The Struggle for Environmental Security
By Cynthia G. Wagner
Scholars revisiting The Limits to Growth assess its predictions.
In their 1972 report The Limits to Growth, MIT researchers Donella and Dennis
Meadows and colleagues warned that the world would face severe food shortages as
populations grew out of control. Though these specific forecasts did not come to bear,
other unpredicted events have occurred in the past 30 years that lead a new crop of
scholars to the same essential conclusion: The planet's future is in serious trouble, and
humans are largely to blame.
Hunger, for example, is a critical problem, but not because of the predicted global
overpopulation or shortages of food. Population growth rates instead have been declining,
and new, unpredicted agricultural technologies have kept the world's breadbaskets full.
Hunger happens because of poverty, according to contributors to a new anthology, From
Limits to Growth to Ecological Security, edited by Dennis Pirages and Ken Cousins.
"Hunger endures amidst adequate food supplies because food-insecure people cannot
access the food that is available," writes Marc J. Cohen, a researcher with the
International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. "Globally, 1.2
billion people (20% of the world's population) live on the equivalent of less than $1 a
day and are unable to afford food and other necessities. . . . Poor people frequently lack
access to land and other productive resources, and so cannot produce food for
themselves."
Access to vital resources is not strictly an environmental issue, but also a political
and socioeconomic one, involving trade barriers, farm subsidies, debt, and other burdens
that keep impoverished peoples impoverished and hungry even when food is plentiful on a
global basis. And such is the case with most of the environmental problems that The
Limits to Growth foresaw--and didn't foresee.
Water supply, for instance, was of considerable concern to the Limits to Growth
researchers, and indeed it is a major problem of the twenty-first century, as they warned.
But the fact that a billion of the world's people lack access to safe drinking water has
less to do with supply than with such factors as international river diplomacy and
controversies over supply infrastructure and water financing, notes University of Maryland
researcher Ken Conca.
One major problem that was merely a scientific hypothesis in the 1970s is global
warming, which has come to be viewed as the key threat to future environmental security.
Another trend that emerged relatively abruptly after The Limits to Growth was
published is globalization, the mass movement of not only people, but also cultures and
technologies, money and ideas, bioinvaders and disease. All of these things can
destabilize both natural and human ecologies, notes co-editor Dennis Pirages, the Harrison
professor of international environmental politics at the University of Maryland and
co-chair of the World Future Society's board of directors.
Debate needs to move beyond discussions about the possible environmental limits on
resource-intensive growth, according to Pirages. Instead, the focus should be on
ecological security, a broader concept that embraces not only the environment, but also
politics, economics, demography, ethics and values, and technological innovation.
"Ecological security is a more useful way of thinking about the many aspects of
the predicament of humankind," says Pirages. "The concept rests on empirical
observations that for the foreseeable future, resource scarcity is likely to be a
relatively minor source of human suffering." He concludes that the best way out of
this human-created predicament is to promote cooperation to "redress the imbalances,
disparities, and inequalities that are emerging in this era of increasing ecological
insecurity."
Source: From Resource Scarcity to Ecological Security: Exploring New Limits to
Growth edited by Dennis Pirages and Ken Cousins. The MIT Press,
http://mitpress.mit.edu. 2005. 268 pages. Paperback. $24. Order online from the Futurist
Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.
