The End Is Nigh ... Again

There is no shortage of frightening reports on the future of our planet making the rounds, but the granddaddy of sky-is-falling warnings came last week from the United Nations. In sum: Without radical changes, 1 billion of the world’s poorest citizens will, within 50 years, be deprived of the fresh air, clean water and other basic natural resources they need to survive.

The U.N.’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, put together at a cost of $24 million over four years, urges world leaders to radically change the way they treat nature. The report is hardly ideal; most of its 219 pages lack any hard science to back up its “end is nigh” conclusion: “Human actions are depleting Earth’s natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”

Worse, most of its entreaties are the very sort of banalities found in earlier, ominous warnings about the dangers of technology, such as the observation by 18th century English minister Thomas Robert Malthus that unchecked procreation would lead to population growth that would exceed the food supply over time, leading to mass starvation. Malthus’ prediction was thwarted by what he could not know: that advances in agricultural science would vastly increase our ability to produce food.

Malthus was one of the first in a long string of pessimists who assumed that nations would invariably wreak environmental havoc by mechanizing the world and mining its natural resources. But industrial societies have also become progressively cleaner by developing new technologies to reduce air pollution and remove toxins from drinking water.

None of this is to say the U.N. report should be ignored, particularly because in many ways it represents a compromise between the rest of the international community and the United States on environmental issues. It identifies a few practical reform steps, such as incentives to power plants that reduce fossil fuel emissions. This is the sort of solution that the Bush administration has long touted.

Despite its murky suggestions and vague idealism, the U.N. report does acknowledge that technology is as much tool for improvement as villain. By embracing market mechanisms as part of the solution to environmental ills, it also puts the U.N. in closer sync with the Bush administration than might recently have seemed possible.