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PAN Discussion Group Wednesday November 29th 2006
Subject: Futurism: Near term visions of social conditions
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Location: Lakeview-ish RSVP for details
Time: 7pm to 10pm - ish
!!! DON’T FORGET: !!!
The event that makes the Holidays worthwhile
!!! PAN HOLIDAY PARTY DECEMBER 10th !!!
Bring drinks and snacks to share
General:
The articles are the basis for the discussion and reading them helps give us some common ground and focus for the discussion, especially where we would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The discussions are not intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a chance to explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum. Feel free to bring along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or on topics the group might be interested in for future meetings.
GROUND RULES:
* Temper the urge to speak with the discipline to listen and leave space for others
* Balance the desire to teach with a passion to learn
* Hear what is said and listen for what is meant
* Marry your certainties with others' possibilities
* Reserve judgment until you can claim the understanding we seek
Any problems let me know...
847-963-1254
tysoe2@yahoo.com
The Articles:
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First some near term forecasts
http://www.wfs.org/forecasts.htm
Top 10 Forecasts from Outlook 2007
Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine. Here are the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2007:
1. Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas. For the first time in its history, the United States will see a significant proportion of its population emigrate due to overseas opportunities. According to futurists Arnold Brown and Edie Weiner, Generation Y, the population segment born between 1978 and 1995, may be the first U.S. generation to have many of its members leave the country to pursue large portions of their lives, if not their entire adult lives, overseas. Brown and Weiner also predict that by 2025, 75% of Americans will live on the country’s coasts.
2. Dwindling supplies of water in China will impact the global economy. With uneven development across China, the most water-intensive industries and densest population are in regions where water is scarcest. The result is higher prices for commodities and goods exported from China, so the costs of resource and environmental mismanagement are transferred to the rest of the world. As a nation, China already outconsumes the United States on basic commodities, such as food, energy, meat, grain, oil, coal, and steel.
3. Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money. The productivity boom in the U.S. economy during the twentieth century created a massive consumer culture?people made more money, so they bought more stuff. In the twenty-first century, however, workers will increasingly choose to trade higher salaries for more time with their families. Nearly a third of U.S. workers recently polled said they would prefer more time off rather than more hours of paid employment.
4. Outlook for Asia: China for the short term, India for the long term. By 2025, both countries will be stronger, wealthier, freer, and more stable than they are today, but India's unique assets?such as widespread use of English, a democratic government, and relative transparency of its institutions?make it more economically viable farther out.
5. Children's "nature deficit disorder" will grow as a health threat. Children today are spending less time in direct contact with nature than did previous generations. The impacts are showing up not only in their lack of physical fitness, but also in the growing prevalence of hyperactivity and attention deficit. Studies show that immersing children in outdoor settings?away from television and video games?fosters more creative mental activity and concentration.
6. We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030. In the next 25 years, we’ll learn how to augment our 100 trillion relatively slow inter-neuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence and with each other. By the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.
7. The robotic workforce will change how bosses value employees. As robots and intelligent software increasingly emulate the knowledge work that humans can do, businesses will "hire" whatever type of mind that can do the work?robotic or human. Future human workers may collaborate with robotic minds on projects for a variety of enterprises, rather than work for a single employer.
8. The costs of global-warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year. The world’s total economic loss from weather-related catastrophes has risen 25% in the last decade. According to the insurance firm Swiss Re, the overall economic cost of catastrophes related to climate change threatens to reach $150 billion per year in a decade or double the present level. The U.S. insurance industry’s share would be $30–$40 billion annually. The size of these estimates also reflects increased growth and higher real-estate prices in coastal communities.
9. Companies will see the age range of their workers span four generations. Workers over the age of 55 are expected to grow from 14% of the labor force to 19% by 2012. In less than five years, 77 million baby boomers in the United States will begin reaching age 65, the traditional retirement age, but many are expected to continue working. As a result, the concept of “retirement” will change significantly.
10. A rise of disabled Americans will strain public transportation systems. By the year 2025, the number of Americans aged 65 or older will expand from 35 million to more than 65 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Individuals in that age group are more than twice as likely to have a disability as those aged 16 to 65. If that figure remains unchanged, the number of disabled people living in the United States will grow to 24 million over the course of the next 20 years. Rising rates of outpatient care and chronic illness point to an increased demand for public transportation as well as special public transportation services in the coming decades.
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A look at the future based on the past
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/08/kavanagh-collapse/
Don't Do as the Romans Do. Jared Diamond's Collapse traces the fates of societies to their treatment of the environment BY MICHAEL J. KAVANAGH
I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase "east-west axis of orientation" the most talked-about kind of orientation there was -- freshman, sexual, or otherwise. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question -- "Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?" -- and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. For most readers (and there were millions), Guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. To broadly simplify, Diamond's book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. It had the kind of paradigm-shifting impact that happens with a book only once every few years, and it turned Diamond -- a professor of geography at UCLA -- into something of a rock star.
If Guns venerated the role that geographic chance played in societal development, Diamond's newest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, restores human agency to the picture. Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society's response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society's demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society's response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can "choose to fail."
Diamond then identifies the 12 environmental problems that are portents of doom: destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation); reduction of wild foods; loss of biodiversity; erosion of soil; depletion of natural resources; pollution of freshwater; maximizing of natural photosynthetic resources; introduction by humans of toxins and alien species; artificially induced climate change; and, finally, overpopulation and its impact.
These issues, which dovetail neatly with the flashpoints of the modern environmental movement, will be familiar enough to readers of Grist. But while the factors that Diamond believes lead societies to collapse may be clear, his definitions of both "society" and "collapse" are less so. "Collapse" can refer to complete extinction (Pitcairn Island), population crash (Easter Island), resettlement (Vikings), civil war (Rwanda), anarchy (Somalia, Haiti), or even just the demise of a political ideology (the disintegration of the Soviet Union). His definition of "society" is equally vague; he variously uses it to refer to a settlement (e.g., various Viking communities), a nation (ranging from Rwanda and Haiti, two of the smaller countries in the world, to China, one of the largest), a state (Montana), and an island (Easter). Each individual example makes sense, but as analogues -- to each other or to the situation in today's globalized world -- they often falter.
The best examples in Collapse are those that avoid this apples-and-oranges problem by comparing two societies at the same moment in time and in the same place, such as the chapters on the Greenland Norse and on Hispaniola. In the case of the Vikings, as one historian said, they came to Greenland, "it got cold, and then they died." But somehow, Diamond rejoins, the Greenland Inuit came, stayed, and survived -- right up until this day. The point? Cold or not, the Greenland Norse didn't have to die. Diamond elucidates how they mistreated their environment (without even realizing it in some cases) and refused to adapt to its variations. The Vikings, Diamond notes in his customary casual style, had a "bad attitude" and thought the Inuit were "gross weirdos." As a result, they didn't adapt to the Greenland environment as the Inuit did, and, eventually, starved to death.
