ECONOMY SELF-DESTRUCTING
Chapter 1. The Economy and the Earth
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth
(W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2001).
The economic indicators for the last half-century
show remarkable progress. As noted earlier, the economy expanded
sevenfold between 1950 and 2000. International trade grew even more
rapidly. The Dow Jones Index, a widely used indicator of the value
of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange, climbed from 3,000
in 1990 to 11,000 in 2000. It was difficult not to be bullish about
the long-term economic prospect as the new century began.6
Difficult, that is, unless you look at the ecological indicators.
Here, virtually every global indicator was headed in the wrong direction.
The economic policies that have yielded the extraordinary growth
in the world economy are the same ones that are destroying its support
systems. By any conceivable ecological yardstick, these are failed
policies. Mismanagement is destroying forests, rangelands, fisheries,
and croplandsthe
four ecosystems that supply our food and, except for minerals, all
our raw materials as well. Although many of us live in a high-tech
urbanized society, we are as dependent on the earth's natural systems
as our hunter-gatherer forebears were.
To put ecosystems in economic terms, a natural system, such as a
fishery, functions like an endowment. The interest income from an
endowment will continue in perpetuity as long as the endowment is
maintained. If the endowment is drawn down, income declines. If
the endowment is eventually depleted, the interest income disappears.
And so it is with natural systems. If the sustainable yield of a
fishery is exceeded, fish stocks begin to shrink. Eventually stocks
are depleted and the fishery collapses. The cash flow from this
endowment disappears as well.
As we begin the twenty-first century, our economy is slowly destroying
its support systems, consuming its endowment of natural capital.
Demands of the expanding economy, as now structured, are
surpassing the sustainable yield of ecosystems. Easily a third of
the world's cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that is undermining
its long-term productivity. Fully 50 percent of the world's rangeland
is overgrazed and deteriorating into desert. The world's forests
have shrunk by about half since the dawn of agriculture and are
still shrinking. Two thirds of oceanic fisheries are now being fished
at or beyond their capacity; overfishing is now the rule, not the
exception. And overpumping of underground water is common in key
food-producing regions.7
Over large areas of the world, the loss of topsoil from wind and
water erosion now exceeds the natural formation of new soil, gradually
draining the land of its fertility. In an effort to curb this, the
United States is retiring highly erodible cropland that was earlier
plowed in overly enthusiastic efforts to expand food production.
This process began in 1985 with the Conservation Reserve Program
that paid farmers to retire 15 million hectares, roughly one tenth
of U.S. cropland, converting it back to grassland or forest before
it became wasteland.8
In countries that lack such programs, farmers are being forced to
abandon highly erodible land that has lost much of its topsoil.
Nigeria is losing over 500 square kilometers of productive land
to desert each year. In Kazakhstan, site of the 1950s Soviet Virgin
Lands project, half the cropland has been abandoned since 1980 as
soil erosion lowered its productivity. This has dropped Kazakhstan's
wheat harvest from roughly 13 million tons in 1980 to 8 million
tons in 2000an
economic loss of $900 million per year.9
The rangelands that supply much of the world's animal protein are
also under excessive pressure. As human populations grow, so do
livestock numbers. With 180 million people worldwide now trying
to make a living raising 3.3 billion cattle, sheep, and goats, grasslands
are simply collapsing under the demand. As a result of overstocking,
grasslands are now deteriorating in much of Africa, the Middle East,
Central Asia, the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, and
much of northwestern China. Overgrazing is now the principal cause
of desertification, the conversion of productive land into desert.
In Africa, the annual loss of livestock production from the cumulative
degradation of rangeland is estimated at $7 billion, a sum almost
equal to the gross domestic product of Ethiopia.10
In China, the combination of overplowing and overgrazing to satisfy
rapidly expanding food needs is creating a dust bowl reminiscent
of the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930sbut
much larger. In a desperate effort to maintain grain self-sufficiency,
China has plowed large areas of the northwest, much of it land that
is highly erodible and should never have been plowed.11
As the country's demand for livestock productsmeat,
leather, and woolhas
climbed, so have the numbers of livestock, far exceeding those of
the United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity. In
addition to the direct damage from overplowing and overgrazing,
the northern half of China is literally drying out as aquifers are
depleted by overpumping.12
These trends are converging to form some of the largest dust storms
ever recorded. The huge dust plumes, traveling eastward, affect
the cities of northeast Chinablotting
out the sun and reducing visibility. Eastward-moving winds also
carry soil from China's northwest to the Korean Peninsula and Japan,
where people regularly complain about the dust clouds that filter
out the sunlight and blanket everything with dust. Unless China
can reverse the overplowing and overgrazing trends that are creating
the dust bowl, these trends could spur massive migration into the
already crowded cities of the northeast and undermine the country's
economic future.13
The world is also running up a water deficit. The overpumping of
aquifers, now commonplace on every continent, has led to falling
water tables as pumping exceeds aquifer recharge from precipitation.
