Business As Usual

What with the European debt crisis, Syrian atrocities, and election year politics, the topic of climate change has been the quiet corner of the plate lately.  From the evidence of my in basket, that’s likely to change soon.  First, as the Rio+20 Earth Summit gets set to convene, June 20-22, various international agencies and research groups are reporting their latest findings, and the picture looks grim.  The UN Environment Program reports there has been progress on only 4 out of 90 measures to combat climate change that were previously agreed on by the UN; indoor air pollution is causing 2 million premature deaths per year, almost half of them children under 5 years old; the target for cutting the loss of endangered species has already been missed; and 43 percent of the world’s land surface has already been radically changed by human activity, with a likelihood of 50 percent change by 2025.  The last time such massive change occurred was a 30 percent change about 11,000 years ago which precipitated the last ice age.  A major impact this time around is the drastically increasing desertification arising from global warming which, along with the major urbanization of the earth’s human population, is removing arable land for food production just when it is more and more needed.  Some research indicates that in the last 40 years, the human use of the biosphere for food production and industrialization has risen from its then level of 85 percent of biosphere reproductive capacity to a current level of 150 percent.  On the face of it, humanity cannot continue what it is doing.

A new book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, by a long time Norwegian modeler of global change, Jorgen Randers, predicts it is already too late and that environmental and socioeconomic collapse by the end of this century will cut world population in half.  The case is likely being overstated, but nevertheless indicates grim times ahead, if not for us, then for our children and grandchildren.  The reason, Randers reports, is that of several possible modeling scenarios, tracking data indicates that humanity is following the “business as usual” scenario, which leads to some of the grimmest results.  It is ironic to use that term, business as usual, since that is the fact of life in a corporation dominated world.  Humanity may be dying of its own prosperity.

To multi-national corporations, global change is an externality, economics language for “not my problem.”  But of course it is.  The UN reports, for example, that international trade is the cause of 30 percent of endangered species extinctions.  Industrial pollution from fossil fuels is a major factor in climate change around the world.  This week’s controversy over soft drinks has revealed that Coke had an at least informal goal of “taking over the majority of people’s stomachs” with its products; these products were, through their dominance of corn production capacity and prices, in turn creating agricultural and human crises in third world countries.  And it is corporations who have, through their massive lobbying for their own interests, brought governments, officially the entities responsible for dealing with global change, to a standstill on taking effective action.  For the sovereign power to regulate commerce is the key to solving these issues of all humanity, and in our global world, corporations have left it a governmental power in name only.

Twenty years ago, the Washington Post reports, the first Rio Earth Summit produced 3 major treaties intended to head off dire environmental outcomes; those goals were never achieved.  Predictions from expected participants are that RIO+20 will produce no further significant formal agreements. There is still some room for optimism, though, as participants ranging from the UN Secretary General to a vice president of the World Bank voice their expectation of a common understanding and informal agenda to be carried out through regional organizations and a “cloud of commitments” along with concrete pledges from businesses, governments and non-profit organizations.  In other words, major sovereign governments are being bypassed by the problem solvers.  If this approach is effective, it is another nail in the coffin of the sovereign state.   If not effective, the situation is dire indeed.

Perhaps it’s time to turn the problem over to the Episcopalians.  At a prize day convocation yesterday at my grandsons’ Episcopal school, the chaplain included in her invocation, “You have blessed us with the care of Your creation”; in view of the news of the week, I was struck by that juxtaposition of "care of" with "blessed."  If only we, from our own lawn tending to the largest multi-national corporations and to world governments, could lift our vision to recognize that care of the planet is not someone else’s problem, but our own.  And that caring for it need not be only an unwelcome chore that gets in the way of “business as usual”, but an actual better way of doing business, and of living.  That would be blessing indeed.