecall for sustainable development madefour years earlier in Rio, at the U.N.Conference on Environment andDevelopment. Some 127 governmentsarrived in Istanbul with five-year nationalaction plans; they agreed that a key toimplementing their proposals would besupport of the city-level Local Agenda 21plans called for in Rio. These confer-ences—which included record numbersof NGOs—shone a spotlight on problemsof environment and development, fromthe global to the local level. And in doingso, they helped reveal two key obstacles toprogress in sustainable urban planning:


lack of political will and lack of money.70

Lack of political will may relate toinsufficient understanding of local prob-lems. Cities highlighted in this chapterfor their “eco-innovations” succeededbecause they identified problems and thelinks between them. A charismatic mayorin Curitiba, for instance, saw that chaoticdevelopment and poor public transporta-tion conspired to worsen air pollution:car use increased as buildings sproutedfar from bus stops. When citizens under-stand such connections, they often sup-port or even demand change. Yet mostpoor cities lack the basic demographicand environmental data necessary tounveil the links between problems. TheHabitat Agenda charges the U.N. Centreon Human Settlements (Habitat) withhelping in such data gathering, in orderto review post-conference progress. Since1995, Habitat has been compiling data,which now includes indicators on popula-tion, income, water, waste, housing, andtransportation for 237 cities in 110 countries. To expand the effort, Habitathas been assembling government experts, university scholars, and indepen-dent researchers in a Global UrbanObservatory Network.71

Yet even when data on local problemsare adequate, cities may face a dearth ofideas for solutions. Inspiration from othercities may help bolster political will.Nineteenth-century sanitary reformsgained momentum as scientists and localauthorities from different cities com-pared notes. Such exchange is just asessential today. In 1990, the Toronto-based International Council on LocalEnvironmental Initiatives (ICLEI) wasformed to serve as the environmental armof the world’s oldest association of munic-ipalities, the International Union of LocalAuthorities. As a clearinghouse, ICLEIdisseminates information about the2,000-plus cities in 64 countries that arenow working on Local Agenda 21 initia-tives. In a similar vein, one of the most

immediate outcomes of the Istanbulmeeting was a database of “BestPractices,” which now contains more than650 urban success stories. Each city isunique, so an innovation from one mightbe adapted, rather than precisely replicat-ed, in another.72

Direct contact between local authori-ties from different cities can speed suchinformation exchange. In recent years,networks for sustainable cities have prolif-erated, organized by existing municipalassociations, NGOs, national govern-ments, or international agencies. TheNew York-based Mega-Cities Project, oneof the most prominent NGOs, was found-ed in 1987 to promote exchange betweenofficials from the world’s largest cities.Europe has some of the strongest cityexchange programs. More than 100European city leaders convened inAalborg, Denmark, in 1994 to inauguratethe European Sustainable Cities andTowns Campaign, which is supported byseveral municipal associations in Europe,as well as ICLEI and the World HealthOrganization. Networks linked to govern-ments or international agencies may havea funding component. For instance, theWorld Bank and the European Invest-ment Bank brought mayors of cities bordering the Mediterranean together inBarcelona in 1991 to launch theMediterranean Coastal Cities Network.The lending institutions, along withUNDP, help the cities gather data on envi-ronmental problems and devise solutions,as well as exchange information.73

Even when political will exists in onepart of a city, fragmented governanceoften inhibits political action. Rarely doesone government structure correspond toan entire metropolitan region. As districtswithin a metropolis compete with eachother for development that will boost taxrevenue, they push built-up areas overforests and farmland, pave over water-sheds, and invite air pollution fromincreased car use. In the United States,


the city that has made the most notableprogress toward sustainability, Portland, isalso the only one with an elected metro-politan government. David Rusk, formermayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico, hasshown that regions with strong metropol-itan cooperation are also less segregatedalong lines of race and class and are eco-nomically healthier. And Myron Orfield, alegislator from Minnesota, has helped gal-vanize “metropolitanism” in the UnitedStates—a movement that includes inner-city boosters and residents of decayingolder suburbs seeking to direct invest-ment toward existing infrastructure, aswell as environmentalists trying to protectfringe areas from development.74

National and subnational policies canmake or break a city’s efforts to developsustainably. Only higher levels of govern-ment can subdue the rivalry that spawnsurban sprawl. State law requires Portland,for instance, to constrain its metropolitanboundary. Similarly, national policies thatintegrate environmental and spatial plan-ning in Denmark and the Netherlandsrestrict new urban development in citiessuch as Copenhagen and Amsterdam topreserve green space. A city council canenact building codes to improve waterand energy efficiency, but its conservationefforts will be undermined if the nationalgovernment continues subsidizing the useof these resources. Cities with LocalAgenda 21s are generally those that havestrong support from the national level. A1997 survey showed that 82 percent ofknown Local Agenda 21 initiatives wereconcentrated in 11 countries with nation-al campaigns sponsored by governmentor country-wide municipal associations.75

The second main obstacle, lack ofmoney, is often exacerbated by such dis-connections between different levels ofgovernment. National governments inboth industrial and developing countrieshave continued to shift functions to sub-national and city governments in recentyears, relying on local authorities to find

the money to do the job. Yet city govern-ments are generally not allowed to levytaxes high enough to yield the neededrevenue. The challenge for cities is tomobilize existing revenue and localresources to provide needed services.76

If cities have control over services thatdraw on natural resources, they may beable to raise fees to meet both economicand environmental goals. Fees for unsort-ed household garbage have bolsteredurban recycling efforts in a number ofindustrial countries. The success of waterconservation programs from Bogor toBoston has hinged on higher prices—astandby of energy efficiency as well.Rather than maintain artificially lowprices for all, water authorities or electricutilities can provide targeted subsidies,such as a loan or grant for the poorestfamilies to pay for the initial hook-up,which is often the most prohibitive cost.Another tactic is to raise fees on parkingto discourage driving and help fund pub-lic transportation.

In seeking to fund a sustainable city,local authorities have increasingly reliedon the resourcefulness of local communi-ties and NGOs, as well as the profit-mak-ing ability of the private sector. Both typesof alliances work best if they are actualpartnerships, in which local authoritiesacknowledge their responsibility for safe-guarding public welfare. When theresources of the private sector far out-weigh those of the city, local authoritiesmay be unable to oversee the companies’activities and to insist on service provision


National policies that integrate envi-ronmental and spatial planningrestrict new urban development inCopenhagen and Amsterdam to pre-serve green space.

to all. These concerns are not new: in theindustrial cities of the nineteenth century,people complained that rail companiesneglected projects that would benefit thepublic. UNDP’s recently establishedPublic Private Partnerships for the UrbanEnvironment program emphasizes theimportance of public oversight. It aims tohelp cities in developing countries turnenvironmental problems into viable busi-ness opportunities in water, waste, andenergy services.77

Some cities have found a novel way touse one of the most widespread forms oflocal revenue, the property tax, to pro-mote development of vacant lots withinurban areas. Taxes on buildings tend toraise rents and discourage urban redevel-opment, so shifting property taxes frombuildings to land can stimulate construc-tion on central sites, and can encouragespeculators to develop empty city lots tohelp pay their taxes. But such a shift willonly work if complementary policies pro-tect surrounding forests and farmlandfrom development. Thus, metropolitanareas subject to spatial restrictions ongrowth may be best equipped to make useof this tactic.78

Higher service fees and targeted taxpolicies will not achieve their desiredeffect if people cannot pay bills or taxes.Pervasive unemployment and povertyoften keep cash-strapped cities in the red.Most mayors, according to a recent surveyby UNDP, cite job creation as their mostpressing concern. The need for environ-mental services can match up with thedemand for jobs, as the experience withcommunity waste-based industries incities such as Cairo demonstrates. Small-scale lending programs—“microcredit”—can also help alleviate the poverty thatblights cities. Small loans give a chance topoor entrepreneurs who lack the collater-

al a traditional bank would require. In theUnited States, there were 250 microcreditprograms in 1996, twice as many as in1992. According to the World Bank,30–80 percent of workers in the develop-ing world work in the microenterprisesector.79

Rectifying local finances and improv-ing the ability of citizens to pay local taxesfrees up money for environmental protec-tion. In Ahmedabad, India, a talentedmunicipal commissioner began a cam-paign in the early 1990s to balance thecity’s budget by eliminating costly corrup-tion, raising utility rates, and collectingtaxes. By 1996, the city boasted a substan-tial surplus, as revenues shot past expen-ditures. With the new funds, the cityinitiated a host of projects to improve thelocal environment and public health. Asenvironmental health rebounded, so toodid the climate for private investment,which may ultimately attract even moremoney to solving Ahmedabad’s prob-lems. With advice from the U.S. Agencyfor International Development, the cityhas floated India’s first municipal bond,which will finance improvements in waterand sewer infrastructure.80

In the late nineteenth and early twenti-eth centuries, those who reflected on life-threatening urban pollution—Dickens,Howard, and Le Corbusier amongthem—feared that cities might eventuallyself-destruct. Today, it is not only inhu-mane living conditions but also unsus-tainable resource use that pose a threat.Efforts to overcome the political andfinancial barriers to sustainable city plan-ning have one thing in common: thedynamism of committed people tradingideas and working together. It is this con-centration of human energy that allowedcities to give birth to human civilization—and that may ultimately save it.


NotesChapter 8. Exploring a New Visionfor Cities

1. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York:Bantam Books, reissue ed., 1981); PeterKeating, “The Metropolis in Literature,” inAnthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis 1890–1940(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

2. Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years ofUrban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston,NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987).

3. Visions from Peter Hall, Cities ofTomorrow, updated ed. (Oxford, U.K.:Blackwell Publishers, 1996); engineers fromDavid Perry, ed., Building the Public City: ThePolitics, Governance, and Finance of PublicInfrastructure, Urban Affairs Annual Review 43(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc,1995); Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities ofTomorrow (1902), cited in Robert Fishman,Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (NewYork: Basic Books, 1977); Le Corbusier, TheCity of Tomorrow and its Planning, translatedfrom the 8th French Edition of Urbanisme(1924) by Frederick Etchells (Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 1971).

4. U.S. cities from James HowardKunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1993); skyscrapers fromDavid Malin Roodman and Nicholas Lenssen,A Building Revolution: How Ecology and HealthConcerns Are Transforming Construction,Worldwatch Paper No. 124 (Washington, DC:Worldwatch Institute, March 1995).

5. World Commission on Environment

and Development, Our Common Future (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987); Plato,The Republic, cited in James A. Clapp, The City:A Dictionary of Quotable Thoughts on Cities andUrban Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Center forUrban Policy Research, Rutgers University,1987); Jorge Hardoy, Sandy Cairncross, andDavid Satterthwaite, The Poor Die Young:Housing and Health in Third World Cities(London: Earthscan, 1990); World ResourcesInstitute (WRI), United Nations EnvironmentProgramme (UNEP), and United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP), WorldBank, World Resources 1996–97 (New York:Oxford University Press, 1996).

6. Mathias Wackernagel and WilliamRees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing HumanImpact on the Earth (Philadelphia, PA: NewSociety Publishers, 1996); Herbert Girardet,“Cities and the Biosphere,” UNDPRoundtable, The Next Millennium: Cities forPeople in a Globalizing World, Marmaris,Turkey, 19–21 April 1996; InternationalInstitute for Environment and Development(IIED) for the U.K. Department ofEnvironment, Citizen Action to Lighten Britain’sEcological Footprints (London: IIED, 1995).

7. Clive Ponting, A Green History of theWorld (New York: Penguin Books, 1991);United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects:The 1996 Revision (New York: United Nations,1998).

8. Norman Hammond, “Ancient Cities,”Scientific American, Special Issue, vol. 5, no. 1(1994); Robert M. Adams, “The Origin ofCities,” Scientific American, September 1960

(reprinted in Special Issue, 1994); LewisMumford, The City in History (San Diego, CA:Harcourt Brace, 1961).

9. Josef Konvitz, The Urban Millennium:The City-Building Process from the Early MiddleAges to the Present (Carbondale, IL: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1985); Joel Garreau,Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York:Doubleday, 1991); U.S. Department ofCommerce, Bureau of the Census, State andMetropolitan Area Data Book (Washington, DC:U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997);Wendell Cox Consultancy, “US UrbanizedArea: 1950–1990 ó40 Data and RankingTables,” at <http://www.publicpurpose.com>,viewed 10 November 1998.

10. Gregory Ingram, “MetropolitanDevelopment: What Have We Learned?”Urban Studies, June 1998; United NationsCentre for Human Settlements (Habitat), AnUrbanizing World: Global Report on HumanSettlements, 1996 (Oxford, U.K.: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996); United Nations, op.cit. note 7.

11. Habitat, op. cit. note 10; Saskia Sassen,“Urban Impacts of Economic Globalization,”Comparative Urban Studies Occasional PaperSeries No. 5 (Washington, DC: WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars,undated); Robert Kaplan, “In the Lexicon ofthe New Cartography, All Roads Will Lead toCity-States,” The World Paper, July 1998.

12. Hall, op. cit. note 3; Chandler, op. cit.note 2; United Nations, op. cit. note 7; Pravin Visaria, Urbanization in India: AnOverview, Working Paper No. 52 (Ahmedabad,India: Gujarat Institute of DevelopmentResearch, September 1993).

13. United Nations, op. cit. note 7, andChandler, op. cit. note 2; figure of 90 percentbased on United Nations, op. cit. note 7.

14. United Nations, op. cit. note 7; John D.Karsada and Allan Parnell, Third World Cities:Problems, Policies, and Prospects (Newbury Park,

CA: Sage Publications, 1993); “mega-villages”from Martin Brockerhoff and Ellen Brennan,“The Poverty of Cities in Developing Regions,”Population and Development Review, March 1998.

15. Girardet, op. cit. note 6; Clark Wieman,“Downsizing Infrastructure,” Technology Review,May/June 1996.

16. Mumford, op. cit. note 8.

17. Nineteenth-century engineers fromHans van Engen, Dietrich Kampe, andSybrand Tjallingii, eds., Hydropolis: The Role ofWater in Urban Planning (Leiden, theNetherlands: Backhuys Publishers, 1995);French cities from John Briscoe, “When theCup’s Half Full,” Environment, May 1993.

18. Mark A. Ridgely, “Water, Sanitation andResource Mobilization: Expanding the Rangeof Choices,” in G. Shabbir Cheema, ed., UrbanManagement: Policies and Innovations inDeveloping Countries (Westport, CT: Praeger,1993); World Health Organization (WHO),Water Supply and Sanitation Sector MonitoringReport 1996 (Geneva: 1996); WHO, The WorldHealth Report 1998 (Geneva: 1998); WHO, TheUrban Health Crisis (Geneva: 1996); WRI,UNEP, and UNDP, op. cit. note 5.

19. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, citedin van Engen, Kampe, and Tjallingii, op. cit.note 17; western United States from “Water in the West: Buying a Gulp of the Colorado,”The Economist, 24 January 1998, and fromWilliam Booth, “Los Angeles Asked to RefillDusty Lake It Drained in 1920s,” WashingtonPost, 16 May 1997; China from “Official SaysWest Has Duty to Provide Grants, Loans, toHelp Fight Water Shortage,” InternationalEnvironment Reporter, 29 April 1998, and fromWang Wenyuan, “High Time to ConserveWater Asset,” China Daily, 20 April 1998;increase from I.A. Shiklomanov, “Global WaterResources,” Nature and Resources, vol. 26, no. 3(1990).

20. Chester Arnold and James Gibbons,“Impervious Surface Coverage: The Emer-


gence of a Key Environmental Indicator,”Journal of the American Planning Association,March 1996.

21. National Research Council, Academicade la Investigacion Cientifica, A.C., AcademiaNacional de Ingenieria, A.C., Mexico City’sWater Supply (Washington, DC: NationalAcademy Press, 1995).

22. Sandra Postel, Last Oasis, rev. ed. (NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997); PeterGleick, The World’s Water: 1998–1999: TheBiennial Report on Freshwater Resources(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998).

23. Postel, op. cit. note 22; RutherfordPlatt, “The 2020 Water Supply Study forMetropolitan Boston: The Demise ofDiversion,” Journal of the American PlanningAssociation, March 1995; Jonathan Yeo,Massachusetts Water Resources Authority,Water Works Division, discussion with author,27 October 1998.

24. Ismail Serageldin, Water Supply,Sanitation, and Environmental Sustainability: TheFinancing Challenge, Directions in Develop-ment (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1994).

25. Organisation for Economic Co-opera-tion and Development (OECD), WaterSubsidies and the Environment (Paris: 1997);Bogor from Ismail Serageldin, TowardSustainable Management of Water Resources,Directions in Development (Washington, DC:World Bank, 1995).

26. Habitat, op. cit. note 10.

27. Tokyo Metropolitan Government,“Action Program for Creating an Eco-Society”(draft), Tokyo, February 1998.

28. Gleick, op. cit. note 22; “SustainableWater Management Systems Must BeDeveloped Soon,” International EnvironmentReporter, 18 March 1998.

29. Todd Wilkinson, “An UpstreamSolution to River Pollution,” Christian Science

Monitor, 19 May 1997; Douglas Martin, “WaterProjects Cost So Much That Even Environ-mentalists Worry,” New York Times, 15 June1998; Geoffrey Ryan, New York CityDepartment of Environmental Protection, dis-cussion with author, 28 October 1998.

30. Boston from Anne Whiston Spirn, TheGranite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design(New York: Basic Books, 1984); Mike Davis,Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination ofDisaster (New York: Henry Holt, 1998).

31. Wetlands treatment in general fromRobert Bastian and Jay Benforado, “WasteTreatment: Doing What Comes Naturally,”Technology Review, February 1983; Arizonafrom David Rosenbaum, “Wetlands Bloom inthe Desert,” Engineering News-Record, 11December 1995, and from David Schwartz,“Phoenix Uses Cleaning Power of Wetlands toScrub Sewage,” Christian Science Monitor, 16January 1997.

32. Arif Hasan, “Replicating the Low-CostSanitation Programme Administered by theOrangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan,” inIsmail Serageldin, Michael Cohen, and K.C.Sivaramakrishnan, eds. The Human Face of theUrban Environment, Proceedings of the SecondAnnual World Bank Conference onEnvironmentally Sustainable Development(Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995); FredPearce, “Squatters Take Control,” New Scientist,1 June 1996; Akhtar Badshah, Our Urban Future(London: Zed Books, 1996).

33. Funds needed for reliable water systemsfrom Serageldin, op. cit. note 25; UnitedKingdom and France from David Suratgar,“World Water: Financing the Future,” TheJournal of Project Finance, summer 1998, andfrom Frederico Neto, “Water Privatization andRegulation in England and France: A Tale ofTwo Models,” Natural Resources Forum, May1998; percentage from private sources fromBradford Gentry and Lisa Fernandez,“Evolving Public-Private Partnerships: GeneralThemes and Examples from the Urban WaterSector,” Globalisation and the Environment:


Perspectives from OECD and Dynamic Non-MemberEconomies, OECD Proceedings (Paris: OECD,1998); privatization trend from Gisele Silva,Nicola Tynan, and Yesim Yilmaz, “PrivateParticipation in the Water and SewerageSector—Recent Trends,” Private Sector,September 1998; Buenos Aires fromEmmanuel Ideolvitch and Klas Ringskog,Private Sector Participation in Water Supply andSanitation in Latin America, Directions inDevelopment (Washington, DC: World Bank,1995).

34. Martin Melosi, Garbage in the Cities(College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1981);Mumford, op. cit. note 8; Dickens from Clapp,op. cit. note 5.

35. Mount Smoky from WRI, UNEP, andUNDP, op. cit. note 5, and from “SmokyMountain Blues,” The Economist, 9 September1995.

36. Developing world from Habitat, op. cit.note 10; waste disposal methods from WHO,Solid Waste and Health, Local Authorities,Health and Environment Briefing PamphletSeries No. 5 (Geneva: 1995).

37. Nutrient cycle from Gary Gardner,Recycling Organic Waste: From Urban Pollutant toFarm Resource, Worldwatch Paper 135(Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute,August 1997); New York from Toni Nelson,“Closing the Nutrient Loop,” World Watch,November/December 1996, and from VivianToy, “Planning to Close Its Landfill, New YorkWill Export Trash,” New York Times, 30November 1996; nitrogen pollution fromPeter Vitousek, Human Alternation of the GlobalNitrogen Cycle: Causes and Consequences(Washington, DC: Ecological Society ofAmerica, 1997).

38. Waring cited in Spirn, op. cit. note 30;waste generation from Habitat, op. cit. note10.

39. Organic waste from U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency, Organic Materials

Management Strategies (Washington, DC: 1998);industrial countries from OECD, Environ-mental Data Compendium 1997 (Paris: 1997);European cities from Josef Barth and HolgerStöppler-Zimmer, “Compost Quality inEurope,” Biocycle, August 1998.

40. UNDP, Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs andSustainable Cities (New York: 1996); Nelson, op.cit. note 37.

41. Waste-based industries from JenniferRay Beckman, “Recycling-Based Manu-facturing Boosts Local Economies in U.S.,”Ecological Economics Bulletin, Fourth Quarter1997; recycling in U.S. cities from Institute forLocal Self Reliance, Cutting the Waste Stream inHalf: Community Record-Setters Show How (draft)(Washington, DC: October 1998).

42. Tokyo from “Tokyo Examines Fees ForCollection of Garbage from Households by1999,” International Environment Reporter, 5February 1997; Graz from First Steps: LocalAgenda 21 in Practice (London: Her Majesty’sStationery Office, 1994); InternationalCouncil for Local Environmental Initiatives(ICLEI), “Profiting from PollutionPrevention” (Toronto: 1994).

