Science, Sustainability, and the Human Prospect

Dr. Peter H. Raven / AAAS Presidential Address Boston, Massachusetts 14feb02

Peter H. Raven, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO 63166, USA; 314-577-5111; praven@nas.edu

About a year ago, when some of us conceived the theme for this year's AAAS annual meeting, "Science in an Interconnected World," we were thinking of the ways in which the fates of nations were connected as never before, and of the role of science in shaping communications between them. For my part, I was particularly mindful of the enormous challenges that faced a world which had grown so rapidly in population, individual consumption levels, and rapidly changing technologies over the past 10,000 years, over the past 250 years, and particularly over the last half century, and how a sound future for that world could be secured. In the months that followed, the immense shock delivered by the September 11th events brought home with unimagined force the ways in which our collective neglect of these relationships had helped to bring about the dangerous and unstable state of the world in which we were living. Consequently, the problems we face seem cruelly compounded, but in terms of their root causes they remain the same. How can so many of us share the world's resources in a way that is equitable and allows the greatest possible chance for the success of every individual human being, regardless of where they happen to be born, their gender, race, religion, age, degree of wealth, or anything else? Even though preventing specific acts of terrorism must be our immediate target, our overall goal should be no less than the empowerment of individuals throughout the world and the ultimate construction of a society in which all people can live together in peace and justice. As I shall discuss subsequently, the potential role of science and engineering in achieving this goal is profound and deeply significant.

The challenges that we face are enormous and deeply rooted in relationships that we have neglected for far too long. To deal with these challenges meaningfully we must find new ways to provide for the needs of a human society that because of its size, demands for consumption, and use of inappropriate technology has temporarily outstripped the limits of global sustainability. And, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to Congress, January 6, 1941, "Those who man our defenses and those behind them who build our defenses must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are now calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for... the preservation of democratic life in America." New ways of thinking -- an integrated, multidimensional approach to the problems of global sustainability -- have long been needed, and it is now up to us to decide if the especially difficult challenges that we are facing today will jolt us into finding and accepting them.

THE STATE OF THE WORLD

How did we get to where we are now? Over 400 generations, the 10,000 years that have elapsed since people first began to cultivate crops, our human population has grown from several million people, the level we attained during two million years of human history, to approximately 6.1 billion people. During this time, villages, then towns, cities, and nations formed, became the homes for poets, philosophers, lawyers, builders, religious leaders, tool makers, and all of the diverse professions that make up what we consider "civilization" today. The kinds of interactions between people and nations that exist today have no counterparts in the past. Despite this, we continue to depend on a series of often ancient genetically-determined (hardwired) and socially-determined habits and attitudes, many of which seem to have been more suitable for our hunter-gatherer ancestors than for us today. How, then, can we find and adopt new ways of thinking that will serve us and our descendants well for hundreds, for thousands, of years, in a world that is crowded beyond imagining, a world in which we are and shall always be the major ecological force -- unless of course, we somehow destroy ourselves?

During the 1790s, early in the Industrial Revolution, when the Reverend Thomas Malthus was predicting that human population growth would outstrip our capacity to produce food, the global population was about a million people, one-sixth of what it is today. Despite Malthus' dire prediction, we did produce enough food to limit the extent of starvation during the 19th and 20th centuries by applying to the cultivation of the Earth the force of the steam engine and its successors, fueled first by wood, and subsequently by fossil fuels -- coal, petroleum, natural gas. We succeeded in part by manufacturing the increasingly toxic pesticides with which we now douse our agricultural lands at the rate of 3 million metric tonnes per year, 0.5 million in the United States alone. We also are poisoning the environment with the nitrogen we fix, our output now exceeding the total derived from natural processes. The world's cultivated lands have grown to comprise an area about the size of South America. The rangelands on which some 180 million of us graze 3.3 billion cattle, sheep, and goats occupy about a fifth of the world's land surface; although there is a rapidly increasing demand for animal protein, most of this rangeland is now grazed at capacity or beyond (Brown, 2001). About two-thirds of the world's fisheries are being harvested beyond sustainability. Over the past half century, we have lost about a fifth of the world's topsoil, a fifth of its agricultural land, and a third of its forests. Grain production has fallen short of consumption for two consecutive years, reducing the stored surplus to 22 percent of annual consumption, the lowest level in two decades (Brown, 2001). We have changed the composition of the atmosphere profoundly, first by adding about one sixth to the carbon dioxide that is contributing substantially to driving global temperatures upward and second, by depleting the stratospheric ozone layer by about 8 per cent. Almost all major fisheries are under severe pressure, and habitats throughout the world have been decimated, with populations of alien plants and animals exploding and causing enormous damage throughout the world.

