Encyclopedia of

Global Environmental Change

e g e c

The volumes in this Encyclopedia are:

Volume OneThe Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change

Volume TwoThe Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change

Volume ThreeCauses and consequences of global environmental change

Volume FourResponding to global environmental change

Volume FiveSocial and economic dimensions of global environmental change

Encyclopedia of

Global Environmental Change

e g e c

Editor-in-Chief

Ted MunnInstitute for Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada

5Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change

Volume Editor

Peter TimmermanIFIAS, Toronto, Canada

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Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief

Ted MunnInstitute for Environmental Studies, University of Toronto, Canada

Volume Editors

Volume One The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental changeDr Michael C MacCracken, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA andDr John S Perry, formerly, National Research Council USA

Volume Two The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental changeProfessor Harold A Mooney, Stanford University, Stanford, USA andDr Josep G Canadell, GCTE/IGBP, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia

Volume Three Causes and consequences of global environmental changeProfessor Ian Douglas, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Volume Four Responding to global environmental changeDr Mostafa K Tolba, International Center for Environment and Development, Cairo, Egypt

Volume Five Social and economic dimensions of global environmental changeMr Peter Timmerman, IFIAS, Toronto, Canada

International Advisory Board

Dr Joe T BakerCommissioner for the Environment, ACT, Australia

Professor Francesco di CastriCNRS, France

Professor Paul CrutzenMax Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany

Professor Eckart EhlersIHDP/IGU Germany

Professor Jose GoldembergUniversida de Sao Paulo, Brazil

Dr Robert GoodlandWorld Bank, USA

Professor Hartmut GrasslWCRP, Switzerland

Professor Ronald HillUniversity of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Dr Yu A IzraelInstitute of Global Climate & Technology, Russia

Professor Roger E KaspersonClark University, USA

Professor Peter LissUniversity of East Anglia, UK

Professor Jane LubchencoOregon State University, USA

Mr Jeffrey A McNeelyIUCN, Switzerland

Professor Thomas R OdhiamboHon. President, African Academy of Sciences andManaging Trustee, RANDFORUM, Kenya

Sir Ghillean T PranceUniversity of Reading, UK

Professor Steve RaynerColumbia University, USA

Contents

Preface to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change ix

Preface to Volume Five xv

The Human Dimensions of Global Change 1The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in

the Context of Global Environmental Change 11Economics and Global Environmental Change 25Ecological Economics 37Environmental Politics 49Global Environmental Change and Environmental

History 62Globalization in Historical Perspective 73Technological Society and its Relation to Global

Environmental Change 86Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and

Environmental Concern 97Social Science and Global Environmental Change 109The Emergence of Global Environment Change into

Politics 124The Environment and Violent Conflict 137Development and Global Environmental Change 150

Anthropology and Global Environmental Change 163Art and the Environment 167Attenborough, David 175

Bahai Faith and the Environment 176BAT (Best Available Technology) 183Bateson, Gregory 183Brent Spar 184Brower, David 185Buddhism and Ecology 185Business-as-usual Scenarios 191

Carson, Rachel Louise 192CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis) 193Chipko Movement 193Christianity and the Environment 194Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate,

Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity 201Commons, Tragedy of the 208Cousteau, Jacques 209

Deep Ecology 211Demographic transition 211Discounting 214

Earth Charter 216Earth Day 216Earth First! 217Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric 217Ecofeminism 218Eco-socialism 224Ecosystem Approach 225Ecosystem Services 226Emergy 228Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge 228Enlightenment Project 229Environmental Defense Fund 230Environmental Economics 230Environmental Ethics 231Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government

Organizations (NGOs) 243Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological

Ecology 253Environmental Psychology/Perception 257Environmental Security 269Environmental Sociology 278Equity 279Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 283

Francis of Assisi 284Friends of the Earth 285Futures Research 285

Gaia Hypothesis 287Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 290Governance and International Management 292

Hazards in Global Environmental Change 297Hinduism and the Environment 303Homocentric 311Human Body, Immediate Environment 312

Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and SustainablePractice 314

International Environmental Law 324ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI

(Genuine Progress Indicator) 331

viii CONTENTS

Islam and the Environment 332ISSC (International Social Science Council) 339

Jains and the Environment 341Judaism and the Environment 349

Kelly, Petra 355Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich 356

Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping ofthe Environment 357

Leopold, Aldo 367Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental

Governance 368Literature and the Environment 370Love Canal 382

Malthus, Thomas Robert 384Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System 384Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental

Change 394Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism 408Muir, John 411

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 412National Environmental Law 413Nature 419New Ageism 420NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) 421Noosphere 421

Phase Shifts or Flip-flops in Complex Systems 422Political Movements/Ideologies and the

Environment 429Political Systems and the Environment:

Utopianism 443Post-normal Science 451

Precautionary Principle 455Property Rights and Regimes 457

Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths 461Religion and Environment Among North American First

Nations 466Roosevelt, Theodore 475

Scenarios 476Seveso 482Sierra Club 483Small is Beautiful 483Social Ecology 484Social Impact Assessment (SIA) 484Social Learning in the Management of Global

Atmospheric Risks 485Soft Energy Paths 487Sovereignty and Sovereign States 487Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and

Environmental 489

Theology 492Theories of Health and Environment 492Thoreau, Henry David 502Three Mile Island 503Torrey Canyon 503

UNU (United Nations University) 504Virtual Environments 505Waldsterben 508WCC (World Council of Churches) 509

Alphabetical List of Articles 511

List of Contributors 523

Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms 553

Index 569

Preface to the Encyclopedia of GlobalEnvironmental Change

THE ENVIRONMENT

The word environment, whose dictionary meaning is simplythat which surrounds, has in the last few decades become

a buzzword , encompassing an exceedingly diverse arrayof elements and social issues. Taking the original meaningas a point of departure, it is clear that we humans dependtotally on the environment provided by planet Earth forthe food we eat, the water we drink, and the air webreathe. Thus changes in this environment must be ofvital concern. Will Earth continue to sustain humans ina way that also encourages the ourishing of the otherliving things with whom we share the planet? This questionhas loomed ever larger as it has become more evidentthat human activities have been inducing major changesin all of the compartments of the global environment. Wehave converted forests and savannas to farms and cities;we have exhumed ancient treasures of fuels and minerals;we have used the rivers and winds as convenient sewers;and we have released entirely new chemical compoundsand organisms into the environment. In the 1960s, thescienti c community began to use the word environmentin this new non-specialist sense. Soon too, Departmentsof the Environment were created by many governments,and new scienti c journals began publication while otherswere re-named. For example, the International Journal ofAir Pollution became Atmospheric Environment! In theensuing decades, the world community has come to seethe environment in many different ways, as a life-supportsystem, as a fragile sphere hanging in space, as a problem,a threat and a home.

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

A broader and deeper understanding of the global aspects ofenvironmental concerns emerged in the 1970s and 1980s,and a new phrase global environmental change acquiredpopular currency. Paleoresearch had revealed that environ-mental change was far from new, and by no means thesole result of the actions of heedless humans. Since theplanet s formation, virtually every element of its environ-ment has been undergoing massive changes on all space andtime scales. Oxygen waxed and carbon dioxide waned inthe atmosphere. Continents moved about the planet s sur-face like scum on a soup kettle. Great ice sheets grew andshrank. Above all, the force of life (the biosphere) emergedas a dominant driver of planetary change.

However, another vital insight began to emerge about1980: the inescapably interlinked nature of these manyenvironmental changes. On the very longest time scales,continental drift moved lands into different climates butalso changed the climate of the globe itself. Photosyn-thetic life changed the atmosphere but also made possiblemore advanced life forms that could take advantage of thenew environment. On shorter time scales, atmosphere andocean often interact to produce the massive changes inthe Southern Paci c that we term El Nino and La Nina,whose consequences extend across the planet, and pro-foundly affect even our socioeconomic systems. Indeed,we have come to realize that human-induced perturbationsin the environment are becoming increasingly large, andare potentially coming to dominate the natural workings ofthe complex and interdependent global system that sustainslife on Earth. Humans and their global environment are nolonger independent; they are ever-increasingly becominginterdependent components of a single global system.

Thus, the term global environmental change has come toencompass a full range of globally signi cant issues relat-ing to both natural and human-induced changes in Earth senvironment, as well as their socioeconomic drivers. Thisimplicitly includes concerns for the capacity of the Earth tosustain life that have motivated the development of stud-ies of global change and sustainable development in thelast few decades. Analyses of global environmental changetherefore demand input from the social sciences as well asthe natural sciences (and indeed also from the engineeringand health sciences) necessitating an inescapably inter-disciplinary approach.

