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Only one Earth, Stockholm 1972

Barbara Ward

Are we present at one of those turning points when the human race begins to see itself and its concerns from a new angle of vision and, as a result, finds new openings for action, for courage and for hope?

When we were asked to prepare a conceptual framework for the Stockholm Conference, we didn't get a conceptual framework. What we got was something like standing under Niagra. This is a time when people's ideas about the planet they live in, about the way they have to live, about the way they can live, are changing in an absolutely monumental fashion. When we'd read through all the advice from experts from around the world, we noticed that not only the range of ideas and concepts, but also the ways in which even familiar ideas were framed, were new.

Stockholm has come at one of the moments when people are radically beginning to reconsider how they have to view their life on Earth, and what sense their existence makes to them. It is only when people begin to shake loose from their preconceptions and from the ideas that have dominated them, that you begin to get that sense of new directions which I think we would all agree our poor old planet most desperately needs.

Over two millennia ago, intellectual ferment accompanied the end of China's feudal war and the establishment of the first great centralized Han dynasty. In more recent times, people had almost to stand on their heads to realize that the Sun did not go round the Earth, but the reverse. This ‘Copernican Revolution’ is the archetype of fundamental change by which people learn to rethink, totally, their place in the scheme of things.

Our own epoch is, I believe, such an age again. We belong to the generation that has used radio telescopes to uncover 100,000 million other galaxies each with 100,000 million other suns. We belong to the generation that has brought nuclear energy to Earth. Computers have made possible the simulation, acceleration and forward projection of infinitely complicated human activities, and instantaneous worldwide and interplanetary visible and audible communication has opened new horizons.

Above all, we are the generation to see through the eyes of the astronauts the astonishing ‘earthrise’ of our small and beautiful planet above the barren horizons of the moon, Indeed, this generation would be some kind of psychological monstrosity if this were not an age of intense, passionate, committed debate and search.

So vast is the scale of change through which we live that there must be an equally vast range of competitors for first place as agents of upheaval. I want to suggest three areas in which, it seems to me, the concepts being virtually forced upon us offer a startling break from past patterns of thought and accepted wisdom.

A PLANET UNFIT FOR LIFE

The first is the possibility of making the planet unfit for life. Hitherto, people have known that they could do local damage. They could farm carelessly and lose topsoil or deforest or overgraze or mine out a mineral. They also contrived to live through major natural disasters –earthquakes, tornadoes, ice ages. But nobody thought that the planet itself could be at risk.

Today our experts know something new. They know that air, soil and water form a totally interdependent worldwide system or biosphere sustaining all life, transmitting all energy and, in spite of its rugged powers of survival, full of immensely delicate and vulnerable mechanisms, leaves, bacteria, plankton, catalysts, levels of dissolved oxygen, thermal balances – which alone permit the Sun's searing energies to be transmuted and life to carry on.

Our experts also tell us what we do not know. Given our suddenly and vastly increasing numbers, our enormous rise in the use of energy, including nuclear energy, and our fabulous mastery of molecular chemistry, we impinge on the fine balances and mechanisms of the total system in ways and with consequences that we too often are in no position to judge.

For example, our traditional vision of the oceans is that they are boundless. But we have no idea of their capacity to absorb – as they ultimately must – virtually all the planet's wastes. In the last two or three decades, to give only one instance, a high percentage of the long-lived chlorinated hydrocarbons – including DDT – appears to have been absorbed into natural ‘sinks’ in the biosphere. Recent sample-taking suggests an unexpectedly high dosage appearing in the oceans.

Does this mean that natural storage systems are filling up? Will further effluents reinforce irreversible damage to marine species known to be susceptible to such substances as DDT?

Is this part of a deeper risk of deterioration from a steadily widening range of chemical wastes? We do not know. Rivers and lakes teach us that there are limits to water's self-cleansing properties. Ultimately the oceans are one vast cistern with no outlet. This image is a safer one, perhaps, than that of Keats’ infinite and ‘moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth's human shores’.

