The Race Between Tipping Points: Can We Save Our Civilization?

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The government of Bangladesh had to subsidize rice in 2008 when the cost of food skyrocketed. These women are buying rice from a border guard. PAVEL RAHMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

To mark our 40th anniversary, we asked our longtime contributing editor and sustainable development expert, Lester Brown, to look ahead and share his assessment of the most significant trends that are affecting our world today. — MOTHER

The Bad News: 10 Troubling Trends

I’ve been studying global environmental issues for decades, and for perspective, I read about ancient civilizations that declined and collapsed. Most often, shrinking food supplies were responsible for their demise. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil — the result of a design flaw in their irrigation system — brought down wheat and barley yields, and eventually the civilization itself. For some other early civilizations that have collapsed, it was soil erosion that triggered their decline.

Does our civilization face a similar fate? Unless we can reverse the environmental trends that are undermining the world food economy, the answer may be yes. Here are the 10 greatest environmental threats I think we face today.

1. Soil Erosion. Erosion now exceeds new soil formation on about 30 percent of the world’s cropland. In some countries, it has reduced grain production by half or more over the past three decades. Kazakhstan, for example, has abandoned 40 percent of its grain land since 1980. Space photos of continent-sized dust storms coming out of the Sahelian region of Africa and northwestern China show us that the loss of topsoil is expanding.

2. Falling Water Tables. Water tables are now falling in countries that together contain half the world’s people. A World Bank study shows that 175 million people in India are being fed by overpumping aquifers. The comparable number for China is about 130 million people. As the wells go dry, the food supply will tighten in both countries.

3. Population Growth. Since 1950, world population has more than doubled. Stated differently, population growth from 1950 to 2009 exceeded that during the preceding 11,000 years since agriculture began. Today’s world population of 6.7 billion is growing by 80 million per year. In many countries, populations have simply outrun their resource base. The result is soil erosion, falling water tables, deteriorating grasslands, collapsing fisheries and shrinking forests. No civilization has ever survived the destruction of its natural support systems, nor will ours.

4. Melting Ice Sheets. The melting of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, combined with thermal expansion of the oceans, could raise sea levels by up to 6 feet during this century. Every rice-growing river delta in Asia is threatened. Even a 3-foot rise would devastate the rice harvest in the Mekong Delta, which produces more than half the rice in Vietnam, the world’s No. 2 rice exporter. A World Bank map shows that a 3-foot rise in sea level would inundate half the rice land in Bangladesh, home to 160 million people.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print