Although it's the chapter on Greenland that has thus far won the most acclaim, Diamond's treatment of contemporary Hispaniola might be more relevant to the complexities of today's world. Two countries share the island -- the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Their resources, climate, religion, and history as colonies are markedly similar. And yet, their current situations couldn't be more divergent. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Only 1 percent of its land is covered in forest, compared to 28 percent in the D.R. While the D.R. is by no means rich, its economy continues to grow, its environment is protected, and it reaps the benefits of munificent relations with the international community. In Haiti, there are too many people, too few resources, too few jobs, and, at the moment, scarcely a government. Diamond argues that the proximate cause of collapse in a society like Haiti -- a coup d'état or a flood resulting from a hurricane, for instance -- is only a manifestation of the ultimate cause: the mismanagement of its environment and resources.
These days, many Haitians -- and indeed much of the rest of the developing world -- face a stark choice: protecting the environment or eating. If it weren't for foreign aid, Haiti could never support its population. And while the D.R. is a magnificent success by comparison, it's important not to underestimate the similar tension it faces between the forces of development and the fight for environmental preservation. The difference is that the D.R.'s leaders and citizen-activists had the foresight to protect their environment before it was beyond repair.
This is an essential issue in Collapse, because Diamond's goal in historicizing our understanding of the relationship between a society's development and its environment is to prove that the two impulses are not antithetical. Much as Guns, Germs, and Steel was crafted in part as a response to books like The Bell Curve, which had managed to repopularize theories of racial determinism, Collapse is partly a response to the dominant environmental discourse in the United States today, which holds that environmental concerns are secondary to economic and security concerns. Rather, Diamond argues, environmental concerns are at least equal in importance, and inextricably linked, to all other aspects of a society's success. His examples imply that, when it comes to the environment, a stitch in time means more than saving nine -- it's the difference between keeping and losing your shirt.
Don't Give Away the Ending ...
Collapse is a long book, and because Diamond is a guileless writer, you understand right from the introduction why he thinks societies falter, and to a certain extent what he thinks we should do about it. If you take it as a given that Diamond will prove his thesis (and I'm certainly not suggesting that you should), you could read the introduction and the last few chapters and get the point. But then you'd miss out on what Jared Diamond does best: tell stories.
Like Guns, much of Collapse is propelled by a quasi-Socratic question-and-answer style. The questions are sometimes obvious ("How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?"), sometimes poignant ("What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" "Did he shout 'Jobs, not trees!'" Diamond wonders), sometimes charmingly pointy-headed ("Which year did he go there and in which month? Did he find any stored hay or cheese left?"). The larger ones establish the contours of the book, while the smaller ones fill in the details that render what could be a tedious tome delightful: the fact that 1816 had no summer due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, say, or that there are only 578 U.S. college students studying mining. But there are also the meatier details of Diamond's profession: how to carbon date, how to read tree rings, and, in a hilarious example of mad science, how to date the middens of packrats. (Packrat middens, in case you don't know, are urine balls that, even thousands of years after they're excreted, still taste surprisingly sweet. Yes, taste.)
Diamond's sense of humor and eye for detail breathe life into people, places, and subjects that are foreign to most readers. He's always been good at this -- he can take a community of Easter islanders who've been dead for hundreds of years and make them sound like your next-door neighbors. So when Diamond makes a case study of the people who actually are his next-door neighbors -- the residents of Montana's Bitterroot Valley -- his analysis is particularly compelling.
When Diamond first visited Montana 50 years ago, it was one of the most prosperous and environmentally pristine states in the U.S. Today, it's one of the poorest, with a grim environmental outlook. Global warming, leach mining, tourism, and libertarian values knock heads in a particularly violent way under the Big Sky. From dairy owners and politicians to mine workers and militia members to wealthy Californians who daytrip to Montana in their private jets, Diamond describes a community of such diverse and conflicting interests that miracles are more likely to solve its problems than any kind of compromise.
The trouble is, Montana's problems have to be solved. Its glaciers are disappearing, many of its mines are polluting the land and water, and its old industries -- farming, mining, and ranching -- are bordering on extinction. But the old guard has one idea of what to do about it, the new billionaire landowners another, the farmers another, the miners another, the teachers another, and so on. Diamond has fewer hard and fast answers about what should be done in Montana -- the place he knows best -- than he does about any other case study.
Whether such profound clashes can be resolved, Diamond argues, comes down to that great buzzword of 2004: values. He suggests that the "bad attitude" label that he used for the Vikings could be applied to the libertarian streak in Montanans, the inability of U.S. citizens to learn from past events like, say, the 1973 fuel crisis, and, notably, the reluctance of environmentalists to engage the proponents of business development. "Perhaps the crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold onto, and which ones to discard and replace with new values," Diamond writes. In many ways, the main point of Collapse is to get us to assess the environmental impact of our values -- whatever they are -- and do something about the ones that don't work.
The examples Diamond cites where this has actually happened provide the grace notes to Collapse -- moments when the book becomes less about failure and more about how a society might beat the odds and come out on top. For instance, Diamond devotes a large section of his conclusion to outlining examples of successful collaborations between corporations and environmentalists. If these examples sometimes seem rather rosy, that might be part of Diamond's plan. "My motivation is the practical one of identifying what changes would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead," he writes. To that end, he saves some of his sharpest tongue-lashing for average citizens, who could put more pressure on lawmakers, on corporations, and on themselves (mostly in the form of taxes) to clip the fuse of the environmental time bombs. In a world where public companies are legally required to maximize their profits, the burden is on citizens to make it unprofitable to ruin the environment -- for an individual, a company, or a society as a whole.
For Diamond, there is no project more urgent facing the world today. Late in the book, he puts two maps of the world side by side. One map highlights today's environmental trouble spots, the other highlights political trouble spots. The two maps are identical, and seem to provide striking visual proof of Diamond's thesis: poor environmental management leads to violent conflict and the brink of collapse. Of course, it would be easy to fill a map with politically stable nations that are suffering from environmental troubles (China, the U.S., and Australia, to use some of Diamond's own case studies from the book), and there are places of conflict where environmental troubles are not a significant issue -- Kosovo and Northern Ireland come to mind. Diamond's tendency to present his theories in overly neat packages like these makes Collapse occasionally feel like a game of Sim Society. You might reasonably find yourself thinking, "If I planted just enough forests and remembered to eat my fish and not let my sheep graze for too long, I could be as successful as the Inuit or the shoguns of Japan (barring Godzilla), and would never succumb to the fate of the Vikings or contemporary Rwanda." Considering that Edward Gibbon spent over a thousand pages on the fall of Rome alone, it's easy to see how Diamond's 20-to-40 page thumbnails on societies' declines can seem like caricatures.
It's small soft spots like these maps that have led some critics to call Diamond a fearmonger. But Collapse is more warning than prophecy, and the sheer number of examples Diamond provides -- dozens of versions of what might happen, because it already has -- is what gives the book its admonitory power. Even if its disparate stories never perfectly meld into one convincing argument, the scope of the work is breathtaking. And if I read Diamond's ambitions right, he'd rather Collapse be read as an imperfect call to action than a perfect work of airtight logic. Ultimately, the proof of Collapse's value will not lie in the book itself, but in what people are inspired to do after reading it.
