Are We Really Destined To Destroy This Eden?

The Express, December 1999

In October, the United Nations found a baby in Sarajevo and declared her to be Baby Six Billion. There are now four times more human beings on the planet than there were when Queen Victoria presided over the birth of this century. This extraordinary statistic is important because we mostly assume that people are the biggest environmental problem, and that in nearly everything we do we are threatening the planet's ability to work well and provide beautiful and healthy surroundings for our lives. This is a clich, the one young people hear when adults put on a special long face and talk about "The Environment".

Cue doomy music. Cut to Klaus Toumlautpfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): "Even as we struggle with the traditional environmental problems, new ones continue to emerge." His words are typical of the tone of these things - a gloomy view that is not easy to shift. Yet there is a strong case that the planet is in good shape. Better still: we now begin to see how to achieve much of what people need and want with surprisingly little further damage to the natural world.

It is our culture - our dreams and myths and habits - which stand in the way of seeing the facts clearly. Over the past couple of millennia, it has seemed obvious that man - greedy, organised, but thoughtless - is the great destroyer. The Garden of Eden imagery tells most of that story, and it was there through to the 19th century. Romantic poets fumed at the industrial revolution which was polluting the air but also bringing in the improvements in hygiene and health which added life expectancy to its workers.

You could say that the "modern" period begins in 1969, when a uniquely privileged man put his lonely footprint on the moon and down below him hordes of youngsters rediscovered primitive tribal living en masse as weekend hippies at rock festivals. The two worlds met as the "fragile" planet, a spaceship alone in space with its life-support system running out of air, was presented to us. Since then, to be Green has been at the heart of a post-socialist expression of youthful idealism. Greenpeace was, for most of this time, the coolest single organisation on the earth.

The Green voices have been brilliant at telling us about ecological systems about to collapse. Ozone holes were thought to threaten the oceans' plankton. Whales and elephants were said to be wiped out, Northern hemisphere forests zapped by acid rain, and tropical rainforest logged out for ranching: these were the stories of the Seventies and Eighties. Some we've put right. Some were exaggerated beyond all reality. Some still need attention. Lord knows, there are problems: nations allow their fishermen to deplete stocks; too many cattlemen overgraze their pastures; many tropical regions are growing far less food than they might; and many need to replenish their soils with fertilisers and minerals. Nations allow too many tropical forests to be logged carelessly and without attention to their long-term potential, not least for re-cropping.

Issue by issue, the greens were mostly right when they stuck to what conventional science was saying and mostly wrong when, more often, they made things up as they went along.

UNEP told us last month that "consumerism" was producing "irreversible" damage worldwide. Actually, Western consumers do surprisingly little damage, and very little ecological damage is beyond repair. Where is the world-shattering disaster which mismanagement is supposed to have brought on? Maybe it's global warming. Hedged with huge uncertainties as this issue is, it seems entirely possible that man's industrial activities - and all his use of fossil fuels - have warmed the planet in a way which influences its climate. After that, the arguments really begin.

A typical row concerns Greenpeace's latest big cause: damage to coral reefs. Maybe it's caused by global warming, maybe not. Maybe it's irreversible, maybe not. And how big is the effect? Is it our "fault"? Where will the pain fall? Who will benefit? The issues are complex, mostly because we don't understand the interplay that adds up to the human economy, so how can we suddenly understand something so much more complex: the world's climate?

And then there is the enormous difficulty of knowing what to do about the situation. The rich world could quite quickly reduce its huge and extravagant energy-take, but the Third World is about to kick-in with serious amounts of fossil fuel-dependent growth. It may well be that one way or another we are going burn a lot more fossil fuel, and we had better learn to live with the consequences. The balance of the evidence and intelligent speculation so far suggests that the world's economy will not be much dented by global warming. It has grown even faster than the population, so we may well be able to afford to help those people whose environment is damaged.

If you think that's an irresponsible attitude, then consider what you personally would give up to remedy a situation. Most citizens care rather less than they say, and less than some governments (ours for instance).

Very roughly speaking, every mile you travel in an aeroplane is about as "globally warming" as every mile you drive alone in your car. Biking to work and then jetting off to trek in the Himalayas seriously cancel each other out. Look at all those oh-so-cool caring mothers in their 4x4s taking baby around town: switching to "people movers" has cost a 10 per cent loss in energy efficiency by the North American car fleet. So should we switch to public transport? Well yes, but if we could miraculously double the number of people travelling by train, we'd only reduce by a fifth the number travelling by car.

