World View : Learning to Give as Much as We Take From Earth : * ‘Sustainability’ offers hope for activists who say the human species is multiplying faster than renewable resources.

In a tiny overcrowded office at the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think tank, a new computer program code-named “Sugarscape” has simulated the patterns of life--and created new visions of the Earth’s future.

Some 7,500 miles away in Arabuko Sokoke, the largest remaining coastal forest in East Africa, Kenya’s Museum Society has launched a new program with the Giriama tribe to harvest butterflies for export--and to help alleviate local poverty.

And in El Paraiso, Honduras, World Neighbors, an Oklahoma-based humanitarian aid group, is teaching women to make basic medicines out of back-yard plants--cough syrup out of bougainvillea flowers, for example--both to improve their health and their self-esteem.

The link between Brookings, butterflies and El Paraiso is one of the broad new principles--and buzzwords--now giving direction and shape to the post-Cold War world: sustainability.

Promoted by the U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, sustainability was originally defined as efforts that “meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations.” In other words, encouraging economic growth while also preserving the environment--goals once considered incompatible.

But seven years later, the term is also associated with a quiet revolution redefining the national security agenda, overhauling concepts of foreign aid and providing a great new impetus to political change worldwide. It’s effectively become a new barometer of human progress.

“Sustainable development is the sine qua non of the new world order,” said Gus Speth, U.N. Development Program chief.

“Sustainability is now essential to achieve all of the major international goals of the United States or any other country--peace, democratization, disease control, migration control, environmental protection and population stabilization.”

The revolution comes none too soon. The Worldwatch Institute’s “State of the World 1994,” published this week, offers several dire new warnings, including one on food scarcity.

After 40 years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with “unanticipated abruptness.” Human demands are now “approaching the limits of oceanic fisheries to supply fish, of rangelands to support livestock, and, in many countries, of the hydrological cycle to produce fresh water,” it reports.

By 1993, the fish catch per person had declined 7% from a historic high in 1989. Grain production per person in 1993 was 11% less than in the peak year of 1984.

“The world’s farmers can no longer be counted on to feed the projected additions to our numbers. . . . As the nineties unfold, the world is facing a day of reckoning,” Worldwatch warns.

The report is only the latest red flag. In 1992, 1,600 scientists, including 102 Nobel laureates, issued a “warning to humanity.”

“No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. . . . A new ethic is required (which) must motivate a great movement, convincing reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed changes,” it said.

Sustainability appears to be the most effective response, according to U.N., U.S. and World Bank development specialists.

“Development thinking has progressed from a focus on per capita income in the 1960s to social indicators in the 1970s to political dimensions in the 1980s to environmental sustainability concerns in the 1990s,” Speth said.

Over 70 countries have established councils on sustainable development, while the five-year U.N. development program has been revised to focus on sustainable projects. Even the World Bank, often criticized for shortchanging ecology issues, now helps borrowers with “environmental action plans.” And last year, the United States adopted sustainability as a policy goal.

Yet a key problem of sustainability is that neither ecologists nor economists have fully determined Earth’s limits--or how sustainability can soon be achieved, according to John D. Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at Brookings.

All past projections were flawed. In the 18th Century, English economist Thomas Malthus’ theory on the geometric spiral of population growth and its environmental impact turned out to be simplistic. In the 1970s, the Club of Rome’s predictions about the future were widely believed to be excessively alarmist.

And despite studies of the Worldwatch Institute and other groups, many mainstream economists contend market forces are sufficiently flexible to alleviate future ecological threats.

Creating a Model

To help finally settle that debate, Brookings, the World Resources Institute and the Santa Fe Institute have launched Project 2050, a collaborative project to address critical questions. What constitutes a sustainable society? What is the critical time period? And what strategies promote sustainability?

At think tanks and universities around the world, Project 2050 participants are now engaged in high-tech studies of obvious issues like climate and population as well as far-flung variables such as cultural differences and new political actors.

The mission of Brookings’ “Sugarscape,” developed by Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell, is to identify the basic rules of collective behavior through simulations.