The most troublesome environmental change of all, in that it is irreversible, is the loss of biodiversity. Over the past 65 million years, as determined from the fossil record, the rate of species extinction has remained at about one species per million per year. Historical records over the past few centuries demonstrate that it has now risen by approximately three orders of magnitude, to perhaps 1,000 species per million per year (0.1 per cent of all species per year), and it continues to rise sharply, with the accelerating destruction of habitats throughout the world -- for example, less than 5 percent of tropical most forests are projected to remain intact by the middle of the present century. Species-area relationships, taken worldwide, lead to projections of the loss of fully two-thirds of all species on Earth by the end of this century, a loss that approximates that at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the character of life changed permanently, taking millions of years to recover (Pimm and Brooks, 1999). And these projections do not include the inevitably negative effects of climate change, widespread pollution, and the destruction caused by alien species worldwide, among other factors.

The significance of such a loss for global stability as well as human progress is staggering. Biodiversity can be thought of in several different ways. The importance of biodiversity to human beings is self evident. We obtain all of our food, directly or indirectly, from plants. For most people in the world, plants are their primary source of medicines; for those who have access to prescription drugs, a majority of these too have been derived from plants, fungi, or microorganisms, although some are now manufactured. With the advent of genomics, we now have a greatly enhanced appreciation of the functioning of living organisms, and can use contemporary techniques to shape their characteristics for our benefit, but only if those organisms continue to exist.

Biodiversity also determines the properties of communities and ecosystems, which capture energy from the Sun, expend it in the metabolism of the organisms included in them, and regulate geochemical cycles in which water, carbon dioxide, and minerals are involved. In addition, ecosystems directly affect the amounts and distribution of local precipitation, topsoil retention, watershed functioning and many of the properties -- ecosystem services -- reviewed by Daily (1997) and Baskin (1997), and elaborated in an outstanding new book, filled with practical approaches to conservation, by Daily and Ellison (2002).

Considering finally our simple affection for plants and animals, and the ways in which they enrich our lives, it is simply incredible that we continue to destroy them so rapidly. A moving account of the way we feel about biodiversity, and the reasons we should regret its loss, is that of Wilson (2002, chapters 6 and 5). And that loss need not happen on the scale projected. The actions that we carry out over the next few decades will decide the fate of millions of species of plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms, the greater number of them completely unknown at present and likely to have remained so at the time of their permanent disappearance from our planet. In doing so, we shall determine the degree to which options for human progress are limited or expanded in the future.

Summarizing, we can see that the world has been converted in an instant of time from a wild, natural one to one in which human beings, one of an estimated 10 million species of organisms (possibly many more), are consuming, wasting, or diverting an estimated 45 percent of the total net biological productivity on land and using more than half of the renewable fresh water. We have altered substantially the characteristics of the land, the fresh waters of the Earth, and the seas, and are driving a major proportion of the species, fundamental for our continued existence, to extinction. With perhaps 3 billion additional people joining our numbers over the next half century, we clearly will have an increasingly difficult time in maintaining our current levels of affluence or in achieving the lofty goals which our historical progress seems to have made available to us. The scales and kinds of changes in the Earth's life support systems are so different from what they have ever been before that we cannot base our predictions of the future, much less chart our future courses of action, on the basis of what has happened in the past (Vitousek et al., 1997; Rojstaczer et al., 2001).

It is for these reasons that George Schaller, the great conservationist of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, stated so appropriately in 1997, "We cannot afford another century like this one." We cannot afford it because natural resources are limited, and because we are using them up far faster than they can be replenished. As a consequence, the world is becoming less resilient, more homogeneous, less interesting, and with fewer opportunities for ourselves and our descendants: where the process reaches equilibrium is up to us. In essence, we have been obsessed by thinking, hoping, deluding ourselves that we can somehow go on forever with business as usual, but simply cannot.

Against this background it is distressing, but not surprising, that false prophets and charlatans have arisen who, neglecting the scientific context that must underlie all wise decisions, pretend to deliver "good news" about the environment -- they basically win fame by telling people what they want to hear. Such pseudo-scientists are acclaimed by those who either simply cannot accept any limitations in their own excesses or who want to continue to achieve short-term, superficial success at the expense of others, now and in the future. Warmed by the applause that their mis-statements generate, such individuals can simply deliver falsehoods or the products of wishful thinking to encourage the activities of those who simply don't care about the facts.

The most recent example of this kind of problem is the work of a Danish economist named Bjorn Lomborg, who reprises many of the earlier misleading, if not outright delusional, conclusions offered earlier by Julian Simon and Gregg Easterbrook (1995), among others. Lomborg's book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World," has, remarkably, been published by the generally-respected Cambridge University Press, but evidently without critical review from people actually knowledgeable about environmental science. Although Lomborg appropriately questions some of the hyperbolic statements that environmentalists have made over the years, resurrecting a number from the past to bolster his case, he largely ignores the peer-reviewed literature in the fields he discusses, and frequently misrepresents the views of many of the scientists who have analyzed these areas. He blithely attacks a series of straw men that he resurrects from the past literature or simply constructs, and then repeatedly exposes his ignorance of facts and critical analyses in areas of great importance, such as the extinction of biodiversity.

