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AS WE ENTER THE THIRD MILLENNIUM the kinds of relations that have evolved between people, and between people and nature, create increased tensions, conflicts, and crises. Both sets of relations—the ecological as well as the social—are now unsustainable. To bring today’s macroshift to a safe conclusion and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to a more balanced post-Logos civilization, we must understand and reckon with these “unsustainabilities.”

Unsustainable relations have evolved on this planet between human societies and nature as a consequence of the unfolding of two basic trends:

• the rapid growth of demand by a growing population for the planet’s physical and biological resources, and
• the accelerating depletion of many of the planet’s physical and biological resources to satisfy these demands.

If these trends continue, the curves described by their unfolding will cross, and humanity’s demand will exceed the planet’s capacity for satisfying it. This will be an unprecedented situation.

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For most of our five-million-year history, humanity’s demand in relation to the available resources has been insignificant. With our primitive technologies and smaller numbers, planetary resources seemed limitless. Even when the technologies employed exhausted a local environment and depleted local resources, there were always other resources and environments to exploit. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the human population reached 1 billion, and it is more than 6 billion today. Our population is expected to be around 7.2 billion in 2015 and may grow to 8 billion or 10 billion by the middle of this century. Approximately 95 percent of this growth will occur in the presently poor countries and regions, but massive migrations will diffuse human populations to all the economically inhabitable areas of the globe.

Yet human numbers alone do not explain the current unsustain-abilities. Today’s 6 billion humans constitute only about 0.014 percent of the biomass of life on Earth, and 0.44 percent of the biomass of animals. Such a small fragment need not constitute a threat to the entire system, and hence itself. But because of excessive resource use and environmental degradation, we do threaten the entire system. Our impact on Earth’s resources is entirely out of proportion to our size, and we cannot increase these demands indefinitely.

The current ecological unsustainabilities are the result of a mode of development that is as old as civilization. Prehistoric societies were stable and enduring: they evolved a sustainable relationship with their environment. Only the energy of the sun entered the nature–human system, and only the heat radiated into space left it—everything else was cycled and recycled within it. Food and water came from the local environment and were returned into that environment. Even in death the human body did not leave the ecological system: it entered the soil and contributed to its fertility. Nothing that men and women brought into being accumulated as “nonbiodegradable” toxins; nothing we did caused lasting damage to nature’s cycles of generation and regeneration. The situation changed when groups of early humans learned to manipulate the environment and broke open the loop of regeneration that earlier tribes maintained. With this change, the human impact on the natural environment began its fateful increase.

As better tools and implements were invented, more resources could be accessed and existing resources could be better exploited. As a result, the population could, and did, grow. With the control of fire, perishable foods could be maintained over longer periods, and people gathered food and hunted over more extensive territories. Human settlements spread over the continents and began to transform nature to fit their needs. No longer content to gather and hunt their food, our ancestors learned to plant seeds and use rivers for irrigation and the removal of wastes. They domesticated some species of dogs, horses, and cattle. These practices enabled our forebears to extend their dominion over vaster territories, but they also increased humanity’s impact on nature. Nourishment began to flow from a purposively modified environment, and the growing wastes from larger and technologically more sophisticated communities continued to disappear conveniently, with smoke vanishing into thin air and solid waste washing downstream in rivers and dispersing in the seas. If a local environment gradually became arid and inhospitable—due to deforestation and overworking the soil—there was always virgin land to conquer and to exploit.

This is no longer the case today. We are operating at the outer edge of the planet’s capacity to sustain human life. The Earth is a finite system, with finite space, resources, and regenerative potentials, and we are now exceeding the effective range of these limits.

Quantitative indices and measurements have been developed to calculate the level of human impact on nature. One such index is the ecological footprint: the area of land required to support a human community. If the footprint of a settlement is larger than the area of that settlement, the settlement is not independently sustainable. A city is intrinsically unsustainable, for example, because few of the natural resources used by its inhabitants come from within its borders; most come from hinterlands and catchments in regard to food, water, and other resources, and the disposal of wastes. But entire regions and countries could well be sustainable if their ecological footprint did not extend beyond their boundaries.