GROWTH IS NOT A SOLUTION

This concept of newly understood limits is relevant to the second reversal of earlier concepts whose implications I would judge to be most revolutionary for the present age. For over a century now, and with increasing enthusiasm in the last 25 years, we have seen in economic growth, measured by the satisfaction of both ordinary and induced material needs, a prime aim of national policy and a powerful solvent of social conflict. Inside the nation, as output and incomes rise, the flow of goods will be great enough to reward effort and enterprise and provide on an upward scale for the needs of the mass of the people. In the world economy, international trade and investment will pull the developing peoples up in the wake of the already developed nations.

But this implicit assumption of unending expansion has two self-reinforcing flaws. Even within the wealthiest states, even with all the transfers of resources from richer to poorer citizens secured by tax and welfare and social insurance, ‘trickle down’ economics do not ensure the ending of poverty at the base of society. The lowest 20 per cent can have as little as 5 per cent of national income; the top 20 per cent as much as 40.

In the world at large, where no systematic social transfers occur, the richer states are pulling away from the less developed ones. Even if $10,000 a year per capita is a reasonable likelihood for developed societies by the year 2000, for two-thirds of humankind, $400 a year looks like being the utmost reach of optimism. For perhaps a third, malnutrition, illiteracy, shanty-town dwelling and unemployment – in other words, the worst of all human environments – could be the most likely fate.

But now we must add another constraint. Even if we assume unlimited resources with which to develop, development is, as we have seen, grossly uneven. But suppose there are indeed strict physical ‘limits to growth’? Suppose that these delicate mechanisms and balances in the biosphere that make life possible cannot sustain 10 billion people all aiming to produce and consume and discard and pollute according to present developed standards?

Here, admittedly, the range of debate is very wide. Some experts believe that 20 billion people can live at America's present standards simply on the products of atomic energy, water and the minerals in common rock. Others postulate irretrievable damage in terms of exhausted resources, thermal pollution, and environmental disruption if even half that number secure the current standards of the rich. We are at the beginning of this debate. But one point is surely clear. There are limits. The biosphere is not infinite. Populations must become stable. So must the demands they make.

But in that case, whose upward aspirations must first be checked? Given finite resources, we cannot evade this basic social issue. Where are the restraints to be put? What is to be reduced, the luxuries of the rich or the necessities of the poor? What are the priorities – a decent human environment for the whole human species or riches for some and squalor for the majority? We can slide over this fundamental issue of environmental quality only if ‘trickle down’ economics work within a context of unlimited resources. Neither assumption is correct. So, as nations, as a planet, we are compelled to confront the fundamental issues of choice and justice.

We have got to learn to live with a more modest use of resources and we cannot cheat by simply saying that we're going to carry on with the same division as we have now. If two-thirds of us stay poor so that one-third can stay rich, they won't do it. It is as simple as that.

NATIONS ACTING TOGETHER TO AVERT DISASTER

But at this point we encounter a third basic challenge to our habits of thinking. Our effective instruments of judgement, decision and action are separate national governments. The nations give our planet its colour, its variety, its richness of life and experience. For those to whom full nationhood has come only in the last quarter of a century, it expresses the essence of their being and their hopes. None of this can be doubted. Yet it is also true that the cumulative effect of the separate actions of separate sovereign governments can, over time, injure the basic national needs of all of them.

If our airs and oceans can stand only so much strain before they lose their capacity for self-purification, it will help no government to say that others were responsible. The most flagrant case is clearly the risk of nuclear conflict and planetary nuclear pollution. (We may rejoice that a number of intergovernmental agreements now limit atomic testing in the air, keep nuclear weapons from the seabed, outer space and Antarctica. We can welcome, too, the agreements between the USA and the Soviet Union to check the arms race and hope that such agreements may signal the beginning of a joint effort to wind it down.)