In many ways, Lomborg's popular success, like that of Simon and Easterbrook before him, demonstrates the vulnerability of the scientific process, which is deliberative and hypothesis driven, to outright misrepresentation and distortion. It is difficult to understand why Cambridge University Press published his book, or why the a justifiably respected and useful journal like The Economist would rush to his defense. Although there have been multiple excesses on both sides of this debate, at its root it is a matter of science and factual analysis, and that is the point that seems to have been lost in all the shouting and finger-pointing that followed the book's publication. All of the world's environmental scientists cannot reasonably be classified as "dedicated greens," and their views dismissed, or we are collectively in real trouble. At the end of the day, the truth will out, and those who understand it and act on what they find will benefit accordingly.

The consequences of the environmental problems that we have reviewed on the world's people, coupled with our failure to find adequate means of supporting one another, are severe. About a quarter of humanity lives in what the World Bank defines as absolute poverty, on less than $1 per day. Depending on the criteria used, between an eighth and a half of the world's people are malnourished, with about 700 million of us literally starving. Some 14 million babies and young children under the age of four starve to death each year, at the rate of 35,000 per day. In the world's poorest societies, women and children are literally disenfranchised, having to spend most of their time foraging for firewood or water, and unable to gain the benefits of education, which would enable them to contribute to the progress of their societies, or our own. Such relationships are inevitable in a world in which 20 percent of us control 80 percent of the total resources, and 80 percent of us have to make do with the rest. The empowerment of women is one of the most critical needs for building a sustainable world for the future -- it simply cannot be postponed further.

Among the nations of the world, the role of the United States has become particularly dominant. In our country, where only about 4.5 percent of the world's people live, we control about 25 percent of the world's wealth, and produce 25-30 percent of the world's pollution. Clearly, we are dependent on the stability and productivity of nations all over the world to maintain our level of affluence: the time has long passed when we could act on our own, and rely on our own resources to maintain our standard of living. In the face of these relationships, it is remarkable that the United States, the richest nation that has ever existed on the face of the Earth, is the lowest donor of international development assistance on a per capita basis of any industrialized country. It simply does not make sense; but only in the area of public health that we have supported even the rudiments of an adequate global system. Although we economically dominate much of the world, this same dominance can be expressed and interconnectedness, which makes us vulnerable and ought to make us responsive to the hopes, dreams, and desires of other nations. Unilateralism is over the long run never a viable strategy, whereas mutual respect and consultation always are.

Since the publication of the Brundtland report, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), we have become accustomed to thinking of the world as a place in which everyone could eventually become rich. This may be so, but it cannot happen using the technologies we possess now, and building to industrialized-world levels of consumption everywhere. When it had become definite that India would attain independence, a British journalist interviewing Gandhi asked whether India would now follow the British pattern of development. Gandhi replied immediately "It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve this prosperity. How many planets will a country like India require?" More recently, Wackernagel and Rees (1995) and others have emphasized again that if everyone lived at the standard of industrialized countries, it would take two additional planets comparable to Earth to support them, three more if the population should double; and that if worldwide standards of living should double over the next 40 years, twelve additional "Earths." Aspirations to such a standard of living everywhere are clearly unattainable, and yet advertising continues to reassure us that it is both appropriate and achievable. Even those of us who live in rich countries continually strive to seek to increase their standards of living by increasing their levels of consumption. The paradox presented by these relationships can be solved only by achieving a stable population, finding a sustainable level of consumption globally, accepting social justice as the norm for global development, and developing improved technologies and practices to make sustainable development possible.

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

It is generally accepted as we enter the 21st Century that advances in science and technology power the world's economy and provide the best hope for economic progress in the future. In America, leading economists and government policy-makers uniformly agree that the nation's extraordinary capabilities in science, technology, and health are among its strongest assets. Indeed, it has been estimated for the United States that investment in basic scientific, engineering, and medical research produces a rate of return of between 20 and 50 percent per year, an impressive figure by any standard. Our collective belief in the economic power of science and technology is so strong that I doubt if there is a single country in the world that does not envision a future economy based on information technology and biotechnology, nanotechnology and other advanced fields, with virtually no one thinking of themselves as maintaining or enhancing natural productivity as a matter of choice.

In view of the importance of science and technology for our future, the Administration's proposal for the Fiscal Year 2003 budget includes substantial overall increases for science and technology -- to a level of some $111.8 billion, $8.6 billion or 8.3 percent more than in the current fiscal year. Although this proposal increases only the research budgets for the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, these departments do fund a great deal of basic research in other agencies. There are clear reasons for concentrating on defense, health, and homeland security in these extraordinarily challenging times, but a danger certainly exists that cutting research support in other areas of the federal budget will eventually weaken our national economy, which is our ultimate defense. Moreover, our science, engineering, and health research communities form the basis for contributions of fundamental importance that we can offer to the rest of the world. We may hope, therefore, that as discussions concerning the federal budget continue, that research budgets in other agencies may be increased.