43. Susan Hall, “Lessons from a Semi-Private Enterprise in Bandung, Indonesia,” inU.S. Agency for International Development,Privatizing Solid Waste Management Services inDeveloping Countries, Proceedings Paper(Washington, DC: International City/CountyManagement Association, 1992); ICLEI,“Bandung, Indonesia: Solid Waste Manage-ment,” Project Summary 67 (Toronto: 1991).

44. Kalundborg from Steven Peck andChris Callaghan, “Gathering Steam: Eco-Industrial Parks Exchange Waste for Efficiencyand Profit,” Alternatives Journal, spring 1997;U.S. cities from Mark Dwortzan, “TheGreening of Industrial Parks,” TechnologyReview, 11 January 1998.

45. Glenn Yaro, The Decline of Transit: UrbanTransportation in German and U.S. Cities


1900–1970 (Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984).

46. United States from Steve Nadis andJames J. MacKenzie, Car Trouble (Boston:Beacon Press, 1993); Bangkok from MalcolmFalkus, “Bangkok: From Primate City toPrimate Megalopolis,” in Theo Barker andAnthony Sutcliffe, eds., Megalopolis: The GiantCity in History (London: St. Martin’s Press,1993), and from Peter Newman and JeffKenworthy, Sustainability and Cities: OvercomingAutomobile Dependence (Washington, DC: IslandPress, in press).

47. Le Corbusier, op. cit. note 3; WHO, TheWorld Health Report 1997 (Geneva: 1997).

48. WHO, The World Health Report 1995(Geneva: 1995); British Medical Association,Road Transport and Health (London: BritishMedical Association, 1997).

49. Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation (NewYork: Random House, 1997); AnnalynLacombe and William Lyons, “The Trans-portation System’s Role in Moving WelfareRecipients to Jobs,” Volpe TransportationJournal, spring 1998; Michael Replogle andWalter Hook, “Improving Access for the Poorin Urban Areas,” Race, Poverty and theEnvironment, fall 1995.

50. Michael Wals and Jitendra Shah, CleanFuels for Asia, World Bank Technical Paper No.377 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997);Jitendra Shah and Tanvi Nagpal, eds., UrbanAir Quality Management Strategy in Asia: MetroManila Report, World Bank Technical PaperNo. 380 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997).

51. U.S. estimate is for 1982–92 and is fromAmerican Farmland Trust, Farming on the Edge(Washington, DC: March 1997); China esti-mate is for 1991–96 and is from Liu Yinglang,“Legislation to Protect Arable Land,” ChinaDaily, 15 September 1998; carbon calculationis based on population projections in UnitedNations, op. cit. note 7, and average carbonemissions per capita in 10 U.S. cities from

Newman and Kenworthy, op. cit. note 46.

52. Newman and Kenworthy, op. cit. note46; Gary Gardner, “When Cities Take BicyclesSeriously,” World Watch, September/October1998; Michael Bernick and Robert Cervero,Transit Villages in the 21st Century (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1997).

53. Jonas Rabinovitch and Josef Leitman,“Urban Planning in Curitiba,” ScientificAmerican, March 1996; Jonas Rabinovitch,“Innovative Land Use and Public TransportPolicy,” Land Use Policy, vol. 13, no. 1 (1996).

54. Mary Williams Walsh, “Instant Mobility,No Headaches,” The Sun, 3 August 1998;European Academy of the UrbanEnvironment, “Berlin: Stattauto-GermanyLargest Car-Sharing Company,” SURBAN-Good Practice in Urban Development (Berlin:June 1997). The SURBAN database is availableon the Internet at <http://www.eaue.de/>.

55. Chris Bushell, ed. Jane’s Urban TransportSystems, 1995–96 (Surrey, U.K.: Jane’sInformation Group, 1995).

56. ICLEI, Initiatives Newsletter, November1997; Gardner, op. cit. note 52.

57. Marcia Lowe, Shaping Cities: TheEnvironmental and Human Dimensions,Worldwatch Paper 105 (Washington, DC:Worldwatch Institute, October 1991).

58. Jorge E. Hardoy and DavidSatterthwaite, Squatter Citizen: Life in the UrbanThird World (London: Earthscan, 1989); ManalEl-Batran and Christian Arandel, “A Shelter ofTheir Own: Informal Settlement Expansion inGreater Cairo and Government Responses,”Environment and Urbanization, April 1998;Roush Wade, “Population: the View fromCairo,” Science, 26 August 1994.

59. Streets from Jane Jacobs, The Death andLife of Great American Cities (New York: RandomHouse, 1961), and from Peter Calthorpe, TheNext American Metropolis: Ecology, Community,and the American Dream (New York: Princeton


Architectural Press, 1993); parks from John F.Dwyer, Herbert Schroeder, and Paul Gobster,“The Deep Significance of Urban Trees andForests,” in Rutherford H. Platt, Rowan A.Rowntree, and Pamela C. Muick, eds., TheEcological City (Amherst, MA: University ofMassachusetts Press, 1994), and from MichaelHough, Cities and Natural Process (London:Routledge, 1995); São Paulo from RaquelRolnick, “Territorial Exclusion and Violence:The Case of São Paulo, Brazil,” paper for theWoodrow Wilson International Center forScholars’ Comparative Urban Studies Projecton Urbanization, Population, Security, and theEnvironment, Washington, DC, 14–15September 1998; Jacobs, op. cit. this note.

60. Transportation from Newman andKenworthy, op. cit. note 46; buildings’ materi-als and energy use from Roodman andLenssen, op. cit. note 4.

61. Rutgers University Center for UrbanPolicy Research, Impact Assessment of New Jersey,Interim State Development and Redevelopment Plan(New Brunswick, NJ: 1992); Maryland Officeof Planning, Land Use and Development Patternsin Maryland (Baltimore, MD: 1994); Chicagofrom E. Gregory McPherson, David J. Nowak,and Rowan A. Rowntree, Chicago’s Urban ForestEcosystem: Results of the Chicago Urban ForestClimate Project (Radnor, PA: NortheasternForest Experiment Station, Forest Service,U.S. Department of Agriculture, June 1994).

62. Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie,Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Ageof Sprawl (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); AlanThein Durning, The Car and the City (Seattle,WA: Northwest Environment Watch, 1996);Mike Burton, Portland Metro Chief, Portland,OR, discussion with author, 18 June 1998.

63. Philip Langdon and Corby Kummer,“How Portland Does It: A City That Protects itsThriving Civil Core,” The Atlantic, November1992; Newman and Kenworthy, op. cit. note46.

64. Anne Spackman, “The Pressure is on

for a Brown Future,” Financial Times, 13–14June 1998; Thomas K. Wright and Ann Davlin,“Overcoming Obstacles to Brownfield andVacant Land Redevelopment,” Land Lines,Newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of LandPolicy, Cambridge, MA, September 1998; WesSanders, “Environmental Justice, UrbanRevitalization, and Brownfields,” Orion Afield,spring 1998; “EPA Awards Grants to 17 MoreBrownfields Projects in Midwest,” PR Newswire,15 July 1998.

65. Hardoy and Satterthwaite, op. cit. note58; Curitiba from Bill McKibben, Hope: Humanand Wild (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,1995).

66. Roodman and Lenssen, op. cit. note 4;Nina Munkstrup and Jakob Lindberg, Urban Ecology Guide—Greater Copenhagen(Copenhagen: Danish Town PlanningInstitute, 1996).

67. John Spears, “Rebuilding LivesThrough Sustainable Solar CommunityDevelopment,” presented at the AmericanSolar Energy Society Conference, June 1998;Will Zachman, “‘Whole Building’ Approach toSustainable Design,” Environmental Design andConstruction, July/August 1998; PeterWilkinson, “Housing Policy in South Africa,”Habitat International, September 1998.

68. Spirn, op. cit. note 30.

69. Abel Wolman, “The Metabolism ofCities,” Scientific American, March 1965;Herbert Girardet, Cities: New Directions forSustainable Urban Living (London: Gaia Books,1992); John Eberhard, “A Third Generation ofUrban Systems Innovations,” Cities: TheInternational Journal of Urban Policy andPlanning, February 1990.

70. Eric Carlson, “The Legacy of HabitatII,” The Urban Age, August 1996; UnitedNations, Report of the United Nations Conferenceon Human Settlements (Habitat II), Istanbul,3–14 June 1996 (New York: 1996).


71. Jay Moor, Global Urban Observatory, e-mail to author, 16 October 1998; ChristineAuclir, “Researchers Needed for Global UrbanDatabase,” Urban Age, spring 1998.

72. ICLEI from Richard Gilbert et al.,Making Cities Work: The Role of Local Authoritiesin the Urban Environment (London: Earthscan,1996); Local Agenda 21s from ICLEI, discus-sion with author, 17 August 1998; UnitedNations, op. cit. note 70; Habitat, “UrbanProblems Mushrooming—First Ever Databaseof Urban Solutions Created,” press release(Nairobi: 20 November 1995); Habitat,“Database of Human Settlements BestPractices Released,” press release (Nairobi: 5October 1998). The database is available at<http://www.bestpractices.org/>.

73. Mega-Cities Project Inc, EnvironmentalInnovations for Sustainable Mega-Cities: SharingApproaches that Work (New York: 1996); JanicePerlman, “Mega-Cities: Global Urbanizationand Innovation,” in Cheema, op. cit. note 18;European Commission, European SustainableCities (Brussels: 1996); Ayse Kudat, “UrbanEnvironmental Audits: Networking andParticipation in Six Mediterranean Cities,” inSerageldin, Cohen, and Sivaramakrishnan, op.cit. note 32.

74. Paul Lewis, Shaping Suburbia: HowPolitical Institutions Organize Urban Development(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press,1996); David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson CenterPress, 1993); Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: ARegional Agenda for Community and Stability(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press,1997); Penelope Lemov, “Building it Smarter,Managing it Better,” Governing Magazine,October 1996.

75. Portland from Durning, op. cit. note62; Denmark and the Netherlands fromEuropean Commission, op. cit. note 73;ICLEI, in cooperation with the United NationsDepartment for Policy Coordination andSustainable Development, Local Agenda 21Survey (New York: March 1997).

76. Habitat, op. cit. note 10.

77. Ismail Serageldin, Richard Barrett, andJoan Martin-Brown, eds., The Business ofSustainable Cities: Public-Private Partnerships forCreative Technical and Institutional Solutions,Environmentally Sustainable DevelopmentProceedings Series No. 7 (Washington, DC:World Bank, 1995); nineteenth century fromWorld Bank, World Development Report 1994(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);UNDP from “Public-Private Partnerships forthe Urban Environment,” <http://www.undp.org/>, viewed 26 October 1998.

78. David Malin Roodman, The NaturalWealth of Nations (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1998).

79. UNDP from Jonas Rabinovitch, presen-tation at Woodrow Wilson InternationalCenter for Scholars’ Comparative UrbanStudies Project on Urbanization, Population,Security, and the Environment, Washington,DC, 14–15 September 1998; microcredit fromGary Stix, “Small (Lending) is Beautiful,”Scientific American, April 1997; World Bankfrom Ismail Serageldin, “Helping Out withTiny Loans,” Journal of Commerce, 2 April 1997.

80. Dinesh Mehta, “Participatory UrbanEnvironmental Management: A Case ofAhmedabad, India,” paper for the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars’Comparative Urban Studies Project onUrbanization, Population, Security, and theEnvironment, Washington, DC, 14–15September 1998; Jonathan Karp, “Muni BondsBecome Novel Way of Funding City Projects inIndia,” Wall Street Journal, 26 November 1997;Patralekha Chatterjee, “India ULBs GiveLenders More than IOUs,” Urban Age, vol. 5,no. 2 (1997); Priscilla Phelps, ed., MunicipalBond Market Development in Developing Countries:The Experience of the U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment (Washington, DC: U.S. AIDFinance Working Paper, November 1997).


Ending Violent ConflictMichael Renner

“This conference could augur well for thecoming century. It would unite into onemighty whole the efforts of all States sin-cerely striving to make the great idea ofuniversal peace triumph over strife anddiscord.” Count Mikhail NikolayevichMuravyov, Russia’s Foreign Minister,expressed the hopes of many when hespoke of the prospects for the First HagueInternational Peace Conference in 1899.1

Called on the initiative of CzarNicholas II of Russia, who expressed con-cern that the armed peace of the timeconstituted a “crushing burden,” theevent brought together representativesfrom 26 countries. The internationalpeace movement, which had worked hardfor the gathering to take place, but whoserepresentatives were not allowed to par-ticipate, placed high hopes in the event,anticipating progress on disarmamentand the establishment of a permanentcourt of arbitration to settle internationalconflicts by peaceful means. But the con-ference—and a follow-up gathering in1907—succeeded mostly in codifying the

rules of warfare rather than making waritself less likely.2

Indeed, the two Hague peace confer-ences proved incapable of stoppingEurope and the world from marchingtoward the general war that was the open-ing event of what British historian EricHobsbawm has called “the age ofextremes.” The twentieth century was tobecome the most violent of all humanages, unprecedented in the scale andintensity of killing and destruction.Around the turn of the century, prepara-tions for war intensified and soon turnedfeverish. “In the 1900s war drew visiblynearer, in the 1910s its imminence couldand was in some ways taken for granted,”observes Hobsbawm. From 1880–1914,the six leading European powers tripledtheir military expenditures. Their armiesalmost doubled in size—from 2.6 millionto 4.5 million—and their navies, mea-sured in tonnage, grew more than five-fold. Out of the Industrial Revolutionemerged a military-industrial complexcapable of churning out massive quanti-

9

ties of weapons, ready and eager to profitfrom an insecure and belligerent world.3

Some, including the Swedish industrial-ist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamitein 1867, put faith in the argument that thedestructive power of his explosives and ofother new armaments was so immense asto render future warfare more and moreunthinkable. Others, like Polish-Russianindustrialist Ivan Bliokh, who in 1898 pub-lished Technical, Economic and PoliticalAspects of the Coming War, predicted thehorrors of trench warfare and the politicaland social convulsions that would followthe mass slaughter of World War I.4

No one was more ardent in warningagainst the coming war or worked harderto prevent it than Bertha von Suttner, oneof the most well known pacifists of hertime. Her anti-war novel, Die Waffen Nieder(Lay Down Your Arms), published in1889, became one of the most influentialbooks of the nineteenth century.Translated into many languages, it helpedspread the pacifist idea throughout theworld at a time when peace societies in thedifferent European countries were smalland splintered, and lacked coordination.

Von Suttner worked hard to convinceher close friend Alfred Nobel to devotehis wealth to the cause of peace. It was herinfluence that made the Swedish industri-alist establish, posthumously, the NobelPeace Prize, which she then received in1905.5

Von Suttner was in many ways ahead ofher time. She prophesied the enormity ofdestruction in World War I, warned ofcoming weapons of mass destruction,argued for peacekeeping forces, demand-ed the establishment of a UnitedNations–type organization, and supporteda “European Confederation of States.”Imbued by her era’s sense of the inevitabil-ity of progress, she held that peace was acondition “that would necessarily resultfrom the progress of culture.” But vonSuttner became more anxious and pes-simistic in the last years of her life, as

Europe and the world lurched toward war.When she passed away on 21 June 1914, itseemed that the hope for peace died withher. Seven days later, the heir to the throneof the Habsburg empire and his wife werekilled by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo—the event that triggered World War I.6

A third Hague Peace Conference,scheduled for 1915, never took place. Yetthe Hague Conference process hasremained a milestone event in humanefforts to tame the beast of warfare. Onehundred years later, its legacy is beingrevived. In an effort to take care of unfin-ished business, the Hague Appeal—amajor citizens’ peace conference to beheld in May 1999—will bring together cit-izen activists, political leaders, and othersto develop global strategies for disarma-ment and an end to nuclear arms, thepeaceful settlement of disputes, and inter-national humanitarian law.7

WAR IN THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY

Although militarism was an ingrainedhabit of many societies 100 years ago, thepreambles of nineteenth-century human-itarian law nevertheless frequentlyinvoked the need for civilization torestrain warfare. The 1868 St. PetersburgDeclaration Renouncing the Use, in Timeof War, of Certain Explosive Projectilesrecognized that there was a limit “atwhich the necessities of war ought to yieldto the requirements of humanity.”8

During our century, however, killings,expulsions, and wholesale destructionhave been conducted with such ruthless-ness and on such an astronomical scalethat new words had to be invented todescribe them: genocide was coined in1944 to talk about the deliberate and sys-tematic destruction of a racial, political, orcultural group, and overkill was first used


in 1957 to describe the obliteration of atarget with far greater destructive forcethan required. Until the sixteenth centu-ry, fewer than 1 million persons werekilled in battle or due to war-related caus-es during any 100-year stretch. From thenon, the pace accelerated. Three times asmany people fell victim to war in our cen-tury than in all the wars from the first cen-tury A.D. until 1899. (See Table 9–1.)

So immense was the killing duringWorld War I that its individual battlesinflicted casualties as large as those suf-fered in entire wars of earlier eras. (SeeTable 9–2.) The French lost almost 20percent of their men of military age, andthe Germans 13 percent. All in all, an esti-mated 26 million people died during theGreat War; at least another 20 million orso were maimed, permanently shell-shocked, or otherwise disabled. Civiliansaccounted for half of all war deaths, killedmostly by malnutrition, lack of medicalcare, crowding, and the breakdown ofsocial services.9

One reason World War I was so devas-tating was the enormous size of thearmies that were mobilized. Governmentshad begun to use standing armies in theseventeenth century, and universal con-scription had become the rule in most

countries by the end of the nineteenthcentury. Some 20 million Europeans wentoff to fight in August 1914, and by 1918 atotal of 65 million soldiers had beenmobilized on all sides. Compared withjust 1 percent in the wars of 100 years ear-lier, 14 percent of Europe’s populationwas pulled directly into the fighting. Andsoldiers were armed far more formidably.World War I saw the first substantial use ofwar planes, tanks, and chemical warfare.10

World War II, however, dwarfed WorldWar I in scale. It signaled a new era of war-fare—total war, waged not just against mil-itary forces, but mercilessly against acountry’s economy, infrastructure, andcivilian population. The Allied militaryforces reached a peak strength of 46.9million soldiers, and the Axis powers, 21.7million. At least 45 million persons wereinvolved in arms manufacturing. Betweena third and half of the major combatantstates’ labor forces were directly or indi-rectly involved in the war effort. (SeeTable 9–3.)11

The nations at war thus devoted thelion’s share of their industrial strengthand economic wealth to this gargantuanall-or-nothing struggle. The Soviet Unionsuffered by far the most from the fighting;not only did 17 million of its inhabitantsperish, but 25 percent of its prewar capi-tal assets were destroyed, compared with13 percent in Germany, 7 percent inFrance, and 3 percent in the UnitedKingdom.12

The five major combatants in WorldWar II—the United States, the SovietUnion, Germany, the United Kingdom,and Japan—were producing armamentsin fearful quantities, including at least220,000 tanks and 780,000 aircraft. Just inthe European “theater” of the war, theAllies and Axis together used more than$2.5 trillion worth of munitions duringWorld War II. The United States gearedup from producing a negligible share of global arms production in 1939 to 40percent by 1944.13

Ending Violent Conflict (153)

Table 9–1. War-Related Deaths Over the Centuries

Deaths perYears War Deaths 1,000 People

(million)

0–1499 3.7 n.a.1500–99 1.6 3.21600–99 6.1 11.21700–99 7.0 9.71800–99 19.4 16.21900–95 109.7 44.4

SOURCE: William Eckhardt, “War-Related DeathsSince 3000 BC,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, December1991; Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and SocialExpenditures 1996 (Washington, DC: WorldPriorities, 1996).

Statistics about the war’s humanimpact tend to be numbing, so immensewas the scale. Almost 54 million peopleare believed to have perished in frontlinefighting, aerial bombardment, concentra-tion camp mass murders, repressions ofuprisings, and disease and hunger. Wardeaths were equivalent to 10–20 percentof the total population in the SovietUnion, Poland, and Yugoslavia, and 4–6percent in Germany, Italy, Japan, andChina. World War I had generated per-haps 4–5 million refugees. At the end ofWorld War II, by comparison, an estimat-ed 40 million people were uprooted inEurope alone—not including 11 million

foreign forced laborers stranded inGermany or 14 million Germans expelledfrom Eastern Europe. In Asia, theJapanese occupation of China left about50 million Chinese homeless.14

The final acts of hostility of World WarII—the dropping of atomic bombs overHiroshima and Nagasaki—also heraldedthe beginning of the nuclear age and thecoming cold war. After this, another worldwar would not just have been “a war toend all wars,” as the euphemism at thestart of World War I had it, but more like-ly a war to end all civilizations. Hugeresources went to develop, build, andmaintain nuclear arsenals. The UnitedStates alone is thought to have spent atleast $5.5 trillion (in 1996 dollars). Howmuch the Soviet Union and the othernuclear powers spent may never beknown, though one estimate says a grandtotal of $8 trillion may be a reasonable,though conservative, assumption.15

With the help of 2,046 test explosions,the United States, the Soviet Union, andthe smaller nuclear weapons states devel-oped and deployed huge armaments.(See Figure 9–1.) The global stockpile ofnuclear warheads peaked at 69,490 in


Table 9–2. Death Tolls of Selected Wars, 1500–1945

Conflict Time Period Number Killed Civilian Victims(percent)

Peasants’ War (Germany) 1524–1525 175,000 57Dutch Independence War (vs. Spain) 1585–1604 177,000 3230-Year War (Europe) 1618–1648 4,000,000 50Spanish Succession War (Europe) 1701–1714 1,251,000 n.a.7-Year War (Europe, North America, India) 1755–1763 1,358,000 27French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars 1792–1815 4,899,000 41Crimean War (Russia, France, Britain) 1854–1856 772,000 66U.S. Civil War 1861–1865 820,000 24Paraguay vs. Brazil and Argentina 1864–1870 1,100,000 73French-Prussian War 1870–1871 250,000 25U.S.-Spanish War 1898 200,000 95World War I 1914–1918 26,000,000 50World War II 1939–1945 53,547,000 60

SOURCE: Calculated from Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1991 (Washington, DC:World Priorities, 1991).