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How will democracy be affected in the future
http://www.wfs.org/trendso06.htm
Government – E Power to the People by Parker Rossman
Communication technologies could help put the public back into public affairs.
Politics can be both the creator of global crises and the path to their solutions. The rise of sophisticated new communications technologies is enabling an improved functioning of democracy and helping build new kinds of political parties that will better represent the wishes of citizens. With these communications tools, political parties could potentially educate the global public on how to deal with massive organized crime, world hunger, global pandemics, piracy, and struggles for peace and justice where genocide threatens.
Effective political parties of the future will need to reach out to each other globally even before humanity achieves successful global governance. This is not necessarily a new idea--the Communist party became a global party in the twentieth century. However, it failed to succeed as a global party because it tried to operate from the top down instead of giving an effective voice to people from the bottom up. Today's political parties do not yet give an adequate voice to all citizens or enlist them in responsible debate on political alternatives. Democracy is thus weakened.
To alter that model and strengthen democracy, political parties could use their new tools to help educate and inspire citizens with new ideas and a sense of enfranchisement.
One place to start, at least in the United States, is political party conventions. Instead of providing a model for future democratic governments, party conventions now resemble pep rallies before a football game rather than forums to educate voters on the pros and cons of political alternatives. After sessions, conventioneers gather to dance and party rather than debate serious issues or learn more about major crises that elected leaders will need to address.
New technologies are already working major transformations in business, medicine, and education, but not enough yet in politics. The speeches of many political candidates rarely discuss the real global crises facing humanity, or offer only simplistic solutions. Many politicians try hard to obscure their ignorance and poor judgments, but this will not be possible in an information-empowered and transparent global society.
For example, now in America a legislative body can be presented with a 400-page legislative bill without adequate time to reflect seriously upon it. Posting such a document online will give not only the legislators adequate time to consider it but also allow all citizens to read it. The document would be indexed and linked to sources of information, helping educate all stakeholders on the issues in the proposed legislation.
In the future, political conventions should electronically listen to voters to learn what most concerns them, what they are angry about, what kinds of legislation they would like to see debated, and how to accomplish the best possible solutions. The parties that are out of power will have to be better prepared to focus on alternative solutions rather than on the failures of the party in power.
The Global Knowledge 97 conference in Toronto, funded by the Canadian government, could serve as a model for future political conventions. It began with a "voices of the poor" survey that interviewed the most miserable of the poor to enlist their help in defining their needs and solutions. For six months prior to the conference, delegates were briefed from an online library of successful projects under way in the world. Similar online conferences on global issues have been sponsored by such organizations as BBC World Service, FAO, WHO, UNICEF, and UNESCO.
The sort of local participation that was used for the Toronto conference will, in the future, greatly enliven global democratic politics. The technologies used for the Toronto conference enabled the participation of people from around the world who could not afford to go to Toronto. Future political parties could use local community telecenters that will turn every neighborhood school into a 24-hour-a-day community electronic education center.
The connections formed at Toronto continued after the conference. All the information stayed on the Internet for continuing further work, so the proposals and decisions made at Toronto could receive adequate follow-up.
Future political party conventions could develop online working groups for key issues, such as health-care legislation. The groups would solicit suggestions and criticisms from all stakeholders--physicians, their patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical corporations--but do so openly and above board, not in after-session arm-twisting, and shared with informed people all over the world.
Many legislators already use electronic voting so that the yeas and nays--and who cast them--can be seen instantly on large monitors or individual PCs. Such electronics will speed up the process at a political convention so that there will be more time for serious education and debate. After a first vote, all the party members at home could be polled for their reactions, with details spelled out on the Internet so they could give informed opinions.
Complex new problems will always keep arising to require growth and change, so vibrant and more-open political parties are needed to contribute their solutions. Otherwise, a single party becomes dominant without checks and balances from a loyal opposition. Or forms of authoritarian government may emerge that lose the confidence of the majority of citizens. Too often now, raising money for propaganda has become more important than engaging the public in intelligent, informed debate. Future political conventions thus need to become "teach-ins" providing education for both the politicians and the public as well as opportunities to debate alternative ways of solving problems.
Town-hall meetings and questionnaires are the traditional tools for parties to gain feedback from the electorate between conventions and elections. But too often the questionnaires are thinly disguised campaign contribution solicitations ("Do you want better schools? health care? environment?"), and town-hall meetings may not draw enough local interest in crucial but esoteric topics, such as building a lifelong education system for everyone on the planet. Online, those who are interested can meet with hundreds or thousands of others; together, they can generate new ideas for their political parties. One recent project that benefited from putting thousands of minds to work online was organized by the World Bank and other global organizations to focus on water shortages and pollution.
Since communication technologies are global, they could be used to share ideas and expand political parties across national boundaries. This may be especially important because major human problems have both local and global components, and many will be solved only on a global level.
Two-way networking could also strengthen the United Nations and help make it more effective. Giving a voice to all the world's people and not just those gathered in New York will encourage participation and large-scale public debate.
Global political leaders need to be educated on how to involve the public in designing plans for decades into the future. Many politicians seem ignorant and narrow-minded because they don't know what is possible with new technologies, especially the Internet. Rather than using new tools to conduct old political business (campaign financing, for instance), future political parties could stress education of the global public. Present efforts are too simplistic to deal with the complexities of global problems.
In an era of globalization, democracy will be strengthened as political parties with similar missions link together across national lines. Future political leaders will also be engaged in a process of self-education and discovery. They will use more comprehensive and sophisticated information bases, models, tools, policy development, assessment procedures, problem-solving skills, international consensus building, and decision-making procedures to address complex and controversial issues.
The bottom line is that, if wisely used, communication technologies will enhance the creative-age political party by enabling political education and facilitating citizen involvement. Perhaps politics was never simple, but its complexity will require ever more sophisticated tools and comprehensive collaboration.
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What about the future energy crisis?
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally on Energy Use by Patrick Tucker
U.S. states push bold fuel conservation programs.
Impatient with the U.S. federal government's lackluster conservation efforts, many states are moving to cleaner energy policies and practices on their own.
According to the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environment, community, and social-justice leaders, states from Oregon to Florida have embraced the Alliance's New Energy For America plan and hope to reap the rewards of greater energy independence and improved public health as a result. The plan calls for a national commitment of more than $300 billion over the decade in order to produce 3 million new jobs and an additional $1.4 trillion in U.S. gross domestic product. The 10-point plan is intended to highlight the best and most feasible policies to reach energy independence within a decade.
Below is the Alliance's framework and some examples of how different states are leading the fight for cleaner energy and the development of alternative energy sources.
1. Promote Advanced Technology and Hybrid Cars. According to the Apollo Alliance, Massachusetts is getting a handle on this issue in a number of ways. Corporations with fleets of more than 50 vehicles receive tax credits of at least 10% of their fleet on alternative fuels. Private citizens who own a hybrid or alternative fuel vehicle receive an income tax deduction and the right to travel in carpool lanes.
2. Invest in More-Efficient Factories. Pennsylvania established a special authority to finance clean, advanced energy projects in that state. Solar energy, wind, low-impact hydropower, geothermal, biomass, landfill gas, fuel cells, coal-mine methane, and demand-reduction measures all qualify for special funding.
