Earth Worst

Remember the torrential winter storms that pounded California? The fires that devastated Florida last summer? The weeks of 100-degree-plus heat that baked Texas? 1998 has been a year of extreme weather, both in the United States and abroad, and scientists say humanity is at least partly to blame. The Florida fires, for example, were dwarfed by earlier blazes in Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia that were often set by politically connected agribusiness companies. The smoke over the Amazon was so thick, wrote one observer, that “the sun disappeared for days at a time.”

Get used to it. To hear Eugene Linden tell it in “The Future in Plain Sight,” weirdly unpleasant weather is bound to increase during the years ahead. Global warming, caused mainly by the carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel combustion and forest fires, is already raising temperatures around the world. Eight of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have been in the last decade, and the first nine months of 1998 rank as the Earth’s hottest months on record. Because a hotter planet experiences more evaporation, global warming also causes more frequent and severe storms and drought. As 1998 has shown, the costs of such weather to human life and property are enormous.

And weather, Linden warns, is not the only thing that will be more volatile in the 21st century. Linden, the environmental correspondent for Time magazine, argues that human history is on the verge of a major, cataclysmic shift. The last 50 years have been a period of remarkable political stability--without world wars or economic cataclysms--and this charmed era comes at the end of 150 years of climatic stability. But such periods of stability are actually exceptions in human history, Linden contends. He predicts the next 50 years will mark a return to instability.

His thesis: As climates change, population growth and economic globalization continue, the effects will overwhelm financial systems, food production, disease control and other pillars of the social order. Because these trends are all but irreversible in the short run, writes Linden, humans in the 21st century will “be in the position of watching and understanding events that we cannot control, and that will make the coming instability all the more intolerable.” Humanity will eventually make the transition “to stable population growth, to an economic system that neither beggars the Earth nor marginalizes the great bulk of humanity, and to a value system that recognizes the limits of materialism, but these transitions will not come about smoothly.” Billions may die along the way.

Gloom and doom is a tricky message for an author, but to his credit, Linden does not pull punches for fear of frightening away readers. Nor does he employ the melodramatic tone favored by some environmental Paul Reveres. His voice is urgent but businesslike. He cares about his subject and trusts readers to care too.

After all, who could remain indifferent to the news that 30 of the world’s 50 largest cities lie near coasts, leaving them vulnerable to the increased flooding that climate change will produce? When 750 million of the world’s 2.5 billion workers are either unemployed or underemployed and rural masses throughout the Third World are migrating in unprecedented numbers to cities that are already woefully over-stressed, who cannot see the potential for social upheaval? Ecosystems are fraying under humanity’s weight today, yet Linden reminds us that human numbers are bound to increase because half of the world’s population is younger than 26 years old.

These are arresting facts. Unfortunately, Linden doesn’t include enough of them, nor explore their implications sufficiently, to do justice to his argument. The problem may lie in the organization of the book, which is divided into three sections. The first section is reportorial and discusses the trends noted above; the second is a “thought experiment” in which Linden speculates in detail about how the world will look in 2050; the third contains a brief conclusion.

Many chapters in this book read like extended magazine articles in Time; they are studded with useful information but lack the nuance and in-depth analysis one expects from a serious book. One wishes that the 96 pages spent on the thought experiment had instead been devoted to expanding the first section of the book.

In a chapter on urban migration, for example, Linden touches on a key debate now underway about human welfare: Are things getting better or worse for the world’s poor? The conventional wisdom is that the last 50 years have brought tremendous improvements to poor people around the world and that current practices of global capitalism and technological society should therefore continue largely unchanged. But Linden summarizes the evidence for this argument in a single sentence before concluding the paragraph by arguing that this comforting view is in fact misleading. He makes a number of excellent points in this chapter, but his discussion is too truncated to sway anyone but a newcomer to the debate.

That is a shame, for much of this book’s analysis is dead-on. It is possible that the world’s urban population could swell from 300 million in 1950 to 6 billion in 2050 without massive social collapse, as Linden concedes, but it is not likely. Too many things, he reminds us, would have to go perfectly: Corrupt governments would have to be reformed and technological breakthroughs made. Likewise, it is possible that a new spirit of cooperation between the world’s rich and poor will reduce inequality, but at the moment humans are not headed in this direction. Rather, the combination of rising population with a worldwide embrace of American-style consumerism makes instability, even chaos, inevitable, says Linden.

Linden is too well-informed to be optimistic about our collective future but too savvy not to offer us reasons for hope. Family sizes have shrunk dramatically in recent years in poor nations, for example, as women’s status and education have been improved. “If bad ideas can transform the globe, so can good ideas,” Linden writes.

If the bad ideas have the upper hand at the moment, that is hardly Linden’s fault. The future, says the old cliche, is where we will spend the rest of our lives, and it looks like it’s not going to be a pretty place.