Table 9–3. Share of Working Population inWar Effort, 1943

Country Arms Industry Armed Forces

Soviet Union 31 23United Kingdom 23 22Germany 14 23United States 19 16

SOURCE: Alan L. Gropman, Mobilizing U.S. Industry inWorld War II, McNair Paper 50 (Washington, DC:Institute for National Strategic Studies, August1996).

1986, containing an explosive yield of 18billion tons of TNT (3.6 tons for everyhuman being), compared with 6 milliontons of explosive force used in all ofWorld War II.16

Not only has the firepower of weapons,nuclear and non-nuclear, multiplied.Their speed, range, maneuverability, andaccuracy have soared as well. Govern-ments have spent lavishly on militaryresearch and development to producethese technical breakthroughs. Extra-polating from U.S. data, cumulativeworldwide resources devoted to militaryinnovation may have amounted to some$3.5 trillion during the last half-century.17

Despite some ups and downs, the over-all trend in twentieth-century global mili-tary spending has been one of stronggrowth. Total expenditures by all combat-ants in 1914–19 ran to about $1.4 trillion.During the 1930s, annual world militaryspending increased from about $50–60billion to about $150 billion on the eve ofWorld War II. Military spending duringthat conflict may have come to somethingon the order of $7–8 trillion, or about$1.3 trillion a year. Considering that glob-al military expenditures toward the endof the cold war peaked at roughly $1.3 tril-

lion a year, it is clear that maintaining thearmed peace of the 1980s came with anannual price tag as large as that for wag-ing the largest war in human history.18

While the superpowers were armingthemselves for doomsday, they and theirallies also spread arms across the planet inunprecedented quantity and quality.Since 1960 alone, the global arms tradeamounted to at least $1.5 trillion (in 1996dollars). Perhaps as much as two thirds ofthat went to developing countries—oftenindebting the recipients and skewingtheir national budget priorities in theprocess. From 1984 to 1995 alone, forinstance, the developing world receivedabout 15,000 tanks, 34,000 artillerypieces, 27,000 armored personnel carri-ers and armored cars, close to 1,000 war-ships and submarines, 4,200 combataircraft, more than 3,000 helicopters,some 48,000 missiles, and millions ofsmall-caliber arms.19

This massive infusion of arms helpeddestabilize countries and regions thatwere in the throes of anti-colonial strug-gles, ethnic battles, and numerous otherunresolved conflicts. It is little wonder,then, that the number of conflicts in thepost–World War II era surged, from 12 in1950 to a peak of 51 in 1992. Only afterthe end of the cold war was it possible tobring several long-running hostilities toan end, bringing the number of armedconflicts down to 25 in 1997. None of thepost-1945 wars could measure up to theearlier global conflicts, but together theyhave killed almost as many people as diedduring World War I. And some of themwere incredibly destructive: Korea lost 10percent of its population to war in theearly 1950s, and Viet Nam lost 13 percentin the 1960s and 1970s. (See Table 9–4.)And the share of civilians among the vic-tims has risen to ever higher levels: per-haps 70 percent of all war casualties sinceWorld War II, but more than 90 percentin the 1990s.20

From the beginning of the modern


1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 20000

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

60,000

70,000

80,000Number of Warheads

Source: NRDC

Figure 9–1. Global Nuclear Stockpiles,1950–97

state system some 350 years ago, stateshave put great energy and enormousresources into developing ever moresophisticated and destructive weapons, inthe process building up relentlesslytoward ever higher levels of organized vio-lence. Weapons now can traverse theentire planet and extinguish all life; mili-tary satellites can pry into the most remotecorners of the world; alliances havespanned continents. Yet with the end ofthe cold war, this buildup reached its anti-climactic denouement: violence betweensovereign states, though not unthinkable,has become less likely and far less fre-quent, whereas violence within societieshas become depressingly commonplace.

PEACE AND DISARMAMENT IN

THIS CENTURY

Prior to the twentieth century, recourse toforce was seen as the sovereign right ofgovernments. But the experience of1914–45—of total uninhibited global war-fare—underscores the fact that efforts toregulate conduct during war alone aresorely inadequate. In order to survive,humanity needs international norms pro-

hibiting the use of force in the first place.It is one of the accomplishments of thetwentieth century—though one still beingviolated—that the use of force by states isnow considered illegal except in self-defense. The U.N. Charter states unam-biguously that: “All Members shall refrainin their international relations from thethreat or use of force against the territori-al integrity or political independence ofany state.” The use of force domestically,meanwhile, is also less and less seen asacceptable, though governmental opin-ions diverge widely, and the internationalcommunity has shown itself to be highlyselective in addressing the issue.21

Throughout human history, nationshave made repeated efforts to promotethe rule of law in international relations,provide for avenues of peaceful settle-ment of conflicts, govern the conduct ofwarring parties (codifying the expectedbehavior of combatants toward each otherand specifying the need to spare noncom-batants), regulate armaments, and createinstitutions for the common good. Duringthe twentieth century, a series of rules andnorms have been formulated (see Table9–5), with the two Hague PeaceConferences being milestone events. Allin all, some 41 international “humanitari-an laws” are currently in force, though


Table 9–4. Death Tolls of Largest Armed Conflicts Since 19451

Conflict Time Period Number Killed Civilian Victims(percent)

Chinese civil war 1946–50 1,000,000 50Korea 1950–53 3,000,000 50Viet Nam (U.S. intervention) 1960–75 2,358,000 58Biafra (Nigerian civil war) 1967–70 2,000,000 50Cambodian civil war 1970–89 1,221,000 69Bangladesh secession 1971 1,000,000 50Afghanistan (Soviet intervention) 1978–92 1,500,000 67Mozambican civil war 1981–94 1,050,000 95Sudanese civil war 1984 onward 1,500,0002 97

1Conflicts that killed 1 million persons or more. 2Numbers up to 1995 only.SOURCE: Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1996 (Washington, DC: World Priorities,1996).

hardly respected universally.22

The rule-writing has not only sought todeal with the age-old, intrinsic savagery ofwarfare, but also to catch up with newrealities—such as new means of wagingwar and the changing nature of conflicts.The 1977 Environmental ModificationConvention, for instance, instructs statesnot to engage in any military use of envi-ronmental modification techniques thathave “widespread, long-lasting or severeeffects.” And whereas war laws had tradi-tionally covered interstate wars, theSecond Protocol Additional to the 1949Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977,addressed the protection of victims ininternal conflicts, in recognition thatthese are the dominant forms of war inour time.23

The twentieth century is also the cen-

tury of human rights advocacy. Theadvancement of human rights—initiallyfocused on civil and political rights, andfollowed by so-called second-generation(economic, social, and cultural) andthird-generation rights (right to develop-ment, right to peace, and right to a decentenvironment)—implicitly annuls warfareas a legitimate tool, since warfare deniesthe enjoyment of these rights. The 1968Teheran Human Rights conference statedquite unambiguously that “Peace is theunderlying condition for the full obser-vance of human rights and war is theirnegation.” Today there are more than 70international and regional conventions,agreements, and declarations on humanrights. Although the number of countriesthat have signed and ratified these legalinstruments is still limited—let alone


Table 9–5. Selected Humanitarian, Human Rights, and Arms Control Treaties of the Twentieth Century

Humanitarian/Laws of War Human Rights Arms Control/Disarmament

1907 Hague Conventions 1948 Universal Declaration 1959 Antarctic Treatyof Human Rights

1925 Protocol Prohibiting 1951 Convention Relating 1967 Outer Space TreatyUse of Poison Gas to the Status of Refugees

1929 Geneva Conventions 1966 Covenant on Economic, 1969/1995 Nuclear Non-Social, and Cultural Rights Proliferation Treaty

1948 Genocide Convention 1966 Covenant on Civil and 1971 Seabed TreatyPolitical Rights

1949 Geneva Convention 1984 Anti-Torture Convention 1972 Biological WeaponsConvention

1976 Environmental 1993 Chemical WeaponsModification Convention Convention

1977 Protocols Additional to 1996 Nuclear Test-Ban1949 Geneva Convention Treaty

1980/1995 Inhumane Weapons 1997 Anti-Personnel Convention Landmine Convention

SOURCE: United Nations Treaty Collection Web page, <http://www.un.org/Depts/Treaty/overview.htm>,viewed 19 August 1998; Ian Browline, ed., Basic Documents on Human Rights (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press,1992); Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995); “Multilaterals Project Chronological Index,” <http://tufts.edu/fletcher/multi/chrono.html>,viewed 20 July 1998.

those that live up to their commitments—there can be no doubt that human rightsadvocacy has been one of the most trans-forming factors of our age.24

An important part of the efforts tolimit the use of force has been the cre-ation of international organizationsthrough which states could discuss andregulate their affairs. Reflecting the grow-ing complexity of global human society,the twentieth century has witnessed a pro-liferation of intergovernmental organiza-tions, such as the League of Nations andthe United Nations, growing from just 37in 1909 to more than 400 by 1997. In partthrough these organizations, a total ofsome 50,000 bilateral and multilateraltreaties have been negotiated in allspheres of life.25

The most important and representa-tive body is the United Nations, whosemembership grew from an original 51states in 1945 to 185 today. Established “tosave succeeding generations from thescourge of war,” as the famous passagefrom the U.N. Charter puts it, much ofthe peace and security machinery of theUnited Nations was deadlocked by thecold war. When that ended, however, theSecurity Council entered a period of fren-zied activity. The number of resolutions,official statements, and consultations sky-rocketed, and only a few vetoes were castby the permanent members.26

Forced by cold war strictures to impro-vise, the United Nations came up with animportant innovation when it “invented”peacekeeping—the dispatch of unarmedor lightly armed U.N. personnel initiallyto help patrol tense border areas and

monitor ceasefire lines, and later tosupervise the implementation of complexpeace treaties, including such tasks as dis-arming and demobilizing combatants,and monitoring elections and humanrights violations. Despite sudden (andshort-lived) growth in the 1990s, however,peacekeeping was and still is being run onan ad hoc basis, and hobbled by unreli-able financing.27

While the U.N.’s involvement in mili-tary and security matters remained limit-ed throughout the cold war years, it hasbeen clear from the start that many of itsother activities—from promoting anti-poverty and child survival programs to assisting education efforts, advocatingwomen’s rights, encouraging fair elections and human rights adherence,and promoting sustainable develop-ment—have a significant bearing onpeace. This is based on the recognitionthat true peace requires justice and equi-ty, and a sufficient degree of human well-being. The UNESCO charter, forinstance, states that “Since wars begin inthe minds of men, it is in the minds ofmen that the defenses of peace must beconstructed.” U.N. agencies and officialshave been awarded a total of 11 NobelPeace prizes.28

As part of the United Nations system,the World Court was established as aforum in which nations could search forpeaceful settlement of their disputes. TheCourt is the product of 200 years ofefforts at international arbitration.Disputes can be brought before the courtin one of three ways. First, several hun-dred international commercial, econom-ic, environmental, and other treaties givethe Court jurisdiction to iron out any dif-ferences in interpretation. Second, coun-tries may agree bilaterally to submit analready existing dispute. Third, they maydecide to accept the Court’s compulsoryjurisdiction beyond any particular case.Despite considerable hopes, however,only a relatively small number of coun-


The end of the cold war permitted theworld to climb down from theextreme heights of overkill arsenals.

tries have accepted this latter role for theCourt. By 1996 the number had reached59, but 12 countries, the United Statesamong them, had withdrawn their one-time consent.

Although the Court has enjoyed a sig-nificant rise in the numbers of disputesbrought before it since 1986, on thewhole it remains sorely underused: it hasso far delivered 61 judgments in responseto a total of 74 cases considered, and ithas rendered 23 advisory opinions. Casesactually brought before it have ofteninvolved minor matters instead of thekind of high-profile issues that couldestablish the Court as a key organ in reg-ulating international affairs. Only whenthe United States and others decide thatan effective World Court is far better thana pliant one will the institution finally beunshackled.29

Near the close of the twentieth centu-ry, the international community is alsobelatedly making progress on anotherfront: the establishment of an Inter-national Criminal Court (ICC). (SeeTable 9–6.) This is, in a sense, the crown-ing event of a long historical struggle con-cerning the legality of war itself and theconduct of warfare. In 1946, the victors ofWorld War II established an InternationalMilitary Tribunal to prosecute Nazi lead-ers for crimes against peace (that is, waging a war of aggression), war crimes(violating accepted norms limiting theconduct of war), and crimes againsthumanity (genocide and other systematicand widespread persecutions of civilianpopulations). But the cold-war rivalryblocked any effective action on establish-ing an international criminal court. Theend of the East-West standoff permittedthe adoption of at first a stop-gap mea-sure—ad hoc tribunals in 1993 and 1994for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda—and then the resumption of serious workon setting up a permanent court, whichled to the adoption of its founding statutein the summer of 1998.30

Another area in which some progresshas been achieved is disarmament.During the first half of the century, gov-ernments talked about disarmament butnever achieved it. During the cold war,the world had to content itself with weakarms control measures that barelyrestrained the dynamic of the arms race.But after accumulating armaments inunparalleled quantity and unprecedentedsophistication, the end of the cold war—and several hot wars—permitted theworld to climb down from the extremeheights of overkill arsenals.

Military expenditures have declined bysome 40 percent from their mid-1980speak. The ranks of the armed forces havebeen trimmed by about 20 percent fromtheir high point in 1988 of 28.7 million.Worldwide holdings of tanks andarmored vehicles, artillery, combat air-craft, and major fighting ships have fallenabout 19 percent between 1990 and 1995.Meanwhile, the conventional arms trade,running amok in the 1980s, has taken anosedive. From a peak of $82 billion in1987 (in 1995 dollars), the value ofweapons transfers fell to less than $27 bil-lion in 1994, then rose to $32 billion in1995. Nuclear arsenals, too, have beentrimmed, from a peak of close to 70,000warheads to just under 40,000 by 1996—although the equivalent of 8 billion tonsof TNT assembled in these weapons is stillfar more than necessary to destroy theentire planet, and hopes for deeper cutsappear distant and uncertain. Fournations actually relinquished theirnuclear arms: Belarus, Kazakhstan, andUkraine transferred their Soviet-era arse-nals to Russia, and South Africa disman-tled warheads as the apartheid regimecame to an end.31

The post–cold war reduction in arma-ments is best seen as a “thinning out” ofarsenals—akin to pruning badly over-grown weeds. The Chemical WeaponsConvention is one of few instances inwhich a whole class of weapons has actu-


ally been outlawed. Opened for signaturein 1993 and entering into force in April1997 (signed so far by 168 states), the con-vention bans the development, produc-tion, trade, possession, and use ofchemical warfare agents and mandatesthat existing stockpiles and productionfacilities be eliminated.32

War may have reached the ultimatescale in our century, and peace may neverhave been more necessary for human sur-vival, but musings about war and peace

are nothing new. All through human his-tory, lofty rhetoric about peace can befound, along with realism about the terri-ble impact of warfare and skepticismabout its merit. What is perhaps differentnow is that civil society—peace move-ments and other citizens’ groups—seemsto be playing a more important role thanin the past, trying to subject security poli-cy to greater public scrutiny and to wrestit from the narrow control of militarybureaucracies and defense intellectuals.33


Table 9–6. Pluses and Minuses of the New International Criminal Court

Pluses Minuses

Jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against But states can reject the court’s jurisdictionhumanity, and war crimes. over war crimes for the first seven years.

Aggression is included as a core crime. But a legal definition of aggression has yet tobe agreed.

Jurisdiction over crimes committed in inter- But the list of specific prosecutable crimes national and internal wars. for internal conflicts is more limited (does

not include forced starvation of civilians orgassing of civilians).

ICC prosecutor can initiate investigations on Court cannot act unless the state of the his/her own, based on information from accused person’s nationality, or the state victims, NGOs, or any other reliable source. where the crimes took place, have ratified

the treaty.

The U.N. Security Council does not have a But the Council, if unanimous, can request veto over the ICC’s proceedings. a one-year delay of prosecution, and renew

the request indefinitely, in one-year segments.

States are required to comply with the Court’s But states can withhold cooperation onrequests for cooperation. national security grounds.

Civilian and military commanders can be held But there is a limited right to assert theresponsible for crimes of their subordinates. existence of orders from one’s superior as a

defense.

States that ratify the treaty cannot create reservations (by declaring that certain portionsdo not apply to them).

Court can prosecute as a war crime the useof children under 15 as soldiers, rape, sexual slavery, or enforced pregnancy.

SOURCE: Human Rights Watch, “Human Rights Watch Text Analysis International Criminal Court Treaty July17, 1998,” <http://www.hrw.org/hrw/press98/july/icc-anly.htm>, viewed 12 August 1998; “The Draft Statuteat a Glance,” On the Record, 27 July 1998; “A Court Is Born,” On the Record, 17 July 1998.

As the destructive power of weaponryaccelerated with the IndustrialRevolution, the quest for peace becamemore urgent. Local or national peacesocieties were founded in Europethroughout the nineteenth century,although the earliest such groupsappeared in New York in 1815 and inBritain. By 1886 there were some 36peace societies worldwide. Internationalcontacts and coordination grew andimproved with initiation of annual WorldPeace Congresses in 1889 and the estab-lishment of the International PeaceBureau in Bern in 1891.34

The early peace movements, like thoseof our day, struggled with the ebb andflow of popular interest and support. Theend of the East-West standoff has made itdifficult to rally public opinion on issuesof peace and disarmament. At the sametime, however, the involvement of abroad variety of nongovernmental orga-nizations (NGOs) has expanded the tra-ditional peace agenda. In the 1980s,peace groups were consumed by suchquestions as the hair-trigger alert ofnuclear strike forces and the circular-error probability of intercontinental mis-siles. Now, NGOs that are concerned withsuch varied issues as human rights, gov-ernmental transparency and accountabil-ity, environmental protection, humandevelopment, and justice and equityincreasingly weigh in on matters of peaceand war—reflecting a broadened under-standing of peace and injecting a newdynamic. For instance, the successful anti-personnel landmines campaign and theNGO campaign for the International

Criminal Court were spearheaded not byarms control groups but by human rightsorganizations and groups with social andhumanitarian agendas.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF

GLOBAL SECURITY

The second half of the twentieth centuryhas witnessed two great paradoxes. Oneof them is that the most belligerent conti-nent—Europe—became one of the mostpeaceful regions of the world, at least ifpeace is defined as the absence of war.The second paradox is that almost all con-flicts now take place within rather thanbetween nations. So large-scale invest-ments in traditional military security tofend off potential outside invaders appearspectacularly misplaced.

What accounts for Europe’s “success”?And can it be replicated elsewhere in theworld? The horrors of twentieth-centurywarfare appear to have convinced a sub-stantial portion of political leaders andthe general public that Europe finally hasto go down a different path if it is to sur-vive. The experience of World War I alonewould presumably have sufficed, but the1919 Treaty of Versailles prevented theemergence of a European and globalpolitical system capable of reconciling for-mer enemies and working to their com-mon benefit. Instead, the penal peaceimposed on Germany strengthenednationalist forces there and helped set thestage for World War II.

A crucial difference after World War IIwas that Germany was fully integratedinto the postwar order, becoming a pillarof the European Community. Europe—or, to be more precise, Western Europe—has finally moved toward the con-federation of states that Bertha vonSuttner and others saw as indispensablefor peace. In the process, strong and com-


As the power of weaponry accelerat-ed, the quest for peace became moreurgent.

petent institutions emerged to regulaterelations among European nations andresolve disputes that may arise. Economiclinks became so tight as to make peaceinfinitely more beneficial than gains any-one could hope to derive from rupturingthese links. Cultural exchange programsand other efforts helped generate a grow-ing sense of a common destiny instead ofa purely national one. Equally important,democratic governance and respect forhuman rights grew far stronger. Finally,social welfare programs ensured a highdegree of human well-being, greatlyreducing the danger that social discon-tent could nourish violent conflict withincountries.