Much of what we personally can do is of marginal use at best, or purely gesture politics. So how can we be ecologically useful? If you are serious about helping global warming, then cancel that overseas holiday, stop keeping up with your relatives at the weekend and live in a city. Then campaign noisily for a local municipal waste incinerator. No one thinks household rubbish can be recycled with ecological or economic efficiency. Most swear by burning the stuff, which at least recovers some of its value: its calories. Don't worry about the incinerator's emissions: we've had reliable technology to deal with those for at least 20 years.

It is true that the world is facing a serious shortage of fresh water. But both rich and poor people waste so much of this stuff that we have little idea what the current sources could actually supply. We stand on the brink of a revolution in technologies to harness the sun's energy: it looks as though we will soon be able to throw pollution-free energy at many problems, including water desalination, if necessary. We also stand on the brink of astonishing developments in gene technology which will allow us to cure or prevent a vast range of human diseases and problems. Equally, genetically - modified organisms will enable us to grow crops with significantly less demand for water, fertiliser, pesticide and land.

Mostly, the GMO revolution on farms will be working with plants which have already proved themselves to be good crops and useless weeds. In other words, our existing farmed plants need to be on farms in order to grow; they hate escaping into the wild and when genetically modified , they keep those properties. In a visit last month to Performance Plants, a firm spun off by a British scientist from Queen's University, Ontario, I met biologists developing these plants. They were all very Green-minded. They think they are engaged in making huge benefits for mankind, but doing so in a way which is deliberately clever at looking after nature. More productive farmland means less need to convert wilderness. Insect resistant plants mean more, not fewer, insects, and less chemical use to control them. (The plant repels but doesn't kill bugs). A good chunk of the tropical world's harvest gets wasted through rot: plants can be engineered to stay firmer longer. Mud-hut villagers visiting the market once a week will welcome produce which doesn't go off in a few hours.

Genetic engineering is as big a development for our future as modern medicine has been for our past. It raises rather the same balances - ethical and technical - of benefit and risk. The same sort of voices are raised in protest at the onset of the New World as were raised during the Enlightenment: science and technology were to be distrusted then as now.

Progress was seen then as helping the powers that be, not the common man. The difference today is that the powers of prejudice, anxiety and superstition are now professionalised: from foodies to Greens, from "consumer" groups to development charities, there is a howling majority to decry GMO agri-technology before it's half begun. The campaigners strike positions which are intuitively sound, but in fact they are not on the side of the planet or the people.

Let's have a little reality check. The United Nations Population Fund (the body which declared that there are now six billion people) went on to make a rather cheerful prediction, that there is a reasonable chance that the population may not now double.

It is good news to hear that we can reasonably hope for - and work towards - a situation in which human numbers continue to rise, but do so much less fast and for much less time than was expected only a few years ago. It is hard for most of us to grasp, because we do not often hear the evidence, but young families all around the world - whether rich or poor - are having about half the babies they used to. These babies have an average life expectancy far greater than their grandparents.

How come? We need to understand that the big revolutions of modern medicine and plumbing are reaching most people now alive. This is not to say that the bottom third of the world's people have a great time. About a billion have a wretched time. The easiest way to think of the situation is to imagine Europe 250 years ago: the Third World is in many places facing the same opportunities and problems as a rural peasantry flocking to cities. If the poor countries of the world can build modern economies quickly enough, they can create the wealth which gets them beyond the lousy housing, foul sewers, and choking air which always seem to afflict the first few generations of city types, but which city life itself makes it easier to cure in the longer term.

We begin the next millennium, then, with a likelihood of somewhere between eight and 11billion people being alive in about 50 years. If recent trends continue, they stand a much better chance than any of their forebears of having a say in their government. The World Bank reports: "As recently as 25 years ago, less than one third of the world's countries were democracies. That figure has risen to more than 60 per cent." With luck, more people will live in modern industrial states which prize conservation as a huge aesthetic and spiritual boon. With luck, they will have the technologies which deliver affluence without effluents. Science, technology, democracy and capitalism look set to do rather more good than "Green" thinking.