Crossing the threshold: early signs of an environmental awakening.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.

At a time when the Earth's average temperature is going off the top of the chart, when storms, floods and tropical forest fires are more damaging than ever before, and when the list of endangered species grows longer by the day, it is difficult to be optimistic about the future. Yet even as these stories of environmental disruption capture the headlines, I see signs that the world may be approaching the threshold of a sweeping change in the way we respond to environmental threats - a social threshold that, once crossed, could change our outlook as profoundly as the one that in 1989 and 1990 led to a political restructuring in Eastern Europe.

If this new threshold is crossed, changes are likely to come at a pace and in ways that we can only begin to anticipate. The overall effect could be the most profound economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution itself. If so, it will affect every facet of human existence, not only reversing the environmental declines with which we now struggle, but also bringing us a better life.

Thresholds are encountered in both the natural world and in human society. One of the most familiar natural thresholds, for example, is the freezing point of water. As water temperature falls, the water remains liquid until it reaches the threshold point of 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Only a modest additional drop produces dramatic change, transforming a liquid into a solid.

The threshold concept is widely used in ecology, in reference to the "sustainable yield threshold" of natural systems such as fisheries or forests. If the harvest from a fishery exceeds that threshold for an extended period, stocks will decline and the fishery may abruptly collapse. When the demands on a forest exceed its sustainable yield and the tree cover begins to shrink, the result can be a cascade of hundreds of changes in the ecosystem. For example, with fewer trees and less leaf litter on the forest floor, the land's water-absorptive capacity diminishes and runoff increases - and that, in turn, may lead to unnaturally destructive flooding lower in the watershed.

In the social world, the thresholds to sudden change are no less real, though they are much more difficult to identify and anticipate. The political revolution in Eastern Europe was so sudden that with no apparent warning the era of the centrally planned economy was over, and those who had formidably defended it for half a century realized it was too late to reverse what had happened. Even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency failed to foresee the change. And after it happened, the agency had trouble explaining it. But at some point, a critical mass had been reached, where enough people were convinced of the need to change to tip the balance and bring a cascading shift in public perceptions.

In recent months, I have become increasingly curious about such sudden shifts of perception for one compelling reason. If I look at the global environmental trends that we have been tracking since we first launched the Worldwatch Institute 25 years ago, and if I simply extrapolate these trends a few years into the next century, the outlook is alarming to say the least. It is now clear to me that if we are to turn things around in time, we need some kind of breakthrough. This is not to discount the many gradual improvements that we have made on the environmental front, such as increased fuel efficiency in cars or better pollution controls on factories. Those arc important. But we are not moving fast enough to reverse the trends that are undermining the global economy. What we need now is a rapid shift in consciousness, a dawning awareness in people everywhere that we have to shift quickly to a sustainable economy if we want to avoid damaging our natural support systems beyond repair. The question is whether there is any evidence that we are approaching such a breakthrough.

While shifts of this kind can be shockingly sudden, the underlying causes are not. The conditions for profound social change seem to require a long gestation period. In Eastern Europe, it was fully four decades from the resistance to socialism when it was first imposed until its demise. Roughly 35 years passed between the issuance of the first U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking and health - and the hundreds of research reports it spawned - and the historic November 1998 $206 billion settlement between the tobacco industry and 46 state governments. (The other four states had already settled for $45 billion.) Thirty-seven years have passed since biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, issuing the wake-up call that gave rise to the modern environmental movement.

Not all environmentalists will agree with me, but I believe that there are now some clear signs that the world does seem to be approaching a kind of paradigm shift in environmental consciousness. Across a spectrum of activities, places, and institutions, the atmosphere has changed markedly in just the last few years. Among giant corporations that could once be counted on to mount a monolithic opposition to serious environmental reform, a growing number of high profile CEOs have begun to sound more like spokespersons for Greenpeace than for the bastions of global capitalism of which they are a part. More and more governments are taking revolutionary steps aimed at shoring up the Earth's long-term environmental health. Individuals the world over have established thriving new markets for products that are distinguished by their compatibility with a sustainable economy. What in the world is going on?

Thomas Kuhn, in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, observes that as scientific understanding in a field advances, reaching a point where existing theory no longer explains really, theory has to change. Perhaps history's best known example of this process is the shift from the Ptolemaic view of the world, in which people believed the sun revolved around the Earth, to the Copernican view which argued that the Earth revolved about the sun. Once the Copernican model existed, a lot of things suddenly made sense to those who studied the heavens, leading to an era of steady advances in astronomy.

We are now facing such a situation with the global economy. Although economists have long ignored the Earth's natural systems, evidence that the economy is slowly self-destructing by destroying its natural support systems can be seen on every hand. The Earth's forests are shrinking, fisheries are collapsing, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, coral reefs are dying, atmospheric C[O.sub.2] concentrations are increasing, temperatures are rising, floods are becoming more destructive, and the rate of extinction of plant and animal species may be the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago.

These ecological trends are driving analysts to a paradigm shift in their view of how the economy will have to work in the future. For years, these trends were marginalized by policymakers and the media as "special interest" topics, but as the trends have come to impinge more and more directly on people's lives, that has begun to change. The findings of these analysts are primary topics now not only for environmentalists, but for governments, corporations, and the media.

Learning From China

If changes in physical conditions arc often the driving forces in perceptual shifts, one of the most powerful forces driving the current shift in our understanding of the ecological/economic relationship is the flow of startling information coming from China. Not only the world's most populous country, China since 1980 has been the world's fastest growing economy, raising incomes nearly fourfold. As such, China is in effect telescoping history, showing us what happens when large numbers of people become more affluent.

As incomes have climbed, so has consumption. If the Chinese should reach the point where they eat as much beef as Americans, the production of just that added beef will take an estimated 340 million tons of grain per year, an amount equal to the entire U.S. grain harvest. Similarly, if the Chinese were to consume oil at the American rate, the country would need 80 million barrels of oil a day - more than the entire world's current production of 67 million barrels a day.

What China is dramatizing - to its own scientists and government and to an increasingly worried international community - is that the Western industrial development model will not work for China. And if the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy will not work for it, then it will not work for India, with its billion people, nor for the other two billion in the developing world. And, in an increasingly integrated global economy, it will not work in the long run for the industrial economies either.

Just how powerfully events in China are beginning to sway perceptions was brought home to me at our press lunch for State of the World 1998 when I was talking with some reporters sitting on the front row before the briefing began. A veteran reporter, rather skeptical as many seasoned reporters are, said that he had never been convinced by our argument that we need to restructure the global economy - but that the section in State of the World on rising affluence in China and the associated rising claims on...