Yet there is ambiguity. There is muchtalk these days about the “democraticpeace,” noting that democratic societiesdo not go to war against each other(though they may very well fight againstnondemocratic states). Greater trans-parency and accountability in democraticsocieties can make it harder for govern-ments to go to war by subjecting theirpolicies and reasoning to scrutiny. But his-torian Eric Hobsbawm warns that indemocratically governed societies, adver-saries are “demonized in order to makethem properly hateful or at least despica-ble.” As the Gulf War showed, there maybe a great aversion to putting your ownsoldiers in “harm’s way,” but little com-punction about using overwhelmingforce to pulverize the military forces andthe public infrastructure of the adversary.Democracy is a necessary but insufficientcondition for peace.35

There is a similar degree of ambiguityabout economic integration as an antidoteto violent conflict. Leaders after WorldWar II recognized that the “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies of the late 1920s andearly 1930s—erecting trade barriers andengaging in competitive currency devalua-tions—caused a severe economic crisisthat contributed to the undermining ofthe fledgling democracy in Germany and

helped lead to the outbreak of war. After1945, economic integration was seen as akey remedy. When the fates of nationaleconomies are tied together closely in aglobal unregulated market, however, theripple effects of economic trouble can bedevastating—as developments in the late1990s are showing so clearly. Moreover,moves by individual countries to protecttheir own economic base could set off adynamic akin to that of the 1930s, withpotentially worrisome ramifications inoverall relations among nations.36

Integration also only works to furtherpeace if it brings benefits to broad sec-tions of society. The downside is that inte-gration, as seen today under the bannerof “globalization,” can cause such disloca-tions, social pain, and growing uncertain-ty that integration itself can become asource of tension—if not between nationsthen within them. The issue is not just thedegree of economic and other forms ofinterdependence, but the extent to whichthis integration is seen as accountable andexperienced as beneficial to its con-stituent parts.37

A crucial question now is whetherRussia will be treated like Germany afterWorld War I or after World War II. Thereare mixed signals, with ominous implica-tions. In security matters, NATO’s deci-sion to expand into Eastern Europe sent amessage to Moscow that Russia is stillregarded as a potential enemy. This prob-lem could have been avoided by makingthe Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, rather thanNATO, the cornerstone of a continent-wide security system.38

On the economic front, there has beenless “integration” than an emergence ofRussian dependence on the West: Russiais primarily exporting natural resourcesto western economies while importingconsumer goods. Its domestic ability toproduce goods and services has almostevaporated; during the 1990s, the grossdomestic product has fallen by an esti-


mated 50–80 percent and capital invest-ment has dropped by 90 percent.Resurgent disease and malnutrition andmassive poverty and inequality havesharpened social tensions. Where thecountry is headed and whether it willhold together are open questions. Also,since ill-informed western advice hasplayed a significant role in the current sit-uation, the country could turn decidedlyanti-western in the future, perhapsreigniting East-West antagonism.39

Russia is not the only source of con-cern. Unlike Western Europe, nationalrivalries in other portions of the worldmay well result in armed conflict.Although war between France andGermany is no longer thinkable, itremains a constant threat or at least a dis-tinct possibility between India andPakistan, North and South Korea, Greeceand Turkey, Israel and Syria, and Nigeriaand Cameroon, among others. Somescholars wonder whether the Asia-Pacificregion, plagued by a variety of disputesand antagonisms, will end up like Europein 1914—the victim of destabilizing “bal-ance-of-power” politics and a heavy infu-sion of weaponry.40

But most conflicts nowadays do notinvolve opposing armies equipped withfancy weapons. Instead, they take placewithin countries, among domestic oppo-nents—often ragtag armies outfitted withunsophisticated small caliber arms, pro-tagonists in a vast array of virulent social,ethnic, political, and other conflicts.Although a substantial share of theresponsibility for these lies within thesecountries, outside factors play an impor-tant role.

The first is the cold war. East-Westgeopolitics ascribed “strategic” value tocertain parts of the developing world;industrial countries accordingly inter-vened in a variety of ways and armed theirprotégés to the teeth. Once the cold warended, however, the importance of manyonce-indispensable allies vanished.

Premier cold-war battlegrounds likeAfghanistan, the Horn of Africa, orCentral America reverted to “backwater”status. Recipients of aid and weaponsfrom the North saw the flow of assistancedry up. But the legacy—the easy availabil-ity of weapons, a pervasive culture of vio-lence, and a stunted political system—willlikely be found in many of these countriesfor a long time to come.

The second factor is economic. Manydeveloping countries were and are boundinto the global economy as highly depen-dent sellers of raw materials or low-endmanufactured goods. As advanced indus-trial countries move toward economiesgeared more toward information andcommunications technologies, these trad-ing relations inevitably undergo structur-al change; economies dependent on therevenues that a single or a handful ofcommodities can fetch on the world mar-ket are naturally vulnerable to thesechanges. As painful social and economicadjustments must be made, internal con-tradictions erupt or are aggravated.

Many countries, particularly in thedeveloping world, are facing a multitudeof pressures that threaten to shred theweak fabric of their societies. Ethnic andsectarian cleavages are dividing commu-nities and entire countries. But they areoften the product of growing economicdifficulties, especially the lack of employ-ment and the widening discrepancies inwealth and power between rich and poor.In particular, the lack of adequate num-bers of jobs in countries with burgeoning


When national economies are tiedtogether closely in a global unregulat-ed market, the ripple effects of eco-nomic trouble can be devastating.

youthful populations is generating aminefield of social discontent and misery.State-centered economies are often notdynamic enough to generate sufficientemployment; the capitalist global econo-my, on the other hand, may yield highgrowth but is promoting a type of eco-nomic development that favors those withmodern skills—and leaves the manyunskilled far behind.41

Equity issues also interact with growingresource scarcity and environmentaldegradation. The depletion of waterresources and degradation of arable land,for instance, are playing an importantrole in generating or aggravating conflict.As Michael Klare of Hampshire Collegeargues, “the damaging effects of environ-mental decline will not be felt uniformlyby all peoples but will threaten somestates and groups more than others—pro-ducing sharp cleavages in human societythat could prove more destabilizing thanthe effects of the environment itself.”42

Where governments show themselvesunable or unwilling to deal with acceler-ating social, demographic, economic, andenvironmental pressures, people are try-ing to find support, identity, and securitywithin their more immediate group orcommunity. But individual groups feelthey are competing against each other forscarce resources and services, and gov-ernments may even encourage such splitsin classical divide-and-rule fashion. All toooften, the end result is a polarization andsplintering of societies, literally invitingviolent responses to unresolved problems,and sometimes leading to the unravelingand collapse of society.

It is typically the weaker societies of the Third World that more readily fall vic-tim to the multiple pressures at hand.What reaches the Western eye and ear is usually the symptoms of failures—the humanitarian fiascos, the flood ofrefugees—reinforcing the mistaken sensethat industrial nations are not affected bysome of the same underlying pressures,

particularly growing social and economicpolarization.

Western countries, not surprisingly, areattempting to insulate themselves fromwhat they perceive as a suddenly “chaotic”world. Instead of the Soviet threat, discus-sions revolve around “rogue” states, thecoming “clash of civilizations,” or the sup-posed rise of China as a threatening worldpower. The West is working hard to estab-lish or retain a monopoly on sophisticatedarms (hence the strong emphasis on non-proliferation instead of global disarma-ment), pursuing ever newer armstechnologies, building highly mobileintervention forces that can be deployedrapidly in far-flung places, retainingstrong control over U.N. Security Councilmatters, and using punitive economicembargoes against “rogue” states.

SETTING THE NEW SECURITY

AGENDA

Even during the cold war there was grow-ing recognition that traditional securitypolicies—building national or allied mili-tary muscle—often yielded insecurity. Aseries of independent international com-missions headed by world leaders such asWilly Brandt of Germany, Olof Palme ofSweden, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, GroHarlem Brundtland of Norway, andIngvar Carlsson of Sweden have promot-ed a fundamental rethinking of security.They advanced the concepts of “commonsecurity”—the view that in order for onestate to be secure, its opponents must alsofeel secure—and “comprehensive securi-ty”—the notion that nonmilitary factorssuch as social inequities, poverty, environ-mental degradation, and migratory pres-sures are at least as important as militaryones in determining the potential forconflict. The second concept in particularquestions whether state security rather


than security for people is the properfocus. It also implies that many sources ofconflict today are not amenable to mili-tary “solutions,” and that reliance onarmaments, no matter how technological-ly sophisticated, can in fact be counter-productive.43

Security policy in the twenty-first cen-tury will have to deal both with the lin-gering legacies of the twentieth centuryand with the newly emerging, nonmilitarychallenges. These two problems are inter-twined: while the particular causes of ourcentury’s wars and arms races may quick-ly become history, the accumulated, left-over military equipment now makes forsuch easy availability of arms of all calibersthat recourse to violent measures infuture disputes is far too easy. To forestallthe likelihood of endless skirmishes andwars in the coming century, governmentsand societies will have to pursue demilita-rization, conflict prevention, moreinspired and vigorous global institution-building, and a fundamental recalibra-tion of their security investments.

As discussed earlier, the last few yearshave seen a reduction in military spend-ing, in arms production, trade, anddeployments, and in the size of armedforces. Yet progress has been highlyuneven across the world, substantial arse-nals remain in place, there is no letup inthe drive toward more sophisticatedweaponry, and business in transferring“surplus” weapons from one country toanother is brisk. More fundamentally,there are few internationally acceptednorms and standards to curb the produc-tion, possession, and trade of arms; theutility of military power has hardly beenforesworn by the world’s governments.Establishing effective restraints will be akey task in the twenty-first century. Onemeasure long demanded by human rightsorganizations and other groups is a bind-ing code of conduct to ensure thatweapons are not exported to govern-ments that fail to hold free elections,

trample human rights, or engage inarmed aggression.44

It is also time to rethink the utility oflarge standing military forces and toadvance the norm that possession of anoffensively armed military is unaccept-able. Countries that face no obvious exter-nal adversaries may want to cut theirmilitaries radically and to refocus remain-ing forces on purely defensive tasks;indeed, some may want to reconsiderwhether they need an army at all, joiningthe twentieth-century pioneers Costa Rica,Haiti, and Panama and the nineteenthcentury trailblazer Liechtenstein in abol-ishing their standing armed forces. Apartfrom any unilateral measures, a group ofNGO experts has kicked off a projectcalled Global Action to Prevent War thatoutlines a four-phase process over 20–40years to achieve major multilateral reduc-tions in armaments and armies and createan alternative security system.45

Denuclearization—the establishmentof a timetable to phase out and eventual-ly abolish all nuclear arms—is anotherpressing task. The nuclear “haves” insistthat they will retain their arsenals. But thestakes are rising: India and Pakistan havejoined the “nuclear club,” and it is pre-mature to assume that others will noteventually be tempted to acquire nuclearweapons as well. At the same time, pres-sure on the nuclear powers to fulfill theirpart of the bargain under the NuclearNon-Proliferation Treaty and to beginserious negotiations for nuclear disarma-ment is rising. At the core of the nuclearissue lies an important general princi-ple—that constraints on armaments be


Countries that face no obvious adver-saries may want to cut their militariesradically.

universal instead of allowing a selectgroup of countries to hold on to certainkinds of weapons denied to all otherstates (as implied by current nonprolifer-ation policies).46

If and when those who have nuclearweapons relent, these arms will join a stillvery short list of weapon types that haveactually been outlawed since 1899, whenthe Hague International Peace Con-ference decided to ban expanding, or so-called dum dum bullets (a prohibitionthat was subsequently sidestepped by newtechnologies). Although the use of chem-ical weapons was banned in 1925, nearlyanother 70 years had to pass before the1993 Chemical Weapons Convention out-lawed their production as well. In 1995 thesale and use of blinding-laser weapons wasoutlawed, and in 1997 a treaty prohibitinganti-personnel landmines was signed.47

To deal with the security challenges ofthe twenty-first century, global institutionsneed to be strengthened and made morerepresentative of the world’s peoples.There is growing recognition that theU.N. Security Council is anachronistic inits composition and central workings—particularly the veto power held by thefive permanent members. But there is no consensus on the specifics of reform,and the permanent members are highlyreluctant to relinquish or water down anyof their privileges. Yet this stance may well increase worldwide resentment;because the Council relies on the willingcooperation of at least a clear majority of the world’s nations, it may also compromise the authority and effective-

ness of the Council.48

At least in the short term, it may bepolitically impossible to abolish the veto.But the veto right might be limited toissues concerning Chapter VII of the U.N.Charter (issues most directly concernedwith threats to international peace andsecurity), or the negative votes of two per-manent members instead of just onemight be required in order to veto a reso-lution. Likewise, the Council structurecould be reformed by deciding on a set ofcriteria that any country hoping toremain or become a permanent memberwould have to meet.49

Peacekeeping and conflict preventionwill also need an injection of new think-ing. Experience has amply demonstratedthe inadequacies of the current ad hocU.N. peacekeeping infrastructure. Thereis a strong need to establish a more per-manent, reliable system. Equally impor-tant is a far greater emphasis on conflictprevention—by building an early conflictwarning network, providing for preven-tive deployments of peacekeepers, andestablishing standing conflict resolutioncommittees in every region of the world.Too little has been done so far: in 1997the new U.N. Trust Fund for PreventiveAction Against Conflicts received soaringrhetoric but scant funds.50

The wider United Nations needsreform as well. To make it truly the orga-nization of the “peoples of the UnitedNations,” as the U.N. Charter puts it—and hence more responsive to the kindsof conflicts that are typical of our age—the General Assembly needs to be supple-mented by an assembly morerepresentative of each society. This mightbe a chamber composed of national par-liamentarians (akin to the EuropeanParliament), or a forum of civil societythat includes representatives of labor,environmental groups, and others. Thiswould not be entirely a revolutionary con-cept: the International Labour Organi-sation has long had a tripartite structure,


What is needed in the twenty-first century is nothing short of a whole-sale recalibration of our securityinvestments.

bringing together representatives of gov-ernment, business, and labor.51

This and other steps would likely helpmove security policy away from its heavystate- and military-centered focus andtoward an effort to address the numeroussocial, economic, demographic, and envi-ronmental pressures that many societiesface. It would permit governments todevote greater resources and political willto such critical tasks both on the nationaland the global level. What is needed in thetwenty-first century is nothing short of awholesale recalibration of our securityinvestments—reassessing the meaning ofsecurity, the means and tools of achievingand maintaining it, and the institutionalarrangements necessary for success. Thisnew understanding would be based on therealization that weapons are more oftenfacilitators of violence and destabilizationthan they are guarantors of security.

A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS?

In the twentieth century, nation statesreached the pinnacle of their power, con-cluding a process set in motion severalcenturies ago. But the forces of globaliza-tion and localization—transcending stateborders from within and without—havemade territorial concepts become lesscentral. States continue to be importantplayers, but they are increasingly chal-lenged by footloose corporations operat-ing across the planet, by internationalcoalitions of NGOs, by the march of tech-nology, and by the halting progress in cre-ating and strengthening internationalorganizations. In fact, added to the oldspectacle of alliances of nation statesthere is now the new phenomenon ofmixed coalitions that, on an issue-by-issuebasis, bring together like-minded govern-ments and civil society organizations,such as the campaign to ban anti-person-

nel landmines.The upshot is that peace and security

have become more complex and ambigu-ous objectives. We no longer live in a state-centric world, whether in its unipolar,bipolar, or multipolar form. The meaningof national borders is inevitably changedin an age when such boundaries can andare traversed with ever greater ease. Yet asJames Rosenau of George WashingtonUniversity argues, “It is an epoch of multi-ple contradictions.…States are changing,but they are not disappearing. State sover-eignty has eroded, but it is still vigorouslyasserted. Governments are weaker, butthey can still throw their weightaround.…Borders still keep out intruders,but they are also more porous.”52

In an increasingly interdependentworld, it may appear that nations’ inabilityto cope with social, economic, and envi-ronmental challenges on their own will ofnecessity lead to growing global coopera-tion. But such an outcome is by no meansguaranteed. And while the inherent chal-lenge to territoriality may over time helpmake traditional, military-centered con-cepts of security less relevant, we arealready witnessing the emergence of pri-vate security organizations of all stripes.Their justification for existence is to pro-tect the interests of a corporation, a privi-leged class, or an ethnic group; they maynot defend borders, but they rely on theuse of force—or the threat to use force—just as much as a state’s armed forces.

Meanwhile, globalization—the massiveexpansion of the world economy—itselfcarries new conflict potential. Given spec-tacularly uneven economic benefits,heightened vulnerabilities and uncertain-ties for many communities and individuals,and the inherent challenge to local controland democratic accountability, economicglobalization tears at the very fabric andcohesion of many societies. These process-es may well trigger a backlash. JamesRosenau calls this “fragmegration” (theparallel and interconnected processes of


fragmentation and integration); BenjaminBarber of Rutgers University has given thephenomenon the more colorful title of“Jihad vs. McWorld.”53

Whatever it should be called, it is clearthat this new era, simply by attenuatingthe power of states, will not necessarilyproduce a more peaceful twenty-first cen-tury. Territorial contests and conflictsmay become a thing of the past, and with

them traditional wars. But new forms ofconflict are not too difficult to imagine.Nevertheless, just as the world had anopportunity in 1899 to make war less like-ly, now we have a chance to prevent atwenty-first century marked by fightingthat is driven by accelerating social andeconomic inequity, environmental deple-tion, and weapons left over from twenti-eth-century wars.


NotesChapter 9. Ending Violent Conflict

1. Muravyov quoted in Hague Appeal for Peace, <http://www.haguepeace.org/>,viewed 24 July 1998.

2. Czar quote from Charles Chatfield andRuzanna Ilukhina, eds., Peace/Mir: AnAnthology of Historic Alternatives to War(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,1994); Brigitte Hamann, Bertha von Suttner: A Life for Peace (Syracuse, NY: SyracuseUniversity Press, 1996); “1899–1928: TheHague Convention,” <http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/hague.html>, viewed 20 July1998.

3. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: AHistory of the World, 1914–1991 (New York:Vintage Books, 1994); 1880–1914 increase inmilitary spending from Eric Hobsbawm, TheAge of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: VintageBooks, 1989); army and navy growth calculat-ed from Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of theGreat Powers (New York: Vintage Books, 1987).

4. Nobel from Hamann, op. cit. note 2;Bliokh from Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, op.cit. note 3; John Keegan, The Second World War(New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

5. Hamann, op. cit. note 2; Nobel Website <http://www.nobel.se>, viewed 20 July1998.

6. Hamann, op. cit. note 2.

7. Hague Appeal for Peace, op. cit. note 1.

8. Preambles from Louise Doswald-Beck

and Sylvain Vité, “International HumanitarianLaw and Human Rights Law,” InternationalReview of the Red Cross, No. 293, pp. 94–119(1993); “Declaration Renouncing the Use, inTime of War, of Certain Explosive Projectiles.St. Petersburg, 29 November/11 December1868,” <http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1914m/gene68.html>, viewed 20 July 1998.

9. Loss of military-age men fromHobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, op. cit. note 3;20 million wounded from James Trager, ThePeople’s Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record ofHuman Events from Prehistory to the Present (NewYork: Henry Holt and Co., 1994); civilianshare of victims calculated from Ruth LegerSivard, World Military and Social Expenditures1996 (Washington, DC: World Priorities,1996); civilian conditions from Richard M.Garfield and Alfred I. Neugut, “The HumanConsequences of War,” in Barry S. Levy andVictor W. Sidel, eds., War and Public Health(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

10. Keegan, op. cit. note 4; Hobsbawm, TheAge of Empire, op. cit. note 3; 65 million figurefrom Kennedy, op. cit. note 3; percentages ofpopulation from Professor Arthur Rubinoff,lecture on International Relations, Universityof Toronto, 16 June 1998, and calculated fromibid.

11. Soldiers from John Elting, U.S. MilitaryAcademy, “Costs, Casualties, and Other Data,”Grolier Online World War II Commemora-tion, <http://www.grolier.com/wwii/wwii_16.html>, viewed 22 July 1998; 45 million figure is a Worldwatch estimate; share of laborforce from Alan L. Gropman, Mobilizing U.S.

Industry in World War II, McNair Paper 50(Washington, DC: Institute for NationalStrategic Studies, August 1996).

12. Economic mobilization for war fromGropman, op. cit. note 11; Soviet loss ofhuman life from Sivard, op. cit. note 9; capitalassets lost from Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes,op. cit. note 3.

13. Tank and aircraft production calculat-ed from Gropman, op. cit. note 11, and from“A World of Tanks,” <http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters/1975/>; includingJapan and Italy, aircraft production rose to837,000 in 1939–45, calculated from Kennedy,op. cit. note 3; munitions production fromGropman, op. cit. note 11, who reports $250billion in 1944 prices; U.S. share of arms pro-duction from Keegan, op. cit. note 4.

14. Figure of 52 million calculated fromSivard, op. cit. note 9; percent of populationdead from Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, op.cit. note 3; refugees from ibid., and fromKeegan, op. cit. note 4.

15. Stephen Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit:The Costs and Consequences of U.S. NuclearWeapons Since 1940 (Washington, DC:Brookings Institution Press, 1998); Sivard, op.cit. note 9.

16. “Known Nuclear Tests Worldwide,”NRDC Nuclear Program, Natural ResourcesDefense Council, <http://www.nrdc.org/nrdcpro/nudb/datainx.html>, viewed 31 July1998; Figure 9–1 based on “Global NuclearStockpiles, 1945–1996,” ibid., viewed 4 August1998; explosive force from Sivard, op. cit. note 9.

17. Growing weapons sophistication fromRuth Leger Sivard, World Military and SocialExpenditures 1987–88 (Washington, DC: WorldPriorities, 1987). Between 1946 and 1997, theUnited States spent a total of $1,382 billion (in1996 dollars) on military R&D programs. Theglobal figure is based on the assumption thatthe United States accounted for perhaps 40

percent of global expenditures. WorldwatchInstitute calculation, based on Office of theUndersecretary of Defense (Comptroller),National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 1996(Springfield, VA: National TechnicalInformation Service, March 1995).

18. World War I expenditures, expressed in1913 dollars, came to $82.4 billion. Calculatedfrom Kennedy, op. cit. note 3. Although thereis no price deflator series that could accurate-ly translate this into modern-day dollars, arough calculation using U.S. consumer priceindex data yields an approximate figure of$1.4 trillion in 1996 dollars. World War IIspending is a Worldwatch estimate based onElting, op. cit. note 11. (Elting provides U.S.expenditure data; the assumption here is thatthe United States may have accounted for asmuch as 40 percent of all powers’ militaryspending.) Cold war military expendituresfrom U.S. Arms Control and DisarmamentAgency (ACDA), World Military Expendituresand Arms Transfers 1996 (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office, July 1997).

