Picked up the June 2006 copy of Scientific American last night and found several pieces that I liked. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and of the U.N. Millennium Project, has begun a new column called Sustainable Developments.
This new monthly column, in Sachs’ words, “will be about the emerging geopolitics of sustainability and the search for genuine solutions. It will show that topics usually treated through a political lens–war, terror, corruption–more and more frequently have an ecological underpinning. Global market forces can be “reengineered” to channel economic activity in a sustainable manner. Better technologies can square the circle of economic growth with sustainability. And perhaps most important, new approaches to global politics and governance itself, based firmly on the budding science of sustainability, can provide a vital bridge to future prosperity and peace.”
I like the general drift of Sachs’ column because he’s taking a systemic approach and looking at all of the factors converging on our future in a unified manner. I.e., he sees and is reporting on the Perfect Storm hypothesis even though he may call it by other names.
Here’s the opening text and a link to the full article:
Each era has its own dominating themes of global politics. The 19th century had the politics of industrialization and empire. The first half of the 20th century bowed to world wars and economic depression. The second half was overshadowed by the cold war. Our era, I believe, will be dominated by the geopolitics of sustainability.
Economic development has become a generalized global phenomenon, except in sub-Saharan Africa and a few other poverty hot spots. Even those impoverished areas will probably achieve economic takeoff with a little international help and the application of “best option” technologies. The world’s total economic throughput every year, adjusted for differences in countries’ purchasing power and measured as the gross world product (GWP), now stands at approximately $60 trillion. Over the past century, the GWP has grown roughly 18-fold in price-adjusted terms.
With that increase in economic output have come some phenomenal benefits, such as rising life expectancy and improved overall public health, and some planet-threatening adverse effects, such as massive tropical deforestation, ocean fisheries depletion, man-made climate change, violent competition over limited hydrocarbon resources, and newly emerging diseases such as SARS and avian flu (H5N1). Until now, the favorable outcomes have outweighed the bad. Yet because many of the environmental consequences are hidden from view and from our national income accounts, we sit atop ticking ecological time bombs.
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