But we could collectively pollute the planet not ‘with a bang but a whimper’ – by the small, steady accumulation of long-lasting poisons and pesticides, of chemicals and tailings, of eroded soil and detritus –and reach, almost inadvertantly, a creeping planetary disaster to which all have separately made their cumulative contribution. No single nation can avert this risk as numbers and activities rise. Its control will be achieved by nations acting together – or not at all.

This raises by another route the issue of planetary justice – which equally cannot be solved by nations acting alone. How do we ensure that the need to check pollution does not become an inhibition on the desperate need of two-thirds of humanity for development? This is an area about which we do not know too much. It is certainly not clear that all non-pollutive technologies are more expensive. It is also possible that in opting straight away for pollution control, developing states could take full advantage of the greatest asset of latecomers – to learn from other peoples’ mistakes. Equally it is possible that to control wastes and effluents at an early stage of modernization would greatly add to costs and strains.

Should poorer countries then accept added costs for development or even their own modernization because developed nations have already, as it were, pre-empted so much of the biosphere's costless capacities for self-cleansing? We do not know the answers. But we do know that the relentless pursuit of separate national interest by rich and poor alike can, in a totally interdependent biosphere, produce global disasters of irreversible environmental damage.

A DESPERATE WRENCH FROM ACCEPTED THINKING

There are then, I suggest, three vital ways in which the reality we are beginning to perceive diverges from our habitual thinking. We normally consider nature as a whole, the entire biosphere, to be safe from man, even if we can chip away at little bits of it. We have been taught to believe, with increasing intensity in recent decades, that we can modernize all our economies and settle most issues of distribution by our unlimited command of rising energy, technology and resources, and by our millennial history we have been taught to expect final decisions to be taken by separate sovereign states. It requires a desperate wrench from accepted thinking, a profound leap, a Copernican leap of the imagination, to begin to see that in stark physical and scientific reality none of these pre-suppositions are any longer true. We can damage the entire biosphere. Resources are not unlimited. States acting separately can produce planetary disaster.

We all know enough of history to realize how uncertain it is whether this change in the direction of our thinking will be made in time. Custom and habit hold us to the traditional themes. The sheer momentum of our present activities could well be enough to drive us on for another four or five decades on our present path. This is a possible ‘scenario’. Realists might even call it the most likely one. But I want to give three reasons why I feel it is legitimate to entertain, shall we say, a modest hope?

The first is the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Once environmental concern moves nearer to the centre of the nations’ attention, I do not doubt that its fuller implications will inevitably unfold. Its whole message is that separate drives, ambitions and policies have to be made compatible with the continuing common life of our single, shared planetary system.

My second reason is the scientific imperative. We can cheat on morals. We can cheat on politics. We can deceive ourselves with dreams and myths. But there is no monkeying about with DNA or photosynthesis or eutrophication or nuclear fusion or the impact on all living things of excessive radiation – from the Sun or the hydrogen bomb.

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival. This compelling force of fact may, I think, control our separatist ambitions before they have overturned our planetary life.

But man does not live by fact alone. Our human environment has within it our perpetual striving to make it humane as well. In the past, historians tell us, there have been profound revulsions against the aggression, pride and rapacity of human systems. The great ethical systems of mankind – in India, in China, in the Middle East, from the benign wisdom of Confucius to the passionate social protest of the Hebrew prophets – all sought to express an underlying moral reality: we live by moderation, by compassion, by justice; we die by aggression, by pride, by rapacity and greed.

Now in these latter days, the planet itself in its underlying physical reality repeats the witness of the sages and the prophets. Our collective greeds can degrade and destroy our basic sources of life in air and soil and water. Our collective injustice can continue to create an intolerable imbalance between rich and poor. Envy and fear can unleash the nuclear holocaust.

Here I will admit to what I would call a modest hope: I would say that it is possible that our science and our wisdom are coming together and our faith and our reality are beginning to coincide. If Stockholm is a place where that begins, well, let us all thank God that we were here when it started.

This chapter is based on the transcript of Barbara Ward's speech at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.