19. Cumulative arms trade value is aWorldwatch estimate, based on various edi-tions of ACDA, World Military Expenditures andArms Transfers (Washington, DC: U.S.Government Printing Office), and on Sivard,op. cit. note 9; number of arms transferredcalculated from ACDA, op. cit. note 18.

20. War trends from Michael Renner,“Armed Conflicts Diminish,” in Lester R.Brown, Michael Renner, and ChristopherFlavin, Vital Signs 1998 (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998); Korea and VietNam population losses from Garfield andNeugut, op. cit. note 9.

21. United Nations, Department of PublicInformation, Charter of the United Nations andStatute of the International Court of Justice (NewYork: April 1994).

22. The provisions and full texts of manyrelevant agreements, treaties, and conventions


can be found on a variety of sites on the WorldWide Web, most of which are maintained byuniversity departments. See, for example,“1899–1928 The Hague Convention,”<http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/hague.html>, and “Multilaterals Project ChronologicalIndex,” <http://tufts.edu/fletcher/multi/chrono.html>. The latter site, maintained bythe Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,also contains a page with links to other rele-vant treaty collections. Many internationaltreaties are deposited with the United NationsSecretary-General, and the United Nationsmaintains a Treaty Collection that now can beaccessed and searched online: <http://www.un.org/Depts/Treaty/overview.htm>. See alsoDieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of Humani-tarian Law in Armed Conflicts (New York:Oxford University Press, 1995), and Doswald-Beck and Vité, op. cit. note 8.

23. “Convention on the Prohibition ofMilitary or Any Other Hostile Use ofEnvironmental Modification Techniques,”<http://www.tufts.edu/fletcher/multi/texts/BH700.txt>, viewed 17 August 1998; Doswald-Beck and Vité, op. cit. note 8.

24. Teheran conference quoted inDoswald-Beck and Vité, op. cit. note 8; UnitedNations Treaty Collection Web page, op. cit.note 22; Ian Browline, ed., Basic Documents onHuman Rights (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press,1992); Fleck, p. cit. note 22; “MultilateralsProject Chronological Index,” op. cit. note 22.

25. Growth of intergovernmental organiza-tions from Allen Sens and Peter Stoett, GlobalPolitics (New York: ITP Nelson, 1998); numberof treaties from Steven R. Ratner,“International Law: The Trials of GlobalNorms,” Foreign Policy, spring 1998.

26. United Nations, op. cit. note 21;Security Council activity from Michael Renner,“U.N. Peacekeeping Contracts Further,” inBrown, Renner, and Flavin, op. cit. note 20.

27. Renner, op. cit. note 26.

28. UNESCO Charter quoted in<http://www.unesco.org>, viewed 28 June1998; Nobel Peace prizes awarded to U.N.agencies and officials from “MajorAchievements of the United Nations,”<http://www.un.org/Over view/achieve.html>, viewed 10 August 1998.

29. Web site of the International Court ofJustice, <http://www.icj-cij.org/>, viewed 1August 1998; Sens and Stoett, op. cit. note 25;World Court not called upon to interpret envi-ronmental agreements from MoniqueChemillier-Gendreau, “The InternationalCourt of Justice between Politics and Law,” LeMonde Diplomatique, November 1996, withEnglish version available at <http://www.globalpolicy.org/wldcourt/icj.htm>.

30. Benjamin B. Ferencz, From Nuremberg toRome: Towards an International Criminal Court,Policy Paper 8 (Bonn, Germany: Developmentand Peace Foundation, May 1998); “BasicPrinciples For an Independent and EffectiveInternational Criminal Court (ICC),” LawyersCommittee for Human Rights, <http://www.lchr.org/icc/paplist.htm>, viewed 20 July1998; Iain Guest, “Beyond Rome—What arethe Prospects for the International CriminalCourt?” On the Record, 27 July 1998; “A Court IsBorn,” On the Record, 17 July 1998; AlessandraStanley, “U.S. Dissents, but Accord is Reachedon War-Crime Court,” New York Times, 18 July1998.

31. ACDA, op. cit. note 18; Bonn Inter-national Center for Conversion, ConversionSurvey, various editions (New York: OxfordUniversity Press); “Global Nuclear Stockpiles,1945–1996,” op. cit. note 16; Sivard, op. cit.note 9; The Arms Control Reporter (Institute forDefense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS),Cambridge, MA) various editions.

32. “A Brief History of Chemical Disarma-ment,” <http://www.opcw.nl/basic>, viewed 7 August 1998.

33. Chatfield and Ilukhina, op. cit. note 2;Ervin Laszlo and Jong Youl Yoo, exec. eds.,


World Encyclopedia of Peace, Vol. 3 (New York:Pergamon Press, 1986).

34. Laszlo and Yoo, op. cit. note 33.

35. Miriam Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: IsDemocracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 1997); Hobsbawm, The Age ofExtremes, op. cit. note 3; “Democracies andWar: The Politics of Peace,” The Economist, 1 April 1995.

36. William Greider, “The Global CrisisDeepens: Now What?” and John Gray, “Not forthe First Time, World Sours on Free Markets,”both in The Nation, 19 October 1998.

37. Dimensions of the downside to globaleconomic integration are explored by DavidC. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World(West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1995), byJerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds.,The Case Against the Global Economy and for aTurn Toward the Local (San Francisco: SierraClub Books, 1996), and by Benjamin R.Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York:Ballantine Books, 1995).

38. Sherle Schwenninger, “The CaseAgainst NATO Enlargement,” The Nation, 20October 1997.

39. Stephen F. Cohen, “Why Call itReform?” The Nation, 7/14 September 1998;Daniel Singer, “Twilight of the Czar,” andJames S. Henry and Marshall Pomer, “CanRussia Save Russia?” both in The Nation, 21September 1998; Clifford G. Gaddy and BarryW. Ickes, “Russia’s Virtual Economy,” ForeignAffairs, September/October 1998; JudithMatloff, “Moscow Losing Grip on Regions,”Christian Science Monitor, 9 September 1998.

40. List of current “dangerous interstate sit-uations” in Carnegie Commission on Pre-venting Deadly Conflict, Preventing DeadlyConflict: Final Report (Washington, DC:December 1997); “Will Today’s Asia-PacificEnd Up Like Europe in 1914?” Conference onAlternative Security Systems in the Asia-Pacific

announcement, <http://www.focusweb.org/focus/pd/sec/sec.conference.html>, viewed28 September 1998.

41. Michael T. Klare, “The Era ofMultiplying Schisms: World Security in theTwenty-First Century,” in Michael T. Klare andYogesh Chandrani, eds., World Security:Challenges for a New Century (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1998); Michael Renner,Fighting for Survival (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1996).

42. Renner, op. cit. note 41; Klare, op. cit.note 41.

43. See Robert C. Johansen, “BuildingWorld Security: The Need for StrengthenedInternational Institutions,” in Klare andChandrani, op. cit. note 41; Renner, op. cit.note 41.

44. A voluntary code of conduct was adopt-ed by the European Union in June 1998, but ithas a number of shortcomings. The code isreprinted in Joseph Di Chiaro III, ReasonableMeasures: Addressing the Excessive Accumulationand Unlawful Use of Small Arms, Brief 11 (Bonn,Germany: Bonn International Center forConversion, August 1998). For a critical analy-sis, see Saferworld, “The EU Code of Conducton the Arms Trade. Final Analysis,” <http://www.gn.apc.org/SWORLD/ARMSTRADE/code.html>, viewed 5 October 1998.

45. Costa Rica, Haiti, and Panama fromJoaquin Tacsan, “Reports on Projects andActivities of the Center for Peace andReconciliation,” in Arias Foundation, AriasFoundation for Peace and Human ProgressPerformance Report 1988–1996 (San José, CostaRica: 1996); Liechtenstein from BartHoreman, Marc Stolwijk, and Anton Luccioni,Refusing to Bear Arms: A World Survey ofConscription and Conscientious Objection toMilitary Service, Part 1: Europe (London: WarResisters’ International, November 1997);Jonathan Dean, Randall Forsberg, and SaulMendlovitz, “Global Action to Prevent War: A


Program for Government and GrassrootsEfforts to Stop War, Genocide, and OtherForms of Deadly Conflict,” Union ofConcerned Scientists, IDDS, and World OrderModels Project, 15 May 1998.

46. Brian Hall, “Overkill Is Not Dead,” NewYork Times Magazine, 15 March 1998; JonathanSchell, “The Gift of Time,” The Nation, 2/9February 1998; on the principle of universali-ty, see Johansen, op. cit. note 43.

47. “1899–1928. The Hague Convention,”op. cit. note 22; sidestepping the “dum dum”ban from Michael Klare, discussion withauthor, 13 October 1998; Chemical Weapons Convention, the convention banning anti-personnel landmines, and the blinding-laserprohibition from IDDS, Arms Control Reporter1997 (Cambridge, MA: 1997).

48. Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots: HowWashington Dominates Today’s UN (New York:Olive Branch Press, 1996). For documents andfurther discussion of reform efforts, see theGlobal Policy Forum Web site, <http://www.globalpolicy/reform/index.htm>.

49. The suggestion to establish criteria forpermanent membership was made, for exam-ple, by Jeffrey Laurenti, The Common Defense:Peace and Security in a Changing World (NewYork: United Nations Association of theUnited States, 1992).

50. For a more detailed discussion ofpeacekeeping reform, see Michael Renner,Critical Juncture: The Future of Peacekeeping,Worldwatch Paper 114 (Washington, DC:Worldwatch Institute, May 1993). In 1997, theU.N. Trust Fund received just $4.5 million,from the Netherlands and Norway; TrevorFindlay, “Armed Conflict Prevention,Management and Resolution,” in StockholmInternational Peace Research Institute, SIPRIYearbook 1998: Armaments, Disarmament andInternational Security (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998). For a detailed discus-sion of conflict prevention needs and oppor-tunities, see Carnegie Commission, op. cit.

note 40.

51. Johansen, op. cit. note 43; Commissionon Global Governance, Our GlobalNeighborhood (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995).

52. James N. Rosenau, “The Dynamism of aTurbulent World,” in Klare and Chandrani,op. cit. note 41.

53. Ibid.; Barber, op. cit. note 37.


Building a Sustainable

Society

David Malin Roodman

The last thousand years of history havechanged the way many cultures see histo-ry itself. In traditional societies, wherelife’s rhythms were set by the seasons andby the rituals of birth and death, timeseemed cyclical. Technological innova-tion and cultural evolution occurred withimperceptible slowness, so the most dra-matic changes most people experiencedwithin their lives were drought, flood,famine, or war. Social change was tran-sient—and dangerous. Thus the Chinesecurse, “May you live in interesting times.”

As the planet industrializes, all this ischanging. The process of transformationthat industrialization has unleashed intechnology, society, and culture does notseem like a passing fad. And for billions ofpeople, it holds out the hope of a betterlife. It represents a new kind of change,and is giving rise to a new perception ofhistory, as linear and directed—as amarch of progress. Diseases are being van-quished, child mortality is falling,incomes are rising, people are crossingoceans in mere hours. Chinese tradition

to the contrary, life for millions of peoplein this interesting time is much more ablessing than a curse.

But as we assess our era at this millen-nial moment, it becomes clear that theold view of history is still relevant. Thechanges under way are indeed dangerousfor the planet and for humanity—not sim-ply a process of perpetual advancement.In many respects, the process is transientand unstable, and threatens to give the lieto the very view of history it spawned.

Farmers in the Indian state of Gujarat,for example, are drilling their irrigationwells some 1.5 meters deeper each year, inultimately futile pursuit of falling watertables. Mexico City is, for the moment,sinking, as residents pump up the waterbeneath them. The city has the misfor-tune of resting atop a geological sponge.Elevated train tracks, built flat in the1960s, look like roller coasters now, andold churches are buckling. In the UnitedStates, populations of honeybees, essen-tial for pollinating commercial crops,have shrunk precipitously, while frogs

10

with extra legs and missing eyes have beenfound in northern states. Pesticides are aleading suspect behind both aberrations.On the northern Atlantic, Canadian war-ships have clashed with Spanish andPortuguese fishing trawlers in a “TurbotWar,” a bitter dispute reminiscent ofdebates over rearranging deck chairs onthe Titanic. The fish stocks the boats arecompeting for are collapsing beneaththem from overharvesting.1

All these trends are transient and dan-gerous. In Gujarat, for instance, eitherfarmers will slow their pumping to restorebalance within a few decades, or they willsuck the aquifers dry. Either way, foodproduction could plunge. Thus for all thetalk of the march of progress, our era alsoechoes the dangerous times of warbetween ancient Chinese dynasties thatinspired that curse.

If this is a transitional era, then the nat-ural question is, What will the new dynastylook like? What sort of world are we head-ed toward? So far, the world order emerg-ing is one almost no one wants. Humannumbers are growing, forests are shrink-ing, species are dying, farmland is erod-ing, freshwater supplies are dwindling,fisheries are collapsing, rivers are con-stricting, greenhouse gases are accumu-lating, soot is contaminating the air, andlead is contaminating our blood.

It is not too late, however, to changethe course of events, to build societiesthat are both environmentally sustainableand industrial (automated production isat the heart of many benefits of moderneconomic development). It is not too lateto build a world where the air is safe tobreathe, water is safe to drink, andresources are shared among all theworld’s people—to build a world, in otherwords, that most people recognize as theone they hope their children will inherit.That would be true progress.

Humanity’s departure from environ-mental sustainability has been a complexhistorical process. Its roots reach back 11

millennia to the Agricultural Revolution,when people first modified the environ-ment systematically and on a large scale.Restoring sustainability will be compara-bly complex—but it will need to occurmuch faster if we are to minimize harm tothe planet and to ourselves. More than amatter of inventing cheap solar panels orrecycling household trash, it will be athoroughgoing process involving everysector of society. Only by envisioning thisprocess can we develop a realistic under-standing of what it will take—and findgrounds for realistic hope.2

What, then, will it take to construct asustainable, modern society? Govern-ments will need to aggressively demarcateand defend environmental limits, work-ing domestically and cooperating interna-tionally. And they will have to do so inways that stimulate rather than stifle thecreativity of corporations. Businesses willneed to anticipate the transition and posi-tion themselves to exploit the huge invest-ment opportunities created. Nonprofitorganizations ranging from internationalenvironmental groups to neighborhoodchurches—collectively called “civil soci-ety”—will need to press both govern-ments and businesses forward. Andundergirding all their efforts will be edu-cated citizens operating in their capacitiesas voters, consumers, charitable donors,and owners of land and resources.

Each of these groups—governments,businesses, nonprofit groups, and citi-zens—can press the others toward thegoal of sustainability, in a somewhatchaotic dynamic less reminiscent of anengine firing on all pistons than an organ-ism working to survive. The odds of suc-cess may seem long, but the forcesarrayed in defense of the status quo havenever been weaker than they are today.Society has changed more profoundlyduring this century than in any before. Ifthings keep changing as fast—but for thebetter—then the new millennium’s histo-ry books will recall our generation as the


one that showed the march of progress tobe more than a myth.

GETTING THE SIGNALS RIGHT

There is little question that governmentswill have to apply much of the pressurethat will move modern society onto a sus-tainable path. The paradox is thatalthough they need to force major struc-tural changes on economies, they cannotplan those changes, precisely because ofthe magnitude and complexity involved.

This is particularly clear for the prob-lem of global climate change. TheIntergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange has conservatively estimated thatthe atmosphere can sustain carbon emis-sions of no more than 2 billion tons peryear without serious disruption.Spreading that quota evenly among the10 billion people projected to share theplanet by 2100 yields a per-person quotaof half a kilogram (a pound) a day. In aRange Rover, you could drive 4 kilometers(2.5 miles) on that amount before havingto stop for the night. Not surprisingly, theUnited States, Japan, and other industrialnations are emitting carbon at a pace12–27 times this figure—and climbing.3

Since these unsustainable emissionsrates arise from the way industrialeconomies grow food, make things, andmove products and people about, revers-ing the trends necessarily requires trans-forming many aspects of home and work life in the industrial world. And it will require the development of new, clean technologies, a process of discoverythat is intrinsically unpredictable. In thecase of carbon emissions, a 90–95 percentreduction per person is needed in indus-trial nations—an end, in other words, to the fossil fuel economy as we know it.(See Chapter 2.) No government canplan all that.4

Markets, on the other hand, excel at engineering systemic change. Mar-kets helped make the Industrial and Information Revolutions possible.Properly harnessed, they can also guidethe next Industrial Revolution, the onetoward environmental sustainability. Thekey to making that happen is for govern-ments to stop subsidizing environmentalharm and start taxing it. That will trans-late environmental costs into the lan-guage of the market—prices—and helpenforce the “polluter pays principle,”which says that when people act in waysthat hurt the environment, they shouldfeel the costs of the damage they do.

This commonsense proposal was firstcloaked in the authority of economics 80years ago by Cambridge don Arthur CecilPigou, and has become a textbook staplesince. But “polluter pays” has been prac-ticed much less than preached. As a result,when people flip on a light switch or getbehind the wheel of a car, they are able toignore the costs they impose on others—their neighbor’s asthma, or the minuteaddition they make to the atmosphere’sthickening blanket of greenhouse gases.5

Worldwide, subsidies worth at least$650 billion—equivalent to 9 percent ofall government revenue—support log-ging, mining, oil drilling, livestock graz-ing, farming, fishing, energy use, anddriving. That amount far exceeds what isspent on environmentally protective subsi-dies, such as for soil-conserving farmingpractices. The U.S. government, forinstance, effectively spends tens of mil-lions of dollars each year paying loggers toclearcut some of the country’s only rain-forest, in the Tongass National Forest in

Building a Sustainable Society (171)

So far, the world order emerging isone almost no one wants.

Southeast Alaska. The government coverssuch costs as building logging roads, butthen charges far less for the trees hauledout on those roads. Towering, ancientSitka spruces have sold for $2 each.6

In India, state governments give cheapor free electricity to farmers, who use it topump water out of underground aquifersfaster than rain is recharging them.Though the subsidies are often defendedin the name of the poor farmer or urbanfood buyer, most of the money ends up inthe pockets of richer farmers, who canafford electric pumps. Similarly, govern-ments in industrial nations effectively gavefarmers $284 billion in 1996, through gov-ernment spending and price supports.Though this money flow is usually justifiedas helping small farmers, most of it goes tolarger farms, which produce most of thefood. Of U.S. agricultural support pay-ments, 61 percent went to the 18 percentof farms grossing more than $100,000 ayear (and typically netting at least$50,000). The aid also helps lock in anindustrial style of agriculture that dependsheavily on pesticides and contributes tosoil erosion and water pollution.7

Fortunately, governments have recent-ly cut some environmentally harmful sub-sidies. In 1988, Brazil ended the generousinvestment tax credits it had once offeredto ranchers and farmers who cleared landin the Amazon; officials believe thischange contributed to the temporarydeforestation slowdown at the time. Inthe United States, the Congress has yet toreform an 1872 law that gives miners firstrights to millions of hectares of publicland, but it has at least placed a tempo-rary moratorium on new claims every yearsince 1994.8

Since the mid-1980s, Belgium, France,Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdomhave all eliminated or radically reducedonce-high coal subsidies. The combinedcoal output of these five countries sank byhalf between 1986 and 1995. Meanwhile,the fossil fuel subsidies in nations outside

the industrial West, though still high, areless than half what they were a few yearsago, mainly because of halting, sometimespainful steps away from central govern-ment planning. (See Table 10–1.)9

Still, there are nearly $650 billion morein environmentally harmful subsidies.Cutting most of the remaining ones couldpay for an effective 8-percent cut in theglobal tax burden. Most of these cutswould occur in industrial nations, whichsubsidize pollution the most. In theUnited States, Germany, and Japan,where taxes average $6,000–7,000 a per-son, there would be a net tax cut ofroughly $500 per person or $2,000 perfamily of four.10

Subsidy reform, moreover, is only thefirst step in making prices tell the environ-mental truth. If governments are to makevisible the full environmental costs ofmany products and activities, they need to


Table 10–1. Subsidies for Fossil Fuel Use inSelected Developing and Former Eastern

Bloc Countries, 1990–91 and 1995–96

Region/ SubsidiesCountry 1990–91 1995–96 Change

(billion 1997 (percent)dollars per year)

China 25.7 10.8 –58Egypt 1.9 1.4 –28India 4.5 2.8 –37Iran 12.2 10.1 –17Mexico 5.0 2.4 –53Russia1 62.5 14.8 –76Venezuela 3.2 2.5 –22

All Developing 202.5 84.2 –58and FormerEastern BlocCountries1

1Estimates for Eastern bloc nations are particular-ly rough because of hyperinflation in the early 1990sand because widespread nonpayment of energy billsin some of these nations created hard-to-measure defacto subsidies.SOURCE: Worldwatch Institute, based on World Bank;see endnote 9.

tax pollution and resource depletion, assome increasingly are. (See Table 10–2.)11

One established and effective environ-mental tax regime is the system of waterpollution charges in the Netherlands.Since 1970, gradually rising charges onemissions of organic materials and heavymetals into canals, rivers, and lakes havespurred companies to cut emissions—butwithout dictating how. Between 1976 andthe mid-1990s, emissions of cadmium,chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel,and zinc into waters managed by regionalgovernments (which adopted the chargesearliest) plummeted 72–99 percent, andprimarily because of the charges.12

The Dutch example illustrates thestrengths of environmental taxes at theirbest. Companies that could prevent pollu-tion most cheaply presumably did somost. Companies would also have passedpart of the taxes on to their customersthrough higher prices, causing them toswitch to less-pollution-intensive prod-ucts. And demand for pollution controlequipment has spurred Dutch manufac-turers to develop better models, trigger-ing innovations that governments couldnever have planned, lowering costs, andturning the country into a global leaderin the market. The taxes have in effectsought the path of least economic resis-

tance—of least cost—in cleaning up thecountry’s waters.13

Tax increases sound like the bad newsin “polluter pays.” But the good news,ironically, is that tax burdens are alreadysubstantial in most countries. So there areplenty of taxes that could be cut with themoney raised from environmental taxes. Atax shift would result—not a tax increase.Today, nearly 95 percent of the $7.5 tril-lion in tax revenues raised each yearworldwide comes from levies on payrolls,personal income, corporate profits, capi-tal gains, retail sales, trade, and built prop-erty—all of which are essentially penaltiesfor work and investment. It violates com-mon sense to tax heavily the activities soci-eties generally want while taxing lightlythe activities they do not want.14

One of the world’s most environmen-tally proactive nations, Sweden, becamethe first to take up the tax-shifting idea.(See Table 10–3.) In 1991 the govern-ment took $2.4 billion from new taxes oncarbon and sulfur dioxide emissions,equal to 1.9 percent of all tax revenues,and used the money to cut income taxes.As concern grew over unemployment inWestern Europe, additional shifts in themid-1990s—in Denmark, Finland, andthe Netherlands, Spain, and the UnitedKingdom—focused more on cutting wage


Table 10–2. Experiences with Selected Environmental Tax Systems

Policy, Country, Year Initiated Description, Effect

Toxic waste tax, Germany, 1991 Toxic waste production fell more than 15percent in 3 years.

