Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In island civilization, that relationship is reversed. I envision civilization
as occupying only about two percent of the land mass, with the rest of the
land allowed to be wild and uncontrolled. As Thoreau said in
Walden,
the
trick is to secure all the advantages of civilization without suffering any of
the disadvantages. Most of us, particularly in the United States, have grown
up believing that growth and development are good. Growth and develop-
ment have in fact become synonymous with progress. I suggest that the
new paradigm of environmentalism sees growth as potentially not good. It
is not that progress was wrong; it is simply that progress went on too long.
Most things in nature have limits, and things that grow far beyond normal
size—a hand the size of a chair, for example—are considered abnormal,
unfortunate, freakish. How about our civilization, then? How about our
population? As we look toward the next thousand years, when do we
begin to say that we need to make big corrections to population growth
and material development—decisions that will be against our short-term
interests?
To move toward an island civilization requires setting goals.The first one,
I suggest, is to reduce the world's population from 6 billion to 1.5 billion
by the year 3000. I choose this figure because Paul Ehrlich and others have
concluded that 1.5 billion people could live sustainably, justly, with other
forms of life on this planet. They could enjoy a high quality of life, realiz-
ing their full human potential.The second goal is the implosion of the civ-
ilized environment. By implosion, I mean a concentration of the human
population in small areas, rather than the explosion and sprawl that charac-
terize our cities today. We must scale back to habitats that take up less
space—1.5 billion people living in perhaps 500 concentrated habitats. To
do this, we may have to eliminate much of the infrastructure of our pres-
ent civilization, including roads, parkways, power lines, and dams. Perhaps
physical transportation will be instantaneous or unnecessary. Perhaps these
habitats will be suspended in the air, or will be built underground, or partly
under the oceans. Such notions may seem preposterous today, but then the
prospect of someone walking on the moon seemed just as preposterous 100
years ago. Remember, I am speaking of a very long-term perspective, a
thousand years in the future. I am offering a dream of what could be, what
I believe ethically should be, though I don't know exactly how we can
achieve it. I do know that we need a vision of the future that sees as its end
not growth, not a higher Dow Jones average, not ever greater development,
but rather a technologically gentle and kind island civilization.We will need