In addition to its demonstrated economic importance, science offers other substantial advantages to human society. The scientific attitude provides a strong basis for understanding in an interconnected world that we wish to become more prosperous, secure, and democratic than the world in which we live now. In order to accomplish these aims, we must find ways and means to increase the representation of scientists in all countries; to support the scientific enterprise throughout the world; to share the benefits of science and technology developed in industrialized countries with the poor and needy; to use the techniques of information technology to make those benefits freely available to all; and to strive for a level of scientific literacy in all countries that will support progress everywhere. In this connection, the strong efforts made by our editor Don Kennedy and his associates at Science, to make information available throughout the world, parallel those of many other associations and are greatly to be commended.

Perhaps most important of all is the development of a strongly-based science culture throughout the world. Accomplishing this demands that we be sensitive to local cultures, and why it is so important that we support the institutions of science and its practitioners everywhere. The networks that we build must be based on trust and mutual respect. As South African leader Mamphela Ramphele stated so well in a speech she presented in Washington two years ago,

"The insights, methods, and ways of thinking attendant on scientific inquiry hold, I believe, the key to personal and national development in much of the developing world.. The characterization of science as 'Western' by some social scientists is unfortunate: It serves to delegitimize scientific inquiry and the application of science to everyday problems. It finds resonance among elites in the developing world who see the entrenchment of a science culture as a threat to their power over the poor and marginal."

National Academy of Sciences President Bruce Alberts has repeatedly stressed the importance of honesty, generosity, and a respect for the intrinsic worth of ideas and opinions as central features of the scientific community. In turn, they are values badly needed by society at large, ones that scientists should attempt to spread to others in all parts of the world. They clearly form part of the basis of a free, democratic society, and, properly appreciated, would greatly expedite understanding between the peoples of the world. As Jacob Bronowski put it in his "Science and Human Values":

"The society of scientists is simple because it has a directing purpose: to explore the truth. Nevertheless, it has to solve the problem of every society, which is to find a compromise between the individual and the group. It must encourage the single scientist to be independent, and the body of scientists to be tolerant. From these basic conditions, which form the prime values, there follows step by step a range of values: dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honor, human dignity and self respect. Science has humanized our values. Men have asked for freedom, justice, and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread among them."

What are the specific contributions that science and engineering can make to the development of a sustainable society? Contemporary efforts to build the science of sustainability as an accessible, integrating discipline are well summarized in the National Research Council study, "Our Common Journey. A Transition Toward Sustainability" (1999), prepared by the NCR's Board on Sustainable Development. Noting that many of the trends and conditions I reviewed earlier seriously undermine efforts to achieve sustainability, the report concludes that an overall transition could be attained in the next two generations without the development of miraculous technologies or drastic transformations of human societies. The members of the Board stressed, however, that significant advances in basic knowledge, in the social capacity and technological capabilities to utilize it, and in the political will to turn this knowledge into action will be necessary to achieve this transition. The environmental threats arising from multiple, cumulative, and interactive stresses are seen as the most threatening; they must be understood on an integrated and place-specific basis. In a sustainability context, a step-by-step understanding of such phenomena as changes in population growth patterns, globalization of the economy, and energy and materials in human activities as the trends unfold.

The major recommendations presented in "Our Common Journey" as central to attaining global stability are the following:

• Accelerate current trends in fertility reduction.
• Accommodate an expected doubling to tripling of the urban system in a habitable, efficient, and environmentally friendly manner.
• Reverse declining trends in agricultural production in Africa; sustain historic trends elsewhere.
• Accelerate improvements in the use of energy and materials.
• Restore degraded ecosystems while conserving biodiversity elsewhere.

Those who find comfort in the soothing words of Dr. Lomborg might wish to read what a panel of distinguished environmental scientists -- people actually working in the area, and knowledgeable about it -- concluded from their three years of study of the pertinent facts and have presented in this report, before they completely relax their focus on the world as it really is.

One of the areas that is particularly important for building global sustainability is energy. The potential savings from energy conservation are well understood and massive. As to alternative sources of energy, Lester Brown cogently points out in his new book "Eco-Economy" (2001) that a combination of wind turbines, solar cells, hydrogen generators, and fuel cell engines offer both energy independence and an alternative to the fossil fuels that are driving global warming. Worldwide and over the past decade, the use of wind power grew by 25 per cent a year, solar cells at 20 per cent a year, and geothermal energy at 4 per cent a year. During the same period, oil consumption grew by 1 per cent a year, while coal consumption declined by a similar amount. Natural gas, likely to be the transition fuel in moving to a sustainable energy era, grew by 2 per cent annually. Unfortunately for the United States, most of this growth has taken place abroad. We depend on the Middle East for 56 per cent of our petroleum supplies, and consider drilling in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, which at peak production, after 7-10 years, would provide barely 5 per cent of our national needs. At the same time, we do not sufficiently encourage inventiveness in developing and marketing sustainable energy sources, a trend that threatens us economically over the medium run, while rendering our economy increasingly insecure as it grows. According to the Cato Institute, America spends at least $30 to $60 billion per year, and deploys thousands of military personnel, in securing the roughly $10 billion worth of oil we import from the Persian Gulf. Would it not make sense to invest some of this money in promoting energy conservation and alternative sources of energy, or at least to hold national forums to run the numbers and make participatory decisions about our future sources of energy from financial and other viewpoints?