Water pollution taxes, Netherlands, 1970 Main factor behind 72–99 percent drop in industrial discharges of heavy metals into regionally managed waters.

Sulfur oxide tax, Sweden, 1991 One third of 40-percent emissions drop during 1989–95 attributed to charge.

Ozone-depleting substance tax, Smoothing and enforcing phaseouts.United States, 1990

Carbon dioxide tax, Norway, 1991 Emissions appear to be 3–4 percent lower thanthey would be without the tax.


taxes. And in 1998, the new, left-of-centergovernment of Germany announcedplans to shift 2.6 percent of taxes fromwages to energy.15

Though significant, these shifts onlyhint at the long-run potential in tax shift-ing, especially if greenhouse gas emis-sions are taxed. Studies suggest that ifcarbon taxes were phased in worldwideover 50 years, reaching $250 a ton in2050, global emissions might roughlyplateau by then, as people and businessesused fossil fuels more efficiently and shift-ed to solar and other energy sources.(The full tax would add as much as 18¢ tothe pump price of a liter of gasoline, or69¢ for a gallon.) If the tax kept risingafter 2050, emissions might almost halt by2100. Climate models suggest that theamount of carbon dioxide in the airwould stabilize at about 65 percent abovethe preindustrial level, which is as small

an increase as can realistically be hopedfor. (The concentration is already up 30percent.) Revenues would peak mid-cen-tury at roughly $700 billion to $1.8 trilliona year, enough to pay for cuts of perhaps15 percent in conventional taxes on workand investment. Such taxes would alsomove the world a huge step closer to envi-ronmental sustainability.16

REINVENTING REGULATION

Though fiscal tools are powerful, it wouldbe a mistake for governments to expectthat they can simply get the environmen-tal prices right, and then let the markettake care of any problems. Even the mostdiligent tax authorities could not reach allthe places they would need to in order to


Table 10–3. Tax Shifts from Work and Investment to Environmental Damage

Country, Year Initiated Taxes Cut On Taxes Raised On Revenue Shifted1

(percent)

Sweden, 1991 Personal income Carbon and sulfur emissions 1.9

Denmark, 1994 Personal income Motor fuel, coal, electricity, and 2.5water sales; waste incinerationand landfilling; motor vehicleownership

Spain, 1995 Wages Motor fuel sales 0.2

Denmark, 1996 Wages, agricultural Carbon emissions; pesticide,property chlorinated solvent, and

battery sales 0.5

Netherlands, 1996 Personal income Natural gas and electricity sales 0.8and wages

United Kingdom, Wages Landfilling 0.21996–97

Finland, 1996–97 Personal income Energy sales, landfilling 0.5and wages

Germany, 19992 Wages Energy sales 2.61Expressed relative to tax revenue raised by all levels of government. 2Planned but not enacted as of

October 1998.SOURCE: See endnote 15.

safeguard the environment single-hand-edly. For example, it is impractical to mea-sure—and thus tax—the smog-producingchemicals spewing from each of a city’smillion cars. Regulations, in contrast,have slashed tailpipe emissions in manycountries by simply requiring that compa-nies make cleaner cars.

Still, there is considerable room forimproving regulations. Much of the firstgeneration of environmental policy inindustrial countries, starting in the 1970s,was born out of environmentalists’ deepdistrust of businesses, and seemed found-ed on the belief that the best way to makesure firms clean up was to tell them exact-ly how to do it. But by focusing on meansrather than ends—for example, by pre-scribing water filters considered advanceda quarter-century ago—the regulationshave favored established, end-of-the-pipefixes over cheaper and more effective pol-lution prevention techniques, such asusing nontoxic, citrus-based solvents. Inaddition, environmental laws in mostcountries are divided into fiefdoms—air,water, hazardous waste, and so on.Regulators dealing with one type of prob-lem are often effectively required to ignoreimplications for other problems. Rulescalling for sulfur scrubbers in smokestacks,say, produce solid waste problems in theform of toxic scrubber sludge.17

The patchwork texture of laws on thebooks worsens the situation. Many gov-ernments, for instance, heavily regulatewater pollution from factories while near-ly ignoring runoff of manure, fertilizer,and pesticides from farms. Other rules,such as zoning laws that limit the densityof new neighborhoods, are too rarelyeven thought of as environmental poli-cies, despite their major environmentaleffects. (See Chapter 8.) Worse, in richand poor countries alike, many regula-tions are poorly enforced. In the UnitedStates, recent government audits foundthat state and federal officials had failedto issue or renew hundreds of pollution

permits for factories and wastewater treat-ment plants that were still operating.Enforcement tends to be even weaker inpoorer nations.18

Fortunately, these shortcomings havenot escaped notice, and are leading togradual reform. One response has beenfor governments to make regulationswork more like taxes, in the sense of zeroing in on results rather than pre-scribing solutions. The Duales SystemDeutschland (DSD) offers a particularlyfar-reaching example of this approach.Established by the German governmentin 1991, the system makes manufacturersof products such as detergents and toyslegally responsible for the plastic wrap,cardboard, bottles, and other packagingmaterial in which they ship their prod-ucts—even after the products are sold.(See Chapter 3.) Stores must accept theused cardboard boxes and shampoo bot-tles from customers; producers in turnmust accept materials from stores.19

In principle, the German law forciblycloses the packaging materials loop in theeconomy but leaves businesses with flexi-bility in accommodating this new limit.Many companies, for instance, havefound ways to reuse or recycle their mate-rials, while others have opted for simplerpackaging. Though not without prob-lems, the system increased recycling ofpackaging materials to 4.8 million tons ayear by 1994—a substantial 70 percent ofall packaging materials—at a modest costof some $20 a year per German resident.Austria, France, and Belgium have sinceadopted versions of the DSD system.20

The Netherlands has been a leader inrethinking not only the structure of regu-lations but the process through whichthey are formed. In 1989, it released aNational Environmental Policy Plan afterconsulting with industry and public inter-est groups. Revised periodically, the planhas set national goals in eight problemareas, ranging from waste disposal to cli-mate change. The government has then


taken various steps toward these goals,including taxes, regulations, and quasi-voluntary covenants with industry. Thecovenants in particular need not beobeyed to the letter, but good-faith effortsare essentially required. Otherwise, morespecific and more burdensome regula-tions may follow.21

The building industry in theNetherlands, for example, is well on itsway to meeting its commitment to recycle90 percent of its waste, mainly bricks andconcrete from construction and demoli-tion. Nationwide greenhouse gas emis-sions, on the other hand, have not fallenas hoped. But the country has phased outozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons(CFCs), as required by internationaltreaty, and should come close to its goal ofcutting pollutants that cause acid rain by80 percent between 1980 and 2000.22

GLOBAL CHALLENGES, GLOBALCOOPERATION

The world’s 200 nation-states have dividedthe Earth among themselves in ways thathave little to do with geography, or withthe anatomy of the global economy. So asnatural resources, pollutants, trade, andinvestment increasingly course across arbi-trary borders, the international dimen-sions of the environmental crisis steadilyexpand. The crisis therefore calls for anequally international response, and onewith two main prongs. The treaties andinstitutions of international economicgovernance, such as the World Bank andthe World Trade Organization (WTO),will need to take the environmental impli-cations of their actions into fuller consid-eration. In addition, cooperation on theenvironment will be needed to protectoceans, seas, and many rivers, as well asbiodiversity, natural habitat, and theatmosphere.

The need for international governancein solving international environmentalproblems has become well recognized inthe latter half of the twentieth century, butin words far more than deeds. The WorldBank in particular, with its historical rootsin the rebuilding of Western Europe afterWorld War II, has long been a majorfinancier of giant public works projectssuch as coal plants and hydropower dams.In many developing countries, such pro-jects have wrought grievous harm. InSingrauli, in the Indian state of Bihar, theBank has lent billions to help build a giantcomplex of 12 open-pit mines and 11 coalplants. The huge projects have impover-ished many peasants by poisoning theregion’s soils and forests; the plants havealso become one of the world’s largestsources of greenhouse gases.23

The World Bank’s current president,James Wolfensohn, has apparentlyworked hard to reform the institution inorder to incorporate environmental andother development concerns into its day-to-day operations. On balance, however,his efforts have so far deflected the courseof the bureaucracy he commands only afew degrees. According to the Bank’s ownfigures, it has lent six times as much forfossil fuel projects as for renewable ener-gy and energy efficiency since 1992, theyear its funders and clients signed thelandmark treaty on global climate changeat Rio. Moreover, the Bank still favorscoal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, much morethan private lenders do, at roughly 40percent of its energy portfolio comparedwith 20 percent for private lenders.24

Consultants for the Bank have con-cluded that if the institution evaluatedprojects as if a modest $20-a-ton carbontax were in place in client countries—inorder to give some weight to environmen-tal concerns—40 percent of the energyprojects financed would fail a cost-benefittest. Of course, developing countriesshould be able to emit some carbon, espe-cially while rich nations emit so much


more and renewable energy technologiesare maturing. Nevertheless, the Bankseems to be pushing developing countriesalong a development path bound to hitan environmental dead end.25

Through the World Bank and otherBretton Woods institutions—including theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) andthe World Trade Organization—nationshave shown the willingness and ability tobuild international institutions strongenough to defend one principle many seeas essential to long-term economic devel-opment, namely that trade and investmentshould flow easily across borders. In 1997and 1998, for example, the IMF condi-tioned emergency loans to Asian nationsin part on reforms that would, it hoped,draw private funds back into the countriesby making life easier for internationalinvestors. And in 1998, the WTO ruledagainst a U.S. law prohibiting importationof shrimp caught with nets lacking devicesthat protect endangered sea turtles, callingthe law an illegal restraint of trade. (SeeChapter 5.)26

The power of these institutions makesthem equally capable of becoming strongsupporters of sustainable development.To do this, they would need to put intopractice a more sophisticated conceptionof development, one that elevates envi-ronmental protection (along with educa-tion, health, and advancement of women)from the current status of a poor relationin the international economic policyarena. Institutions that absorbed that newview would be as eager to defend the envi-ronment as they now are to defend inter-national capital.

There are hints that this view is gainingcurrency, and not just in the President’soffice at the World Bank. In late 1998, forexample, the WTO partly reversed itselfin the shrimp-turtle case, taking issue withthe way the U.S. law was implementedrather than dismissing it outright.27

Similarly, nations that accepted thisapproach would provide adequate funds

for international environmental bodiessuch as the U.N. Environment Pro-gramme (UNEP), and would negotiatestronger environmental treaties.

To date, governments have ratifiedmore than 215 international environmen-tal treaties, on everything from acid rainto desertification. Most are regional inscope. Agreements aimed at protecting 14of the world’s regional seas have beenforged under the auspices of UNEP, forexample, and have been signed by morethan 140 nations. A few environmentaltreaties, however, are global, includingthe conventions on biodiversity and cli-mate change signed at the U.N.Conference on Environment andDevelopment, the Earth Summit, in Rioin 1992. Governments have also signednumerous action plans and commu-niqués that lack binding legal status.28

But most of the treaties and agree-ments have been inadequate to the prob-lems at hand, either in design or inimplementation and enforcement. Theinstitutions they have created have typi-cally been given ambitious mandates inprinciple, but minimal authority andfunding.29

What can be said for these accords isthat the international negotiating confer-ences that made them have helped pavethe way for longer-term progress. For one,they have facilitated agreement on suchquestions as priorities for internationaldevelopment assistance. The Inter-national Conference on Population andDevelopment in Cairo in 1994, for exam-ple, marked the widespread acceptanceamong governments and their aid agen-


Most international treaties and agree-ments have been inadequate to theproblems at hand.

cies of the importance of improving thelot of poor women in order to slow popu-lation growth.30

The conferences have also made prob-lems such as marine pollution and speciesextinction suddenly newsworthy. Atten-tion from the press corps leads to atten-tion from the public and can heightensupport for action. Coverage of environ-mental issues, for example, reached newlevels during the Rio conference. And byraising awareness, international confer-ences have helped catalyze organizationsof nonprofit groups, legislators, and busi-nesses within and across borders, creatingstronger lobbies for action both domesti-cally and internationally.

Still, if nations are to exercise effectiveinternational environmental governance,such conferences will eventually need toproduce more than beneficial side effects.They will need to forge strong treaties.Encouragingly, on a few issues theyalready have. In 1990, for example, theConvention on International Trade inEndangered Species of Wild Fauna andFlora banned cross-border trade in ivory.With markets dried up, elephant poach-ing in Africa plummeted and some herdsbegan to recuperate (although sometrade has been allowed again, and poach-ing is reportedly on the rise in somenations). In Western Europe, a series ofinternational agreements during the last20 years lie behind the steady decline inemissions of sulfur and nitrogen, themain causes of acid rain.31

Most spectacular has been the successof the 1987 Montreal Protocol on

Depletion of the Ozone Layer. This treatyrequired industrial countries to halt CFCproduction and importation in 1996.Each nation used a different mix of taxes,regulations, and education programs to comply. The accord calls for a globalphaseout by 2006, and for production of most other ozone-destroying chemicalsto fall.32

In order to forge a strong treaty, signa-tories yielded sovereignty in severalnotable ways. To discourage individualnations from staying outside the treatyand becoming havens for CFC produc-tion, parties to the treaty accepted a rulethat forbids them from trading with non-parties in CFCs or products containingthem. (Whether this provision would sur-vive a challenge under WTO rules is notclear.) They also set up a fund throughwhich industrial nations can aid others inmaking the transition; some $750 millionhas been transferred so far. In addition,the Protocol requires consent from onlytwo thirds of the signatories, includingmajorities of more and less industrialcountries, to ratify accelerations of reduc-tions. Tighter timetables were in factapproved unanimously in 1990 and 1993,but the threat of majority rule may havehelped bring would-be stragglers into thefold of international consensus.33

In outline, the Montreal Protocol is atemplate for effective treaties on muchtougher international environmentalproblems, including biodiversity loss andclimate change. It recognizes that nationsthat are richer and have caused more of aproblem need to take the lead in solvingit. They may end up paying more(because they phase out CFCs faster andfund most of the research on substitutes),but precisely because they are wealthier,they are willing to spend more to preventskin cancer deaths and crop damage. Theresult, ideally, is a treaty that serves eachnation’s interest, and at a price each canafford. And because of the way nationshave yielded some sovereignty in this case,


The Montreal Protocol is a tem-plate for effective treaties on muchtougher international environmentalproblems.

historians may cite the Montreal Protocolas an important, early instance of nationsforging global governance in order tosolve global problems.34

AN ECO-INDUSTRIALREVOLUTION

Debate over environmental issues oftencenters on the whys and hows of govern-ment action. That emphasis is warranted,but it risks overshadowing the role thatnongovernmental actors, including businesses, will need to play in fashioninga sustainable society. The creativity andentrepreneurship of businesses, after all, generated many of the economic and technological changes that shapedthe twentieth century. Businesses will playno smaller a role in an eco-industrial revolution.

Of course, companies are not general-ly in the business of doing things out ofmoral duty. They exist primarily to makemoney. So the proper role of business increating a sustainable society would nec-essarily be subtle. On the one hand, busi-nesses would be the objects of change.They would be prodded along by strongenvironmental taxes and regulations,major international accords, and con-sumer pressure, and lured by the hugeinvestment opportunities created by gov-ernments rewriting the ground rules ofthe $38-trillion-a-year global economy. Onthe other hand, they could be agents ofchange as they devised technologies thatsaved fuel or recycled water cheaplyenough to trigger major shifts away fromunsustainable technologies.35

In practice, however, the distinctionbetween businesses as reactors and asactors is fuzzy. Ask CEO John Browne whyBritish Petroleum (BP) is investing $1 bil-lion in solar and wind energy R&D and hewill probably give two overlapping

answers: BP needs to prepare for a strongglobal climate treaty, which will dampendemand for oil. And BP wants to bringdown the price of solar energy in order tolead the world, profitably, toward change.Gauging how large each considerationlooms is as hard as predicting which will move faster—government policy ortechnology. Thus the holistic view that a shift toward sustainability would be systemic—driven by businesses, govern-ment, nonprofit groups, and consumerstogether—is perhaps most relevant.“Using uncertainty as an excuse for doingnothing,” explains Browne, “only margin-alizes us in an important and rapidly mov-ing debate.” Businesses have a role to playand an opportunity to exploit.36

The transition to sustainability wouldcontinue the economic dynamism thathas characterized the two centuries afterthe Industrial Revolution. Corporatebehemoths, such as BP, General Motors,and Dupont, that rose on the crest of thefossil fuel revolution could capture manyof the new opportunities. Or they couldbe elbowed aside by the Microsofts of thenew technological generation. (SeeChapter 2.) For every declining coalindustry, there would be a rising windpower industry. From businesses’ point ofview, government policy and consumerpressure would foreclose some profitopportunities, but open up others. Somejobs would regrettably be shed, but otherswould be created.

Regulations, a few environmentaltaxes, and consumer pressure are alreadygiving a taste of what may come. Sales oforganically grown food rose 19-fold in theUnited States between 1980 and 1996,from $180 million to $3.5 billion. TheMontreal Protocol is shutting down mar-kets for CFCs, but it has created billion-dollar demands for ozone-safealternatives and for the refrigerators andair conditioners that use them. The inter-national market for “environmental”goods and services that recycle, monitor


and control pollution, and save energyreached roughly $450 billion in 1996.37

A full transition to sustainability wouldmake these markets seem small. Funda-mentally reconfiguring the global econo-my would cause demand for technologiesthat prevent pollution in the first place tomushroom. In fact, global wind powercapacity additions quintupled between1990 and 1997. Denmark, Germany,Spain, and India installed the most,thanks in part to strong subsidies. Thewind industry now employs 20,000 in theEuropean Union, up from practically zeroin the 1970s. The latest global sales dou-bling for solar cells, which are made fromsilicon, took only four years, a growth rateworthy of silicon computer chips.38

Major investment opportunities wouldalso materialize within existing industries.Indeed, most industries would see neithermassive shrinkage nor massive growth onthe way to a sustainable world. Manywould, however, have to evolve in order tosurvive. A sustainable economy wouldneed some paper, chemicals, and steel,for example, but makers of these prod-ucts would have to overhaul how theyoperate in order to pollute much less andrecycle much more.

