Toward a Troubled 21st Century

A presidential panel finds the global outlook extremely bleak

If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now... Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.

By now such grim warnings have become all too familiar. But this particular forecast is different. For the first time, the U.S. Government has added its full voice to the chorus of environmental Cassandras deeply distressed about the future. In an 800-page study issued last week, a presidential panel warns that time is fast running out for averting a global calamity. Says the report: "Unless nations collectively and individually take bold and imaginative steps ... the world must expect a troubled entry into the 21st century."

Three years in the making under the joint auspices of the State Department and the President's Council on Environmental Quality, The Global 2000 Report to the President represents the accumulated findings, statistics and analyses of 13 Government agencies, from the Department of Agriculture to the CIA. On the whole, the conclusions are hardly startling. Indeed, as compared with such doomsday forecasts as that of the Club of Rome's 1972 The Limits to Growth, which predicted mass starvation, political chaos and general catastrophe by the middle of the next century, the study is cautiously restrained, even muted, giving its warnings more impact in a way. The report's highlights:

> By the year 2000, at current and projected birth rates, world population will have risen to 6.35 billion people from 4 billion in 1975. Most of this growth will be in the poorer, less developed countries (LDCs), mostly in their urban slums and shantytowns. Mexico City, already crowded with more than 10 million people, will swell to more than 31 million people; Calcutta will teem with nearly 20 million, and more than 15 million will jam Bombay and Cairo, Jakarta and Seoul. However, in a chilling Malthusian hedge, the study adds: "In the years ahead, lack of food for the urban poor, lack of jobs, and increasing illness and misery may slow and alter the trend."

> While food production is expected to rise 90% over 1970 levels in the next 20 years, assuming no deterioration in climate, most of this harvest of plenty will go to countries that are already well fed. That will mean calamitous scarcity in the Third World, which will slip farther behind the industrialized countries in per capita gross national product as well ($587 vs. $8,485 in 2000 compared with $382 vs. $4,325 in 1975, as measured in 1975 dollars). The number of malnourished will rise from an estimated half-billion people in the mid-1970s to 1.3 billion by the year 2000. Starvation will claim increasing numbers of babies born in less developed countries, and many of the survivors will grow up physically and mentally stunted.

> For wealthy industrialized nations, the study predicts adequate supplies of oil and other energy sources through 1990, but even before then the poor nations will experience serious shortages, with the outlook particularly bleak for the one-quarter of humanity dependent primarily on wood for fuel. Already the relentless quest for firewood in places like Africa's Sahel and the foothills of the Himalaya--to say nothing of such commercial exploitation as the denuding of the Amazon rain forest --has meant the annual loss of enough trees to forest half the state of California. One side effect: as the trees are slashed away, the ground loses its ability to retain water, the land becomes increasingly arid and precious topsoil is lost. Shortages of drinking water will become chronic in many parts of the world.

> There will also be other environmental nightmares. As man invades their wild habitats and pollutants rain down on them, 500,000 to 2 million species of plants and animals may die off in the next two decades. Rare plants needed to create new blight-and pest-resistant hybrids will vanish. Paradoxically, some environmental problems may be the consequence of the best of intentions. As farmers try to squeeze more food out of their fields by irrigation, the soil's salinity will increase, thus impairing its ability to sustain crops. Less predictable, but no less frightening: a possible global heating from the growing volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--expected to rise a third over preindustrial levels by century's end from continued burning of fossil fuels.

For its catalogue of depressing scenarios, the report admits, there are "no quick fixes." Says the panel: "The only solutions ... are complex and long-term [because the difficulties] are inextricably linked to some of the most perplexing and persistent problems in the world--poverty, injustice and social conflict." But, in an optimistic conclusion, the study adds that disaster can be prevented through "vigorous, determined new initiatives" by the nations of the world, with the U.S. taking a strong leadership role and setting policy examples such as conserving fuel.

Some critics noted that the worst effects forecast by the study may be eased by unanticipated technological breakthroughs before the year 2000. By contrast, 17 environmental organizations, in an otherwise laudatory statement, noted that the report painted perhaps too bright a picture. The Carter Administration quickly made clear that it attaches considerable importance to the study. It was distributed to all foreign embassies in Washington, and President Carter announced creation of a Cabinet-level task force, under Gus Speth, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, to develop a course of action for mitigating the global threats envisioned in the study.

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