Moving now to another topic, consider the role of education in the development of sustainability worldwide. The challenges of the 21st century, owing principally to the combined impacts of the globalization of markets and technology-driven knowledge, as well as the information explosion, demand increased attention to the proper development of education systems both for the United States and for the world at large. Building representative democracies in a world that is increasingly science- and technology-based demands no less. Thus scientific understanding is no longer only a desirable good, it is an imperative for building truly representative democracies. Science teaching and learning needs to be brought to new heights, involving substantial investments in a high-quality instructional workforce, major advances in our understanding of human learning, and effective and efficient instructional entities. Such achievements demand the substantial and often direct involvement of the whole scientific community, a process that we all must back if it is to be successful. The involvement of scientists in an effective information network leading to an improvement of the educational system overall is a highly desirable trend that would help greatly in building strong, sustainable societies.

Public understanding of science is another area in which the role of scientists is critical. Such efforts will both help informed citizens to make better decisions, they will ultimately lead to increasing the financial support for the scientific enterprise. The AAAS has been a leader both in the public understanding of science and in formal science education, and we continue to stress these fundamentally significant fields in the future, and Jane Lubchenco's presidential address in 1997 (Lubchenco, 1998) constituted an outstanding call to action by individual scientists in this regard. But the tasks of educating the public, and that of motivating scientists, are difficult ones. Nonetheless, scientists clearly have an important responsibility to participate actively in the process, and to participate in public life in many different ways. The importance of such participation has been stressed by leaders across the political spectrum, from George Brown to Newt Gingrich, who said:

"... we need scientists to attend town hall meetings, address members of Congress, and appear on talk radio to explain why research matters. They must go to their local civic club and demand that science education be trusted to those who know science, and demand that the excitement of discovery (the heart of the scientific experience) replace bureaucratic memorization models of science education... America needs a science lobby fueled by scientists. In our rapidly moving culture where people can shut out information, we need to hear from the people who are doing the research, making the breakthroughs, and inventing the future.... Surely a little citizenship is a small enough price to pay to do the same thing in the public arena. After all, our health, prosperity, and survival are at stake."

ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE WORLD

As we review the deteriorating state of the world's environment over the past half century, and the overall lack of environmental progress, except in the wealthy parts of the world, since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, one is compelled to wonder whether the model of a world driven by nations and the kinds of international institutions that were established in the wake of World War II will prove adequate in itself as a basis for building a sustainable world. To me, one key feature of the Rio Summit was that Maurice Strong, the organizer, utterly failed to persuade the United States, Japan, or any other country to provide the funds necessary to redress the global imbalances that exist. Despite the fundamental nature of the relationship described so eloquently by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972, "The inherent conflict is not between conservation and development but between environment and the reckless exploitation of man and the earth in the name of efficiency." the world, by and large, has not responded. How can we do better?

Scientist-to-scientist cooperation between those in industrialized nations, where approximately 90 percent of the practicing scientists of the world live, along with 20 percent of the world's people, and developing countries, with 80 percent of the people and about 10 per cent of the practicing scientists, is an important ingredient in achieving effective global communication and, ultimately, global sustainability. The effective functioning of the global system of nations will depend in part on efforts like those pioneered so successfully by Abdus Salaam, a Pakistani Nobel Laureate in Physics, who focused world attention on the opportunities inherent in such communication as no one else has before or since. Dr. Salaam founded the Third World Academy of Sciences, as well as the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, both bodies continuing to make important contributions to the present day. In speaking of this area to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993, Congressman George Brown stated:

"This work must begin first by viewing developing nations as partners instead of as step-children... Of all the many ways in which we can cooperate for the common good, the case for science and technology cooperation with science-poorer nations is perhaps the most compelling. To do so, we must abandon the instinct to judge others by their past accomplishments, or to judge our own accomplishments as the proper path for others."

The problem of transferring technologies to countries throughout the world in such a way that they can contribute adequately to sustainable development is a difficult one, but one that we must confront fully. Calestous Juma, who has made so many important contributions to our understanding of this topic and to concrete actions on the ground, will present a paper here at these meeting. In addition to the report by the NRC Board on Sustainable Development mentioned above, the report of the United National Development Programme for 2001, and Schellnhuber and Wenzel (1998) are valuable contributions in this area.