3. Encourage High-Performance Buildings. Utah recently updated state building codes for both residential and commercial buildings to meet with International Energy Conservation Code standards. Meanwhile, New York—where consumers spend $32 billion on energy annually—has enacted its own more stringent codes that, experts predict, will save New Yorkers up to $80 million per year in energy costs.
4. Increase Use of Energy-Efficient Appliances. According to the Apollo Alliance, "California's appliance standards are the oldest and most extensive in the United States. They cover 43 different commercial and consumer appliances, 12 of which are not covered by federal law. These standards have saved Californians at least $3 billion a year since they were implemented in 1978."
5. Modernize Energy Infrastructure. Under current pricing schemes, utility companies generate more profit when they sell more units of energy, which provides little incentive to adopt conservation measures. To address the issue, Oregon has established a "revenue cap" for utility companies. "In this way," according to the Apollo Alliance, "the utility's revenues are disconnected from the amount of electricity it distributes, eliminating any reason to discourage customer generation or energy conservation efforts."
6. Expand Renewable Energy Development. Minnesota has enacted a biofuel mandate (the first of its kind in the United States), which stipulates that nearly all diesel fuel sold in that state include at least 2% biodiesel fuel. Hawaii now offers tax credits for ethanol production and offers incentives to use molasses and other agricultural waste as the feedstock for ethanol.
7. Improve Transportation Options. Massachusetts has adopted a "Fix-it-First" policy that allocates money to repairing existing infrastructure options rather than funding new projects in outlying areas. The Massachusetts bill also proposes money for mass-transit improvements. Mass-transit can be particularly effective in reducing unemployment in low-income areas.
Oregon encourages people to bus more and drive less by providing a tax credit for insurance companies that offer mileage-based rates—the less you drive, the better your rate.
8. Reinvest in Smart Urban Growth. In Maryland, Baltimore is promoting smart growth with "transit-oriented development." The city has laid out plans to develop a 110-acre site in the heart of historic midtown. The site will include a cultural center, subway and light-rail stations, and 3,200 new mixed-income residential homes. The plan also includes a four-acre park and an improved transportation system that provides access to and within the site for all modes of transportation.
9. Plan for a Hydrogen Future. Increasing the number of renewable energy systems (e.g. wind turbines, biogas generators, solar arrays, and hydrogen fuel cells) will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help reduce blackouts. New Jersey currently has the most comprehensive set of laws for screening and certifying the reliability of these sorts of dispersed energy-generating systems and for ensuring such systems are properly hooked-up to the larger electrical grid.
10. Preserve Regulatory Protections. The Apollo Alliance plan calls for certified professionals to be in charge of installing and operating renewable-energy and energy-efficiency systems. Nevada promotes the use of certified solar installers to ensure fair wages and quality control. According to the Apollo Alliance, these steps, undertaken by state officials of varying political affiliations, point toward more energy independence in the future, regardless of the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken by the federal government.
"We have the natural resources, technical ingenuity, and manufacturing and other capacity needed to achieve, relatively quickly, far cleaner energy generation and far greater energy efficiency, [which] will also help save the planet from the mounting threat of global warming," the alliance states.
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And how will cities change? Will it really be the End of Suburbia?
http://www.americancity.org/print_version.php
Suburbia: Homeland of the American Future by Joel Kotkin
For the better part of a half-century, America’s leading urbanists, planners, and architects have railed against the growth of suburbia. Variously, the suburbs have been labeled as racist, ugly, wasteful, or just plain boring. Despite the criticism, Americans have continued to vote with their feet for suburban or exurban landscapes. These Americans now include not only whites, but also a growing proportion of recent immigrants, Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. And it’s not just people who are moving - suburbia is also snagging the lion’s share of new economic growth and jobs.
The “action” in America’s development is thus likely to remain heavily concentrated in suburbs and exurbs. Most projections show that the continued increase in the U.S. population and the projected 50 percent increase in space devoted to the built environment by 2030 will largely take place in the sprawling cities of the South and West, areas dominated by low-density, automobile-dependent development of residential, commercial, and industrial space.
For developers, builders, planners, and public officials, the key challenge will be to accommodate this growth in a way that both preserves the advantages of relatively low-density suburban living and addresses legitimate concerns about the environment and about family, cultural, and spiritual life.
Suburbia and Its Critics
Some critics of suburbia hold the wistful conviction that our lost urban past may be recovered through the imposition of planning - for many of these people, something like the Portland, Oregon, model writ large. Others have responded in ?at-out denial, interpreting phenomena, such as the shrinking percentage of people living in the traditional single-family unit, the rise of a hip “creative class,” or the growth of aging empty nesters, as reversing the suburban tide.
In the most extreme cases, suburbia has been linked intimately both to global warming and America’s involvement with the Middle East. James Kunstler takes an apocalyptic approach, warning that suburban places “are liable to dry up and blow away” due to the rising energy prices. “Let the gloating begin,” Kunstler says, predicting a general catastrophe will impact the suburbs, and urges people to leave these places as soon as possible. Kunstler sees suburbia and other aspects of contemporary American life much the way an early Christian might have viewed classical Rome: “I begin to come to the conclusion that we Americans are these days a wicked people who deserve to be punished.” The dismal collapse of suburbia serves this purpose for Kunstler and others who detest the places most Americans live.
The death of suburbs and the resurgence of traditional cities have been predicted before, most notably during the 1970s energy crisis and during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Yet despite blips in urban growth, the longer term pattern could not be more clear. Since 1950, more than 90 percent of all the growth in U.S. metropolitan areas has been in the suburbs. During the 1970s - a period of radically higher energy prices - the suburbanization trend actually intensi?ed as central cities went through one of their most sustained periods of population decline.
Suburbia’s Relentless Rise
Suburbs may have started as places for living, but their ascendancy has come in large part by becoming places of work. By 2000, roughly three out of ?ve jobs in American metropolitan areas were located in suburbs. More than twice as many people in the United States commuted from suburb to suburb, where the job growth was concentrated, than from suburb to city.
Studies have shown this preference for suburbs extends to a wide range of ?rms. Only 11 percent of the nation’s largest companies were headquartered in the suburbs in 1969; a quarter-century later, roughly half had migrated to the periphery. The pattern of 1990s suburban job growth appears to have expanded further since the beginning of the new millennium. By 2000, in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, only 22 percent of people worked within three miles of the city center; another study focusing on areas with high levels of sprawl (such as Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit) showed that more than 60 percent of all regional employment now occurs more than ten miles from the core.
Perhaps most importantly, suburbs have gradually become the preferred location for the burgeoning science and information-based industries, the biggest growth sectors of the modern economy. Since World War II, high-tech ?rms have migrated to the suburbs for many reasons, including space for large, campus-like office parks, less crime, lower taxes, and most critically, the access to educated workers. Areas like the Santa Clara Valley in Northern California, northeastern New Jersey, and the suburban ring around Boston, have provided ideal locations for aerospace, computer, and information industries.