Irrigation problems are as old as irrigation itself, but this is
a new threat, one that has evolved over the last half-century with
the advent of diesel pumps and powerful electrically driven pumps.
Water tables are falling under large expanses of the three leading
food-producing countriesChina,
India, and the United States. Under the North China Plain, which
accounts for 25 percent of China's grain harvest, the water table
is falling by roughly 1.5 meters (5 feet) per year. The same thing
is happening under much of India, particularly the Punjab, the country's
breadbasket. In the United States, water tables are falling under
the grain-growing states of the southern Great Plains, shrinking
the irrigated area.14
The diversion of water to provide supplies for irrigation and for
cities is also excessive, leaving little or no water in some rivers.
The Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States,
now rarely makes it to the sea. China's Yellow River, the cradle
of Chinese civilization, runs dry for part of each year, depriving
farmers in its lower reaches of irrigation water. The Indus and
the Ganges barely reach the sea during the dry season. Little water
from the Nile reaches the Mediterranean at any time. Draining rivers
dry disrupts the symbiotic relationship between the oceans and the
continents. The oceans water the continents as moisture-laden air
masses move inland, and the continents nourish the oceans as the
returning water carries nutrients with it.15
Economic demands on forests are also excessive. Trees are being
cut or burned faster than they can regenerate or be planted. Overharvesting
is common in many regions, including Southeast Asia, West Africa,
and the Brazilian Amazon. Worldwide, forests are shrinking by over
9 million hectares per year, an area equal to Portugal.16
In addition to being overharvested, some rainforests are now being
destroyed by fire. Healthy rainforests do not burn, but logging
and the settlements that occur along logging roads have fragmented
and dried out tropical rainforests to the point where they often
will burn easily, ignited by a lightning strike or set afire by
opportunistic plantation owners, farmers, and ranchers desiring
more land.
In the late summer of 1997, during an El Ni�o-induced drought, tropical
rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra burned out of control. This conflagration
made the news because the smoke drifting over hundreds of kilometers
affected people not only in Indonesia but also in Malaysia, Singapore,
Viet Nam, Thailand, and the Philippines. A reported 1,100 airline
flights in the region were canceled due to the smoke. Motorists
drove with their headlights on during the day, trying to make their
way through the thick haze. Millions of people became physically
sick.17
Deforestation can be costly. Record flooding in the Yangtze River
basin during the summer of 1998 drove 120 million people from their
homes. Although initially referred to as a "natural disaster," the
removal of 85 percent of the original tree cover in the basin had
left little vegetative cover to hold the heavy rainfall.18
Deforestation also diminishes the recycling of water inland, thus
reducing rainfall in the interior of continents. When rain falls
on a healthy stand of dense forest, roughly one fourth runs off,
returning to the sea, while three fourths evaporates, either directly
or through transpiration. When land is cleared for farming or grazing
or is clearcut by loggers, this ratio is reversedthree
fourths of the water returns to the sea and one fourth evaporates
to be carried further inland. As deforestation progresses, nature's
mechanism for watering the interior of large continents such as
Africa and Asia is weakening.19
Evidence of excessive human demands can also be seen in the oceans.
As the human demand for animal protein has climbed over the last
several decades, it has begun to exceed the sustainable yield of
oceanic fisheries. As a result, two thirds of oceanic fisheries
are now being fished at their sustainable yield or beyond. Many
are collapsing. In 1992, the rich Newfoundland cod fishery that
had been supplying fish for several centuries collapsed abruptly,
costing 40,000 Canadians their jobs. Despite a subsequent ban on
fishing, nearly a decade later the fishery has yet to recover.20
Farther to the south, the U.S. Chesapeake
Bay has experienced a similar decline. A century ago, this extraordinarily
productive estuary produced over 100 million pounds of oysters a
year. In 1999, it produced barely 3 million pounds. The Gulf of
Thailand fishery has suffered a similarly dramatic decline: depleted
by overfishing, the catch has dropped by over 80 percent since 1963,
prompting the Thai Fisheries Department to ban fishing in large
areas.21
The world is also losing its biological diversity as plant and animal
species are destroyed faster than new species evolve. This biological
impoverishment of the earth is the result of habitat destruction,
pollution, climate alteration, and hunting. With each update of
its Red List of Threatened Species, the World Conservation
Union-IUCN shows us moving further into a period of mass extinction.
