Year: 2000
Type: article
Abstract: No set of issues has tended to separate economists and ecologists, especially in the mind of the public, more than those surrounding the linkages between economic growth, human carrying capacity, and the environment. The general lack of interest among the majority of economists in problems of the environment and a parallel lack of interest among the majority of ecologists in economic issues, combined with a lack of dialogue between the two groups, has allowed extreme positions to take hold in the public debate and to influence policy to an inordinate degree. Just one example from a book that consists of a debate between Julian Simon and Norman Myers (Myers and Simon 1994) should suffice to demonstrate just how extreme some of these positions are. Consider the following quote by Simon: We now have in our hands—in our libraries, really—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. Most amazing is that most of this specific body of knowledge developed within the past hundred years or so, though it rests on knowledge that had accumulated for millennia, of course. Indeed, the last necessary additions to this body of knowledge—nuclear fission and space travel—occurred decades ago. Even if no new knowledge were ever invented after those advances, we would be able to go on increasing forever, improving our standard of living and our control over our environment. The discovery of genetic manipulation certainly enhances our powers greatly, but even without it we could have continued our progress forever. (Myers and Simon 1994, p. 65) This degree of faith in the ability of technology to solve all of humanity's problems and allow economic and population growth to continue unabated forever is certainly not shared by many economists (Arrow et al. 1995, Ravaioli and Ekins 1995). And yet, positions like these have been taken as the general view of economists on growth and the environment. For example, a recent lead article about the environment in The Economist (Anonymous 1997) stated that “Forecasters of scarcity and doom are not only invariably wrong, they think that being wrong proves them right.” The article went on to select data out of context and “spin” the facts to make its case that environmentalists who forecast “doom and gloom” about environmental trends were invariably wrong and that economic optimists who forecast a rosy environmental future were invariably right. A parallel situation holds for ecologists. Environmentalists (who are not necessarily ecologists) have often been equally guilty of stretching and spinning the facts to try to win the debate on the environment. They make extreme statements that are intended to dramatize the situation, but end up polarizing it instead. For example, environmentalists sometimes argue that any human presence on the planet is detrimental and that the earth would be better off without any humans at all. The problem is that these issues are often presented, in both the scientific literature and the popular press, in a format that assumes that there is a right and a wrong answer and that attempts to lay out the opposing positions so that the audience members can choose for themselves who is right. This format may appeal to journalists trying to achieve “balanced” coverage, but the complex and important issues that are often the subjects of these debates (e.g., climate change, population growth, biodiversity loss, sustainability) ironically become muddied rather than sharpened when subjected to this format. They are not simple black and white issues, and accentuating the debate format makes it difficult to paint a richer, multicolored picture and achieve consensus on appropriate courses of action (Tannen 1998). In addition, the journalistic search for “balance” often pits a broad scientific consensus against a few extremists willing to take the opposite position—hardly an accurate picture of the true balance of opinion in the community. This is not to say that a thorough and ongoing discussion is not necessary; rather, the format should be one of truly balanced and interactive dialogue rather than confrontational debate in the journalistic style. In this article, we attempt to move beyond the “environment as a debate” by focusing on common ground—the environment as a productive asset shared by all of humanity. The common challenge is to manage this asset so as to maximize the probability that it will continue to support human well-being into the indefinite future. This management must be achieved in the face of huge and unresolvable uncertainties about some key assumptions having to do with the limits of technological change and the capacity of ecological life-support systems. Consequently, it is essential to combine data, ideas, and insights from ecology, environmental science, economics, business, psychology, law, engineering, and many other areas. All of these perspectives can provide at best partial truths—they are, therefore, all needed for effective management of our complex environmental portfolio in the face of uncertainty. One reason that the environmental debate has been so rancorous, confrontational, and unproductive is that the participants are arguing within the context of very different worldviews, or visions, both of how the world is and of how they would like it to be. These worldviews can be described in many ways (Bossel 1998), but a fundamental distinction has to do with their views of technological progress (Costanza 1989, 