It certainly has come to seem unlikely that the governments of the world or the intergovernmental agencies of the world will be able to put their hands on enough money to do all the wonderful things that we expected them to do in the 1940s, in the optimistic days of formation of the United Nations and allied institutions. Many of us look forward with trepidation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg to be held this September, because the continued deterioration of the environment over the past 10 years has been so obvious, and the signs of progress so limited. Nonetheless, there have been some outstanding efforts to refocus and renew commitments there (e.g., Dodds, 2001; Starke, 2002). On the other hand, there is growing evidence that corporations are increasingly realizing that understanding and working with the conditions of sustainable development is a necessary prerequisite for success in the corporate world of the future (Hawken, 1993). John Browne, CEO of BP-Amoco, for example, set his company on a course that will embrace alternative energy sources and energy conservation, reasoning that in the face of global warming, they must do this if they are to continue to be a profitable energy company in the future. Ray Anderson, chairman of Interface, an Atlanta-based carpet manufacturer, is likewise reorganizing his company's efforts around the conditions of the future, where sustainability will be a necessary condition of successful business, rather than those of the past. There are signs that the forestry and fisheries industries are starting to take sustainability seriously, and indications that consumers will increasingly demand appropriate certification for such products because of their concern for the environment. If corporations listen carefully to their stakeholders and take care to operate sustainably, they will affect the actions of governments and international agencies significantly and help to create conditions for their own prosperity, and for the world's sustainability. Frameworks such as that developed by The Natural Step, a Swedish organization that is having much influence throughout the industrialized world, will provide convenient blueprints to help guide us along the path of sustainability, and activity in this area is increasing every year.

The kinds of grassroots activities that are promoting sustainability on a local basis have become a powerful force throughout the world: perhaps they are fundamentally only a re-emphasis of what has been traditional. Whether establishing local clinics and sustainable industries in the Biligiri Rangan Hills of south India, people-based ecotourism centers in native lands in Kenya, rebuilding a broken landscape at the Bookmark Biosphere Reserve in South Australia, learning how to ranch sustainable on the vast grasslands of the Malpai Borderlands of New Mexico and Arizona, or simply rooting out alien plants on Albany Hill in the San Francisco Bay Area, the people who are pursuing sustainability in a direct and personal way will hugely affect the shape of the world in the future. Outstanding books like those by Baskin (1997) and Daily (1997), explaining in detail how nature works and how we benefit from it in ways that most of us never consider will continue to play an important role in stimulating our desire to achieve sustainability. For example, watershed protection, the determination of local climates, and the protection of crops by birds and beneficial insects, including pollinators, that live in the ecosystems surrounding them are examples of ecosystem services-- goods that nature provides without charge if we maintain sufficiently the integrity of the ecosystems that support them. In the light of this awareness, growing numbers of people will find ways to consume less energy, to recycle their materials, to participate in the political process, to promote the acceptance of international understanding as a prerequisite for sustainability, and to support others, individually or in organized groups, who are pursuing these objectives.

Within a few years, a majority of the world's people will, for the first time, be living in cities of more than 1 million population. As Jonathan Lash (2001) has emphasized, within a decade, if trends continue, there will be 27 cities in the developing world larger than New York. The proportion of urban dwellers will grow to a large majority of all human beings by the end of this century. Correspondingly, people living in rural areas are being increasingly excluded from access to knowledge and other commodities that have the potential to improve their lives, and few such communities are doing well anywhere in the world. In order to build a sustainable world for the future, it will be necessary first to develop better models for cities, taking into account the multidimensional contributions of science and engineering, politics and social sciences, and many other fields, to designing the improved cities of the future. On the other hand, it will be necessary to pay increasing attention to the rights and needs of rural dwellers throughout the world, and find ways to give them access to the information that they so obviously require. Activities such as those of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Institute in Chennai, India, in bringing health and agricultural information at low cost to the villages around Pondicherry will need to be multiplied many times over for success; and even in industrialized countries, the empowerment of rural peoples constitutes a serious and growing problem.

Even though future societies based on information seem to promise less environmental degradation, the world view that so many of us share seems an unsuitable one for building a sustainable world. As Kai Lee (1993, p. 200) puts it,

"How much misery will it take to make a global norm of sustainability first visible, then credible, then feasible, then inevitable? We do not know. And we do not know if the lessons of environmental disaster can be learned in time to ward off still more suffering. However bleak that prospect, we in the rich nations must bear the certain knowledge that our societies are both historically responsible for many of the circumstances that imprison the poor and that we will on average fare much better than they. Against this background it is possible to see that sustainable development is not a goal, not a condition likely to be attained on earth, as we know it. Rather, it is more like freedom or justice, a direction in which we must strive, along which we search for a life good enough to warrant our comforts."

A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing Congress on behalf of a nation that was moving inexorably towards full participation in World War II, said:

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium, it is a definite basis for a world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so called 'new order' of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.... Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end but victory."

When the end of the war was in sight, farsighted people took the first steps in the construction of the institutions that they thought would help to build the kind of world that Roosevelt had envisioned. They believed that global institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, with the eventual addition of others such as the International Court of Justice, would serve the world well, as indeed they have, either by helping to solve its major problems or by setting a context within which those problems would not arise. None of our national leaders could have imagined withholding funds or other forms of support from these institutions because of a perceived lack of control over their activities. Instead, the nations of the world recognized themselves as a community in which all people should ultimately be able to enjoy the kinds of specific rights embodied in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. Where have these dreams gone, when we still need them so badly? Why do so few world leaders hold them to be of fundamental importance, when in fact our acceptance of them will set the shape of the world for centuries to come, either for good or for evil?

