WHAT IT MEANSCan humanity still be saved? [Archives:2008/1142/Local News]

Koichiro Matsuura
We have inherited a single planet. But what have we made of it? The Earth is today an endangered heritage, and the species itself is at risk.

UNESCO has just published Making Peace with the Earth (Berghahn Books/UNESCO Publishing) the third anthology in the ' 21st Century Talks ' series edited by Jerome Binde. With the collaboration of some fifteen leading scientists and experts, such as Paul Crutzen, Nicolas Hulot, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Michel Serres, Mostafa Tolba, Asit K. Biswas or Edward O. Wilson, we offer a future-oriented analysis of the global ecological crisis, together with some proposals for action, which are the substance of this article.

Are we fully conscious, even after the latest assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Bali Conference, of the colossal challenges that humanity will have to meet, within timeframes that have already been overrun? I shall not labour the diagnosis yet again: climate change, desertification, global water crisis, deforestation, ocean degradation, air, soil, water and sea pollution, and the increasing erosion of biodiversity – the picture is all too familiar. The economic and geopolitical consequences of this situation are just starting to be quantified. The cost of our war on the planet is liable to be comparable to the cost of a world war, as the Stern Review points out. There is moreover a risk that the war on nature could lead to war in general, given the growing scarcity of fossil fuels and natural resources and the 150 to 200 million eco-refugees anticipated by futures studies.

Yet what we call problems – starting with climate change – are more in the nature of symptoms. The real problem, in fact, is that of material growth in a finite world, which was identified back in 1972 in the Report to the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth. But in 1972, as the Report's joint author Dennis Meadows points out, “humanity was within its limits, now it is beyond them”. This is borne out by the data on the ecological footprint of the human species calculated by the team of Mathis Wackernagel. In 1972 we had reached 85 per cent of these limits. Today human resource consumption stands at about 125 per cent of the level sustainable in the long term.

So can humanity still be saved? Yes, we can do so, and without preventing the human species from developing and combating poverty. We need to combine growth and sustainable development, rather than seeing them as opposites. But how can this be done? We shall need more knowledge, more restraint, less matter, more concreteness, and more – rather than less – ethics and politics. What this adds up to is another contract, a natural contract and an ethic of the future.

More knowledge firstly: there are many who regard techno-science as the enemy. Yet the sickness contains its own cure. We shall not succeed in saving the planet and its guest, the human species, unless we build “knowledge societies”” that prioritize education and research. To address the challenges of sustainable development