In the latest assessment, released in 2000, IUCN reports that one
out of eight of the world's 9,946 bird species is in danger of extinction,
as is one in four of the 4,763 mammal species and nearly one third
of all 25,000 fish species.22
Some countries have already suffered extensive losses. Australia,
for example, has lost 16 of 140 mammal species over the last two
centuries. In the Colorado River system of the southwestern United
States, 29 of 50 native species of fish have disappeared partly
because their river habitats were drained dry. Species lost cannot
be regained. As a popular bumper sticker aptly points out, "Extinction
is forever."23
The economic benefits of the earth's diverse array of life are countless.
They include not only the role of each species in maintaining the
particular ecosystem of which it is a part, but economic roles as
well, such as providing drugs and germplasm. As diversity diminishes,
nature's pharmacy shrinks, depriving future generations of new discoveries.
Even as expanding economic activity has been creating biological
deficits, it has been upsetting some of nature's basic balances
in other areas. With the huge growth in burning of fossil fuels
since 1950, carbon emissions have overwhelmed the capacity of the
earth's ecosystem to fix carbon dioxide. The resulting rise in atmospheric
CO2 levels is widely believed by atmospheric scientists to be responsible
for the earth's rising temperature. The 14 warmest years since recordkeeping
began in 1866 have all occurred since 1980.24
One consequence of higher temperatures is more energy driving storm
systems. Three powerful winter storms in France in December 1999
destroyed millions of trees, some of which had been standing for
centuries. Thousands of buildings were demolished. These storms,
the most violent on record in France, wreaked more than $10 billion
worth of damage$170
for each French citizen. Nature was levying a tax of its own on
fossil fuel burning.25
In October 1998, Hurricane Mitchone
of the most powerful storms ever to come out of the Atlanticmoved
through the Caribbean and stalled for several days on the coast
of Central America. While there, it acted as a huge pump pulling
water from the ocean and dropping it over the land. Parts of Honduras
received 2 meters of rainfall within a few days. So powerful was
this storm and so vast the amount of water it dropped on Central
America that it altered the topography, converting mountains and
hills into vast mud flows that simply inundated whole villages,
claiming an estimated 10,000 lives. Four fifths of the crops were
destroyed. The huge flow of rushing water removed all the topsoil
in many areas, ensuring that this land will not be farmed again
during our lifetimes.26
The overall economic effect of the storm was devastating. The wholesale
destruction of roads, bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure
set back the development of Honduras and Nicaragua by decades. The
estimated $8.5 billion worth of damage in the region approached
the gross domestic product of both countries combined.27
Natural disasters are on the increase. Munich Re, one of the world's
largest re-insurance companies, reported that three times as many
great natural catastrophes occurred during the 1990s as during the
1960s. Economic losses increased eightfold. Insured losses multiplied
15-fold. Although Munich Re's classification does not distinguish
between natural and human-induced catastrophes, much of the increase
appears to be due to catastrophes, including storms, droughts, and
wild fires that are either exacerbated or caused by human activities.28
Insurers are keenly aware that even modest changes in climate can
lead to quantum jumps in damage. For example, a 10-percent increase
in a storm's wind speed can double the damage it inflicts. The cost
of dealing with rising sea level from a modest temperature rise
could easily overwhelm the economies of many countries.29
Andrew Dlugolecki, a senior officer at the CGNU Insurance GroupBritain's
largest insurance groupreports
that property damage worldwide is rising roughly 10 percent a year.
He believes that we are only beginning to see the economic fallout
from climate change. At this rate of growth, by 2065 the amount
of damage would exceed the projected gross world product. Well before
then, Dlugolecki notes, the world would face bankruptcy.30
Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of rising temperature is
ice melting. Over the last 35 years, the ice covering the Arctic
Sea has thinned by 42 percent. A study by two Norwegian scientists
projects that within 50 years there will be no summer ice left in
the Arctic Sea. The discovery of open water at the North Pole by
an ice breaker cruise ship in mid-August 2000 stunned many in the
scientific community.31
This particular thawing does not affect sea level because the ice
that is melting is already in the ocean. But the Greenland ice sheet
is also starting to melt. Greenland is three times the size of Texas
and the ice sheet is up to 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in some
areas. An article in Science notes that if the entire ice sheet
were to melt, it would raise sea level by some 7 meters (23 feet),
inundating the world's coastal cities and Asia's rice-growing river
floodplains. Even a 1-meter rise would cover half of Bangladesh's
riceland, dropping food production below the survival level for
millions of people.32
As the twenty-first century begins, humanity is being squeezed between
deserts expanding outward and rising seas encroaching inward. Civilization
is being forced to retreat by forces it has created. Even as population
continues to grow, the habitable portion of the planet is shrinking.
