The development trajectory leading to 2050 suggests demand for resources and ecosystem services will increase dramatically: a quadrupling of the world economy, 2 billion more people to feed, most of them living in cities, and a few billions more middle class consumers of cars, sofas, meat and computers.
Should we be worried? And if so, how do we express those concerns without sounding Malthusian?
In 1798 Reverend Thomas Malthus penned an essay arguing that real limits to human population and prosperity existed: famine, disease, and environmental limits inevitably bust every population boom. Humans, he predicted, will starve just like other species that reproduce beyond the environment’s capacity to feed them–such were the laws of nature, as he understood them. In the years since Malthus, there has been no shortage of alarms sounded about resource shortages, timber famines, peak oil, population explosions, ecological footprints, and limited carrying capacity of spaceship earth. Like the boy who cried wolf too many times, the alarms now fall on deaf ears.
Is the wolf showing up?
Concerns continue to be voiced by traditional actors: environmental groups, United Nation’s environmental programs, and European countries. But new voices are joining the chorus. The US Department of Defense has identified climate change as major threat to national security. There is now a Dow Jones Sustainability Index for stock investors. Coke, Pepsi, Wal-Mart and other Fortune 500 transnational corporations have active sustainability programs and meaningful efforts to green their supply chains. Deutsche Bank has a real time carbon counter. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development presents a sobering array of environment-related challenges confronting businesses in the 21st Century. And the normally technical and pro-development OECD sounds almost alarmist in its recent Environmental Outlook.
Are these new voices adding legitimacy to the call to action? Most people I talk to just roll their eyes. They are understandably concerned about jobs, gas prices, and civil rights. The people that won’t even talk to me seem more concerned with shopping, driving fast, and smart phones. And then there are those who think environmental science is a massive hoax perpetuated to steal property rights, promote socialism, and destroy America.
If the new trends are accurate, they suggest the past styles of governance and business will not work in the future. How can those of us who believe these trends engage others in discussions about getting to 2050 without being dismissed as Malthusians?
Just because most rienlutvoos end up being lead by persons from the Middle Class, it is hardly surprising as leading any sort of large organization requires a good deal of communications, leadership and organizational skills. The resentment and anger of the poor is always critical to the success of rienlutvoos and it is just as real and important even if the rienlutvoos are managed by disaffected members of high social classes . The poor were critical to rienlutvoos in France, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Zimbabwe. Remember that a political revolution is just as revolutionary as a violent one. When the poor are sufficiently angry they can provide the political base for radical leaders and radical policies that can cause a country to careen off the rails. The poor might not rise up and start running the aristocracy off to the guillotine, but they can empower governments that can. The United States might never have to worry about mobs of the foreclosed storming the gates of Beverly Hills with their personal firearms, but we should all alert to a popular demagogue that is able to capture the support from the economically disposed segment of the population. These things happen like a rubber band snapping and will take the existing ruling establishment completely by surprise. When 75% of the population becomes mad as hell and refuses to take it any more, whatever leader that can mobilize them as a bloc will be in a position to carry out some very crazy policies.So anyone who runs around shouting that Obama is a socialist just keep up the policies of increasing inequality and see what happens when the US gets a real Hugo Chavez in power.