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In a recent survey commissioned by the Earth Council of Costa Rica, the ecological footprints of fifty-two countries were examined. Forty-two of those countries had footprints that exceeded their territory. If other countries within the region had surplus ecological resources, this would still not spell global unsustainability, but this is not the case. The optimum sustainable resource level—where the current loss of topsoil is reduced and ultimately halted—is 1.7 hectares (one hectare is 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres). But the average per capita footprint of the countries examined came to 2.8 hectares. If this average load were reached by the more than 180 countries of the world, the ecological footprint of the human population would be larger than the whole of the biosphere. The only reason this is not the case today is because people in the poor countries have footprints of far less than 1.7 hectares. The extremes range from half a hectare in Bangladesh to 10.3 hectares in the United States.

The unsustainability of our load on nature is aggravated by the progressive impairment of the biosphere, which was not widely recognized until the 1980s. The evident success of technological civilization has obscured the fact that its life-supporting environment is becoming increasingly degraded. Chemically bolstered mechanized agriculture increases yields per acre and makes more acres available for cultivation, but it also increases the growth of algae that chokes lakes and waterways. Chemicals such as DDT are effective insecticides, but they poison entire animal, bird, and insect populations.

Waste disposal contributes to the nature-impairment process. Today we discard much more than our household wastes into the environment. We also inject an estimated 100,000 chemical compounds into the land, rivers, and seas; dump millions of tons of sludge and solid waste into the oceans; release billions of tons of CO2 into the air; and increase the level of radioactivity in water, land, air. The wastes discarded into the environment do not vanish; they come back to plague those who produce them as well as other communities near and far. Refuse dumped into the sea returns to poison marine life and infest coastal regions. The smoke rising from homesteads and factories does not dissolve and disappear: the CO2 released remains in the atmosphere, affecting the world’s weather. In the rich countries some one million chemicals produced by industry are bubbling through the groundwater systems; in poor countries rivers and lakes have up to a hundred times the accepted level of pollutants. Until recently, the water in Malaysia’s Kelang River had enough mercury to function as a pesticide.

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Not surprisingly, there has been a massive increase in allergies in both urban and rural populations. The appellations of toxic environmental effects constitute a whole new vocabulary: there is MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity), wood preservative syndrome, solvent intolerance, chemically associated immune dysfunction, clinical ecology syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and sick building syndrome, among others.

Robert Muller, who spent more than forty years at the helm in the United Nations and remained an inveterate optimist about the future, was also a realist: as his comments to this report shows, he recognized the urgent need for change. His data indicate that the human impairment of nature proceeds at a completely unsustainable pace. Each minute 21 hectares (52 acres) of tropical forest are lost, 50 tons of fertile topsoil are blown off, and 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide are added to the atmosphere (mainly as 35,725 barrels of oil are burned as industrial and commercial fuel). Each hour 685 hectares (1,696 acres) of productive dryland become desert, and each day 250,000 tons of sulfuric acid fall as acid rain in the northern hemisphere. The degradation of water, air, and soil—three of the most essential resources of nature—is especially threatening.

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Water, air, and soil are both overused and misused, and can no longer regenerate sufficiently to meet the demands of a growing population. Statistics from UNESCO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and other U.N. and world bodies show us the details with striking clarity.

WATER

Four-fifths of the planet’s surface is water, and the idea that humanity could run out of water seems preposterous. But water for human use has to be fresh, and the salt water in the oceans and seas makes up 97.5 percent of the planet’s total water volume. Two-thirds of the remaining water is concentrated in polar icecaps and underground. The renewable fresh water potentially available for human consumption—water in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs—is no more than 0.007 percent of the water on the surface of the Earth. This relatively thin trickle is essential, however: one can survive for about a month without food but no more than a week without water.