Aside from climate change, the economic effects of environmental
destruction and disruption have been mostly localcollapsing
fisheries, abandoned cropland, and shrinking forests. But if local
damage keeps accumulating, it will eventually affect global economic
trends. In an increasingly integrated global economy, local ecosystem
collapse can have global economic consequences.
ENDNOTES:
6. Economic expansion from Worldwatch Institute, op. cit. note 2;
Dow Jones Index available from www.djindexes.com/jsp/index.jsp.
7. Loss of topsoil calculated from Mohan K. Wali et al., "Assessing
Terrestrial Ecosystem Sustainability," Nature & Resources, October-December
1999, pp. 21-33, and from World Resources Institute (WRI), World
Resources 2000-01 (Washington, DC: September 2000); grassland deterioration
from Robin P. White et al., Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems:
Grassland Ecosystems (Washington, DC: WRI, 2000), p. 3; shrinking
of forests from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Forest
Resources Assessment (FRA) 2000, www.fao.org/forestry/fo/fra/index.jsp,
updated 10 April 2001; overfishing from FAO, The State of World
Fisheries and Aquaculture 2000 (Rome: 2000), p. 10; overpumping
from Postel, op. cit. note 3, p. 6.
8. USDA, Farm Service Agency Online, "History of the CRP," The Conservation
Reserve Program, www.fsa.usda.gov/dafp/cepd/12logocv.htm, viewed
5 July 2001.
9. Loss of productive land in Nigeria from Samuel Ajetunmobi, "Alarm
Over Rate of Desertification," This Day (Lagos, Nigeria), 23 January
2001; Kazakhstan from FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 1995
(Rome: 1995), pp. 174-95; grain production from USDA, op. cit. note
3, and from Sharon S. Sheffield and Christian J. Foster, Agricultural
Statistics of the Former USSR Republics and the Baltic States (Washington,
DC: Economic Research Service, USDA, September 1993), p. 147; grain
prices from IMF, op. cit. note 3.
10. Livestock herd size from FAO, FAOSTAT Statistics Database, ,
updated 2 May 2001; cost of lost livestock production from H. Dregne
et al., "A New Assessment of the World Status of Desertification,"
Desertification Control Bulletin, no. 20, 1991, cited in Lester
R. Brown and Hal Kane, Full House (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1994), p. 95; country gross domestic products from IMF, World Economic
Outlook (WEO) Database, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2000/02/data/index.htm,
September 2000.
11. Expansion of Chinese economy calculated from IMF, op. cit. note
10; plowing of China from Hong Yang and Xiubin Li, "Cultivated Land
and Food Supply in China," Land Use Policy, vol. 17, no. 2 (2000);
Hou Dongmin, Duan Chengrong, and Zhang Dandan, "Grassland Ecology
and Population Growth: Striking a Balance," China Population Today,
June 2000, pp. 27-28.
12. FAO, op. cit. note 10.
13. Dong Zhibao, Wang Xunming, and Liu Lianyou, "Wind Erosion in
Arid and Semiarid China: An Overview," Journal of Soil and Water
Conservation, vol. 55, no. 4 (2000), pp. 439-44; Erik Eckholm, "Chinese
Farmers See a New Desert Erode Their Way of Life," New York Times,
30 July 2000.
14. Water tables in key food-producing areas from Postel, op. cit.
note 3; share of China's grain harvest from the North China Plain
based on Hong Yang and Alexander Zehnder, "China's Regional Water
Scarcity and Implications for Grain Supply and Trade," Environment
and Planning A, vol. 33, January 2001, pp. 79-95, and on USDA, op.
cit. note 3; water tables falling in China from James Kynge, "China
Approves Controversial Plan to Shift Water to Drought-Hit Beijing,"
Financial Times, 7 January 2000; water tables in China and India
from International Water Management Institute, "Groundwater Depletion:
The Hidden Threat to Food Security," Brief 2, www.cgiar.org/iwmi/intro/brief2.htm,
2001; Bonnie L. Terrell and Phillip N. Johnson, "Economic Impact
of the Depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer: A Case Study of the Southern
High Plains of Texas," paper presented at the American Agricultural
Economics Association annual meeting in Nashville, TN, 8-11 August
1999.