These economic trends have reordered the fundamental relationship between the urban core and its hinterland. For much of the 20th century, the city remained the prime focus of business activity, and so location close to the core was advantageous for proximity to other business activities. Today, central city living appeals more for lifestyle reasons than economic ones.
The Overstated Urban Renaissance
Although the downtown residential “boom” in some areas is heartening, it is important to keep it in perspective: the overwhelming demographic evidence suggests it pales in comparison to growth on the fringes. In a Brookings Institution study of 45 metropolitan areas spread across the country, University of Pennsylvania professor Eugenie Birch calculated that total growth in housing units between 1970 and 2000 was about nine percent, or approximately 35,000 units; in contrast, construction of suburban housing units almost doubled to 13 million units during the same period. In the late-1990s, a period in which some core cities enjoyed their ?rst population gains in decades, many more people headed out to the suburbs than went the other way. This pattern held even among the 25-to-34 age group, considered the prime market for urban living.
And for many urban centers - including such relatively attractive places as Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Boston - population actually declined in the ?rst half of this decade. Out-migration has accelerated in other cities, and in some, growth has slowed considerably from pre-2000 levels. Indeed, according to a 2001 report from the Brookings Institution and the Fannie Mae Foundation, the total projected growth for all major downtowns through 2010 is less than was the growth in the sprawling Riverside-San Bernardino metro area east of Los Angeles in 2004 alone.
Nearly every major region of the U.S. in this sense is undergoing suburbanization, even if the downtown is growing. In Houston, for example, there has been much talk about a downtown housing surge. But the entire inner ring of the city - which extends well beyond the central core - accounted for barely six percent of new units; the vast majority of the growth took place in the region’s far-?ung suburban areas.
The “Universal Aspiration”
The biggest reason for these patterns is not the “conspiracy” of big oil and freeway builders oft cited by enviro-activists and more radical New Urbanists, but rather what the Los Angeles urbanist Edgardo Contini called “the universal aspiration” - not only in America but in almost all rich countries - to own a piece of land, where families may live in relative comfort and privacy.
One clear indication of the vitality of the “universal aspiration” has been the surprising resilience of the single-family home market. Even in the last recession, the number of single-family homes increased. To the surprise of many forecasters and the U.S. Census Bureau itself, instead of dropping with the aging of the baby boomers, single-family home construction surged to levels not seen since the 1970s and twelve percent above those of the 1980s. Not only were more homes built in the late-1990s than expected, but the size of single-family homes actually grew, with the median expanding from 1,605 square feet in 1985 to over 2,100 square feet in 2001. Analysts such as Al Ehrbar suggest that demographers at the time had not only failed to see that many boomers would buy houses later in life, but they also underestimated the total prime homebuyer market - 25 to 34 year olds - by more than 4 million.
The “Other” Suburbanites
Perhaps the most critical shift in sustaining the single-family home, however, has to do with immigrants. More than any demographic group, they are shaping the American future: by 2015, nearly one in three children in America will be an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. Immigrants’ desire for homeownership is often overwhelming and has led a majority of them to seek homes in the suburbs. Seventy percent of minorities in the immigrant-rich Los Angeles-Long Beach area, for instance, live in suburbs. Fast-growing, sprawling markets such as Fort Lauderdale, Riverside-San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Orlando have particularly high rates of immigrant homeownership. The new pattern of immigration also can be seen in places like greater Washington, D.C., in economic and demographic terms the most dynamic region along the eastern seaboard. A recent Brookings study noted that 87 percent of the D.C. area’s foreign migrants live in the suburbs.
Though suburbs are often seen as all-white, middle-class bastions, many suburbs, such as Fort Bend County, Texas, and small cities like Walnut, in the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles, have among the most diverse populations in the nation: these places are majority-minority, though no single minority by itself composes over half the population. “If a multiethnic society is working out in America,” suggests demographer James Allen, “it will be worked out in places like Walnut. The future of America is in the suburbs.”
Immigrants aren’t the only populations changing the nature of suburbia. Evidence from the 2000 Census also revealed that singles, non-traditional families, and empty nesters - widely reported to be moving from suburbs back to the inner city - grew far more rapidly in the suburbs than in the cities. In fact, largely due to the growth of singles and aging parents, there are now more non-families in the suburbs than traditional families.
Of these groups, the “empty nester” baby boomer may prove the most important to shaping suburbia. The baby boom generation far outnumbers its successor, Generation X, by roughly 76 million to 41 million. Due largely to this group, by 2030 more than one in ?ve Americans will be over the age of 65. Where these people - demographer Bill Frey calls them “downshifting boomers” - end up will prove critical in shaping future patterns of new residential and commercial development.
Roughly three-quarters of these “down-shifters” appear to be sticking pretty close to the suburbs where most of them have settled, according to Sandi Rosenbloom, a professor of urban planning and gerontology at the University of Arizona. Those that do migrate, her studies suggest, tend to head further out into the suburban periphery, not back towards the old downtown. “Everybody in this business wants to talk about the odd person who moves downtown, but it’s basically a ‘man bites dog story’,” Rosenbloom observes. “Most people retire in place. When they move, they don’t move downtown; they move to the fringes.”
The reasons they are staying put vary. Some have job commitments or need to stay close to their children or grandchildren; roughly 40 percent, according to one survey, expect their kids to move back in with them at some point. These people are also used to a suburban lifestyle and its amenities. For the most part, they are not acculturated to the density, congestion, and noise of inner-city life. “They don’t want to move to Florida, and they want to stay close to the kids,” suggests Jeff Lee, CEO of a prominent Washington, D.C., real estate, architecture, and planning ?rm. “What they are looking for is a funky suburban development - funky but safe.”
Looking Ahead: Suburbia to 2030 and Beyond
Suburbanization - and even ever greater sprawl - must be accepted as the future. Attempts to stomp out or control outward movement, as Portland tried, have not only failed but have driven settlement even further out beyond the areas of control. By way of proof, during the 1990s over 80 percent of all population growth in greater Portland took place in the suburbs; since 2000 it has been closer to 90 percent. Mass transit, the other linchpin of the Portland “Smart Growth” legend, may also be less of a triumph than reported. Between 1986 and 2001, according to the most recent Texas Transportation Institute study, greater Portland has seen the biggest jump in congestion of any of the nation’s 75 largest metro areas. More people rode the rails, but many more, it appears, have also decided to drive alone, perhaps in large part because they are living and often working further out.
The real issue is not so much how to prevent suburban growth, but how to make it more humane and capable of accommodating an increasingly diverse population. One key solution might lie in the growth of telecommuting, which could allow more suburbanites to work close to or at home. Already 20 million people work part-time or full-time from their residences. Some new suburban developments, such as Ladera Ranch in southern Orange County, have adapted their ?oor plans to serve the mixed uses of residence and business - by incorporating separate entrances for business clients, for instance. Suburban historian Tom Martinson believes the Ladera plan will “be in the history books in twenty years” because it anticipates “an incredible change in the way we live and work.”