It is during such times of turbulencethat the industrial pecking order is mostoften rearranged. Those who anticipatechange in the business environment—indeed, press it forward—will gain ontheir competitors. A growing list of cor-porations seem to be taking this messageto heart with respect to sustainability.39

The key conceptual shift manufactur-ers need to make in becoming more sus-tainable is to see themselves as sellingservices rather than goods. As WilliamMcDonough, dean of the University ofVirginia School of Architecture, pointsout, consumers do not buy televisionsbecause they feel a powerful need tobring a box of circuit boards, toxic com-pounds, and metals purified at great envi-ronmental expense into their living

rooms. They want information and enter-tainment. The challenge for business,then, is to maximize the provision of suchservices while minimizing the productionof goods. Information and human intelli-gence then become the sources of mosteconomic value—as they already are insoftware, movies, financial services, andother dynamic sectors.40

The techniques for generating moreservice with less environmental harm are many. (See Chapters 3 and 4.)Appliances, vehicles, even houses can bemade both more efficient and more effi-ciently. Their usefulness can be stretchedby making them more durable and easierto repair, upgrade, disassemble, and recy-cle. The Xerox Corporation, for instance,says that it sees itself as selling copies ratherthan copiers. When it provides a customerwith a machine, it guarantees an agreedlevel of copier service for an agreed num-ber of months. The company will replaceor upgrade parts in its modularly designedunits at no extra cost to the customer. Andwhen a contract expires, Xerox takes itsmachine back in order to reuse it or scav-enge it for parts. The company now recy-cles more than a million parts a year,saving some $100 million annually.41

As Xerox’s experience suggests, devis-ing these new ways of providing serviceswill often cost much less than feared—somuch so that frequently it will profit com-panies to press ahead of the environmen-tal policy curve. One study of the costs ofenvironmental laws for businesses found adozen policies in the United States forwhich costs had been estimated bothbefore and after entering into force. Allbut one policy turned out to cost half orless of what was originally projected,mainly because of unforeseen technologi-cal advances. And some saved money.42

As the CFC phaseout deadlineapproached in the early 1990s, for exam-ple, electronics giants such as AT&T,General Electric, and Texas Instrumentsworked together to find alternatives to


CFCs for cleaning new circuit boards.Eventually they settled on a more radicaland efficient approach: soldering compo-nents together so neatly that they neededno cleaning in the first place. By 1992, theyhad refined the technique and halted CFCuse. One company, Nortel, spent $1 mil-lion on the switchover, but saved $4 mil-lion in CFC purchase and disposal costs(and CFC taxes). The new process alsoraised efficiency and product quality.43

One reason “greener” can turn outcheaper is that the goal of environmentalprotection can energize employees, whoare not just corporate cogs but humanbeings concerned about what they aredoing to their communities and to theirchildren’s futures. People do better workwhen they care more about it. In addition,lack of time prevents companies frominvestigating all of the millions of processchanges they could make. Thus practicesthat waste resources and money can per-sist for decades. Nortel, for example, foryears stuck to money-wasting circuit boardcleaning techniques simply because theyhad worked reasonably well in the past.The CFC phaseout, however, focused itscorporate heart and mind. Engineerswere put on the job of finding affordablealternatives, and in a matter of years theysucceeded beyond expectation.44

Economies of scale also help compa-nies cut the cost of environmentallybenign technologies. The more widgets—or water purifiers, or solar cells—a com-pany makes, the better it becomes atmaking them, which allows it to bringdown prices, stoke demand, and makeeven more widgets. This virtuous circlecan arise in any manufacturing businesswhere change is afoot, which is why tech-nologies often develop in unpredictablewaves and pulses. Between 1975 and 1997,for instance, the price of a watt of solarcells dropped from $89 to $4.25 (in 1997dollars)—or 30 percent for every dou-bling in cumulative sales. At this rate,another 10-fold increase in cumulative

sales would bring prices to $1 per watt,often considered the threshold for com-petitiveness with coal and natural gas.45

Trends like that may explain whyToyota has begun selling an innovativeelectric-gasoline hybrid car, a sporty four-seater called the Prius, that gets twice themileage of conventional models. Toyota isreportedly losing as much as $10,000 onevery Prius that rolls out of the factory,but is evidently banking on the expecta-tion that the more experience it developswith the new technologies, the more itcan cut costs and sharpen its competitiveedge in this strategic new market.46

Still, there is little reason to expect thatbusinesses can bring about an eco-indus-trial revolution on their own. When twotechnologies compete, an overwhelmingadvantage usually goes to the one with thehead start. Solar power, for instance, mustcompete with oil- and coal-burning tech-nologies on an economic playing fieldthat has been tilted in favor of fossil fuelsfor a century by subsidies and lax envi-ronmental laws. As a result, for every dol-lar that has been spent developing solarpower, a hundred or a thousand havebeen spent refining its competitors. Thusgovernments will need to exercise sub-stantial policy muscle to tip the markettoward environmentally sound technolo-gies. When that happens, the businessesthat are best prepared will likely reapmost of the profits for doing right by theenvironment.

CIVIL SOCIETY FOR ASUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

The disintegration of communism in theEastern bloc unleashed a wave of environ-mental horror stories. From the “BlackTriangle” at the nexus of East Germany,Czechoslovakia, and Poland to the east-ern reaches of Siberia, there were reports


of polluted forests where no birds chirpedand no leaves sprouted from the trees, ofwhole nuclear reactors dumped intoArctic waters, of high cancer rates andmysterious clusters of children born with-out left forearms. Intriguingly, there werealso reports, less publicized, that environ-mental groups, such as Ecoglasnost inBulgaria, were a significant conduit forthe groundswell of discontent that top-pled communist regimes in 1989.47

The abysmal environmental record ofthe former Eastern bloc teaches an impor-tant lesson: a sustainable society almostcertainly must be founded on a strong civilsociety, which is defined here as the realmin which people may work as individualsor in groups to shape their world on anonprofit basis, without the sanction ofviolence that undergirds governmentaction. Civil society includes voters, con-sumers, churches and mosques, politicalparties, unions, and a dizzying variety ofother nongovernmental groups. In theWest, where civil society comparativelythrived, pressure from voters and inde-pendent groups led governments andsome businesses to take local environmen-tal problems seriously. But Soviet dictator-ship clamped down on civil society. As aresult, local environmental problems hadto become acute before there appeared aglimmer of response in those countries.

Still, Westerners should not take toomuch pride in the contrast. While rivers,seas, and forests are generally healthier inthe West, lifestyles there are also grosslyunsustainable. (See Chapter 3.) Demo-cratic nations may have reduced localenvironmental problems, but by import-ing fish, timber, food, and minerals fromthe rest of the world and exporting pollu-tants such as carbon dioxide, they aredoing more than their part to spoil theglobal commons. That points to the needfor global environmental governance. Butjust as domestic civil society has had topress for domestic government action onthe environment, a strong, global civil

society, in which researchers, activists, pol-icymakers, and citizens link up across bor-ders, will be needed to press forinternational action.

In the final analysis, it is the power ofindividuals, channeled through civil soci-ety, that will drive governments, interna-tional institutions, and businesses towardsustainability.

Fortunately, recent trends here are pos-itive. Polls show the global public becom-ing more worried about environmentalproblems every year. According to a 1998survey by Environics International cover-ing 30 nations as different as China andItaly, majorities in 28 feel that their gov-ernments need to do more to protect theenvironment. And during the 1990s, therehas been a halting but global shift towarddemocracy and space for civil society.Increasingly, public concern about theinadequacy of governmental action on theenvironment is voiced, and is heard.48

The process is at work even in China, acountry hardly known for brooking dis-sent. In Jiangsu province, a man whose4,800-strong flock of ducks earned himthe local name “King of Ducks”—and agood living from the eggs—awoke onemorning in 1994 to find his piece of riverpitch black. Within days, all of LuShihua’s ducks were dead. In response,Lu and his neighbors launched a classaction lawsuit against the polluters—state-owned distilleries and soymilk factoriesupstream. The villagers won, setting aimportant new precedent in China(though the case was under appeal as ofearly 1998). Given the strength of the cen-tral government in China, it is likely thatthis victory was a product of pressure fromboth below and above: of the plaintiffs’courage and persistence and of a greateropenness in Beijing toward criticism ofhighly polluting state enterprises.49

As this example shows, getting thingsdone in the civil sphere, as in businessand government, usually takes organiza-tion. In the environmental realm, the


groups that have so far made the most dif-ference are of a type usually labeled,somewhat vaguely, as nongovernmentalorganizations, or NGOs.

The rise of nongovernmental groupshas been one of the most striking andhopeful developments in societal struc-ture in the last quarter-century. The grad-ually increasing space for civil societyworldwide has given them room to grow.The seeming inability of governments tosolve complex, modern problems such aspoverty and environmental degradationhas provoked them. And the spread of lit-eracy and cheap electronic communica-tion has nurtured them.50

In western democracies, environmen-tal NGOs abound. On the Indian subcon-tinent, a huge number of small grassrootsgroups operate, drawing on a Gandhiantradition of self-help. In the Panchmahalsdistrict of India’s Gujarat state, forinstance, scores of villages have organizedcommittees to protect and regeneratelocal forests in the last 10 years—foreststhat began declining after the govern-ment took them over from the departingBritish. In Latin America, a comparablenumber of Christian Base Communities,born out of the liberation theology move-ment of the 1980s, unite Catholicism withsocial action. Thousands more groupsoperate throughout the rest of Asia andsub-Saharan Africa. North Africa, on theother hand, has relatively few NGOs.51

The Internet has spurred many NGOefforts. In 1997, a ragtag coalition ofgroups ranging from the Third WorldNetwork in Malaysia to the Council ofCanadians used the World Wide Web,electronic mail, and electronic confer-ences to quickly organize opposition tothe Multilateral Agreement on Invest-ments. The prospective treaty to liberalizeinternational investment rules was beingnegotiated behind the closed doors of theOrganisation for Economic Co-operationand Development (OECD). “If a negotia-tor says something to someone over a

glass of wine,” boasted Maude Barlow,chair of the Council of Canadians, “we’llhave it on the Internet within an hour, allover the world.” In April 1998, the OECDannounced a six-month delay in negotia-tions, acknowledging that the NGOs hadaroused enough opposition in manycountries to derail the process. A similarnetwork spearheaded the campaign tofinalize a new treaty to ban land minesworldwide.52

Increasingly, NGOs are linking up totest the limits of existing international lawas well. In Nicaragua, the indigenouscommunity of Awas Tingni is workingwith the U.S.-based Indian Law ResourceCenter (ILRC) in a bid to regain controlof its homeland. With ILRC assistance,the community filed a petition in 1995 atthe Inter-American Commission onHuman Rights, arguing that the govern-ment had violated international as well asnational law by unilaterally granting tim-ber concessions to foreign loggers onAwas Tingni land. In 1998, the commis-sion, an investigative body, found firmlyin favor of the community and filed suiton residents’ behalf in the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, whichis part of the Organization of AmericanStates (OAS). The finding embarrassedthe Nicaraguan government, but whetherit will lead OAS members to raise the legalstanding of indigenous land claimsremains to be seen.53

Though policymakers may find theresults unpleasant in the short run, itseems clear that fostering NGOs will servesociety and government stability in the


Polls show the global public becomingmore worried about environmentalproblems every year.

long run. Governments can support civilsociety in several ways. One essential stepis to protect freedoms of press and assem-bly, something that often still runs againsttheir nature. The Malaysian government,like many, has an uneasy relationship withNGOs. In 1997, it raided the offices ofthree of them in an apparent attempt tosilence its critics.54

Another key step is for governments tomake themselves more accountable to allthe governed, since special interests oftenwork to block progress. This calls forstrengthening the more egalitarianavenues of influence over public policyformation, such as elections, while lessen-ing those that favor the wealthy few, suchas campaign donations.

Almost all governments maintain com-fortable relationships with moneyed inter-ests, which reduces the power of civilsociety as a whole. One of the most pow-erful men in Indonesia, for example, isBob Hasan, a long-time friend and aide offormer President Suharto. UnderSuharto, the government sold Hasanhuge logging concessions in the nation’srainforests at prices far below true worth,turning him into a billionaire even as itimpoverished thousands of villagersdependent on the forests. Hasan almostcertainly channeled some of his loggingprofits back to Suharto relatives and otherkey officials.55

One useful tack against corruption isfor governments to make sure that offi-cials who formulate and implement policyare paid well, in order to reduce theappeal of bribes. Also critical are adop-tion and enforcement of strong anti-cor-ruption laws, periodic auditing ofofficials, and an independent judiciary;enforcement will never stamp out corrup-tion, but it will increase the risks forpotential bribe takers. Finally, reducingthe discretion of bureaucratic decision-makers and making their actions publicwill further reduce the appeal of bribes.Sunlight is the best disinfectant.56

In industrial democracies, campaigndonations create similar problems. In the1995–96 U.S. election cycle, oil and gascompanies gave $11.8 million to congres-sional candidates to protect tax breaksworth at least $3 billion over the period.Timber lobbies donated $3.6 million,mainly to members of committees thathave set the U.S. Forest Service’s timbersale quotas high enough to propel wide-spread clearcutting on public lands.57

Almost every industrial democracy hasadopted its own mix of campaign financereform measures during the last fewdecades, drawing from such ingredientsas public financing, limits on contribu-tions and spending, and bans on politicaltelevision advertising. Some have workedbetter than others. In Canada, forinstance, a 1974 package of reforms com-bined disclosure requirements, tax creditsfor private donations, strong spendingcaps for political parties, and direct pub-lic financing. These reforms limited cam-paign spending for the most recentfederal elections to 80¢ per capita, com-pared with $9 in the United States. Andthe reforms appear to have facilitated therise of new political parties.58

In addition to making sure the deck isless stacked against civil society groups,governments can give those groups addi-tional cards to play. In particular, govern-ments can release information abouttheir own activities and those of business-es. The United States pioneered a potentsystem in this spirit, under a law whosepassage owed much to support from envi-ronmental groups. In 1986, it began col-lating and publishing data on toxicchemical emissions from industrialplants. The database, known as the ToxicsRelease Inventory (TRI), for the first timegave citizens the right to know how muchof various chemicals was being emitted bylocal industry.59

Especially now that it is available overthe World Wide Web, the TRI has becomean invaluable tool for local groups press-


ing factories to clean up, as well as forinvestors concerned about the associatedcosts. The negative publicity that inde-pendent groups generate from the datagives them clout with companies a hun-dred times as big. One study found thatstock prices for firms on the TRI listdropped an average 0.2–0.3 percent($4–6 million) the day the first resultswere released in 1989, with larger lossesfor heavier polluters. And the companiesthat lost the most value then cut theiremissions the most, apparently inresponse. The TRI has inspired imitatorsin Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic,Egypt, Mexico, the Netherlands, SouthAfrica, Switzerland, and the UnitedKingdom.60

In a potentially far-reaching step, the55 nations of the U.N. EconomicCommission for Europe, which coversNorth America and Europe, signed a con-vention in 1998 that obliges them toincrease public access to information andbroaden public participation in govern-ment decisionmaking related to the envi-ronment—in a word, to increase“transparency.” The treaty also requiresmembers to promote the same goals forinternational institutions they belong to,such as the World Trade Organization,which has been extremely secretive in itsdeliberations. The convention mightresult in the WTO court releasing tran-scripts of cases with environmental impli-cations. Most likely, signatories willimplement the convention in fits andstarts—pushed forward by NGOs.61

THE POWER OF AN EDUCATEDCITIZENRY

What is remarkable about nonprofit, non-governmental organizations is that theywield power despite their seeming lack ofit. They have no army or police force, no

power to tax or regulate or ratify bindinginternational accords. The for-profit sec-tor dwarfs them financially. Their sourceof strength is far less tangible: it lies ineducation, broadly defined. Many NGOsare supported by foundations and indi-vidual donors motivated by understand-ings they have gained of major socialproblems. And many in turn work to edu-cate the public and persuade policymak-ers about the need for action. Thissuggests that the fundamental challengein building a sustainable society is one ofeducation. What people think and feelabout the world affects what they do asvoters, consumers, and resource owners,and as government officials, internationaldiplomats, and employees.

It is encouraging to note that mindsetscan change quickly in response to educa-tion. In developing nations, educationcampaigns, along with increased availabil-ity of family planning services and contra-ception, are one major reason thatfertility rates fell remarkably quicklybetween the early 1960s and the first halfof the 1990s—from 6.0 births per womanto 3.3. (These figures exclude China,where particularly coercive policesreduced fertility even faster.) If this hope-ful trend were to continue, fertility in thedeveloping world would drop to the sus-tainable rate of slightly more than 2 chil-dren per woman by 2010–15. (Populationgrowth would continue for some decades,however, because so many women will stillhave their childbearing years ahead ofthem.) The transition from high birthrates and high death rates to low birthrates and low death rates, which took 150years in what are now the more industrialcountries, would then have taken only 50in developing countries.62

One striking reason fertility has fallenis that women are more educated not justabout family planning, but generally.Many studies have found that a woman’seducation level is among the strongest, ifnot the strongest, predictor of how many


children she will have. (See Figure 10–1.)Women who spend more time in schoolmarry and have children later. They alsowork more in the formal economy andearn more. This gives them more to losefinancially if they stay at home with youngchildren, as well as less need for childrento support them in old age. Educatinggirls also improves women’s economicand social status, and thus is one of thebest ways to make economic developmentboth equitable and sustainable.63

A more specific role for educators liesin teaching children and adults about theenvironment—how it functions, how theydepend on it, and how they affect it.Children in particular respond to theselessons. The seeds of understandingplanted now will produce concerned citi-zens in a generation’s time. One purposeof education is to give people the toolsthey need to become responsible citizens.Teaching students about the environmentmerely extends the understanding of “cit-izenship” to encompass their responsibili-ties as citizens of planet Earth.

Environmental education soundsstraightforward, but doing it may wellrequire major changes in how students are

taught. Education today teaches discon-nection. Disciplines such as political sci-ence, economics, moral philosophy,anthropology, biology, psychology, chem-istry, and thermodynamics are severedfrom each other even though each, incombination with the others, helps explainour environmental predicament. More-over, points out David Orr, a professor atOberlin College in Ohio, the very experi-ence of classroom learning teaches discon-nection, since it typically occurs in artificialindoor environments, which are main-tained with environmentally costly flows offossil fuels and water and which psycholog-ically isolate students from the naturalworld. As a result, the structure of educa-tion itself trains students to ignore the eco-logical consequences of their actions.64

“Ecological literacy” is above all an abil-ity to connect, to synthesize knowledgefrom the gamut of disciplines in order tosee the big picture. To become ecologi-cally literate, Orr argues, students need toexperience education less as an exercisein taking dictation than as an ongoingdialogue, in which ideas are formulated,tested against everyday experience, andrevised. This forces students to thinkabout how the physics of solar cells andthe chemistry of petroleum, say, shape theworld economy and geopolitics.65

One of the most promising paths tosuch experience is for students to helpmanage their own campuses and neigh-borhoods. At the University of JorgeTadeo Lozano in Bogatá, Colombia, forexample, students and administratorshave joined to launch a campus recyclingprogram that aims to collect 17 tons amonth of plastic, organic waste, andpaper. In Ankara, Turkey, students andstaff at the Middle East TechnicalUniversity have spearheaded the refor-estation of 1,500 hectares (3,750 acres) ofwasteland into the largest green space inthe city. In the United States, studentpressure is perhaps the main reason 80percent of campuses now recycle.66


ColombiaDom.Rep.

Egypt KenyaPakistan

SenegalThailand

Children Per Woman

Source: PRB

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8No EducationPrimary EducationSecondary Education

Figure 10–1. Fertility Rate by Education Levelof the Mother, Selected Countries

The world’s oldest institutions of edu-cation—though often not thought of assuch—are arguably institutions of reli-gion. Like universities and schools, theyseek to help people understand theworld. Like NGO leaders, religious lead-ers are primarily motivated by moralbeliefs, and try to teach society how totranslate those values into action. Some3.5 billion people, more than half theplanet’s population, belong to organizedreligions. And the values of environmen-talism—respect for the Creation, theimportance of human health, and theright of the next generation to a securefuture—are nearly universal, so it is notsurprising that all major religions can beread as environmentalist. A Buddhistmeditation, for example, runs, “Cut downthe forest of your greed, before cuttingreal trees.” Hinduism holds India’sGanges river to be sacred. And the Bookof Genesis says, “The Lord God took theman and put him in the Garden of Edento work it and take care of it.”67

As moral educators, spiritual leaderscan help people discover environmental-ism within themselves and help themthink about how to apply that ethic intheir lives. In the United States, for exam-ple, the National Religious Partnershipfor the Environment, a coalition ofgroups from several faiths, lists more than150 environmentally active congregationsnationwide. These range from a Jewishyouth group in San Diego that buildsnature trails and does monthly cleanupsin two parks to a Baptist congregation inCollinsville, Alabama, campaigning tounseat officials who approved a locallandfill that parishioners say is pollutingthe groundwater. Meanwhile, in theIndian city of Varanasi, a hereditaryHindu priest and hydroelectric engineernamed Veer Bhadra Mishra heads a foun-dation that is working on low-cost ways toclean up the Ganges, which is heavily pol-luted despite its sacredness.68

H.G. Wells foreshadowed much of the

twentieth century when he wrote that“human history becomes more and morea race between education and catastro-phe.” The sort of education that will saveus from catastrophe is not just a matter ofdisseminating information, for the planetis now awash in information. The educa-tion needed, rather, is the sharing of wis-dom. Our knowledge of the natural worldhas raced far ahead of our wisdom inusing it. As a result, we are razing ourforests, grinding down our mountains,siphoning off our rivers, paving ourplains, modifying our climate, pollutingour air, and tainting our blood. We areproducing, in other words, a world noneof us wants.69

There is an alternative path. It cannotbe described to the last detail, but it can beoutlined convincingly. And there are hintsthat we are moving toward that path. Windand solar power sales are skyrocketing.Water-conserving practices are spreading.Population growth is slowing. We can alsodraw hope from the rapidity of changeduring the century just ending.Technologies once hardly dreamed ofbecame commonplace a generation later.Public attitudes, about smoking for exam-ple, also evolved rapidly in many countries.

The turning of the new millenniumbrings a historic moment of truth forglobal society. Will we rescue what is goodin the modern economy while teaching itto cherish natural wealth and humanhealth? Will we fashion an economy fit forthe long haul?

Crossing over to a sustainable path willbe a long and complex process. Govern-ments need to play a large role, working


Environmental education may requiremajor changes in how students aretaught.

within their borders and cooperatingacross them. Businesses will need to takemany of the risks, generate many of theinnovations, and create the new jobs. Andpressing them all forward will be civil soci-ety in its many forms, grounded in aneducated citizenry.

Like any economic revolution, this onewill involve upheaval and even some sacri-

fice. In order to make way for new indus-tries—and thus new jobs, investmentopportunities, and products—others willbe shed. But the benefits will be healthyair, safe drinking water, a secure food sup-ply, and protection for the planet’s diver-sity of species—in short, a planet we canbe proud to leave for our children. Thechoice is ours to make.