Scientists from many disciplines have been attractedto this growing eld of global environmental change.This is particularly noticeable in the biological sciencesthrough the encouragement of IGBP (International Geo-sphere Biosphere Programme), which invites ecologists toexpand their eld of vision from the plot and landscapescales to the regional, continental and global ones, and tointeract with scientists from other disciplines in exploringenvironmental change at these larger scales. Indeed thistrend has encouraged publishers and scienti c societies tointroduce new journal titles, and these publications from allaccounts appear to be ourishing.

At the same time, human social, economic, and culturalsystems are rapidly changing under the in uence of growingglobalization. In the economic sphere, for example, today sdiscourse centers on multinational corporations, the Global

x PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Economy, and the Globalization of Trade. Thus, theagendas of most of the physical, life, and social sciencesincreasingly focus on global-scale changes.

THE EVER-CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

Since the launching of Earth-viewing satellites, we havebeen able to see a constantly updated moving picture ofour planet. Great weather systems sweep around the globe,waves of green and brown ebb and flow over the continentswith the seasons, as do white waves of ice and snow.Nevertheless, a remarkable feature of the Earth systemhas been its relative stability. Since the dawn of life,the planets environment has remained within a range ofconditions that has supported life. Moreover, with somenotable and perhaps cautionary exceptions, changes fromyear to year, decade to decade, millennium to millennium,have been modest, particularly during the last 10 000 years.Many features of human society exhibit similar behavior.Civilizations and cultures evolve slowly for the most partin response to environmental, economic, and social drivingforces over their long lives. Great cities like Rome endurethrough the ages. A citizen of ancient Babylon probablywould have little difficulty understanding the politics ofmodern Toronto.

But today we appear to be entering an era of changeunprecedented since Babylon was a cluster of mud huts.There are many reasons to believe that changes greater thanhumankind has experienced in its history are in progressand are likely to accelerate.

Virtually every measure of human society numbers ofpeople and automobiles, airplanes, energy consumption,generation of waste is increasing exponentially. While thevalues of a few indicators are leveling off, the magnitudesof annual increases of others remain immense.

Major changes are becoming evident in many critical ele-ments of the environment increasing carbon dioxide con-centrations, stratospheric ozone depletion (not to mentionthe stratospheric Antarctic ozone hole and the possibility ofa similar Arctic event), rising sea level, declining produc-tivity of soils, widespread collapses of fisheries, dramaticdeclines in biodiversity, destruction of tropical forests, etc.Within living memory, the countryside around large citieshas been swallowed up by suburban developments andhighways. Humans are stepping on the gas pedal of theplanets environment, and perhaps recklessly breaking thesurvivable speed limit of global change.

Paleoclimatological studies have shown that the sta-ble environment that we take for granted has not alwaysprevailed. Indeed, the relatively brief period in whichhuman civilization has developed is somewhat unusual inits equable stability. Neolithic hunters in Europe some13 000 years ago saw their climate shift from temperate toglacial in a single short lifetime. The evolution of human

society is punctuated by wars, pestilence, and technologicalrevolutions. Major perhaps even catastrophic changecould occur in the future, because we know it has occurredin the past.

Rapidly advancing understanding of both natural andhuman systems and above all the ability to translate thatunderstanding into quantitative models has enabled us toexplore the future of our global society and its global cli-mate with unprecedented realism. Although prediction ofthe single future path that we will follow is inherentlyunpredictable, it is possible to map a broad range of futureenvironmental trajectories that we might take, each com-pletely consistent with our understanding of how the systemworks. Such scenario-building exercises amply confirm ourconcerns that the changes of the 21st Century could befar greater than experienced in the last several millennia.Business-as-usual for human society appears to implybusiness-as-highly-unusual for the global environment.

THE INTERLOCKINGBIOGEOPHYSICAL SOCIOECONOMICSYSTEMS

Recognition came in the 1970s that many of the environ-mental issues are inter-connected through the biogeochem-ical cycling of trace substances, especially carbon, sulfur,nitrogen and phosphorus. In fact, in a prescient statementon the main environmental research priority of the 1980s,Mostafa Tolba (then Executive Director of the UnitedNations Environment Programme) and Gilbert White (thenPresident of the Scientific Committee on Problems of theEnvironment) drew the attention of both the scientific andthe science-policy communities to the need to understandthe major global biogeochemical cycles in order to main-tain the global life support systems in a healthy state (Tolbaand White, 1979). Quoting from that statement,

We draw attention to the fundamental scientific importance ofunderstanding the biogeochemical cycles which link and unifythe major chemical and biological processes of the Earths sur-face and atmosphere. The results will have practical significancefor all of us who inhabit an Earth with limited resources andwho, by our actions, increasingly affect the quality of the humanenvironment.

So it is that many of the global environmental issues acidrain, stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, nitro-gen over-fertilization are inter-related through the globalbiogeochemical cycles.

One of the interesting results of the study of the Earthshistory has been the discovery of the global teleconnec-tions of the Earth system, with some major climatic shiftsoccurring simultaneously in the two hemispheres. In ananalogous way, there has been recognition for a long timethat human social, economic, and cultural systems are glob-ally inter-related. That these are connected in turn to the

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE xi

Earth system was implicitly recognized as early as the 1972Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.

To manage the human responses to this enormously var-ied but at least moderately coupled world system in anera of increasing global change through the diverse arrayof local, national and international organizations is indeed adaunting challenge. An essential first step is to describe pastand present states, then to explain the various phenomenaobserved, and finally to develop predictive models (or atleast a range of scenarios) describing the future behavior ofthis total SocioeconomicCulturalEnvironmental system.In this process, environmental scientists must learn howto assimilate better the new information constantly beingreceived, although uncertainties, often large, will continueto exist. Within this mix, rational and effective policies mustbe developed that will balance the risks and costs of globalenvironmental change in an adaptive way. Only then willwe be able to even formulate, much less start to implement,rational and effective policies that cope effectively withglobal change. The prospect of change tempts us to thinkin terms of winners and losers. However, such analysesoften do not play out in simple ways. For example, a mod-est increase in rainfall would cause farmers to rejoice whilevacationers would despair. However, greater farm produc-tion can lead to lower commodity prices, thereby reducingfarm incomes while making vacation food purchases lessexpensive. Human society is pretty well adapted to thepresent environment, so change is necessarily a challenge.

In the longer-term, much depends on the ability of soci-eties to respond, to adapt. Societies will differ in theresources natural, human, and technological that areavailable to them. They will also differ in terms of thevalues and priorities they attach to physical, social, andenvironmental goals, and in the social and political mech-anisms that they employ to seek these goals. These dif-ferences in the human world of generations yet unbornmay be as great and as significant as the changes inthe global environment. A major challenge for our times isto develop frameworks for understanding complex interdis-ciplinary issues of this complexity.

No discussion of change and the future can be completewithout consideration of risk. Projections of the future,however imaginative or soundly based, necessarily cen-ter on plausible, surprise-free scenarios population willincrease, economies will advance, climate will change alltypically slowly and smoothly. However, such projectionsmade at the beginning of the 20th Century would havemissed two World Wars, the automobile, aviation, spacetravel, television, and McDonalds in Beijing. By defini-tion, genuine surprises cannot be predicted. However, anunderstanding of the impacts of past surprises may help usto make our society and our world somewhat more robustin the face of the unknown surprises that await us.

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBALENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

The human dimension of global change has been definedas the ways in which individuals and societies contributeto global environmental change, are influenced by it, andadapt to it. Many empirical studies have been undertakenthat describe human activities in physical terms, based onvarious kinds of indicators. Rates of deforestation, urban-ization, and changing levels of emissions of greenhousegases are only some measurable contributors to environ-mental change. But the dynamics of human activities andglobal change are much more complex, and they reflect thecomplexities of the humannature relationship.

While the sheer burden of human activity on the planetis important, we know that the major forces at work arehuman beings operating together through political systems,corporations, interest groups, and beliefs that sway wholepeoples. These raise questions about the nature of choice,about the hopes, dreams, and frustrations that impel peopleforward, or block them. At the moment, for instance, thedream of the good life which has been a critical elementof every religious tradition in the world is increasinglybeing defined in terms of material possessions and powerfulimages that are shown on global media. Can this particularversion of human happiness be sustained on a limitedplanet? Some people say that it can; others say that itcannot.

