New Gunslingers to Target the Big Issues

The history of life on planet Earth offers sobering examples of species destroyed by their own success, species whose success at reproduction eventually overwhelmed the habitat on which they relied. Will Homo sapiens be such a species?

There are ominous signs that the answer may be “yes.” The “State of the World” report of the Worldwatch Institute has become, for many, the foremost herald of these signs. This year’s report notes that China lost enough arable land to development and abuse during the Cold War years to support 450 million people. Despite population control efforts that have been criticized for their harshness, China’s numbers are still increasing. And China, immense as it is, is only a part of this problem. How long can arable land shrink and population grow before a massive crisis results?

Belt-tightening in the First World will not suffice. According to David Durham of the organization Carrying Capacity Network, a worldwide lowering of average per capita caloric intake to the basic sustenance level would forestall worldwide food shortages by perhaps as little as a decade. The Green Revolution bought time, but population growth has now overtaken it. Demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum dismisses as “cornucopianism” the belief that there is no level of world population that unchained free enterprise cannot provide for. Where can change begin?

Writing in this newspaper’s World Report, Times correspondent Robin Wright draws attention to little-noticed initiatives like the Kenya Museum Society’s butterfly harvesting program that make protection of an irreplaceable resource like Kenya’s Arabuka Sokeke forest economically viable (the dried butterflies are sold to shops and for craft work). Conservation International has done something analogous for the Amazon rain forest by reviving commerce in tagua, a fiber from a bush that survives only if the forest is not destroyed.

These projects, which by making environmentalism economically viable help to preserve the human habitat, are neither liberal nor conservative, neither redistributionist nor entrepreneurial, but a third alternative somewhere in the middle. And somewhere in the middle is where their sponsoring groups also stand. Typically called NGOs (non-governmental organizations), they could also be called NBOs (non-business organizations). Their importance has been growing sharply but is only now being recognized. The nonprofit sector, Lester M. Salamon writes in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, “has arrived as a major actor on the world scene, but it has hardly arrived as a serious presence in public consciousness, in policy circles, in the media, or in the scholarly world.”

That needs to change. Champions of big government and big business alike should give Salamon’s article--and the NGOs--a close look. There is clearly an impasse to be broken, and perhaps NGOs will show the world how to break it. Even if it takes a lot of muddling through the middle.