Pressures on the Planet

Worldwatch Institute has taken another look at the State of the World and offered some urgent advice on basic, really basic, threats to national security.

The world can no longer afford both more guns and more butter, but most leaders are ignoring the hard choices that must be made and they are ignoring the numerous security threats “with which military forces cannot cope,” the 1986 report concludes.

“The new sources of danger arise from oil depletion, soil erosion, land degradation, shrinking forests, deteriorating grasslands, and climate alteration,” Lester R. Brown, president of Worldwatch, writes in the culminating chapter, “Redefining National Security.”

“As pressures on natural systems and resources build, as the sustainable yield thresholds of local biological support systems are breached, and as oil reserves are depleted, governments can no longer both boost expenditures on armaments and deal effectively with the forces that are undermining their economies,” he writes. “Whether they occur with forests, soils, fisheries, or water supplies, ecological deficits, like fiscal ones, represent a borrowing from the future . . . The price for our shortsighted choice to live beyond our means will be paid by our children and grandchildren.”

This is the third annual “State of the World” report by Worldwatch. Like its predecessors, it carries a message of importance to policy planners of all nations. The 1986 edition has a particular relevance because of its analysis of the breadth of the security issue at a time when the issue is being debated in the United States almost solely on the basis of levels of armaments deemed adequate to guard the nation. Clearly, the United States, as other nations, has not noticed that bombs are not the only threat to its security.”

The most obvious remedy is reduction in arms spending. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have argued the impossibility of cutbacks until new international agreements are fashioned. Most other nations, including impoverished Third World nations, are following that example and arming at any cost. But there are exceptions, Brown found. The most conspicuous is China which, despite its common frontier with the Soviet Union, “has unilaterally decided to reduce military expenditures, cutting them from 14% of GNP (gross national product) a decade ago to 7.5% in 1985,” while making massive new investments in agriculture, consumer goods, reforestation, desert reclamation and family planning. “In effect,” Brown reports, “China is defining security in economic and ecological terms.”

The report does not argue that solutions will be easy. “Blocking external aggression may be relatively simple compared with stopping the deterioration of life-support systems,” he says. But the search for solutions will be facilitated by this bold redefinition of national security.