It’s called Sugarscape because one program tracks the behavior of dozens of “agents”--red and blue dots representing life forms--unleashed randomly on a screen with two sugar mountains, which represent resources.

In the most basic simulation, all agents flock to one of the two mountains, around which they create two distinct cultures. As each society prospers, their growing populations tax resources, leading agents to forage between mountains--and to either trade or combat between the two societies to survive.

The lesson? Confirmation of the basic principle of “carrying capacity”--or the largest number of any species a habitat can support indefinitely--and the dangers of exceeding it.

Most ecologists long believed that when a population exceeds carrying capacity resources decline--then so does the species.

And that point may be nearing--or here. “As a result of our population size, consumption patterns and technology choices, we have surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity,” Worldwatch warns.

The implications may be sweeping. “The ideological conflict that dominated the four decades from 1950 to 1990 is being replaced by conflict between steadily growing demand for food and the Earth’s physical capacity to satisfy those demands,” it claims.

“The deteriorating balance between food and people . . . will increasingly preoccupy national political leaders, reorder national priorities and dominate international affairs.”

Sugarscape represents the theoretical search for sustainability and long-term guidelines. But the term has multiple definitions and applications.

Other more tangible, short-term projects deal with everything from poverty and women’s rights to AIDS.

Butterflies in Kenya

One new model is the Kenya Museum Society’s butterfly program, which reflects the shift away from big-buck, high-tech mega-projects based on foreign expertise that were a hallmark of foreign aid during the Cold War. The new emphasis is on low-cost micro-projects sustainable by local people.

It also exemplifies the new approach to the problem of deforestation. Since the mid-1970s, 10% of Kenyan forests have been cut down for crop lands or wood products, and polls show most tribes near Arabuko Sokoke--the Giriama, Digo, Duruma, Choyi, Rabai, Ribe, Jibana, Kambe--want to clear what remains to farm.

Worldwide, forests cover 24% less land than in 1700. Just between 1980 and 1990, forests decreased by an area twice the size of Pakistan or Texas, according to Worldwatch. And most tropical forest land cleared now can sustain crops for only a few years, while species eliminated in the process are gone forever.

So the Kenya Museum Society set out to alter the balance of power between humankind and nature by changing attitudes and interaction--beginning with Arabuko Sokoke’s butterflies. The goal is “sustainable use of a forest resource that can economically benefit the local community.”

Launched last June, the project teaches farming families how to raise 50 butterfly pupae (the stage between larva and adult) per month for export, at one dollar per pupa, that amounts to an income supplement ($600 a year) greater than the country’s $385 per capita annual income.

And it is cost-efficient. The museum will receive a one-time grant of $50,000 from the new joint small-grants program of the United Nations and the World Bank. After that, the venture will last as long as it can sustain itself through butterfly sales--a growth market because of foreign interest in entomology.

“Ten years ago, development was synonymous with growth, size and quantity. Big dams, resorts or cities were the name of the game,” explained Alicia Barcena, executive director of the Earth Council. (The Costa Rica-based body was created by the 1992, U.N.-sponsored Earth Summit environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro to enact its recommendations.)

“But that model didn’t work as we thought it would. Poverty, unemployment and other problems are worse than ever. All this happened as we liquidated our natural capital, the environment.”

Indeed, a study of 25 World Bank-financed projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War found over half had no lasting developmental impact six to 10 years later. Most also could not be sustained without outside funding or expertise. And they didn’t produce anticipated benefits, said Michael M. Cernea, the bank’s senior adviser for social policy.

Failure is also reflected in the widening gap between rich and poor, despite billions spent worldwide for development.

Farming in Honduras

In 1960, the wealthiest 20% of the world’s people accounted for 70% of global income. By 1989 their share increased to 83%. The poorest 20%, meanwhile, accounted for only 1.4% of global income, according to Worldwatch.

The El Paraiso project in Honduras reflects another new model to deal with inadequate arable land--a crisis at the heart of food scarcity.