The central questions about the role of human beingsin global environmental change revolve around social, cul-tural, economic, ethical, and even religious issues. Theseare becoming more and more pressing, and more and morefoundational as human beings deliberately or inadvertentlymodify more and more of the planet. It is also obvi-ous that in this generation the modification of organismsand ecosystems may well extend to the modification ofhuman beings themselves. Among the fundamental ques-tions are: What motivates us towards saving or harmingthe environment? How do we see ourselves with regard tonature? What is our responsibility to this and future gen-erations? Who do we think we are, and who would welike to become? Appropriately enough, Volume Five of thisEncyclopedia wrestles, in many different voices, with theseultimate questions that remain intimately linked with thesweep of physical, chemical, biological, geographical, andinstitutional changes documented and discussed throughoutthe earlier four volumes.

The Brundtland philosophy urges us not to reduce optionsfor future generations. Implementation of this idea is, how-ever, difficult. For example, it often seems more compellingto alleviate current poverty than to protect the environmentand renewable resources for future generations. Many sci-entists agree that new approaches are needed to meld thesocial with the natural sciences in the policy arena. Some ofthe new methodologies that go beyond the physical sciences

xii PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

are described in Volumes Four and Five of this Encyclo-pedia, e.g., post-normal science, integrated environmentalassessment, and the precautionary principle.

In a commentary in which he described the 21st Cen-tury as the century of the environment, Edward O. Wilsonbegan by referring to the growing consilience (the inter-locking of causal explanations across disciplines) so that theinterfaces between disciplines become as important as thedisciplines themselves. He then stated that this interlock-ing amongst the natural sciences will in the 21st Centuryalso touch the borders of the social sciences and humani-ties. In the environmental context, environmental scientistsin diverse specialities, including human ecology, are moreprecisely defining the arena in which that species arose,and those parts that must be sustained for human survival(Wilson, 1998).

This is a major challenge for environmental scientists.Already through DNA techniques, for example, it is possi-ble to trace back connections amongst prehistoric peoplesthrough the last Ice Age to modern times.

THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBALENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

More than two million papers are published every year inscience and medicine, a twentyfold increase since 1940 thattaxes the resources of concerned citizens, scientists, uni-versity departments, research institutes and libraries. At thesame time, many policy-motivated organizations find it dif-ficult to draw together the necessary expertise for resolvingthe newly emerging environmental issues. The scientificliterature relating to the environment is burgeoning. How-ever, research syntheses are in general still scattered acrossa broad spectrum of journals and books, and informationon global environmental change is not readily available inan inter-related way. In particular, it is quite uncommonfor contributions from the natural sciences to appear inthe same journal or workshop proceedings as contributionsfrom the social sciences and the humanities.

This Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change isa comprehensive and integrated reference in the broadarea of global environmental change that will be con-veniently accessible and productively usable by students,managers, administrators, legislators, and concerned citi-zens. The Encyclopedia consists of five volumes of inter-related material:

Volume 1 The Earth system: physical and chemicaldimensions of global environmental change(Michael C MacCracken and John S Perry,editors)

Volume 2 The Earth system: biological and ecologicaldimensions of global environmental change(Harold A Mooney and Josep G Canadell,editors)

Volume 3 Causes and consequences of global environ-mental change (Ian Douglas, editor)

Volume 4 Responding to global environmental change(Mostafa K Tolba, editor)

Volume 5 Social and economic dimensions of global env-ironmental change (Peter Timmerman, editor)

The first four volumes cover the broad issues of the sci-ence and politics of global environmental change. VolumeFive adds an often understated but extremely importantaspect, linking as it does, global environmental changeto the socioeconomic, cultural and ethical dimensions ofhuman societies. Here will be found a rich panoply of writ-ings by people who are not natural scientists but who havethought deeply about the environment. It places global envi-ronmental change in a refreshing historical, sociological andcultural context. In many contributions, the time horizonsof most interest are the last hundred and the next hundredyears. However, some contributions dip backward millionsof years. Throughout, the emphasis is upon the dynam-ics of the various processes discussed how and why didthey change? A second recurrent theme is the interconnec-tion of processes and changes What produces change?What is impacted by change? Finally, we attempt to dealeven-handedly with natural and human-induced change, andwith impacts on both the natural world and human society.From the numerous diverse articles in the Encyclopedia,we believe that the user can obtain a coherent picture ofthis complex and dynamic system of which we all area part.

To assist in promoting this coherence, each volumebegins with a group of extended essays on major top-ics that embrace the field covered in that volume. Theseare intended to provide an introduction to the topic, aconvenient road map through cross-references for explor-ing the Encyclopedia. Then there follows, in alphabeticalorder, shorter articles on a variety of scientific topics,descriptions of scientific programs, definitions, acronyms,and biographies of leading contributors to the field fromCharles Darwin, through the Russian ecologist Vernad-ski, to the three most recent environmental Nobel Laure-ates Crutzen, Rowland and Molina. Indeed, these defini-tions, biographies and acronym definitions are, we believe,a uniquely valuable feature of the Encyclopedia. In the caseof acronyms of international organizations and programs, itis no exaggeration to state that a young environmental sci-entist requires not only a good understanding of science,but also a good knowledge of acronyms, if they are tofollow the discussions taking place at many internationalmeetings! Also included in the alphabetic listings are abun-dant cross-references to related topics in the same or othervolumes.

The substantive scientific articles that comprise themeat of the Encyclopedia are original contributions

by active scientists from around the world, and thus

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE xiii

represent authoritative and up-to-date summaries of thestate of current knowledge, direct from the producers ofthis knowledge. A number of these articles break newground in synthesizing and summarizing our understandingfrom novel viewpoints and in unconventional ways. Thus,readers will find a wide variety of styles and approacheswithin the articles, reflecting in a unique way the richdiversity of todays world science. The articles have alsohad the benefit of careful reviews, particularly by our Edi-tors.

The scientific essays and some of the program descrip-tions begin with a few italicized paragraphs written fornon-specialists. These are not intended to be abstracts ofthe paper to follow, but rather are aimed at providing thereader with an introduction into why the topic is impor-tant and where it fits into the broader aspects of globalchange a kind of encouragement to read on. Readingon should not be too difficult a task, since most of thescientific essays are written at the level of journals suchas Scienti c American and AMBIO that are intended forthe non-specialist. The Encyclopedia will be a valuablesource of information for everyone with a general interestor a need-to-know in the various environmental fields (thenatural sciences, socio-economics, engineering, the healthsciences, and policy analyses) particularly as they relate toglobal-scale environmental change, its drivers, and its con-sequences. It is also expected that among the audiences foreach volume will be practitioners and researchers in thefields covered by the other four volumes. We believe thatthis rather unusual indeed unique Encyclopedia will beused in a variety of ways.

1. Some people will employ it simply as a convenientsource of information on specific topics What has beenhappening recently to the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean?Who was Roger Revelle? What is soil mineralization?What is ICSU or IGBP? What is the Kyoto Protocol?What is deep ecology?

2. Serious students in the environmental sciences maybegin by reading one or all of the introductory essays,which present highly compressed crash courses in arange of central topics.

3. We believe that the substantive specialized articles thatconstitute the bodies of the volumes are productivelyand enjoyably readable in their own right.

4. Finally, a case has been made by one of the volume edi-tors (Peter Timmerman) for encyclopedia browsing asan enjoyable and productive pastime (see Encyclope-dias: Compendia of Global Knowledge, Volume 5).

We believe that these five volumes are in the tradition of thehuman aspiration towards the compilation of global knowl-edge that sparked the preparation of the first encyclopediasin the 18th Century.

Our Editors have had the benefit of a marvellous post-graduate education in the course of the Encyclopediasevolution! We are immensely grateful to the many, manyauthors in our virtual university who have contributedtheir wisdom to this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Many helpful comments and draft paragraphs were receivedfrom the Volume Editors during the preparation of thisPreface.

REFERENCES

Tolba, M K and White, Gilbert F (1979) Global Life SupportSystems, SCOPE Newsletter, No. 7, October. 2 pp.

Wilson, Edward O (1998) Integrated science and the comingcentury of the environment, SCIENCE 279, 20482049.