In the past the available water reserves were more than enough to satisfy human needs. Even in 1950, there was a potential world reserve of nearly 17,000 m3 of fresh water for every woman, man, and child. However, the rate of water withdrawal has been more than double the rate of population growth, and in 1999 this reserve amount decreased to 7,300 m3. If current trends continue, in the year 2025 there will be only 4,800 m3 of reserves per person. This would create serious water shortages in many parts of the world.

Just fifty years ago there was not a country in the world that would have faced catastrophic water shortages. Today about one-third of the world’s population lives under nearly catastrophic conditions, and by 2025 two-thirds of the population will have to cope with such conditions. Europe and the United States will have half the per capita reserves they had in 1950, and Asia and Latin America will have but a quarter. The worst hit countries will be in Africa, the Middle East, and south and central Asia. Here the available supplies may drop to less than 1,700 m3 per person.

The World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, the U.N. Environment Programme, and UNESCO foresee serious local and regional water emergencies by around 2005. By 2025 the descending supply curve will intersect the ascending demand curve. This will create unlivable conditions for nearly five billion people—two-thirds of the then-living population—and it will also create serious social and political conflicts, migrations, epidemics, and worsening environmental degradation.

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AIR

The further idea, that we could overexploit the atmosphere that surrounds the planet, seems just as unlikely. After all, this is an envelope some twenty kilometers deep, spread evenly from the polar icecaps to the tropical equator. The amount of air that humans, or even all living organisms taken together, need is minuscule compared to this vast supply. But just as with water, it is not a question of how much we need, but in what form we need it. It is a question of quality rather than quantity. Salty or polluted water is not of much use when it comes to ensuring the survival of the human population, and polluted air of poor quality is also of little use. Yet we are changing the composition of the planet’s atmosphere without regard to its impact. We are reducing the atmosphere’s oxygen content and increasing its carbon dioxide (as well as other greenhouse gas) content. These are unsustainable trends.

Evidence from prehistoric times indicates an oxygen content above today’s 21 percent of total volume. Oxygen in the air has decreased in recent times mainly due to the burning of coal, which began in the middle of the nineteenth century. The current oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere dips to 19 percent over impacted areas and is down to 12 to 17 percent over the major cities. These provide insufficient oxygen to keep body cells and organs, and the entire immune system, functioning at full efficiency. At the levels reached today, cancers and other degenerative diseases are likely to develop, and at levels of 6 to 7 percent, life can no longer be sustained.

Our impact on the atmosphere has resulted in a reduction in oxygen, but it has produced an increase in some other elements. The increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases is particularly significant. During the current interglacial period—a period that has already lasted some 11,000 to 12,000 years—the chemical composition of the atmosphere has been relatively stable, with about 280 parts of carbon dioxide per million. Two hundred years of burning fossil fuels and cutting down large tracts of forest have increased the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content. Currently CO2 exceeds 350 parts per million and is growing rapidly. Gases released by the use of aerosols and refrigerants have produced a related problem: they have seriously depleted the atmosphere’s ozone layer. The well-publicized “ozone hole” over the Antarctic has been spreading, increasing the incidence of skin cancer in numerous countries.

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The continuing emission of greenhouse gases is a threat both to bodily health and to the global food supply. Recent surveys indicate that more than 80 percent of some 105 European cities exceed World Health Organization (WHO) air quality standards for at least one pollutant. Elsewhere the situation is still worse. Pollutant levels in Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta, and Mexico City exceed WHO standards by a factor of three or more, and in some cities in China particulate levels exceed them by a factor of six.

Global food supply is affected as changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere trigger a change in the climate. An atmosphere with a high composition of CO2 and other man-made gases traps heat from the sun, creates a greenhouse effect, warms up the atmosphere and changes the weather. Temperatures in the Western Arctic are currently at a four-hundred-year high. Since 1940, average temperatures in the Arctic region have risen by 2.5°C and some 42 percent of the icecap has already melted. Because the temperature of the Arctic Ocean is rising, the ice is breaking up earlier than usual and huge icebergs are threatening fishing vessels in the area. With a further increase in global warming the volume of fresh water streaming into the North Atlantic would bring along enough icebergs to deflect the Gulf Stream. That would flood Western Europe with frigid waters, creating winters of Siberian cold over much of the continent. While Europe is threatened with a colder climate, most of the planet is subjected to rising temperatures. From 1975 to 1999 the average temperature of the Earth increased from 13.94°C to 14.35°C. All of the warmest twenty-three years since record keeping began in 1866 have occurred since 1975.