At the same time, the increasing decentralization of economic activity may spur the development of ever more self-sufficient “suburban villages.” We can see this model emerging in new communities such as Valencia, California, or the Woodlands, outside Houston, which have developed their own successful town centers complete with thriving cultural and religious establishments. Scores of older suburbs have also used new commercial and cultural amenities to revitalize old town centers, such as Naperville, Illinois; Fullerton, California; and Bethesda, Maryland. Viewed from a long-term perspective, these places may represent not so much a rejection of city life, but a rede?nition of what urban life is about - and where and how it takes place.
In this sense, we need to look at current suburbia not as a ?nished product, but something beginning to evolve from its Deadwood phase. During this evolution, our ancient sense of the city still has much to teach the suburbs, notably about the need for community, identity, the creation of “sacred space,” and a closer relation between workplace and home life. Of course, the emerging suburbs won’t be able to duplicate the forms of our great historical cities, but they will borrow from them as new public spaces are built and a sense of civic identity is established. In this, the suburbs can carry something of cities-past in their substance as they contribute to a new chapter in urban history, one that we today can play a role in forging.
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How will the American worker fare in the future?
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/06/04/richard-florida/the-future-of-the-american-workforce-in-the-global-creative-economy/
The Future of the American Workforce in the Global Creative Economy
By Richard Florida
In March of 2003, I met Peter Jackson, Academy award-winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson did something unlikely in Wellington, a city of roughly 400,000: He built one of the most advanced filmmaking complexes in the world—a “global talent magnet,” he called it.
There, he could attract the best cinematographers, sound technicians, computer graphics artists, model builders, and editors from around the globe. As we walked past a wall map with pins showing the studio workers’ native countries, the head of digital animation joked that the organization looked more like the U.N. than a film studio. Jackson told me his key lure was to offer exciting, challenging work with a secure future in a city with abundant natural beauty, affordable housing, and an outstanding quality of life for people of nearly every income bracket.
Jackson's accomplishment in tiny Wellington hasn't factored into any of the recent debates over business competitiveness, jobs or economic growth—but it should.
American economic experts and policy-makers are rightly preoccupied with the emergence of behemoths like India and China, which offer huge markets, capable workforces, and cost advantages. Unfortunately, they overlook a subtler but even more profound shift in the nature of global competition.
In the past two and a half decades, this shift has taken us from the older industrial model to a new economic paradigm, where knowledge, innovation, and creativity are key. At the cutting edge of this shift is the creative sector of the economy: science and technology, art and design, culture and entertainment, and the knowledge-based professions.
The U.S. is at the forefront of this global creative economy. Over the next decade, it’s projected to add 10 million more creative sector jobs, according to the newest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the present rate of increase, creative jobs alone will soon eclipse the total number of jobs in all of manufacturing. Already, more than 40 million Americans work in the creative sector, which has grown by 20 million jobs since the 1980s. It accounts for more than $2 trillion USD—or nearly half—of all wages and salaries paid in the U.S.
Such remarkable job growth goes far beyond technology and engineering. While the U.S. economy will add 950,000 computer jobs and another 195,000 in engineering, the biggest gains by far will be in health care and education, which will add more than 3.5 million. Jobs for college professors alone are projected to increase by more than half a million. Arts, music, culture, and entertainment will contribute some 400,000 new jobs. That’s twice as many as engineering.
The rise of this global creative economy changes the rules of international competition in four crucial ways.
First, it makes talent the fundamental factor of production. Economic advantage no longer depends on natural resources, raw materials, trade of goods and services, giant factories, or even growing consumer markets. The real source of value creation, and therefore of international competitiveness, is creative talent. Put simply, the places that can produce and mobilize their own creative workers, and attract creative talent from outside, win.
Attracting such talent, from inventor-entrepreneurs David Sarnoff and Andy Grove, to scientists Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, was the key to America’s edge in science and technology throughout the 20th century. Today, this global talent pool continues to help drive U.S. growth, with cutting-edge companies from Google and Yahoo to E-bay and Sun Microsystems all founded or co-founded by foreign-born Americans.
But as Jackson’s success in Wellington illustrates, places around the world have stepped up their efforts to skim off talent. China and India are stepping up their efforts to attract back their own top scientists and entrepreneurs, while Canada, Australia, and many European and Scandinavian nations bolster their efforts to attract leading graduate students, scholars and cultural creatives from around the world.
The U.S. should not be worried about losing out on the low-cost, low-skilled end of the global labor market; it should be worried about other countries slowly chipping away at its ability to grow, attract, and retain top creative talent. Any attempt at immigration reform has to make America more friendly, and certainly not any less friendly, to this crucial source of talent and economic advantage
Second, the new playing field makes regions the fundamental economic and social organizing unit of the world economy. True, technology enables the diffusion and decentralization of economic activity, leading to what Tom Freidman likes to call the “flattening” of the world economy. But the tremendous productivity and creativity gains that spring from high density give shape to a powerful counterforce: geographic clustering and concentration.
As a result, the cutting edge of the world economy is taking shape around a relatively small number of regions—places that Bill Gates has aptly dubbed “IQ magnets.” Some of these are enormous and established creative hubs such as New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Others are centers of science and technology (the San Franciscos and Bostons of the world), powerful regional centers (think Taipei and Singapore) and diverse talent magnets (from Sydney and Melbourne to Amsterdam and Dublin, Toronto and Vancouver).
This clustering of talent is just as prevalent in the emerging economies, especially India and China, where economic and technological activity is becoming far more concentrated than in the advanced world. A small number of booming mega-regions like Bangalore, New Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou are sucking talent from the countryside, connecting to the world economy, and leaving the rest of their countries behind. Within these regions, too—as within U.S. metros—the economic divide between high-skilled and low-skilled is growing.
Third, the very forces of concentration fueling the growth of the global creative economy are also creating powerful new social, cultural, and political divides in the United States. UCLA economist Ed Leamer has dubbed this division “geeks vs. grunts.” But it’s more aptly seen as a growing divide between those who enjoy higher-paying higher-skill work in the creative sector and those who do lower-wage lower-skill service work.
It’s no coincidence that these are the two sectors of the U.S. economy enjoying rapid growth. Alongside its 10 million new creative sector jobs, the U.S. economy will add another 5 million, mostly low-paying, service jobs over the coming decade—including 735,000 retail salespeople, 550,000 food service workers, 470,000 customer service representatives, 440,000 janitors, 375,000 waiters and waitresses, and 230,000 landscapers and groundskeepers. Impressive figures: until one considers that these jobs pay a third of those in the Creative Economy, and half of what manufacturing workers make.
As the U.S. loses another half-million high-paying manufacturing jobs over the coming decade to automation, improved efficiency, and outsourcing, its labor market is essentially cleaving into two distinct economic classes: high-skilled, high-paying creative work and much lower paying, low skill work in the service economy.
The task facing economic leaders of the 21st century is not simply how to spur technology and innovation, but how to recreate the large pool of high-paying but relatively low-skill jobs that were once the hallmark of our broad middle-class society.
Since not everyone can be a scientist, artist, or professional, and since a large number of manufacturing jobs simply will not be coming back, the best strategy may be to elevate the millions of new service-sector jobs our economy is generating into secure, respectable, high-paying jobs. When I asked a group of my students whether they would prefer to work in good, high-paying jobs in a machine tool factory or lower-paying temporary jobs in a hair salon, they overwhelmingly chose the latter, for its more psychologically rewarding, creative work. Indeed, while vocational training programs for machinists go begging for students, cosmetology classes are overfilled.