Ted MunnEditor-in-Chief

Preface to Volume Five

Volume Five is devoted to the social, political, economic,and spiritual dimensions of global environmental change,and as such represents a departure from the conventionalfocus on the purely physical aspects of global change.It highlights the profound shifts in human thinking andawareness that are required to wrap our minds around theadvent of globalization, and our increasing ability to affectnatural systems, sometimes to our own benefit, sometimesnot. This powerful role cannot simply be captured bytreating human beings as if they were another naturalforce. Social, cultural, and economic ideas and institutionsshape the desires and hopes, the conflicts and resolutionsof conflict that are central to the human dimension ofglobal change. Yet, at the same time, human beings areincontestably part of nature as other volumes in thisEncyclopedia demonstrate. Volume Five overlaps with, andcomplements, these other volumes.

Because of the complex weave of interaction betweenhumanity and the environment, this volume contains manyessays and articles that are more in the realm of probesthan fixed descriptions of their topics. Powerful words andpowerful ideas, metaphors, myths, beliefs, images and arte-facts these are all vehicles for the creation and shapingof meaning among human beings. Topics covered include

the great political and economic theories, the most influen-tial views of nature from Plato to Rachel Carson, and thehistoric and literary seedbeds for the rise of environmentalthought and practice in our time.

Of particular importance in this volume are the introduc-tory essays from leading figures in the field, and specialefforts have been made throughout to give space to alterna-tive voices and ideas. Dialogue and diversity are essential tohuman development, and we hope that the reader is stim-ulated by this volume towards his or her own thoughtfulresponse to the increasing responsibility for the future ofthe Earth that has come upon us in our time.

Among the voices that we are privileged to present inthis volume, the Editors would like to single out that ofEster Boserup, whose pathbreaking work as a student ofthe social dynamics of technological change, and of therole of women in economic development, make her anexemplar of the kind of interdisciplinary thinker so oftenproclaimed as necessary, and so seldom found. She diedbefore the Encyclopedia could go to press, but we wouldlike to dedicate this volume to her memory.

Peter TimmermanEditor of Volume Five

The Human Dimensions of Global Change

PETER TIMMERMAN

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

The central icon of the environmental movement is the earth hanging in space, that mysterious and unexpectedcargo brought back from the voyages to the moon. See Figure 1 in The Earth System, Volume 1. It appearson bedroom walls, refrigerators, and annual reports by multinational food companies. Blue-green and sphericalagainst the stark blackness of space, it speaks of all things natural, all things green, the vision of one earth,one world.

Yet, part of its paradox is that this environmental symbolwas the result of the most advanced technological projectin human history (at that time), whose roots are easilytraceable to the challenge of the Cold War, the long-rangemissile projects beginning in World War II, the atomicbomb, the militarization of space, and even the elegantcamera technology that enabled the pictures to be taken.

But the image is even more iconic and mysterious thanthat. At rst glance, it appears a lonely image the onlyhome we have devoid of human reference points, at leastat the distance of the moon. Yet a nagging question is:where are we in this picture? The easy answer is that weare in there somewhere, maybe waving, or drowning. Themore intriguing answer is that we are the picture: that it tookall of science and technology that is, all of the ability toprovide a temporary earth in a plastic suit in deep spaceto keep a human alive and all of history, that is, not justevolution, but all the social and cultural reasons that wouldmake a being turn around at a precise moment oating inspace, pick out the earth from the surrounding darknessas something worth photographing, and then lift a camerato his eyes, focus, and take a picture with some purposein mind.

The literary critic, Marshall McLuhan, made a typicallyprophetic remark in 1970, in an obscure inaugural piece inan early environmental magazine (since defunct):

whereas the planet had been the ground for the human popula-tion as gure; since Sputnik, the planet has become gure andthe satellite surround has become the new ground . Onceit is contained within a human environment, Nature yields itsprimacy to art.

McLuhan here invokes the familiar image of the gure-ground reversal the faces that turn into vases, and backagain; or the duck that ips into a rabbit and ducks back

again to suggest that while up until the arrival of theimage from space, human beings saw themselves as gureson a ground, the environment is now a mere gure onhuman grounds.

The gure-ground reversal suggests that this is a suddenperceptual shift; which may be the case, but its elementshave been arriving for some time.

One early element can be found in the idea that thehigher you go off the earth, the closer you approach therealm of God. This is obviously exhilarating, but it isalso blasphemous and unsettling. An early source is thetemptation of Jesus, who, after being baptized by John,goes into the wilderness where he is threatened by the devil.Among the trials he undergoes is that of the potential fortotal earthly power; and the devil takes him to the highestpoint of the world and shows it all to him before Jesusrejects it. Peaks are for falling off of, as well as for gainingperspective.

In later medieval literature, airborne journeys of a morelighthearted sort take to the skies, the hero drawn by geeseor lifted up by air currents, or in a dream. Yet when Danteleaps off the earth and moves into the higher realms in TheDivine Comedy, it is clear that this is unsettling. A laterappearance of the earth from space, in Milton s ParadiseLost is ominously seen from the perspective of Satan, newlyreleased from the prison of Hell, and ying around theuniverse looking for a new home away from home.

This Godlike stance, epitomized by the image of the earthfrom space, is, as literature suggests, powerful. The arrivalof global maps and globes in the 16th century was part ofthe great surge of Western power that began with the ageof discovery and has only intensi ed its reach in the ageof the Internet. The ability to hold the world in our mindsis the forerunner of the ability to hold it in our hands, andvice versa.

2 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Today we continue the same process. Again, it wasMcLuhan who said that in the age of satellites there isno more wilderness. There is hardly anywhere on the earthwhere one can hide, for example, from cruise missiles that,guided by satellite, can drop on a designated square meterof ground. The Hubble telescope, of which we have heardso much, has sister scopes whose magnifying powers areturned in to gaze on the details of our lives. It is clearthat the American Armed Forces believe that the next highground for military superiority is the satellite surround.Evidence of this could be found during the Gulf War in1991, when the first action of the Allied powers was to cutoff access to international satellite pictures for the Iraqis,the result being that they were forced to fight essentiallyblind.

Another related element, contributing to the figure-ground reversal, is the gradual increase in humankindsinfluence over the physical systems of the planet. Othervolumes in this encyclopedia highlight this encroachment,where human beings are creaming off and rearranging vastparts of the earths primary production for our own pur-poses. Certainly human beings have affected large chunksof the earths natural terrain before, but the ability to affectwhole physical and chemical cycles of the planet surelyrepresents a watershed (airshed, earthshed) in earths his-tory. Our fingers and fingerprints are now and will continueto be all over the genetic future of a myriad species. Theground plans in which they will figure are human influ-enced, human inspired.

THE HUMAN DIMENSION OF GLOBALCHANGE

A volume of an encyclopedia on global environmentalchange that deals with the human dimension of globalchange is thus necessarily confronted with fundamentalissues, of which the most fundamental remains: what doesit mean to be human?

Tightly related questions, but more obviously tractable(though one need not get too carried away with tractability)are: what is the relationship between human meanings andgoals, and the tools, such as science and technology, thatwe are using to make those meanings and meet thosegoals? What does the humanizing of the planet mean? Is itmanageable, possible, agreeable, delightful, horrifying?

In 1996, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published abook called The View From Nowhere (Nagel, 1996), whichdescribes in detail the stance which modern science wishesto take. Another philosopher, Hilary Putnam, actually refersto this stance as Gods Eye View (Putnam, 1995). The ear-liest intimation of that stance may be Archimedes famousremark, that if he were allowed to place his lever anywhere,he could move the world. This hints at the later stance,which is that the earth is not a privileged vantage point,

and in fact there is no privileged vantage point. Scienceseeks (or sought) to eliminate all the effects and influencesof special locations, investigators, etc., in favor of univer-sal laws. This has been undermined at least at the popularlevel somewhat by the paradoxes of the observer and theobserved at the quantum mechanical level of science; butthe ethos remains intact.

The social critics (Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno,and others) of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s wereamong the first to worry about the possibility that thesearch for this particular kind of enlightenment what wemight call the universe lying spreadeagled on the dissect-ing table was not itself neutral. They suggested that therhetoric of expanding human knowledge was harnessed toa very powerful unexamined Puritanical drive towards apure objective truth, in the face of which ordinary humanexperience would wither and die. They also suggested thatthere is a complex connection between what we could callobjectivity and the treating of the world as if it were anobject.

