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Reality Check: The Mid-Year View From GSReport A mid-1999 survey finds a global situation in which potential bio-tech miracles stand in stark contrast to growing environmental threats, and tragic numbers of humans still commit atrocities against one another.  By Michael Lindemann Start Date: 6/25/99 The June 25 issue of GSReport marks the completion of our first six months of publication. It seems a fitting time to take stock of events and trends we've reported so far, and to consider what they portend for the future. No recent story has commanded more headlines than the crisis in Kosovo. With NATO's bombing ended and a transition -- hopefully toward greater regional stability -- now underway, some hard lessons come into focus. Topping our list: The world we live in can still produce hideous atrocity, because it contains people who, under certain conditions, are willing to believe that atrocity is a justifiable means to their political ends. Such a belief, which archetypally characterized Hitler's Third Reich, is deemed unacceptable by all "civilized" people everywhere -- and yet, the Serbs were and are civilized people, but for the fact that quite a few of them have lately committed atrocities against their neighboring ethnic Albanians. Now, Kosovo Serbs fear atrocious reprisals from returning Albanian refugees, and not without reason. The NATO peacekeepers of KFOR know that preventing those reprisals is a large and potentially daunting part of their mission. The Nazi Holocaust was so atrocious that it stained the conscience of an entire planet. Yet, cries of "Never again" ring hollow with the years, as atrocity mounts upon atrocity -- in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the bloodbath of Rwanda, in scores of smaller yet no less atrocious instances throughout the world. And now Kosovo. It may be true, as many think, that Slobodan Milosevic is a monster. But the atrocities of Kosovo were committed by hundreds or thousands of Serbs, some in uniform and others regarded only days before as simply "the neighbors." The madness that commits such atrocity is never the madness of one man alone. It breeds and grows in the hearts of many. It can break out any time. No legislation, no appeal to morals or reason can guarantee to prevent it. Kosovo is the latest instance, but will hardly be the last. Atrocity is in the eye of the beholder. NATO's bombing of the Serbs was ostensibly to prevent Milosevic from carrying out his program of ethnic cleansing against the Kosovar Albanians -- a noble if perhaps misguided cause, and one almost universally accepted in the West. But some critics of the Balkan campaign say NATO's strategy was both cynical and deceptive, because the terms of the preceding Rambouillet agreement were intentionally designed to be unacceptable to Milosevic, forcing his hand and bringing on the war. By this account, a million Kosovar refugees along with thousands of innocent Serbs paid a horrific price for NATO's deceitful gambit. The point was never to save the Kosovars, but to pacify the Balkans on terms pleasing to the West. In this light, Russia's vehement opposition to the NATO bombing more than makes sense. But few in the West were aroused to similar indignation. Atrocity does not always look brutal and bloody. The human defect -- whatever it is -- that sometimes spawns grotesque mayhem can also produce subtler manifestations of madness. Some might say, for example, that wrecking many square miles of rainforest every day qualifies as an atrocity. Or belching out colossal quantities of greenhouse gases into the air, inexorably changing the planet's climate. But, of course, there is no consensus on this sort of thing. Still, what goes around comes around. The Kosovo Serbs are facing that hard truth now. Similarly, millions of humans around the world will surely feel the sting of global climate change in the years ahead. Sometime this autumn, according to population experts, there will be 6 billion people on Earth for the first time in history. It is another milestone in the long march toward "over-population" -- a much-used term that inspires little but controversy or denial among politicians, population experts and the public at large. How many people is too many? What are the consequences of too many? If nobody ate meat, would too many people be a different number than otherwise? Again, there is no hope of consensus on such questions. But there is evidence regarding consequences of human population growth. In much of the developing world, accelerating deforestation is driven mainly by the relentless need for more subsistence-level crop land. At the same time, global per capita food production -- measured in terms of staple crops (wheat, rice, corn, soybeans) -- has dropped an estimated 7 percent from the peak year of 1984, a trend that is expected to continue. The United Nations in late 1998 adjusted its projections of global human population for the year 2050 downward by 500 million, partly because of an anticipated increase in human deaths from starvation and other causes. Meanwhile, fresh water aquifers are being drawn down at far greater than natural recharge rates in most of the world. Wars will surely be fought over access to drinkable water in the early decades of the new millennium. This year, global population will increase by approximately 78 million human beings. Next year, the increase will be about the same, and so on. Though the rate of growth will slow somewhat, the (downward-adjusted) population in 2050 will be nearly 9 billion -- about a 50% increase over today. Nearly all of those people will be born frighteningly poor, joining an estimated 1.3 billion people already listed by the World Bank as living in a condition of "absolute poverty" -- defined as having an income equivalent to less than one dollar per day. Alongside the effects of poverty, the spread of AIDS is the most critical health issue facing the developing world. In some African countries, over 20 percent of adults are currently HIV positive, and the numbers are growing. Within ten years, 20 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa could die from AIDS alone. Not surprisingly, life expectancy in the world's poorest nations is dropping. But at the same time, life expectancy in the most privileged nations is rising fast. Indeed, human life expectancy is poised to go literally through the roof, at least for those who choose and can afford radical longevity. The first known human being to live 200 years might be alive today. Biotechnology will shape the 21st century as much as electronics and telecommunications shaped the 20th. Some advances on the biotech frontier are spawning intense controversy, even open warfare. The ethics of human cloning is already a hot topic in legislatures around the world. An equally contentious issue is genetically modified (GM) food. At present, several Western European nations are leading the battle to limit GM food production, against the pro-GM stance of U.S. and British leaders and such industrial giants as Monsanto Corporation. Huge environmental and economic issues are at stake. On the medical front, biotechnology is poised to create new replacement body organs from a patient's own stem cells. Genetic engineering will take the place of antibiotics as the "final solution" to a host of infectious diseases, and