The point is not that hair-cutting jobs are somehow inherently better than factory jobs, but that our only choice for avoiding a two-class society is to make these sorts of service economy jobs better, higher-paying middle class jobs. And these personal service jobs—manicuring, landscaping, massaging, and so on—are the ones least likely to be vulnerable to outsourcing.
There are those who say that market forces conspire to keep wages for these jobs low, and others who say that the only way to improve them is with massive government intervention. But companies all across the United States and the world—from Starbucks and Whole Foods to Target and the Container Store—are devising strategies to upgrade service work. They are bumping up pay and benefits, and enabling employees to use their creative talents to serve customers better, not to mention add to the bottom line.
Perhaps the best example is Best Buy, which employs 90,000 people and is the world’s largest specialty retailer of consumer electronics, with annual sales of some $25 billion. Taking a page from Toyota’s much-lauded management system, Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson has made it his company’s stated mission to provide an “inclusive, innovative work environment designed to unleash the power of all of our people as they have fun while being the best.”
Employees are encouraged to improve upon the company’s work processes and techniques in order to make the workplace more productive and enjoyable while increasing sales and profits. In many cases, a small change made on the salesroom floor—by a teenage sales rep re-conceiving a Vonage display or an immigrant salesperson acting on a thought to increase outreach, advertising, and service to non-English-speaking communities—has been implemented nationwide, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in added revenue.
Best Buy’s Anderson understands that harnessing the full power of the Creativity Economy means more that implementing new technology and designing captivating new products. He likes to say that the great promise of the creative era is that, for the first time in our history, the further development of our economic competitiveness hinges on the fuller development of human creative capabilities. In other words, our economic success increasingly turns on harnessing the creative talents of each and every human being, regardless of sex, age, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Fourth, the creative economy is giving rise to even more extreme divides globally between the relatively small number of advantaged regions and the rest of the world. Friedman writes that: “You no longer have to emigrate in order to innovate.” But for the vast majority of the world’s population, that doesn’t hold true. Even as world-class scientists return to exploding creative centers in China and India, the poorest countries and regions around the world continue to export more than half of their scientific and engineering talent to the advanced economies, according to a recent World Bank study. Economic disparity is rising as powerhouse creative regions like San Francisco register rates of income and housing inequality unseen since the 1920s. Incomes in Beijing and Shanghai have risen at three and a half times those of rural China.
So while it’s crucial to spur investment in science and engineering, and to lessen the growing gaps in the international technology talent base, business and government leaders must also recognize that the leading sources of job growth in the creative economy come from sectors outside of high-tech. To continue down the current path will mean far greater regional concentrations of wealth, mounting economic inequality, growing class divides, and eventually worsening political tension and unrest within countries and on a global scale.
It’s time to wake up to the new realities of the creative economy, and stop developing policy for a bygone industrial age. Our only path forward is to make the creative economy work for us—by undertaking regional, national, and global efforts to harness the creativity of each and every human being, aligning the further development of human creative capabilities with the further growth and development of our economies. They did it in Wellington; the challenge of our time is how to do it not just in one region or even one country, but on a truly global scale.—
Richard Florida is the Hirst Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and the author of The Flight of the Creative Class
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Some more thoughts on the global future ….
http://www.infoforhealth.org/pr/m15/m15chap3.shtml
Feeding a Future World
Will there be enough food to go around? Rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and inadequate international food distribution raise this question. About 2 billion people lack food security—defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as a "state of affairs where all people at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life"
In many countries over the past two decades growth in the food supply has lagged behind population growth. Worldwide, the grain harvest increased about 1% annually between 1990 and 1997, a rate of growth substantially slower than the average population growth rate in the developing world, at 1.6%.
In 64 of 105 developing countries studied by FAO between 1985 and 1995, food production lagged behind population growth. Among regions, Africa fared the worst during this period. Food production per person fell in 31 of 46 African countries
Moreover, water shortages are becoming constraints on development in general and on food production in particular. While population tripled in the last century, water withdrawals grew sixfold .
Countries fall into three groups: those that have the agricultural capacity to be self-sufficient in food production; those that are not self-sufficient in food production but have enough other resources to import adequate supplies of food; and (3) those that are not self-sufficient in food production and do not have the financial resources needed to fill the gap with imports.
In the first group, the agriculturally self-sufficient countries are some European countries plus Australia, Canada, and the United States. These countries have sufficient cropland to meet most of their own food needs now and probably for many decades to come. In fact, many of these countries produce substantial surpluses of food, which they export . They probably could produce enough to meet the food needs of all food-deficit countries, if those countries could afford to buy the food. Countries in the second group, food importers, include Japan, Singapore, some European countries, and the oil-producing states of the Arabian Gulf.
The third group consists of the "low-income food-deficit countries," to use the term coined by FAO. The low-income food-deficit countries comprise most of the developing world, including nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa .
Today, about 3.8 billion people-nearly two-thirds of the world's population-live in low-income food-deficit countries. In these countries millions know hunger, malnutrition, and even starvation when harvests fail, unless other countries provide emergency food aid in time. Worldwide, about 825 million people are chronically malnourished, according to a recent estimate by FAO/
Many low-income food-deficit countries have among the world's highest population growth rates. By 2050 about 6 billion people will live in countries that have food deficits today.
Environmental Problems of Food-Deficit Countries
In many low-income food-deficit countries the situation is worsening. Food production capacities are deteriorating (75). These countries face a number of serious constraints to achieving food security:
Limited arable land. Most fertile land already is under cultivation. Most uncultivated land is marginal, with poor soils and either too little rainfall or too much. Without massive technological improvements or substantial investments from external sources, increases in food production in low-income food-deficit countries will soon have to come from existing agricultural land—thus putting ever more pressure on its productive capacity.
Shrinking family farms. In most developing countries, family farms are divided into smaller and smaller parcels for each new, larger generation of heirs. Rapid population growth has shrunk the average family farm by half over the past four decades. In 57 developing countries surveyed by FAO in the early 1990s, over half of all farms were less than one hectare in size, not enough to feed the average rural family with four to six children. In India three-fifths of all farms are less than one hectare in size. Worldwide, an estimated 420 million people live in countries that have less than .07 hectares of cultivated land per person (59).
Land degradation. Population pressures on arable land contribute to the land's degradation, as more and more marginal land is brought into cultivation to feed more and more people . Land degradation claims 5 million to 7 million hectares of farmland each year. When soils are overworked, wind and water erode them faster. Soils also can become poisoned from improper irrigation techniques and from improper use of agricultural chemicals. Moreover, in most developing countries vast amounts of agricultural land are being lost as cities expand
Nearly 2 billion hectares of crop and grazing land are suffering from moderate to severe soil degradation—an area about the size of Canada and the US combined . In some places fertile topsoil is being depleted 300 times faster than nature can replenish it . In Kazakhstan, for instance, nearly half of the cropland will be lost by 2025, according to the country's Institute of Soil Management.