For reasons that are starkly obvious, we are now focusing our attention massively on terrorism and the problems associated with terrorism. As the months go by, the real challenge facing us, however, will be whether we will come to regard the events of September 11 as specific and short-term, or whether we build on the events in analyzing their underlying causes and learning how to deal with those causes. Many of us agree with Leon Fuerth, who eloquently stated on the occasion of a recent forum in Washington, "A world in which the fate of poor and hungry people is of no interest to us is not a world in which we will ever be safe." We must learn to deal justly with people around the world if our own hopes and aspirations are to be realized. Despite the Lomborgs, Economists, and Wall Street Journals of the world, simply appropriating as much as possible of the world's goods and processing them as efficiently as possible can never be a recipe for long-term success, and ignorance of environmental principles can never assist us to lay proper foundations for a sound future. Perhaps if we had fully accepted the vision presented to us sixty years ago by President Roosevelt, and truly worked to make it a reality, we would now be on the way to achieving a peaceful and sustainable world. But it is not too late to accept that vision now.

In reality, the United States ultimately is a very small part of a very large, poor, and rapidly changing world, and we, along with everyone else in the world, must do a much better job of planning to navigate the future. Sustainability science has a good deal to say about how we can logically approach the challenges that await us, but the social dimensions of our relationships are also of fundamental importance. Globalization appears to have become an irresistible force, but we must make it participatory and humane to alleviate the suffering of the world's poorest people and the effective disenfranchisement of many of its nations. As many have stated in the context of the current world situation, the best defense against terrorism is an educated people. Education is necessary for the peoples of industrialized countries to use science and technology appropriately, but at an even more fundamental level, education, which promises to each individual the opportunity to express their individual talents fully, is fundamental to building a peaceful world -- and I believe there is no higher value.

Ultimately, as those who have been considering the matter carefully over the past several months have come to realize, there is often no way to deter a committed terrorist, regardless of how clever and vigilant we may be. Consequently, the only way to build a secure world is to change both that world and our way of thinking about it. Obviously, there are many steps that we can and should take in the short run -- such measures as better surveillance, better detective methods, hardened infrastructure improved methods of protecting data on the internet, a better understanding of the psychology of people living in different situations, and more secure ways of dealing nuclear weapons and other dangerous nuclear materials. We must urgently address the need for constant supplies of renewable energy and reduce our dependence on both foreign and domestic sources of oil, coal, and natural gas, putting high priorities on both energy conservation and alternative sources of energy. The technology to accomplish this is available, and the economic and security advantages that would accrue to the nation from pursuing this area actively are enormous. In addition, we would be able to reduce our massive contribution to the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide, an extremely serious problem for the whole world. General areas of sustainability, such as addressing public health on a global basis, improving agriculture and helping to arrest the spread of AIDS in Africa, working out and helping to implement ways to provide water equitably to the world's people. As Gandhi said so well, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and soon the whole world will be blind and toothless." It is exactly that outcome that we must, with all our hearts, strive to avoid.

I'd like to conclude with a few general principles.

First, we have the extraordinary privilege of living in a democracy here in the United States, a system that we have developed over the more than two centuries of our history, and one that is based on individual expression and participation. Our democracy expects individuals to be empowered and to express their views on matters of interest and to be educated in order to be able to express those views in an effective way. People matter. People have to be encouraged to exercise the ways in which they matter in a democracy and not simply be left behind. Effective participation involves access to a level of education that is appropriate for the time.

In a democracy, governmental processes must be transparent to all, participatory, and subject to continuous review and improvement. In an increasingly technical society, people must have confidence in their government. The mishandling of epidemic of mad cow disease in the U.K. provides a vivid example of what happens to that confidence when inappropriate advice is given by governmental agencies. People need to be empowered to do things to protect themselves; people need to be empowered to be able to improve their lives; and to create the kind of lives that they want for their children. That empowerment in part comes from appropriate and generally-understood government processes.

Civil liberties are fundamental, precious, and not to be sacrificed for any but the most urgent reasons. Those principles are generally recognized in a democratic society, but not always observed. Pressures on what we consider normal civil liberties will increase inexorably as the world population swells and demands for enhanced consumption grow. In the face of these pressures, we need to be vigilant to protect what we consider the most important. If we do exercise the right to vote, we deserve what we get.

Accepting, even embracing, diversity must become a cornerstone of a successful modern society. Indeed, the world is likely to function well only if we learn to love one another as much as we love the members of our own families. It is against our common interests that hundreds of millions of women and children, living in extreme poverty, are unable to put forward their best efforts, to make the best use of their abilities, in contributing to our general welfare. Such discrimination, whether we focus on it or not, is both morally abhorrent and at the same time incredibly stupid. Let us join in a common effort to do away with discrimination completely in our workplaces, in our communities, in our places of worship, and throughout the world.