The experience of the Nazi years (which, among otherthings, led to the fleeing of the Frankfurt School to Amer-ica), and the arrival of the atomic bomb and the Cold War,substantially undermined the claims of what has been calledthe Enlightenment Project or the Age of Modernity (seeEnlightenment Project, Volume 5). The claim that reasonand science could improve the lot of humankind becamejuxtaposed against the claim that it could also destroyhumankind. It was not enough to say that evil is alwayspossible, and reason and science could be misused; criticsbegan to question if there was something unreasonable inthe very framework of modernity.

The famous (or notorious) outcome of this was thearrival of postmodernism whose antagonism to modernitywas described succinctly by the French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard, as a suspicion of all grand narratives(Lyotard, 1984). These grand narratives included the spreadof reason over the world, universal human rights, theredescription of the natural world in scientific terms, theincreasing recasting of natural resources by technology, andglobalization.

It is worth pointing out in this context that virtually allthe international organizations and initiatives representedin this encyclopedia subscribe to the grand narrative tra-dition, simply because they were either generated in the19th century explosion of scientific networks and soci-eties; or in the post-World War II heyday of the UnitedNations.

Postmodernist thought is aligned to what is sometimescalled postnormal science (see Post-normal Science, Vol-ume 5), which is an expression of a similar form of skep-ticism about the rhetoric of neutral science. Postnormalscience interrogates this rhetoric, but also examines thework practices of scientists, their worldview assumptions,

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 3

the agenda-setting devices (e.g., why are scientists lookingat this particular part of the world and not another?) andtheir communities.

Rayner and Malone, in their overview essay for this vol-ume, describe in detail a number of the tensions between theuniversalizing tendencies in the physical sciences and theless powerful (but often similarly universalizing) counter-strategies in the social sciences and the humanities (seeSocial Science and Global Environmental Change, Vol-ume 5).

To report on some personal experience, it was while Iwas involved with the project to establish the InternationalHuman Dimensions of Global Change Programme in thelate 1980s that the project leaders found themselves prac-tically, as well as theoretically, faced with the implicationsof the split between the worldviews of the physical sciencesand those of the social sciences and humanities. Roughlyspeaking, however, the main dividing line is not betweenthe sciences and the social sciences; in fact, the dividingline is within the social sciences, between those social sci-ences whose practitioners see themselves engaged in someform of quasi-physical science enterprise, and those that seethemselves engaged in (what for want of a better phrase)what could be called meanings and frameworks.

The practical implications of this were (and are) thatmodels of global change generated by physical scienceinstitutions treat human beings as if they were another ele-ment in a diagram of boxes with wires. The output of certainsocial sciences parts of physical geography, anthropol-ogy, demography, etc. can fit reasonably congenially intothese wiring diagrams. Social behavior, communications,politics, and so on, are marginalized or added on as rhetor-ical flourishes in the form of feedback loops. On the otherside of the dividing line, other social scientists and human-ists assault the whole enterprise, i.e., that it is a symptom ofthe global situation we are in (the rationalized objectifica-tion of the world) and not a solution. This kind of standoffhas complicated efforts to create international research pro-grams that could usefully integrate the natural and the socialsciences.

THE RISE OF THE ENVIRONMENTALMOVEMENT

Traditionally, histories of the environmental movement(especially in North America) begin with conservationefforts and egregious examples of early industrial pollu-tion, and trace its evolution through the creation of nationalparks, the upsurge of interest in the 1960s through RachelCarsons (1963) Silent Spring, and the arrival of environ-mental legislation in the 1970s and 1980s. This fits in with aprogressive model of a set of problems, problems identified,an orderly political response, and so on.

In light of the above, however, I believe that a morepowerful history links environmentalism to some centralconcerns of the Romantic movement in the late 18th centuryabout the fundamental relationship between human beingsand Nature, in particular the nature of Human Nature in aworld increasingly subjected to human influence. Moreover,the most compelling parts of works like Rachel Carsonsare not about this or that pesticide, but about threats to whatcould be called the fabric of life, i.e., threats.

As discussed more fully in Art and the Environment,Volume 5 and Literature and the Environment, Vol-ume 5, the Romantic movement was driven by a desireto overturn and reconstruct what the artists, poets, andadvanced political thinkers of the time believed to be anoutmoded, and indeed repressively dead, cosmology. Thiscosmology patriarchal, hierarchical, and rational (in thesense of a machine-like logic) was increasingly beingused to cage and tie down new expressions of human well-being. Because it was outmoded, it was like a snake skinor an exoskeleton that was too small externally applied,not internally generated.

Among the metaphors applied to this cosmology were themask and the machine. The mask ultimately derived fromthe critique of civilization fomented by the French philoso-pher Jean-Jacques Rousseau symbolized the hypocrisyand public demeanor of ancient powers, as well as theemerging urban populace alienated from those powers, andfrom each other. The opposite of the mask was the Manof transparent virtue, and part of the increasingly vicioustheatre of the French Revolution (17891795) was therelentless stripping off of, first, the masks of rank and sta-tion, and then, the stripping off of the masks of personallife down to the bone.

The machine came to symbolize both the newfoundenergy that could stimulate a new world of wealth creation,but also the turning of people into creatures of the machine.The early Industrial Revolution appeared to be like the mawof some great creature, driving rural people away from theirfarms and villages, and into hideously polluted factorieswhere they worked inexorably, hour after hour, day afterday. The fact that incomes and life-expectancies begantheir also inexorable rise upward, and the uncomfortablefact that supposedly happy rural life before industrializationwould not bear close examination, had less impact than theimmediately obvious relationship between the dismantlingof a seemingly organic world and the interim chaos thatensued. Capitalism turned everything into a resource forexploitation.

To the Romantic writers and poets William Blake,Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Schiller Nature becomesmany things in the wake of the extraordinary eruption ofindustrialization into the world. Most obviously, it becomesa refuge from the ills of modernizing life, which is one ofthe sources for the conservation and parks movement. Less

4 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

obviously, it becomes a kind of comrade, or surrogate-like human beings, Nature is under threat. Some socialecologists see this as a central thread in modern environ-mental politics. Another aspect of Nature is its presencein the world as an alternative system or structure to thatbeing raised by human ingenuity. The fact that it has acreative autonomy of its own, and is supremely inventiveand complex in its own right, challenges the arrogance oftechnological man.

For some people, Nature becomes an entry into a spiritualrealm, and interestingly enough, it is critics like JohnRuskin and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who fastenon the intricate details of Natures design as the entry way;and not, as earlier, on Nature as a grand symbol. In this, onecan see the growing influence of natural science, initially onthe Victorians, and later in the synthesis that would becomethe environmental movement.

However important this history may be, the real historyof the modern environmental movement, to my mind,begins with Hiroshima, and is followed very quickly by therevelations about the Nazi death camps. It was these eventsthat concentrated a growing unease about the capacity ofhuman beings to destroy themselves, and perhaps the worldaround them. We can begin to see a change of tone inenvironmental writing (still nature writing) in the 1950s(Rachel Carsons first successes appeared then); and it islittle remembered that the writing of Silent Spring coincidedwith the first great international grassroots environmentalaction to stop the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.Part of what fueled that successful political activity was theunsettling prospect of having what had hitherto been seenas a most benign metaphor, mothers milk, poisoned; andpoisoned at a distance. Carsons pesticide poisoning at adistance amplified and echoed that other concern.

These threats to the fabric of life to the possibilitythat rents in the fabric might be caused by human igno-rance were (in my mind) the spiritual dynamic behind theenvironmental movement. In the 1970s, it went somewhatunderground, as the nuts and bolts of environmental man-agement took center stage. I say somewhat, because it couldalways be found, for example, in the concern for the poten-tial loss of endangered species. But at various points, it hasreturned in full force to revitalize environmental activism.In the late 1980s, the prospect of a rent in the fabric of thesky the ozone hole regenerated a whole array of envi-ronmental actors and institutions. Similarly, if more slowly,the prospect of irreversible climate change has begun toconcentrate the minds of many activists.

The current activist environmental movement in partbecause of the political dynamic associated with globalenvironmental issues (symbolized by the Rio Earth Sum-mit in 1992) appears to be more inclined to return tothe question of the role of modern industrialization and itstechnological imperatives. Globalization as a phenomenon

is becoming widely seen as the interim step towards the ulti-mate transformation of the Earth into a human enterprise.Since multinational corporations and the rhetoric of globalfree trade are propelling much of this, environmentalistshave begun making more and more sophisticated critiquesof mainstream economics.

ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL CHANGE

A central fact about contemporary life is that globalizationis rooted in a range of theories and practices that derivefrom economics. This is contested by those who wouldprioritize political structures such as the nation state, orstrategies of imperialism, or even social or legal or philo-sophical forces deriving from the spread of Western modelsof individualism across the globe. Nevertheless, if one seesin economics a complex web of all of these, ultimatelyjustified by an almost religious belief in the virtues of themarket system whose every whim needs to be tended, thenits strength as a belief system for at least the elites in theWest and their acolytes can be hardly disputed.

Looked at historically, one of the most important aspectsof modern economic theory and practice is that it representsthe first and most successful form of systems theory asapplied to social systems. This is part of its power; andas will be discussed shortly, is essential to its ethicaldimension.

Economics, like the modern social sciences generally,originated in various attempts to do for the social worldwhat Newton had done for the physical world, that is,find a set of simple laws that would explain and under-pin a complex set of phenomena. The Scottish and Frenchenlightenment thinkers were haunted by this possibility;and among the first, and among the most controversial, ofthe attempts at fulfilling this vision, was the provocativework by the British writer (actually born in the Nether-lands) Bernard de Mandeville (1714), The Fable of theBees.

In the Fable, Mandeville breaks with the moral andspiritual traditions of the world, and argues that privatevice should be encouraged, because spending on luxurygoods, prostitutes, race horses, etc., generates many publicbenefits through employment. Here in embryo is the centralpillar of neo-conservative thought in our own day. Whatmade Mandevilles work so influential was the linkingof local phenomena to global phenomena with oppositecharacteristics. The social thinker is either to trace theimpacts of the local phenomena to their global outcomesfrom a neutral stance (the view from nowhere), or, evenmore influentially, realize that the local phenomena canbe described quite differently when seen from a highervantage point. Moreover, the allocation of goods and badscan be dissociated from any notion that the Deity bestowsthem.

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 5

This powerful systems model sat in the armory of theearly economists, awaiting further refinement. In the mean-time, these economists, including the physiocrats in France(mid-18th century), and the classical economists Smith,Malthus, and Ricardo (1750s1830s) began the task oftracing out the transformation of Nature, people, and invest-ments/finance/invention/buildings into land, labor, and cap-ital. With each tracing, the relationship between economicactivity and the physical world diminished, and was re-placed by the intricate workings of the market.

Perhaps one of the hardest things for a non-economist(actually, for most economists as well) to recognize isthat economics does not deal with the physical world.This became particularly true after the first neo-classicalrevolution in the mid 19th century associated with J S Mill,William Stanley Jevons, and others; and continued intothe 20th century (with variations). Instead, it deals withthe subjective desires of individuals, as expressed throughcompeting demands signaled by prices, and adjudicated bya market whose other component is supplies, drawn to themarket by the price signals, which are re-determined bythe interaction of demand and supply. More modern theoryspeaks of rational allocation of scarce resources, but again,the real world only appears in the tenuous link supplied byan assumption of scarcity.

As a result, in contemporary economic theory and prac-tice, the natural world enters only as it influences prices.If there is no price on koala bears, i.e., no one wants orvalues them, they do not exist. To deal with this prob-lem (and others) is the domain of the emerging disciplineof environmental economics (see Economics and GlobalEnvironmental Change, Volume 5; Environmental Eco-nomics, Volume 5). Among the tasks of this discipline are:to find shadow values for environmental goods that do notshow up in market prices; to develop surrogate measuresfor environmental value; subject environmental goods thatcurrently have no legal or proprietary owners to privatiza-tion; and generally to internalize within the market whatare called externalities.

This environmental economics approach can be com-pared to the approach of ecological economics (see Ecolog-ical Economics, Volume 5). Ecological economics repudi-ates the entire superstructure of modern economic thoughtpolemically described above; and rather proposes to returnto the kinds of approaches characteristic of the Frenchphysiocrats, and others. Specifically, ecological economistsfocus on a variety of physical aspects of human use of theresources of the earth to sustain life.

This approach considers, among other things, what arethe physical requirements to feed human beings, sustainagriculture year by year, harness energy, process mineraland chemical feed stocks for industrial production, andassess the ability of the earth systems to handle the wasteproducts of our activities. There are a number of problems

with this alternative approach, of which perhaps the leastserious is that there is no consistent set of measuring toolsand common language among the variety of competing ver-sions of ecological economists. Economists such as Dalyand Cobb (1993) have been working for some years onalternative measures of gross national product and moni-toring systems other than price mechanisms.

More serious is the difficulty of internalizing the othereconomic approach, which, whatever ones views, doescurrently drive the international economic system. Theprice mechanism is ingrained into the workings of virtuallyall decision-making processes, and acts as a fundamentalpurveyor of information in current society.

Most serious of all are the intangible benefits of thestandard economic approach as a moral and ethical system.A lot that could be said about this, but I would like todiscuss two issues on this topic briefly.

The first, returning to where this section began, withMandevilles vision, is that one benefit of the standardeconomic approach is it allows people to repudiate com-passion; or to put it another way, to feel good about beingself-interested. Obviously, technical economists (welfareeconomists and the like) would protest this kind of remark;but I am speaking here about a general cultural influence.Part of the neo-conservative agenda that has been so pow-erful in recent years is an argument that people who actcompassionately towards the poor are acting inefficiently.Indeed, they are, in fact, standing in the way of the improve-ment in the lot of the poor that would be produced byallowing the market to operate more efficiently. Everythingthat interferes with the market social safety nets, publicinsurance, public health care is by definition inefficient,and thus drags down the potential for the economy. It is thehard-hearted economic realist who is really the benefactorof the poor.

A related moral aspect of this system is that it is sup-posedly morally neutral. Since it derives from individualwants, whatever those wants may be, it says nothing aboutwhether some wants are better than others. This classicattack on the amorality of utilitarians is, in fact, a source ofpride to economic liberals; though they tend, paradoxically,to bemoan the loss of conservative values like family lifethat their system is happily destroying.

The second (and related) issue is that not only are the ori-gins of those wants now subjected to gross manipulation bycorporate advertising; but at the heart of the system for avariety of obscure historical and sociological reasons onecan find a powerful model of the human which is being pro-pounded. In this view, contrary to virtually all ethical andspiritual traditions in the world, human beings are funda-mentally self-interested, and possessed of infinite desireswhich can never be fully satisfied; and that rather thantry and eliminate these desires, they should be encour-aged. Similarly, consumption patterns are now fully seen

6 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

as expressions of one s personality. The rise of fashion, theneed for status differentiation in an increasingly homog-enized world, and the transformation of the citizen into aconsumer rather than a producer, have all contributed to theseemingly unlimited growth in consumption in developedcountries.

As has been stated by numerous writers, the spread of thisin nitely desiring consumer model to the developing worldis doubly troubling. Analysts of the so-called ecologicalfootprint the amount of extra resources needed to ser-vice developed country growth already argue that we willneed three or four new earths to service a world populationcarrying around in its heads the lifestyles of North America.

MANAGING THE EARTH?

In the meantime, if we look at actual production patterns onthe earth, designed to service this population, we can seevery important trends in the technical means being deployedin the reordering of the planet for human ends.

Approximately 40% of land-based net primary produc-tion (that is, plant-generated material), and over 25% ofmarine net primary production is now being diverted orrearranged for human use. Much of this is taken by thedomestication of livestock, the harvesting of higher animalsand sh, and agriculture. This is completely unprecedented.

What is happening around the world is essentially arestructuring of ecosystems in order to maximize produc-tion, primarily through creating systems according to atleast ve rules.

1. organize for harvesting of natural products at the peakof productivity. The productive peak for many naturalecosystems is at the end of the juvenile phase;

2. concentrate for easier planting/monitoring/harvesting;3. replace/buffer/enhance ecosystem processes;4. add value at, and beyond, the farm gate;5. suppress extra-market externalities.

Here are two examples of some of these rules inoperation.

One example is sh farming. Worldwide natural shstocks are in deep trouble, with something like 34% of

sh species threatened with extinction. One solution isintensi ed sh farming in captive tanks. It is calculatedthat one in four sh that reaches market today comes froma sh farm. The problem is that a sh farm is a monoculture,and all the supporting services have to be brought in fromthe outside sh farmers are now competing with poultryand pork producers for grain and protein meal supplements,such as soybeans. These farms also produce high levels ofwaste, they suffer from outbreaks of disease, and forms ofchemical pollution.