NotesChapter 10. Building a SustainableSociety

1. Payal Sampat, “What Does India Want?”World Watch, July/August 1998; Sam Dillon,“Capital’s Downfall Caused by Drinking…of Water,” New York Times, 29 January 1998; Jillian Lloyd, “In Colorado, Beekeepers AreStung by Nation’s Honeybee Losses,” ChristianScience Monitor, 10 March 1998; WilliamSouder, “A Possible Leap Forward onAmphibian Abnormalities,” Washington Post,16 March 1998; Andrew Schaeffer, “1995Canada-Spain Fishing Dispute (The TurbotWar),” Georgetown International EnvironmentalLaw Review, spring 1996.

2. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1997).

3. Emissions of more than 2 billion tons ayear leading to atmospheric carbon dioxideconcentrations above 400 parts per millionfrom John T. Houghton et al., eds.,Stabilization of Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases:Physical, Biological and Socioeconomic Implica-tions, IPCC Technical Paper 3 (Geneva:Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,1997); figure of 10 billion is the U.N. mediumprojection, from United Nations, WorldPopulation Projections to 2150 (New York: 1998);distance estimate based on U.S. Departmentof Energy, Model Year 1998 Fuel Economy Guide(Washington, DC: 1997), and on GreggMarland, “Carbon Dioxide Emission Rates forConventional and Synthetic Fuels,” Energy, vol.8, no. 12 (1983), and assumes 90-percent effi-

ciency in converting petroleum to gasoline;current emissions from T.A. Boden, G.Marland, and R.J. Andres, Estimates of Global,Regional and National Annual CO2 Emissionsfrom Fossil Fuel Burning, Hydraulic CementProduction, and Gas Flaring: 1950–92 (OakRidge, TN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory,Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center,1995).

4. Christopher Flavin and NicholasLenssen, Power Surge (New York: W.W. Norton& Company, 1994).

5. Arthur Cecil Pigou, The Economics ofWelfare, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1932;first published 1920), cited in Mikael SkouAndersen, Governance by Green Taxes: MakingPollution Prevention Pay (Manchester, U.K.:Manchester University Press, 1994).

6. Figure of $650 billion is a Worldwatchestimate, detailed in David Malin Roodman,The Natural Wealth of Nations (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998); U.S. Congress,Committee on Natural Resources, Sub-committee on Oversight and Investigations,Taking from the Taxpayer: Public Subsidies forNatural Resource Development, Majority StaffReport (Washington, DC: 1994); Sitka pricefrom Kathie Durbin, “Sawdust Memories,” TheAmicus Journal, fall 1997.

7. Bela Bhatia, Lush Fields and ParchedThroats: The Political Economy of Groundwater inGujarat (Helsinki: World Institute forDevelopment Economics Research, 1992);subsidy total from Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development (OECD),

Agricultural Policies, Markets and Trade in OECDCountries (Paris: 1997); U.S. distribution fromU.S. Department of Agriculture, EconomicResearch Service, “Number of Farms and NetCash Income by Size Class, 1996,” <http://www.econ.ag.gov/briefing/fbe>, viewed 5December 1997.

8. Brazil from Lester R. Brown,Christopher Flavin, and Sandra Postel, Savingthe Planet (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1991); Susan Brackett,Communications Director, Mineral PolicyCenter, Washington, DC, discussion withauthor, 19 October 1998.

9. OECD, International Energy Agency,Energy Policies of IEA Countries (Paris: variousyears). Figures in Table 10–1 are Worldwatchestimates, converted to dollars using marketexchange rates, using data for the formerSoviet Union from Andrew Sunil Rajkumar,Energy Subsidies, Environment Departmentworking paper (Washington, DC: World Bank,1996), and data for other countries fromWorld Bank, Environment Department,Expanding the Measure of Wealth: Indicators ofEnvironmentally Sustainable Development(Washington, DC: 1997). The regional esti-mates allocate the $10 billion that theRajkumar study estimates for countries not sys-tematically analyzed based on their carbonemissions.

10. Figure of 8 percent is based on $7.5 tril-lion a year in global tax revenues, aWorldwatch estimate, based on gross domesticproduct (GDP) and tax revenue figures forwestern industrial countries from OECD,Revenue Statistics of OECD Member Countries1965–1997 (Paris: 1998), on GDP figures forother countries from World Bank, WorldDevelopment Report 1996 (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996), and on central gov-ernment tax revenue as a share of GDP forother countries from World Bank, WorldDevelopment Indicators (Washington, DC: 1997).Note that some of the subsidy cut would takethe form of reduction in the effective taxes

that arise from policies that raise food prices.Per capita figures based on OECD, op. cit. thisnote.

11. Table 10–2 is based on the followingsources: Germany and Norway from EuropeanEnvironment Agency, Environmental Taxes:Implementation and Environmental Effectiveness(Copenhagen: 1996); Netherlands from HansTh. A. Bressers and Jeannette Schuddeboom,“A Survey of Effluent Charges and OtherEconomic Instruments in Dutch Environ-mental Policy,” in OECD, Applying EconomicInstruments to Environmental Policies in OECDand Dynamic Non-member Economies (Paris:1994), and from Kees Baas, Central Bureau ofStatistics, The Hague, e-mail to author, 24September 1997; Sweden from SwedishEnvironmental Protection Agency (SEPA),Environmental Taxes in Sweden: EconomicInstruments of Environmental Policy (Stockholm:1997); U.S. tax from J. Andrew Hoerner, “TaxTools for Protecting the Atmosphere: The U.S.Ozone-depleting Chemicals Tax,” in RobertGale and Stephan Barg, eds., Green BudgetReform: An International Casebook of LeadingPractices (London: Earthscan, 1995).

12. History from Andersen, op. cit. note 5;statistical analysis of relationship betweencharges and pollution from Bressers andSchuddeboom, op. cit. note 11; emissionsfrom Baas, op. cit. note 11.

13. Technology development from JanPaul van Soest, Centre for Energy Conser-vation and Environmental Technology, Delft,Netherlands, letter to author, 11 October1995.

14. Revenue figures are Worldwatch esti-mates, based on GDP and tax revenue figuresfor western industrial countries from OECD,op. cit. note 10, on GDP figures for othercountries from World Bank, World DevelopmentReport, op. cit. note 10, and on central govern-ment tax revenue as a share of GDP for othercountries from idem, World DevelopmentIndicators, op. cit. note 10. “Taxes on work and


investment” excludes land taxes, which are lib-erally estimated at half of total property taxesin OECD countries, and excludes energy andenvironmental taxes, using figures for theEuropean Union (EU) from Commission ofthe European Communities, Statistical Officeof the European Communities, Structures of theTaxation Systems in the European Union(Luxembourg: Office for Official Publicationsof the European Communities, 1996), and fornon-EU OECD countries from OECD,Environmental Taxes in OECD Countries (Paris:1995). For non-OECD countries, land, energy,and environmental taxes are assumed to gen-erate at most 15 percent of tax revenues, a fig-ure that appears liberal based on InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF), Government FinanceStatistics Yearbook 1994 (Washington, DC:1994). All figures are for 1994, converted todollars using market exchange rates.

15. Table 10–3 sources are as follows:Sweden description from P. Bohm, “Environ-ment and Taxation: The Case of Sweden,” inOECD, Environment and Taxation: The Cases ofthe Netherlands, Sweden and the United States(Paris: 1994); Sweden quantity from NordicCouncil of Ministers, The Use of EconomicInstruments in Nordic Environmental Policy(Copenhagen: TemaNord, 1996); Denmark1994 from Mikael Skou Andersen, “The GreenTax Reform in Denmark: Shifting the Focus ofTax Liability,” Journal of Environmental Liability,vol. 2, no. 2 (1994); Spain description fromThomas Schröder, “Spain: ImproveCompetitiveness through an ETR,” WuppertalBulletin on Ecological Tax Reform (Wuppertal,Germany: Wuppertal Institute for Climate,Environment, and Energy), summer 1995;Spain quantity from Juan-José Escobar,Ministry of Economy and Finance, Madrid,letter to author, 29 January 1997; Denmark1996 from Ministry of Finance, Energy Tax onIndustry (Copenhagen: 1995); Netherlandsdescription from Ministry of Housing, SpatialPlanning, and Environment, The Netherlands’Regulatory Tax on Energy: Questions and Answers(The Hague: 1996); Netherlands quantityfrom Koos van der Vaart, Ministry of Finance,

The Hague, discussion with author, 18December 1995; United Kingdom from“Landfill Tax Regime Takes Shape,” ENDSReport (Environmental Data Services,London), November 1995; Finland fromOECD, Environmental Taxes and Green TaxReform (Paris: 1997); Germany from PeterNorman, “SPD and Greens Agree GermanEnergy Tax Rises,” Financial Times, 19 October1998; total tax revenues for all countries fromOECD, op. cit. note 10.

16. Economic modeling results from JohnP. Weyant, Stanford University, EnergyModeling Forum, Stanford, CA, draft manu-script, June 1995, and from John P. Weyant,letter to author, 10 October 1995; carbon con-tent of fuels from Marland, op. cit. note 3, andassumes a 90-percent efficiency in convertingpetroleum to gasoline; concentration stabiliza-tion based on T.M.L. Wigley, R. Richels, andJ.A. Edmonds, “Economic and EnvironmentalChoices in the Stabilization of AtmosphericCO2 Concentrations,” Nature, 18 January 1996;current concentration from Seth Dunn,“Carbon Emissions Resume Rise,” in Lester R.Brown, Michael Renner, and ChristopherFlavin, Vital Signs 1998 (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998).

17. George R. Heaton, Jr., and R. DarrylBanks, “Toward A New Generation ofEnvironmental Technology: The Need forLegislative Reform,” Journal of IndustrialEcology, vol. 1, no. 2 (1997); Marian R. Chertowand Daniel C. Esty, “Environmental Policy:The Next Generation,” Issues in Science andTechnology, fall 1997; John Atcheson, “Can WeTrust Verification?” The Environmental Forum,July/August 1996.

18. Heaton and Banks, op. cit. note 17;John H. Cushman, Jr., “E.P.A. and StatesFound to Be Lax on Pollution Law,” New YorkTimes, 7 June 1998; developing nations fromMichel Potier, “China Charges for Pollution,”The OECD Observer, February/March 1995, andfrom Sergio Margulis, “The Use of EconomicInstruments in Environmental Policies: The


Experiences of Brazil, Mexico, Chile andArgentina,” in OECD, op. cit. note 11.

19. Frank Ackerman, Why Do We Recycle?Markets, Values, and Public Policy (Washington,DC: Island Press, 1997).

20. Ibid.

21. Brad Crabtree, “A Viable Frameworkfor Steward Ship,” Perspectives (World BusinessAcademy, San Francisco), vol. 9, no. 3 (1995).

22. Ibid.; Royal Netherlands Embassy,“Measuring Environmental Progress,”<http://www.netherlands-embassy.org>,viewed 30 July 1998.

23. Christopher Flavin, “Banking againstWarming,” World Watch, November/December1997.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. “WTO Shrimp-Turtle Appellate BodyDecision,” Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest(International Centre for Trade and Sus-tainable Development, Geneva), 12 October1998.

27. Ibid.

28. U.N. Environment Programme(UNEP), 1996 Register of International Treatiesand Other Agreements in the Field of theEnvironment (Nairobi: 1996); Hilary F. French,After the Earth Summit: The Future ofEnvironmental Governance, Worldwatch Paper107 (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute,March 1992); Halifa O. Drammeh, SeniorProgramme Officer, UNEP, Water Branch,Nairobi, letter to Lisa Mastny, WorldwatchInstitute, 30 October 1998; Hilary F. French,Partnership for the Planet: An EnvironmentalAgenda for the United Nations, WorldwatchPaper 126 (Washington, DC: WorldwatchInstitute, July 1995).

29. French, Partnership for the Planet, op. cit.

note 28.

30. Lori S. Ashford, “New Perspectives onPopulation: Lessons from Cairo,” PopulationBulletin, March 1995.

31. M. Lynne Corn and Susan R. Fletcher,African Elephant Issues: CITES and CAMPFIRE(Washington, DC: Congressional ResearchService, 1997); Marc A. Levy, “European AcidRain: The Power of Tote-Board Diplomacy,” inPeter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and MarcA. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources ofEffective International Environmental Protection(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993).

32. Hilary F. French, “Learning from theOzone Experience,” in Lester R. Brown et al.,State of the World 1997 (New York: W.W. Norton& Company, 1997).

33. Ibid.; figure of $750 million fromSecretariat for the Multilateral Fund for theImplementation of the Montreal Protocol,“General Information,” <http://www.unmfs.org>, viewed 24 October 1998; Hilary French,“Making Environmental Treaties Work,”Scientific American, December 1994.

34. Graciela Chichilnisky, Geoffrey Heal,and David Starrett, International Markets withEmissions Rights: Equity and Efficiency (Stanford,CA: Stanford University, Center for EconomicPolicy Research, 1993); French, op. cit. note32.

35. Figure of $38 trillion uses purchasingpower parities and is a Worldwatch estimate,based on Angus Maddison, Monitoring theWorld Economy, 1820–1992 (Paris: OECD,1995), on idem, Chinese Economic Performancein the Long Run (Paris: OECD, 1998), and onIMF, World Economic Outlook, October 1998(Washington, DC: 1998).

36. British Petroleum, “BP HSE Facts 1997:HSE,” <http://www.bp.com>, viewed 24August 1998; quote from John Browne, “ANew Partnership to Make a Difference,” OurPlanet, vol. 9, no. 3 (1997).


37. Figure of $180 million from GaryGardner, “Organic Farming Up Sharply,” inLester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin, and HalKane, Vital Signs 1996 (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1996); figure of $3.5 bil-lion from Carole Sugarman, “Organic?Industry Is Way Ahead of Government,”Washington Post, 31 December 1997; on CFCs,see generally Elizabeth Cook, ed., OzoneProtection in the United States: Elements of Success(Washington, DC: World Resources Institute,1996); market size from David R. Berg andGrant Ferrier, Meeting the Challenge: U.S.Industry Faces the 21st Century (Washington,DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office ofTechnology Policy, 1998).

38. Christopher Flavin, “Wind Power SetsRecords,” in Brown, Renner, and Flavin, op.cit. note 16; Marlise Simons, “In the NewEurope, a Tilt to Using Wind’s Power,” NewYork Times, 7 December 1997; Molly O’Meara,“Solar Cell Shipments Hit New High,” inBrown, Renner, and Flavin, op. cit. note 16.

39. “When Green Begets Green,” BusinessWeek, 10 November 1997.

40. McDonough from Joan Magretta,“Growth through Global Sustainability: AnInterview with Monsanto’s CEO, Robert B.Shapiro,” Harvard Business Review, January-February 1997.

41. Joseph J. Romm, Lean and CleanManagement: How to Boost Profits andProductivity by Reducing Pollution (New York:Kodansha International, 1994).

42. Hart Hodges, Falling Prices: Cost ofComplying with Environmental Regulations AlmostAlways Less than Advertised, Briefing Paper(Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute,1997).

43. Pamela Wexler, “Saying Yes to ‘NoClean’,” in Cook, op. cit. note 37.

44. On employee motivation, see Magretta,op. cit. note 40; Herbert Simon, The Sciences ofthe Artificial, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The

MIT Press, 1996); Stephen J. DeCanio,“Barriers within Firms to Energy-EfficientInvestments,” Energy Policy, September 1993;Alan H. Sanstad, “‘Normal’ Markets, MarketImperfections and Energy Efficiency,” EnergyPolicy, October 1994; Wexler, op. cit. note 43;Michael E. Porter and Claas van der Linde,“Toward a New Conception of theEnvironment-Competitiveness Relationship,”Journal of Economic Perspectives, fall 1995.

45. W. Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns andPath Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, MI:University of Michigan Press, 1994); KennethArrow, “The Economic Implications ofLearning by Doing,” Review of Economic Studies,June 1962; figure of 30 percent is aWorldwatch estimate, based on price andcumulative sales data, from PV News, variousissues.

46. Sandra Sugawara, “Toyota Steps on theGas,” Washington Post, 14 December 1997.

47. Hilary F. French, Green Revolutions:Environmental Reconstruction in Eastern Europeand the Soviet Union, Worldwatch Paper 99(Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute,November 1990); Mike Edwards, “LethalLegacy,” National Geographic, August 1994.

48. Civicus, Citizens: Strengthening GlobalCivil Society (Washington, DC: 1994);Environics International, “Citizens WorldwideWant Teeth Added to Environmental Laws,”press release (Toronto, ON, Canada: 4 June1998).

49. Bay Fang, “New Class Struggle,” FarEastern Economic Review, 19 March 1998.

50. Lester M. Salamon, “The Rise of theNonprofit Sector,” Foreign Affairs, July/August1994.

51. Alan B. Durning, Action at the Grassroots:Fighting Poverty and Environmental Decline,Worldwatch Paper 88 (Washington, DC:Worldwatch Institute, January 1989); Gujaratfrom Sudeep Mukhia, “The Roots of


Prosperity,” Down to Earth, 15 December 1994.

52. Guy de Jonquieres, “NetworkGuerrillas,” Financial Times, 30 April 1998;quote from Madelaine Drohan, “How the NetKilled the MAI,” (Toronto) Globe and Mail, 29April 1998; P.J. Simmons, “Learning to Livewith NGOs,” Foreign Policy, fall 1998.

53. Julia Preston, “It’s Indians vs. Loggersin Nicaragua,” New York Times, 23 June 1996;James Anaya, University of Iowa, College ofLaw, Iowa City, IA, and Indian Law ResourceCenter, Albuquerque, NM, discussion withauthor, 4 August 1998.

54. S. Jayasankaran, “Watch It: NGOs FearGovernment Crackdown,” Far Eastern EconomicReview, 30 January 1997.

55. Robin Broad, “The Political Economyof Natural Resources: Case Studies of theIndonesian and Philippine Forest Sectors,”Journal of Developing Areas, April 1995; JohnMcBeth and Jay Solomon, “First Friend,” FarEastern Economic Review, 20 February 1997.

56. Susan Rose-Ackerman, Redesigning theState to Fight Corruption: Transparency,Competition, and Privatization, Viewpoint NoteNo. 75 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1996);Honduras from Ved P. Gandhi, Dale Gray, andRonald McMorran, “A ComprehensiveApproach to Domestic Resource Mobilizationfor Sustainable Development,” in U.N.Department for Policy Coordination andSustainable Development, Finance forSustainable Development: The Road Ahead,Proceedings of the Fourth Group Meeting onFinancial Issues of Agenda 21, Santiago, Chile,1997 (New York: 1997).

57. Value of oil and gas tax breaks is basedon low estimate for oil tax breaks only, fromDouglas Koplow and Aaron Martin, FederalSubsidies to Oil in the United States (Washington,DC: Greenpeace USA, 1998); contributionsexclude “party” and “soft” money, and arefrom Center for Responsive Politics (CRP),The Big Picture: Where the Money Came from in the

1996 Elections (Washington, DC: 1997); historyof subsidizing legislation from Charles F.Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land,Water, and the Future of the West (Washington,DC: Island Press, 1992).

58. F. Leslie Seidle, “Regulating CanadianPolitical Finance: Established Rules in aDynamic Political System,” prepared for theRound Table on Political Reform in theMature Democracies, Tokyo, 25–27 August1996; figure of $9 based on $2.4 billion totalspending figure from CRP, op. cit. note 57.

59. John E. Young, “Using Computers forthe Environment,” in Lester R. Brown et al.,State of the World 1994 (New York: W.W. Norton& Company, 1994).

60. Ibid.; responses to TRI from DavidAustin, “The Green and the Gold: How aFirm’s Clean Quotient Affects Its Value,”Resources (Resources for the Future,Washington, DC), summer 1997; list of coun-tries from Instituto Nacional de Ecología,“Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia deContaminantes,” <http://www.ine.gob.mx/retc/prtring.html>, viewed 11 August 1998.

61. Claudia Saladin and Brennan VanDyke, “The New ECE Public ParticipationConvention: A Boost for Access to WTO-Related Environmental Information,” Bridges(International Centre for Trade andSustainable Development, Geneva), July-August 1998.

62. United Nations, World PopulationProspects: The 1996 Revision (New York: 1996);Ashford, op. cit. note 30.

63. Ashford, op. cit. note 30.

64. David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy:Education and the Transition to a PostmodernWorld (Albany, NY: State University of NewYork Press, 1992); see also Herman E. Dalyand John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good:Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, theEnvironment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston:


Beacon Press, 1989).

65. Orr, op. cit. note 64.

66. William H. Mansfield, “Taking theUniversity to Task,” World Watch, May/June1998.

67. Figure of 3.5 billion from Micro-soft Corporation, Encarta 98 Encyclopedia(Redmond, WA: 1998); views of nature fromMary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, “SeriesForward,” in Mary Evelyn Tucker and DuncanWilliams, eds., Buddhism and Ecology: TheInterconnection of Dharma and Deeds(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for theStudy of World Religions and HarvardUniversity Press, 1997); meditation fromHerman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economicsof Sustainable Development (Boston: BeaconPress, 1996); Genesis 2:15, New InternationalVersion, anthologized in The Comparative StudyBible: A Parallel Bible (Grand Rapids, MI:Zondervan Publishing House, 1984).

68. National Religious Partnership for theEnvironment, <http://www.nrpe.org>, viewed14 October 1998; Mishra from Ann Gold,Professor of Religion, Syracuse University,Syracuse, NY, e-mail to author, 19 October1998.

69. The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).


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