Clearly, the basic conditions of change must clearly come from within us. A small minority of Earth 's residents cannot continue to consume such a large majority of Earth's potentially sustainable productivity. By doing so, they will untimely destabilize their own future, as well as the futures of all other people. Population, overconsumption (among others, Schor, 1998, offers a powerful analysis of overconsumption in America), and the use of appropriate technology must all be brought into the equation if our common objective is to achieve a sustainable world in the new millennium. As Paul Hawken (1993) has put it so well, we need completely new ways of thinking about our place on Earth and the ways in which we relate to the functioning of natural systems if we are to find a better way to live in harmony with nature. Nothing less than a new industrial revolution (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins, 1999) and a new agriculture (Conway, 1997) are required to make possible the sustainable world of the future. The task is incredibly challenging, but it is nonetheless one that we much undertake if we responsibly understand the realities of our situation, and for the enduring good of those who come after us. We need to find ways to encourage, to show our respect, for those of us who are able to think outside the box. But we must also remember that moving in the direction of sustainability is a fundamentally spiritual task.

Think about our relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once the Russians left, we left too; it was as clear a demonstration as we could have made of our lack of fundamental interest in the people of the region. And we all know some of the consequences. They certainly do not constitute clear examples of cause and effect, but to me, there is clearly a relationship. Dr. Ismael Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt will bring us up to date tomorrow night about science in the Islamic world. In the context of world events, and global reality, let me ask this: how many of collaborate with a scientist working in an Islamic country, and how many of us are making the effort to nurture science there? We need to work together to overcome the malign effects of the September 11 events, which have put on hold efforts by scientists in Islamic nations to strengthen ties among themselves and with the West, and should reserve funds and some of our time to make sure that that effort succeeds (Stone and Koenig, 2001). And we must work with our own estimated 6 million Muslim residents, continue to honor their unique contributions to our society, and use them to provide bridges to the vast Islamic world, a world that we understand so poorly.

Think about India. We are fortunate that Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, Director-General of the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, will be addressing us on Monday morning about the state of science and technology in that vast country. But what do we really know about India, and how are we working to improve our relationships with the world's largest democracy? One sixth of the world's people live in India, constituting a major economic and environmental force. But what does the average American really know about India? How much does he or she really appreciate what India has to offer, or try to understand its people either in a psychological sense, socially, politically, in terms of its art, its writers, its history, its scientists, and all of the other components that make up that great nation? Would it not be in our common interest to engage much more fully, to understand, to work to build communication? Can we in fact hope to build a sustainable world without such engagement?

Then think about Africa. What do we really know about Africa? We know that many of its people are dying of AIDS; we know that many of them are starving; we have heard of merciless dictators, of bloody civil wars, of slaughtering magnificent, large animals. Many of us have learned to appreciate 19th Century African art, but do we know what Africans are thinking about now: about their dreams and hopes, their literary, musical, and artistic traditions, their efforts to achieve democracy throughout the continent. Are we working with African scientists to help them develop advanced scientific and technical skills that they could use to improve their lot, the sustainability of their lands, and to improve their contribution to global sustainability? Let us try to find ways to increase the scope and effectiveness of our common efforts.

In the words of Gandhi, most appropriate as we chart our course for the new millennium, "The world provides enough to satisfy everyman's need, but not everyman's greed." These words illustrated why Wilson (1993) was able to conclude that humanity would be able to overcome its drive to environmental domination and self-propagation with reason -- why, in short, we are not necessarily suicidal in our approach to the world. In the spirit of Gandhi, one of the greatest leaders of our century, let us take his thoughts to heart and find the new inspiration that we so badly need at this incredibly challenging time. Global arguments may have little impact on the behaviors of individuals unless they perceive the crisis as unbearably severe, something that impinges on people's lives in dramatic and frightening ways. By then it will be too late. Our ethics and our values must change, and they must change because we come to understand that by changing we will be happier people, guaranteeing a decent future for our children on a healthier planet in more vibrant democracy in better neighborhoods and communities.

Many of the world's life-support systems are deteriorating rapidly and visibly, and it is clear that in the future our planet will be less diverse, less resilient, and less interesting than it is now; in the face of these trends, the most important truth is that the actual dimensions of that world will depend on what we do with our many institutions, and with the spiritual dimensions of our own dedication.

For us here at the AAAS, let us dedicate ourselves to expanding our global leadership role on behalf of science and society. In our interconnected and challenging world, both the connections between the disciplines that are symbolized by our fellowship and the global connections so evident in the fields of science and engineering are of extraordinary significance.

If the United States can become more international; if we can all learn to take on board the conditions of the world as they really are, much more closely than we have done before, we can begin to think about the contours of the sort of world that we want to build for the future. To the extent that we do that, the operations of our individual institutions will be successful and we will be making a valid contribution worthy of us to the kind of a world where our grandchildren might really like to live in the future. Being optimistic about the future because of wearing rosy-colored glasses and engaging in wishful thinking, like Bjorn Lomborg and his ilk, constitutes a real crime against our children and grandchildren; being optimistic because of a determination to each contribute what we can to make the world a better place is, in the words of Kai Lee, engaging in a "search for a life good enough to warrant our comforts." Scientists understand this, and we must contribute what we can to improve the world, to learn to respect one another, and to contribute what we can: I am confident that we will do this, and determined that the AAAS will help in an important way in the achievement of this all-important goal.

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