This is exactly the same situation as in monoculturalagriculture. The problem with the average managed eld

is that it is trying to turn back into a meadow or a forest.Today s agriculture requires immense inputs of pesticides,herbicides, gasoline for tractors, etc., in order to create anoutdoor factory. The most recent types of high-yield cornrequire that all the microorganisms in the surrounding soilbe killed off. This kind of agriculture is becoming more andmore expensive, in part because the weeds and the bugs,i.e., the ecological precursors of a return to a meadow, arebeing chemically and biologically selected for resistance towhatever the latest crop strategy is.

A similar process has been underway for many years inforestry.

Rule one means that crops, trees and sh must beharvested in the juvenile phase and before they level off asadults, at which point it is economically inef cient for themto just be sitting around. This means that there are no olderage cohorts left, which also means that the regenerationthrough decomposition disappears. If you have no old trees,you have no carbon being returned to the soil, no place forinsects and other decomposers to nestle in, and so on.

Rule two, which is essential to agriculture and mining,concentration and simpli cation means, in living systems,that there is no diversity, and that makes the system vul-nerable to catastrophic attack by virus, bug, plague, weed,or genetic mutation or rapid climate change.

Rule three means that all the processes of energy cycling,nutrient creation, removal of wastes, and so on, have tobe imported into the simpli ed ecosystem from outside. Inorder to do that, energy is required, in addition to resourcesfrom somewhere else, which means that some other high-quality ecosystem (or stock of fossil fuels) is being tappedinto and degraded. It is based on the assumption that thereis always somewhere else left to go to get the suppliesneeded to feed the arti cial ecosystem.

Rule four, which is well known to farmers, means thatthe primary production of the ecosystem is virtually worth-less it is essentially a host for what will happen next.A potato is worth nothing compared to barbacue potatochips. That is where the money is. A particularly ironicexample of this came recently during the collapse of theEast Coast Fisheries. One of the largest Canadian sh pro-cessors, which was instrumental in destroying the sheries,and has now moved on to the South China Sea, turned itsattention to sh species that it had never bothered to shfor before, ground them up, and then rebuilt them as sh

ngers in the shapes of star sh and seahorses, and was sell-ing them at great pro t to Colonel Sanders and other fastfood outlets in the US.

Rule ve, which is perhaps the most important, is anattempt to eliminate the environment as a part of economiccosts of production and marketing. The best example ofthis the one that is causing global warming is the sup-pression of geography to enable the smooth running of freetrade. Free trade, or if you like, international free markets,

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 7

depend upon the ability to ship goods to any place in theworld without friction or at very low friction. Distance fromone place to another is no longer to be a consideration. Thereason this can be done more or less is the low priceof fossil fuels. Cheap transportation means that Californiaproduce can compete, for example, with Ontario producevirtually year round.

The reason why fossil fuels are cheap is that the earthsubsidizes carbon dioxide and other emissions. The ecolog-ical costs of these fuels are not internalized: if they were,free trade would die tomorrow. As it is, we are awaitingglobal warming.

POLITICS AND THE WANING OF TRUST

Global change presents us with a number of issues cli-mate change, the extinction of species, and the disposal ofnuclear waste that require us to think in the very longterm, over hundreds and maybe thousands of years. Onereason why people have turned to ethicists and spiritualleaders to articulate new environmental ethics, and othersto new environmental politics, is a sense that this kind oftask is beyond the normal reach of our current ways ofthinking, and requires something different. An importantrecent set of discussions has revolved around the conceptof trust, what Niklas Luhmann (1979) referred to as oneof the ways in which we try personally or politically tocope with uncertainty over time through vowing to betrustworthy, trusting others, entrusting ourselves to them,accepting trusteeships, etc.

It is a little known fact that one central element ofWestern representative democracy grew out of a debate(actually a war) about whom to trust, how to entrust, and forhow long, with decision-making power. The British Crownsought (under Charles I in the 1630s) to retain the powerof taxation without representation (to use an anachronis-tic phrase) by claiming emergency powers to deal withsupposed external threats to the nation. Charles wanted tobuild ships and get some extra pocket money. The ensu-ing Ship Money struggle and the Civil War that followedled the next generation of politicians and philosophers towork on the conditions for declaring emergency powers.The political theory and practice that evolved further clar-ified the nature of the entrusting relationship betweencitizen and government as a whole, first in Britain, and thenelsewhere. As outlined by John Locke (among others), thecontract between government and citizen became seen tobe in part based on the entrusting of decision-makingpower to a representative body for a period of time subjectto eventual review by the electorate.

This historical interlude is important because it points upthe fact that pivotal to the entrusting of decision-making torepresentatives was the idea of time: that the governmentcould not always refer back to citizens for every decision

and indeed it was important not to do so, when issueswere so complex or in need of such speedy resolutionthat constant referral back through simple referenda, etc.,was unlikely to produce a better outcome than focuseddebates by representatives, who were free to be convincedby their opponents of the wisdom or folly of their position.Obviously, the legitimacy of this entire setup which is notexactly an accurate description of how things turned out inrepresentative institutions around the world is now undergreat stress. Not only are even democratic governmentscurrently more executive and less legislative, for a varietyof complex reasons, than the ideal supposes, but citizensare now more educated and unwilling to defer to electedrepresentatives than they may have been; and there has alsobeen an evolution towards at least the rhetoric of moreactive participation by unelected individuals in the decision-making process. This has been aided and abetted by newcommunications technologies like the Internet.

Representative democracies have not been able to comeup with appropriate ways to respond to this desire forincreased participation, and what is in place is somewhathaphazard and flawed; and this has affected the ability ofgovernments and institutions to respond to underlying pub-lic anxiety about fundamental environmental questions, andthe whole range of longer term concerns in any other waythan by bureaucracy. On the one hand, there is an increasinguse of single issue referenda, which are subject to manipu-lation and distortion, but give people a voice or at leasta gesture. On the other hand, there has arisen over thepast while, a whole array of quasi-participatory commit-tees, NGOs, and investigative bodies like the EnvironmentalAssessment Review Panels and Royal Commissions. Theseusually report to Cabinet or Parliament, and they are sup-posed to engender trust that the pros and cons of the longerterm are being weighed and assessed properly by expertsas well as citizens in a deeper way.

These new approaches seem, however, to do little toaddress some of the more fundamental distrusting going onout there. This is tied to the phenomenon that this sectionbegan with referring to: the increasing recognition thatdecisions being made (or avoided) are extending over largerand larger stretches of time and space, and having effectsthat are not part of the original mandate of the politicalinstitution making the decision. A classic example of this isthe repudiation by outraged citizens of agreements made bytown councils, and other local bodies, to site hazardous orradioactive waste facilities and the casting about for anappropriately legitimate level of government that can makethat kind of decision. We didnt elect you to make that kindof decision , is the rallying cry. But democratic countrieshave not yet found any way of legitimating decisions aboutwhere to put high-level nuclear waste for a million yearsor more, in spite of a multitude of commissions, reports,inquiries, and so on.

8 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Associated with this is an easily awakened mistrust ofthe elite and professional apparatus of rational manage-ment. Part of the legitimacy of government in our timeis in its professed ability to manage any change rationally.The rise of the modern bureaucratic state is based on thepremise that utilitarian calculations mixed with expert pro-jection can cope rationally with most of the situations thatwill arise. So powerful has this rationalization been thaton the occasions where symbols of managed rationalityhave broken down Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Viet-nam they have threatened the legitimacy of the entiresystem of governance. Some philosophers suggest that thespecial form of rational management associated with themodern world was fatally crippled at Auschwitz. Others,less radically and more hopefully, suggest that people arenow less prone to do things just because their governmenttells them to like walking unprotected into atom bombtest sites.

Certainly one of the interesting facts of our time is thatthe citizenry and the environmental radical are often nowarrayed on the side of prudential behavior with regard toproposed future risks; while governments, administrativeexperts, and corporate elites are essentially risk-prone.Their trust in their own capacities is undisturbed, in partbecause they are so locked into short-term forecasting.It is everyone else who finds themselves forced to injectpessimism and uncertainty back into the process; and tomandate the consideration of worst-cases and the very longterm.