1999). The technological optimist worldview is one of continued expansion of humans and their dominion over nature. Through technological change, humans become independent of nature. The optimist worldview assumes, moreover, that technical progress can deal with any future challenge, that the future will be a smooth extrapolation of the past, and that the market is a good guiding principle. This is the “default” vision in current Western society, one that represents continuation of current trends into the indefinite future. The quote by Simon at the beginning of this article represents the extreme form of this vision. The technological skeptic vision recognizes the importance of technological change but depends much less on it and more on social and community development. This worldview assumes that technical progress is ultimately constrained by the dynamic ecological carrying capacity of Earth; that the future (like the past) will be full of unpredictable, discontinuous surprises; that humans have to work in partnership with nature; and that the market is a good servant but a poor master. Ask two people holding these different visions to debate a complex issue, such as global climate change, and the result will most likely be them angrily talking past each other, with both wondering why the other cannot see their point. The reason is that it is not possible to know whether the assumptions underlying either of these visions are correct until after the fact. In this article, we contend that the way to resolve the fundamental disagreement between the technological optimist and the technological skeptic is therefore to devise policies that maximize the chances of success regardless of which worldview turns out to be right. We show that given this fundamental uncertainty, it is better to pursue (at least provisionally) those policies associated with the skeptical worldview rather than those associated with the optimist worldview, because the benefits of being right are comparable in both cases, but the costs of being wrong when pursuing the optimist's policies are far greater and less reversible than the costs of being wrong when pursuing the skeptic's policies. Why is managing humanity's environmental portfolio so important? What has changed in the world? From the optimist's point of view, nothing fundamental has changed—humans should go on dealing with the environment as they always have. From the skeptic's point of view, however, a fundamental change has occurred. The world has changed from one that was relatively empty of humans and their artifacts to one that is relatively full (Daly 1992). For more than 99% of humanity's history, our ancestors could affect only the local environment. Hunters and gatherers affected their local ecosystems, much as has any other large omnivore, but often more dramatically. For example, hunting cultures are suspected of driving several large herbivores to extinction and significantly altering the fire regimes of some ecosystems (Flannery 1994, Diamond 1997), sometimes causing a major local climatic change (Fagan 1999). Agriculturists altered local to regional vegetation patterns, hydrology, and soils even more dramatically. It has even been suggested (Tainter 1988, Yoffee and Cowgill 1988, Ponting 1991, Diamond 1997) that most historical agricultural civilizations (e.g., Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Roman, Olmec, Chacoan, Mayan) had collapsed due to inattention to the degradation of their local environmental resource bases. Industrial cultures can now affect local, regional, and global biophysical systems and environmental processes, including climate and ocean currents (Pimentel et al. 1997b, Vitousek et al. 1997). From the skeptic's point of view, the question is, can our current global civilization break from the historical trend and achieve sustainability? During the expansion of industrial civilization in the last 200 years, humans have faced what appeared to be a limitless frontier. The optimists believe that technical progress guarantees that the frontier is still there and will remain limitless. The skeptics believe that this rapid human expansion has transformed the planet and is beginning to challenge its capacity to support humanity. Evidence for the skeptics' view includes a plateauing in per capita cereal grain production since the mid-1980s, a plateauing in ocean fisheries yield, a 10–20-fold increase in refugees (political, economic, and environmental) in the past two decades, depletion of freshwater supplies in some regions, and rapid and continuing changes in the profile of infectious diseases (i.e., 2 million deaths per year from AIDS; resurgence of cholera, TB, and malaria; antimicrobial resistance; and the emergence of various new infectious agents associated with changing land-use patterns and intensification of food production; Wilson 1995, De Cock and Greenwood 1998, McMichael et al. 1999). The optimists acknowledge these problems but contend that they are temporary and will (like all problems before them) yield to technological advance. This uncertainty about limits has important implications for how humans manage their environmental portfolio. If it is assumed that the environment is limitless and that nothing that humans can do will seriously harm it (or at least that any problems can be fixed), then the burden of proof should be (as it has been, until now) on those who wish to show that environmental impacts have occurred. If, on the other