Not Too Late to Change Course

Professor Derek Shearer, writing in the HuffPost, shares his experience at the World Ecological Forum in Visby, Sweden:

The most important speech of the conference was the address by Johan Rockstrom, a professor of natural resource management at Stockholm University and head of the Stockholm Environmental Research Institute. Rockstrom received the Forum's Global Impact award for outstanding environmental publication, given for his article, "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity" (Nature, vol. 461/24, September 2009). Rockstrom is a compelling scientific speaker who knows how to hold an audience (perhaps Davis Guggenheim, who directed Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, should make a short documentary of Rockstrom's presentation). The message that Rockstrom expounded is very sobering -- he is not alarmist, but his presentation is highly alarming.

He and his colleagues have worked out the biophysical conditions that allowed human beings to appear and then prosper on the planet -- the safe operating conditions for humanity. They have quantified nine interlinked planetary conditions and their boundaries, which include climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss and other eco-indicators necessary for human survival and civilized development. Three of these boundaries have already been overstepped because of growing global reliance on fossil fuels, industrialized forms of agriculture, and overuse of natural resources. The world economy is fast approaching almost all of the other boundaries.

Rockstrom and his colleagues' work and analysis deserves the widest possible attention -- yet few public figures in the US seem to have heard of him.

Sweden, along with other Scandinavian countries and perhaps New Zealand, has the greenest national policies on the planet. Yet, even Sweden cannot go it alone. Rockstrom explained to me that, by being linked to the global economy, his country cannot be carbon neutral because the products it imports are not manufactured to be. Certainly, countries like Sweden and even green US cities (described in the new book, Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development, by Joan Fitzgerald) can be exemplars of sustainable policies and take political leadership to argue for them beyond their borders, but there is no local or one-country solution to the boundary dangers that Rockstrom describes. In this case, playing over the line can be a deadly game for humanity.

At a final conference lunch overlooking the Baltic Sea, I asked Rockstrom whether we are at the point of no return. He said that it is true we have passed the peak production of oil, that some effects of climate change are already here, and that we have injured some biological realms -- but the earth is not yet beyond repair. Like most Swedes, a master of calm understatement, Johan said that it is not too late to change course. We can preserve a safe and healthy operating planet for humanity and perhaps build a decent, sustainable and more equitable human society. We have time -- but he could not say exactly how much. When I pressed him, he said probably until the middle of the century -- about thirty or forty years or so, at which point, if we haven't already begun to change course, then we will reach a tipping point and life on the planet will go downhill at a much more rapid pace.