may also pave the way for cures to cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and other scourges of modern society. Even the aging process in human cells may be circumvented by clever manipulation of tiny structures called telomeres. And no one can properly estimate the various impacts of cloning technology -- but they are likely to be larger than even optimists predict. As a consequence of such advances, people will be able to live longer and more healthy lives than ever before. By 2050, the average citizen in the developed world might expect to live at least 100 active, healthy years without heroic measures. (Even today, according to CNN, there are about 70,000 people in the U.S. alone who are at least 100 years old.) A wealthy person with access to the best that medicine can offer might choose to live 150 years or more. Longevity -- or its lack -- is one measure of the global distribution of privilege. The social philosophy of Liberalism widely espoused in Western culture holds that the basic privileges of modern civilization -- such things as economic opportunity and security, access to education and information, and protection from arbitrary abuse and violence -- should be distributed as widely as possible. But the economic and social realities emerging in the 21st century will accelerate an anti-Liberal trend already well underway in the latter part of the 20th century, that being a growing disparity between the "Haves" and "Have-nots," and the gradual concentration of privilege among a shrinking percentage of the world's people. Even the best-intentioned governments may be powerless to overturn this trend, at least during the next several decades. More than that, the Liberal democratic model of governance may well become increasingly sidelined in world affairs by the rising dominance of metanational corporate structures. Even today, the economic might of giant corporations dwarfs the economies of smaller nations. This trend is certain to continue, perhaps with some bizarre consequences. Indeed, nothing will argue more forcefully for the consolidation of national governments into a global system of governance than the looming power of global corporations that increasingly operate outside of, or indifferent to, the laws of any land. Fifty years from now, citizens might well pledge allegiance not to the State but to their corporate employer, an entity promising more comprehensive cradle to grave security than any State has ever delivered. Privileged and poor alike will feel the effects of global climate change, but in many ways the poor will feel it most. It is now beyond dispute that levels of so-called greenhouse gases are higher than at any time in the last 400,000 years. Global average temperature is increasing, and that increase will likely accelerate during the coming century. One probable outcome will be more frequent and severe storms, such as last year's devastating Hurricane Mitch or the unprecedented 300 mile-per-hour tornado that hit Oklahoma in May. With the storms will come huge floods, landslides, crop losses and other calamities. At the same time, climate change will also bring unprecedented heatwaves and drought to other parts of the world. Already in China, for example, a combination of drought and torrential rains last year put an estimated 180 million people at risk. No one can be sure how grave or varied the consequences of climate change may be. One possibility is that warming sea water will expand, raising sea levels by several feet. Adding to that prospect, worrisome melting has been observed on the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica. Rising sea levels and stronger storm surges could put hundreds of millions of coastal residents at extreme risk. Since the start of the industrial revolution, burning of fossil fuels has increased at an exponential rate and is now known to be a prime contributor to global climate change. As yet, despite much expressed concern, there is no appreciable progress toward curbing global carbon emissions. Energy consumption will continue to grow not only as a function of population growth but because of increasing industrial activity in the developing world. For many countries, the fuel of choice will be coal for at least the first half of the 21st century. There are signs of hope on the energy horizon, however. Installation of wind and solar power generating facilities are on the rise throughout the world, a trend that is sure to accelerate. Breakthroughs in battery and fuel-cell technology may soon make electric vehicles both practical and relatively economical. More exotic and radical energy breakthroughs, including cold fusion and zero-point energy, may become viable before mid-century. Such developments could begin a slow reversal of the human-induced greenhouse effect and its attendant global climate changes. Space exploration and development could also bring large rewards during the coming decades. In an era of economic uncertainty and shrinking budgets, major governments are increasingly hesitant to commit to ambitious space projects. But large commercial firms are assessing the potentials of space with an eye to profitable ventures ranging from space tourism to orbital manufacturing. In the longer term -- perhaps as soon as 2020 -- there could be exploratory mining ventures on the moon and nearby asteroids. Humans will likely return to the moon and establish the first permanent facilities at the lunar south pole within fifteen years. Civilians might vacation on the moon before 2025. The first human mission could land on Mars at about the same time. In the short term, Y2K still casts its shadow across the threshold of the new millennium. What seems most certain is that no one knows exactly how and where "the bug" will strike, nor who will be most deeply affected. There is widespread expectation that some nations of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe will be very hard hit; and almost equal expectation (except among a small minority of doom-sayers) that Y2K's immediate effects will range from minor to moderate across the English-speaking world, Western Europe and other best-prepared nations. Recent polls indicate that most economists do not anticipate large-scale negative repercussions in global markets, although Wall Street guru Ed Yardeni continues to predict a serious global recession. In the view of GSReport, Yardeni's recession is very likely; and moderate personal preparations are well advised. (See http://www.gsreport.com/Y2K/ for previous installments of our series on Preparing for Y2K.) When all foreseeable events and trends are accounted for, there remains the possibility of a Big Surprise or Wild Card which could have very large and somewhat imponderable effects upon the world's future. Examples of possible Wild Cards are: -- a radical energy breakthrough that quickly ends global dependence upon fossil fuels; -- terrorist use of a nuclear weapon; -- an asteroid strike; -- proof of extraterrestrial life, especially acknowledged contact with or visitation by intelligent aliens. While none of the above are considered probable by mainstream thinkers (except, perhaps, nuclear terrorism), they are the kinds of Big Surprises that cannot be entirely discounted, and that may conspire to make the human future very different than anyone could predict.
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