hand, it is assumed that the environment is not limitless and, in fact, that the world is now full, then the burden of proof should be shifted to those who potentially harm the environment to show that their activities will not have any adverse effects. This harm includes not only pollution but also overharvesting, climate change, other restructuring of the environment, habitat destruction, and the introduction of exotic species. In a full world, the assumption should be that some negative impact will probably occur as a result of these stresses, singly or in combination, unless and until it can be shown otherwise (Rapport et al. 1985, McMichael 1993, McIntyre and Mosedale 1997, Paine et al. 1998). The optimist believes that the environment is expendable because technology can ultimately substitute for any lost environmental services or amenities. The skeptic believes that the environment is of critical importance because it represents humanity's life-support system, a system that technology could never adequately reproduce. For people of both worldviews, however, it is clear that, at present, the services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are necessary to the functioning of the earth's life-support system (Daily 1997). Ecosystem services contribute significantly to economic production and human welfare (Repetto et al. 1989, Kahn 1998, Kahn and Farmer 1999) and represent a significant portion of the total economic value of the planet (Costanza et al. 1997, Pimentel et al. 1997a). Because the value of these services is not fully captured in markets or adequately quantified in terms comparable with economic services and manufactured capital, they are often given too little weight in policy decisions. In an empty world, humans could get away with ignoring the value of environmental assets and their impacts on them because these assets would be relatively abundant. In a full world, however, neglect of the value of ecosystem services might ultimately (if the technological skeptics are correct) compromise the sustainability of human well-being and survival in the biosphere. In the current situation—where there is at least some possibility that the world is now full—the environmental portfolio must be managed in a different way. It must be managed as a critical to the way in which any good its productive assets uncertainty. Most asset are to of uncertainty, and have developed to maximize the benefits from these assets in the face of this uncertainty. shared ecological assets are an extreme in which uncertainty is large and fundamental assumptions (e.g., about the ability of technology to substitute for environmental and the are The debate on the environment has and attempts to deal with this uncertainty. people that there are right and wrong in the either the optimists are right or the skeptics are this fundamental uncertainty. in the face of this fundamental uncertainty, it is not to on ability to solve all future environmental is it to that technology is The more in this case of extreme uncertainty and is one of skeptical which assumes that there will be problems but the possibility that these problems can be out and that they might not be as as was This can be taken without whether the optimist's or skeptic's assumptions are so it is, in a It not new technology and no the it managing in with their and uncertainties and without the of the earth's human and ecosystems (Rapport et al. 1998). This also the of technology that has the best of without the natural capital the technological optimist might this of skeptical that the skeptics are The answer is, not in an in a is, it assumes that the skeptics are right but to technical development. This makes because of the of the costs and benefits (Costanza 1999). the this optimist skeptic can be in format the shown in in which the policies that can be optimist or are on the and the of the world are on the The are with the of the of policies and of the These are complex future of the world that can best be described (Costanza 1999). For the of this however, we them with a simple is, if the optimist policy is and the world out to to the optimist's then the might be This for a is especially given that it has off in the it is not that so many people would like to believe that the world to the optimist's if the optimist's policy is and the world turns out to more to the skeptic's then the result would be because to ecosystems would have and technological would no be If the skeptic policy is and the optimists are then the would be only growth would have been by policies. If the skeptical policy is and the skeptical worldview turns out to be then the are In this last humans would have to within the ecological of the planet and a partnership with nature. for technological technological for This has a simple If there is true uncertainty about the of the world (i.e., if the that the skeptic and the optimist are right are and the can be only then humans should choose the policy that is the of the (i.e., the In other each policy is in for the that could if that policy is and the policy that is is the one with the In the in the skeptic's policy should be because the possible result that policy is a better than the the optimist policy In fact, in this there is only one and the of the is to that regardless of the of the world, because that will not be until it is too an it is as if a has just been by a that there is a possibility that if will For any one can never know whether this