15. Jim Carrier, "The Colorado: A River Drained Dry," National Geographic,
June 1991, pp. 4-32; loss of Aral Sea in Postel, op. cit note 3,
pp. 93-95, and in Philip P. Mickin, "Desiccation of the Aral Sea:
A Water Management Disaster in the Soviet Union," Science, 2 September
1988; Aral Sea fishery from Lester R. Brown, "The Aral Sea: Going,
Going.," World Watch, January/February 1991, pp. 20-27; Eric Zusman,
"A River Without Water: Examining the Shortages in the Yellow River
Basin," LBJ Journal of Public Affairs, spring 1998, pp. 31-41.
16. FAO, Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) 2000, op. cit. note 7.
17. Cindy Shiner, "Thousands of Fires Ravage Drought-Stricken Borneo,"
Washington Post, 24 April 1998; World Wide Fund for Nature, The
Year the World Caught on Fire, WWF International Discussion Paper
(Gland: Switzerland: December 1997).
18. "Flood Impact on Economy Limited," China Daily, 1 September
1998; Doug Rekenthaler, "China Survives Fourth Yangtze Flood Crest
as Fifth Begins its Journey," Disaster Relief, 11 August 1998; removal
of tree cover from Carmen Revenga et al., Watersheds of the World
(Washington, DC: WRI and Worldwatch Institute, 1998).
19. Eneas Salati and Peter B. Vose, "Amazon Basin: A System in Equilibrium,"
Science, 13 July 1984, pp. 129-38.
20. Overfishing from FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture
2000, op. cit. note 7; Mark Clayton, "Hunt for Jobs Intensifies
as Fishing Industry Implodes," Christian Science Monitor, 25 August
1993; Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Cod are Almost Gone and a Culture Could
Follow," New York Times, 28 May 1994.
21. Chesapeake Bay from Anita Huslin, "In Bay Water Off Virginia,
Seeds of Hope for Oyster," Washington Post, 5 June 2001; "Regional
Crisis Adds to Danger of Overfishing in Gulf of Thailand," Agence
France Presse, 22 July 1998; "Bans on Fishing Gear Widens," Bangkok
Post, 14 February 2001.
22. Species Survival Commission, 2000 IUCN Red List of Threatened
Species (Gland, Switzerland, and Cambridge, UK: World Conservation
Union-IUCN, 2000).
23. Robert James Lee Hawke, "Launch of Statement on the Environment,"
speech by the Prime Minister, Wentworth, NSW, 20 July 1989; John
Tuxill and Chris Bright, "Losing Strands in the Web of Life," in
Lester R. Brown et al., State of the World 1998 (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1998), p. 53.
24. J. Hansen, "Global Temperature Anomalies in .01 C," www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp,
viewed 8 June 2001.
25. Munich Re, Topics 2000: Natural Catastrophes-The Current Position
(Munich: M�nchener Ruckversicherungs-Gesellschaft, December 1999),
and MRNatCatSERVICE, Significant Natural Disasters in 1999 (Munich:
REF/Geo, January 2000); United Nations, World Population Prospects:
The 2000 Revision (New York: February 2001).
26. Janet N. Abramovitz, "Averting Unnatural Disasters," in Lester
R. Brown et al., State of the World 2001 (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2001), pp. 123-24.
27. Ibid.; gross domestic product from IMF, op. cit. note 10.
28. Munich Re, op. cit. note 25, p. 43.
29. Andrew Dlugolecki, "Climate Change and the Financial Services
Industry," speech delivered at the opening of the UNEP Financial
Services Roundtable, Frankfurt, Germany, 16 November 2000.
30. Ibid.; "Climate Change Could Bankrupt Us by 2065," Environment
News Service, 24 November 2000.
31. Lars H. Smedsrud and Tore Furevik, "Towards an Ice-Free Arctic?"
Cicerone, 2/2000; John Noble Wilford, "Ages-Old Icecap at North
Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find," New York Times, 19 August
2000.
32. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, "The Greenland Ice Sheet Reacts," Science,
21 July 2000; Bangladesh inundation estimate from World Bank, World
Development Report 1999/2000 (New York: Oxford University Press,
September 1999). .
Copyright
© 2001 Earth Policy Institute
|
|