It is usually said that politicians and the system areunable to think past the next election, and that this issomehow due to the greediness and short-sightedness oftheir masters, the electorate. While there is something tothis, it is not everything. There are endless examples of theshort-sightedness of the expert and the forecaster, whosemodels accentuate the present and discount the future.The expert can miss the forest for the trees, and thefact that there are no more trees may not show up as aloss on the balance sheet, if the property values can becashed out elsewhere. Counter to these balance sheets andsnazzy models is often something much humbler, moreconservative (in the original sense) and simpler: the uneasysense among the ordinary person that something has gonewrong, and that if we keep going the way we are going,things can only get worse.

Common sense is not all that common, and I do notwant to exalt the common man or woman as the paragonof all wisdom. Yet it was the philosopher Karl Popper whomade the case that one of the great virtues of democracieswas that sometimes the citizenry were the only people whocould break the stranglehold of some grand stupidity thatwas mesmerizing the all-knowing powers-that-be.

In this category a feeling for the overall wisdom ofwhat is going on I would put the feel for the longer term.

Perhaps it is just living a life, or the fact of having children,or being the latest in a long story line that stretches backin time. Traditional cultures developed methods of thinkingethically over the longer term, and this is one of the reasonsthey were, in large part, sustainable.

One crucial element of thinking about the longer term,facing the future, is facing towards the past. To developa sense of responsibility over time, traditional cultureshave relied upon ancestor worship and long-standing rituals.Thinking like an ancestor is a familiar strategy: respect for

ones living elders, and ones long-dead ancestors providesone with a compass for what one should do now and alsowhat one should do to keep faith with those people into thedistant future. If we continue to do what has worked wellin the past, then the future is secured.

This kind of approach to risks is, of course, threatenedwhen something new and unique comes along like nuclearpower or PCBs. It is also threatened across the board bya society that, in cutting itself free from the cycles of theseasons and of ecosystems, no longer values the wisdomthat comes from having been through the cycles manytimes. We value the innovations of the young; the old wediscard and stuff away in old peoples homes, their wisdomuseless to us.

Another attempt to extend ethical or moral sentimentsacross time is associated with those cultures that believein reincarnation. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, peopleare encouraged to treat animals properly because they wereones mother in a previous lifetime (and there is always thepossibility that becoming an animal is ones own fate). Allbeings are thereby linked across time by familial ties whichengender respectful treatment.

A third traditional approach, perhaps more familiar inwhat derives from a Christian culture, is to see things subspecie aeternitas, that is, under the gaze of eternity or God.Ones own actions, or the actions of others, can then be seenas part of a larger pattern or narrative. Related to this is theidea of the moral absolute or imperative.

Moral absolutes are associated particularly with the workof the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who expandedon a rich tradition going back at least to Plato. Moralabsolutes (such as thou shalt not kill ) are supposedly freefrom historical or geographical specificity. This means thatthey stretch throughout time: it will always be wrong todo this, whatever the change in the situation. This kindof absolute moral stance can also reflect a belief that theconsequences of ones acts are not important that oneshould do the right thing, whatever happens.

Long-term issues tend to foster absolutist positions,partly because the sense of a problem stretching out fora long time comes to equal forever.

A moral and ethical consideration which seems to benew to our time is the idea of not doing anything to under-mine the sustainability of life on earth we might say to

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 9

fray fatally the fabric of things. This new considerationderives from our considerably enhanced power to affectearths biological and physical systems, which we havealways previously been able to take for granted. Seed-time and harvest shall not fail was Gods pledge to Noahafter the flood. Hans Jonas (in his 1984 book, The Imper-ative of Responsibility), referred to this as the ontologicalimperative. Essentially, human beings are now subject to aphysical imperative which is simultaneously a moral imper-ative: the basic rule is not to threaten the continuation oflife systems on the Earth.

Many people already subscribe to the most drastic ver-sion of this imperative, which shows up as a revulsiontowards extinction of species. It is a widely shared belief(supported by surveys) that since extinction is forever,endangered species require special treatment. It is not clearhow old this sentiment is: that is, previous generationslikely lacked the ecological knowledge (as do we still inmany cases) to predict the ultimate consequences of thewanton destruction of individual members of species to thepoint where reproduction became impossible. A widespreadassumption was that there were always more Xs where Xcame from.

So there are perhaps gestures towards some new moralimperatives based on a new awareness of our capacities fordestruction; and the broadening of a new moral horizon,based on our anxiety that there should continue to be dawnsover the old horizon for as far as we can envision the future.

THREATS TO THE INTIMATE

The concerns over the threats to the fabric of life implied bycertain facets of global environmental change have begunto return as in Rachel Carsons day not just to the localimpacts and expressions of global change, but to what couldbe called threats to the intimate.

An ordinary threat to the intimate is the issue ofendocrine disruptors the possible disruption of the humanendocrine system by some combination of the bath of chem-icals within which people in modern societies operate. Buta more extraordinary threat is posed by the prospect ofgenetic engineering, including ultimately the engineeringof human life.

Because genetic engineering obviously involves gettingdown to the guts of things, it is obvious that it provokesgreat fear and concern, some of which may well be techni-cally unjustified. However, the underlying fear and concernis connected to the themes I have been discussing. Weare on the verge of having human beings determine whatthe nature of the human is going to be. This presentsus with a kind of moral vertigo, rather like sitting ina barbers chair looking into an infinite set of retreatingmirrors.

For environmentalists, the spread of uncontrolled bio-engineering is certainly of concern; but it would be foolishto deny that there is also a visceral reaction to the wholeenterprise, controlled or uncontrolled. This reaction is partof the often-unnoticed, deeply conservative strain in envi-ronmentalism; and it is in part a reaction to the often-unnoticed, deeply radical strain in the modern economicenterprise. The fact that critics of protestors against bioengi-neering use a variety of economic and utilitarian argumentsreinforces the belief that the experiment with the naturalworld is part and parcel of the growing push to experimenton human beings, who are, after all, themselves part of thenatural world. So one is forced back onto some very oldand familiar debates: is there more to human beings thantheir material parts, than their genetic makeup, etc? If thereis, what is its basis?

At the end, we return to the image of the earth fromspace. The French existentialist philosopher, Gabriel Marcelonce made a distinction between what he called prob-lems and mysteries. Problems from the Greek word pro-blemata, to throw in front of are things that one can standback from and attempt to solve from the outside. They canbe cracked open, like nutshells. Mysteries, on the otherhand, are things or questions that cannot be handled in thisway: the more you try and solve a mystery, the more it pullsyou in, the more it involves you personally in its solution.Murder mysteries are really problem novels there is aproblem to be solved, and the detective moves on to thenext one. True mysteries simply expand, deepen, the moreyou probe into them; and usually bring into question yourown deepest beliefs and concerns.

The earth from space looks like a problem Howto manage planet Earth? is a familiar phrase, broughtinto currency by a special issue of Scientific American in1989 but it is in fact a mystery, since it encompassesus, and calls into question the deepest wellsprings of ourcurrent World Project the transformation of the groundout of which we came into something more akin to ourown wishes and desires.

REFERENCES

Daly, H and Cobb, J (1993) For the Common Good, Beacon Press,Boston, MA.

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) The Postmodern Condition, AReport on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manch-ester, xxiiixxv/311/3741.

Jonas, H (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility, University ofChicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Luhmann, N (1979) Trust and Power, Wiley, Chichester, UK.Nagel, T (1996) The View From Nowhere, Oxford University

Press, New York.Putnam, H (1995) Comments and Replies, in Reading Putnam,

eds P Clark and B Hale, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

The Changing HumanNature Relationships(HNR) in the Context of Global EnvironmentalChange

BERNHARD GLAESER

Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany

In his Metamorphoses or Transformations, completed in the year 8 AD, the great Roman poet, P OvidiusNaso tells the story of changes in nature, mythology, and human history. In particular, the philosophy lecturein Book 15 gives an amazing account of natural and social change that include such themes as global change(GC), the Gaia hypothesis, environmental destruction, and human and political development. Ovids depictiondemonstrates the broad scope of natural and social change; it is the starting point for this attempt to discuss avariety of perspectives concerning the changing relationship between humans and nature in the context of globalenvironmental change (GEC).

The overall objective of this introductory essay is to convey a broad view of social and cultural aspects ofGEC. It represents a Western, social science perspective, and re ects on todays discourses as in uenced orcharacterized by the turn from the second to the third millennium. It is concluded that the international scienti ccommunity can and should play a vital role in n