possibility will until it might that will never to and go on of the might out to be but might A more skeptical would the and if the of is the benefits of the from might try to on just to be it is not in this situation to the or the for out the and that might the that global environmental have not is no reason to the environmental community for out the possibility that they might this is the taken by The Economist (Anonymous 1997) and in much recent on the extreme technological optimist move beyond the confrontational debate on the environment, people have to both the uncertainties and what they do and to that is some that is environmental how that is, is not never will be until it is too What is is that the environment is critical to on this must now manage its activities the environment to that this life-support capacity will not be can this be manage the environmental some might be that have effective in managing of assets uncertainty. The of large and other assets do not on the of the market to maximize the value of their They manage them in a and way. The they have developed have become in of that have for a broad of complex would they to the environmental The of asset management is to the of assets and off the In the context of the environment, the natural capital must be so that humans can continue to the of services that from that that or the should be taken only in cases, when there are no This should be until it can be shown that there are The of portfolio management is all of in one Because of uncertainty, cannot to all of our in the optimist's will solve all environmental must be in the skeptic's natural just to be is, ecosystem must be as an and a against the possibility that other (i.e., technological may not yield the This recognizes the of these other on the natural capital at least in the to least for the humans cannot to or the natural capital and the ecosystem services that from it should not be at we have several regional past civilizations collapsed because they into this In the presence of uncertainty a one should to against the not (i.e., and and not even to the recent in fisheries management et al. that, with to the environment, humans to too little and take too many If these policies are so and then why they being If the global environment were and managed like a or like a portfolio of they would no have been ago. The problem is that the global environment is a in many an resource et al. and the of the management problem has far the of the that have been developed for local environmental management (Costanza et al. 1998, et al. 1999). is a between the and other by of of the environment, on the one hand, and the social and other for as a the environment, and future on the other are in a huge social and because of this if might lead to the of global industrial It is as if a large of being as a by its and of on of all the was into independent of which had to to any other for the it a would not last it is just this of system that is in for managing many of the environmental the current value of environmental assets to the uncertainties about the assumptions their humans to manage these assets at least as as manage their the portfolio is a set of assets or the set of systems and that make up the what to be managed or is the of the asset in the of (i.e., the of or and the who is the asset in the case of the environmental The fundamental problem with environmental management is that no effective at the appropriate for managing humanity's and its common global environmental portfolio. A such is to both the value of these environmental assets to continued survival and the unresolvable uncertainty about ability to substitute for then will it be possible to move beyond the which the complex problem of managing our environmental portfolio as a to work to new policies and for effective and management at the appropriate What will these new of they will to be in a of et al. have for to environmental should the of the environmental the face of uncertainty about potentially environmental humans should on the of management should acknowledge uncertainty and and with the of full of the and costs and benefits of the of environmental should be and and affected should be in the and of environmental The of that these for the and management of the environmental portfolio has in at 1993, et al. 1995, and 1998). In the of policy the uncertainty in different worldviews and and by all the affected management views policy and management as in which at several are to achieve and to and the of policy are not as the but rather as to the is on and to and the and, as with all good is to make the system of that the for and management of environmental assets and fisheries 1997, 1998), management 1994, 1997, 1998), and 1993, 1994, et al. 1998). The environmental debate is because it is on assumptions in move it is essential to acknowledge these different worldviews and to search for policies and that are worldview of worldview, there is general that environmental assets are important and that their by humans to be the uncertainty and the of the it is most to at least a that a skeptical worldview as but not and technical technology is an essential in can be from the and of the of which are also to uncertainty. these to be in new that can provide and management of our shared environmental portfolio at the appropriate like to and for on
Source: BioScience
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $5,088
OpenAlex ID: W2155921644