Irrigation problems. Badly planned and poorly built irrigation systems have reduced yields on one-half of all irrigated land, according to a 1995 estimate by FAO . Irrigation is key to agricultural production. Although only 17% of all cropland is under irrigation, irrigated croplands produce one-third of the world's food supply.
Roughly 70% of all water withdrawn for human use goes to irrigate crops. Yet less than half of all water withdrawn for irrigation reaches the crops. Most soaks into unlined canals, leaks out of pipes, or evaporates on its way to the fields . Although some of the water "lost" in inefficient irrigation systems returns to streams or aquifers, where it can be tapped again, water quality invariably is degraded by pesticides, fertilizers, and salts that run off the land .
Salt buildup in soil has severely damaged 30 million hectares of the world's 255 million hectares of irrigated land, FAO estimates. A combination of salinization and waterlogging affects another 80 million hectares . The world's irrigated croplands may actually be shrinking at a time when they should be expanding to meet demand.
What Can Be Done?
Achieving food security means addressing several related issues: slowing population growth, increasing food production, and safeguarding the environment. Since, of course, not every country can be self-sufficient in food production, international trade will become increasingly important in the future to achieve food security worldwide. In low-income food-deficit countries slower population growth would allow time to achieve food security.
To provide food security for all of the 8 billion people projected by 2025, the world would have to double food production over current levels. Achieving this goal would require a second "Green Revolution" in agriculture, like the one in the 1960s that boosted food production in the face of population increases.
Recent years have brought some promising developments. These include a new strain of super rice capable of boosting yields by 25% , improved varieties of corn that could increase yields perhaps by 40% and that could be grown on marginal land , and a new blight-resistant potato .
To achieve food security, the food-deficit countries must reverse the current course of land degradation and begin to manage soil and water resources on a sustainable basis. There are many ways to protect agricultural land. In many areas, for example, irrigated land could be managed better by using hand pumps and traditional water harvesting techniques rather than relying on large-scale automated sprinkler systems .Specific solutions will vary from one area to another. Virtually everywhere, however, protecting the environment will help produce more food to feed more people.
Freshwater: Lifeblood of the Planet
Demand for freshwater is rising rapidly as population grows and becomes more urban, and as water use per capita increases. Some areas already face shortages, and more will face them in the future unless steps are taken to manage water resources better.
The supply of freshwater on earth is finite. Thus, as population grows, there is less water per capita. In 1989 there were about 9,000 cubic meters of freshwater per person available for human use . By 2000, because of population growth, that amount dropped to about 7,800 cubic meters per person . If the world's population grows to over 8 billion in 2025 as expected, the amount of water per capita will be just 5,100 cubic meters .
Even this amount of freshwater per capita would be enough to meet human needs if it were evenly distributed. But available freshwater supplies are not distributed evenly around the globe, throughout the seasons, or from year to year. Two-thirds of the world's population—around 4 billion people—live in areas receiving only one-quarter of the world's annual rainfall.
Throughout much of the world the renewable supply of freshwater—the amount available year after year on a sustainable basis—comes in the form of seasonal rains that run off too quickly for efficient use . India, for example, gets 90% of its annual rainfall during the summer monsoon season, which lasts from June to September. For the other eight months the country gets barely a drop .
Water Shortages
Already, population growth and rising use per capita are creating water shortages in many countries. A country is said to experience water stress when annual water supplies drop below 1,700 cubic meters per person. When supplies drop below 1,000 cubic meters per person per year, the country faces water scarcity for all or part of the year. Swedish hydrologist Malin Falkenmark developed these concepts of stress and scarcity to gauge current and future water needs against available supplies.
In 1995 Population Action International (PAI) adapted Falkenmark's concepts to calculate water stress and scarcity in countries around the world. PAI updated this estimate in 1997, based on population projections for 2025 and 2050. The results are startling: In 1995, 31 countries—home to nearly half a billion people—regularly faced either water stress or water scarcity. In 2025, 48 countries, with about 3 billion people, are projected to face water shortages . The 20 countries of the Near East and North Africa face the worst prospects. In fact, the Near East "ran out of water" as long ago as 1972—in the sense that since then the region has withdrawn more water from its rivers and aquifers than is being replenished by nature . Currently, for example, Jordan and Yemen withdraw 30% more water from groundwater supplies every year than is replenished; Israel's annual water use exceeds the renewable supply by 15% .
Africa also faces serious water problems. Already, over 200 million Africans live in water-stressed or water-scarce countries. By 2025 the number will rise to about 700 million, of whom over half will live in countries that face severe shortages for most of the year.
If water stress and water scarcity were calculated for regions instead of countries, parts of many other countries would be considered at risk. For example, while periodic flooding afflicts the southern part of China, the northern part faces chronic water shortages . China's freshwater supplies have been estimated to be capable of supporting 650 million people on a sustainable basis—only about half the country's current population.
Competing for water supplies. When water supplies become scarce, competition can become intense. In recent years withdrawals of freshwater have grown in all categories of demand—for irrigated agriculture, industrial use, and municipal (household) purposes . Freshwater demand for municipal use is expected to outpace the capacity of many cities to provide it (237). In Bangkok, Dhaka, Lagos, and other rapidly growing cities, water theft has become widespread
Because more than 200 major river systems cross national borders, cooperation can help avoid international conflict. For example, in November 1999 Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan agreed in principle on a strategy for using the Nile River "for the common benefit of all the river basin states" . If implemented, the agreement—which covers all uses of the river, for irrigation, hydropower, drainage, drought and flood control, and pollution prevention—would be a breakthrough in cooperative use of a vital natural resource.
Competing with nature. A substantial portion of the total freshwater supply is needed to sustain marshes, rivers, coastal wetlands, and the millions of species they shelter . As humanity withdraws more freshwater for direct use, less is available to maintain wetland ecosystems . Over 20% of the approximately 10,000 freshwater fish species in the world are either endangered or are already going extinct because their habitats are being threatened .
Wetland ecosystems are economically valuable. Robert Costanza of the University of Maryland estimates the global value of wetlands at close to US$5 trillion a year. This amount reflects the value of wetlands as flood regulators, waste treatment plants, wildlife habitats, fisheries production, and recreation .
The world's 6 billion people are already appropriating just over half of all the accessible freshwater contained in rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers. By 2025 humankind's share will be at least 70%. This conservative estimate reflects the impact of population growth alone. If per capita consumption of water resources continues to rise at its current rate, humankind could be using over 90% of all available freshwater within 25 years, leaving just 10% for the rest of the world's species.
What Can Be Done?
Caught between growing demand for freshwater on one hand and limited and increasingly polluted supplies on the other, many countries face difficult choices. Finding solutions requires responses at local, national, and international levels-a "Blue Revolution" that focuses on integrated management of watersheds and shared water basins/.
Community-led initiatives to manage water resources better can help urban dwellers gain access to safe, piped water supplies, thus improving sanitation and public health. Governments can develop national water management policies that not only improve supply but also manage demand better with appropriate pricing—for example, ending subsidies that in effect encourage overuse (221).
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And for those wanting a longer term view of the future:
http://www.scotese.com/future.htm
That’s all folks
Colin