During the Cold War, China’s lost arable land alone exceeded an area equal to crop lands in France, Germany, Denmark and Holland combined--enough to support 450 million people, or a third of its population, at 1990 grain yields, Worldwatch says.

Globally, crop lands damaged between 1950 and 1990 by moderate to extreme soil erosion total an area equal to China and India combined. Yet to feed the world’s projected population, output must triple in the next 50 years, according to the U.N. Development Program.

After years of helping Honduran farmers increase crop yields--a one-dimensional and standard form of aid--World Neighbors in 1990 adopted an integrated approach that in the spirit of sustainability addresses the links between poverty, population and environmental deterioration.

In hands-on workshops in fields or in centers of sun-bleached adobe, El Paraiso trainers cover issues from breast feeding and child nutrition to reading, women’s rights and velvet bean crops. Velvet beans, which can be made into cocoa and brownies, are 40% protein, a good animal feed and a soil-replenishing crop.

New “social scaffolding,” grass-roots co-management, and the use of local traditions to introduce innovations help development last, according to U.N. and World Bank officials. The only foreigner is the American administrator.

“We take a decentralized approach. And we try to work with the people as equals, not as experts,” explained Gregg Biggs, a World Neighbors senior associate. The project is already showing significant results. Migration by poor rural farming families to shanties around the capital began to slow after the project began in 1990, and some are even starting to return to the countryside.

El Paraiso also underscores the extraordinary role of non-government organizations (NGOs) in development--a field once largely the domain of governments in the industrialized West.

“The rise of NGOs is enormously important to sustainable development, and it’s symbolic of a broader shift,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute and co-chair of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Of course, sustainable development still has a long way to go.

“We’re facing a series of extraordinary challenges of greater magnitude in scope and scale than human beings have ever had to deal with,” said S. Jacob Scheer of the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of “One Year after Rio.”

“The movement will have to accelerate many times to really deal with the problems.”

Only two of the 178 countries in Rio--the United States and Uganda--met the November deadline to report on compliance with the U.N.’s environmental agenda.

Despite growing international consensus and new concrete solutions, U.N. officials, economists and ecologists all complain of an “implementation gap.” Limited resources, lack of political will and inadequate technology transfers are among the leading problems, according to Nitin Desai, U.N. undersecretary for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development. “We have to move beyond the point of defining the problems to more action,” he said.

And the hundreds of sustainability projects launched since 1990 constitute a small fraction of development worldwide, while limited numbers benefit from their efforts. The Kenyan project aids only 50 families, while El Paraiso serves 2,000 Hondurans.

In contrast, the United States alone spent $11.4 trillion (in constant 1992 dollars) on preventing a strategic attack from the East Bloc between 1950 and 1990.

“And if there’d been an attack, it would have been serious,” Steinbruner said. “But in all probability, the consequences of that would still have been nowhere near as great as triggering an irreversible environmental effect.”

Yet among both economists and environmentalists, there is a sense that sustainability is the cutting edge of the future.

“Occasionally in human history, you get a shift of perspective that has large cascading implications,” said Steinbruner. “We feel that way about sustainable development.”

Availability of Renewable Resources

Resources (except forests) are expected to increase by 2010, but not enough to catch up with population growth.

% change Per Circa 1990- capita 1970 1990 2010* 2010 change Population (millions) 3,702 5,290 7,030 +33 -- Fish catch (tons) ** 66 85 102 +20 -10 Irrigated land (hectares) *** 168 237 277 +17 -12 Cropland (hectares) 1,377 1,444 1,516 +5 -21 Rangeland/pasture (hectares) 3,258 3,402 3,540 +4 -22 Forests (hectares) 3,688 3,412 3,165 -7 -30

* Projections based on last 10 years.

** Wild catch from fresh and marine waters (excludes aquaculture).

*** Data is from 1961

SOURCE: “State of the World, 1994,” published by the World Watch Institute

COLOR, World Grain Output (kilograms per person) 1950 - 2030

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

COLOR, World Fish Catch (kilograms per person) 1950 - 2030

Source: U.N. Food and Agricultuare Organization