Global warming interferes with agricultural production: in cold regions with short growing seasons it could increase yields, but it is likely to decrease harvests in tropical and subtropical areas where crops are already growing near the limit of their heat tolerance. These effects are not precisely foreseeable—global warming is not a gradual and distributed process but a differential warming and cooling effect over different parts of the globe. It is accompanied by extreme and violent weather patterns. The occurrence of hurricanes over tropical areas will be intensified, together with massive downpours in temperate zones.

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As polar ice melts, sea level will rise, possibly by as much as 21 centimeters by the year 2050. This will be a threat to nearly 80 million people living in coastal regions at or below the current sea level. Rising sea levels would create millions of refugees in China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, migrating inland and exacerbating conditions in already overcrowded interiors.

Global warming is having an impact on our health. Violent storms, floods, and droughts threaten life; illnesses and deaths increase during heat waves, especially in urban areas and among the infirm and the elderly. With weather changes, infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which are carried by mosquitoes, can spread, and higher sea levels and periodic floodings create additional pressure on the supply of safe drinking water.

TOPSOIL

With the exception of sandy deserts and high mountains, the surface of the continents is covered with soil, but soil of a quality suitable for agriculture is relatively scarce. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that there are 3,031 million hectares (about 7,490 million acres) of high-quality cropland currently available, 71 percent of which is in the developing world. This is a precious resource, desperately needed to supply the food and agricultural needs of a growing human population. Yet pressures of human activity produce erosion, destructuring, compaction, impoverishment, excessive desiccation, accumulation of toxic salts, leaching of nutritious elements, and urban and industrial pollution. Lands degraded to desert-like conditions reduce the world’s food and agricultural production for centuries; it takes nature one hundred to four hundred years to create 10 millimeters of productive topsoil. To build a topsoil layer of 30 centimeters takes anywhere from three thousand to twelve thousand years.

For the past few decades we have lost 5 to 7 million hectares (12 to 17 million acres) of cropland per year. If this process continues, some 30 million hectares will be lost by mid-century, leaving 2.7 billion hectares (about 6.67 billion acres) to support 8 to 10 billion people. This would yield an average of 0.3 hectares (or 0.74 acres) per person—the bare subsistence level of food production for the entire human population.

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The unsustainability of relations between humans and nature is aggravated by growing tension within and among humans. Social relations are becoming just as unsustainable as life-supporting conditions in the environment.

Economic growth still occurs, and is likely to continue, but it is not a panacea. The globalization of the economy is highly uneven. It is driven by the search for higher material living standards and promoted by the spread of information technologies and the increasing dynamism of the private sector. In the areas of information, communication, trade, financial markets, and technologies, globalization proceeds at a breakneck pace, but many countries and population segments are left out of it. These countries face social upheaval and political instability as their have-not population increases. The world is growing together in some respects and is coming apart in others. The richest 20 percent earn 90 times the income of the poorest 20 percent, consume 11 times as much energy, eat 11 times as much meat, have 49 times the number of telephones, and own 145 times the number of cars. The net worth of the more than 500 billionaires of this world (of which about a third come from the developing countries) is roughly $1,110 billion—equal to the net worth of half the world population.

The rich-poor gap is a major cause of social unsustainability in the contemporary world. If access to the planet’s physical and biological resources were evenly distributed, the situation would be less critical. If food supplies, for example, were equally shared, every person would receive about a hundred calories more than are required to replace the 1,800 to 3,000 calories he or she expends each day (the average healthy diet calls for about 2,600 calories). But people in the rich countries of North America, Western Europe, and Japan obtain 140 percent of the caloric requirements of normal health, whereas people in the poorest countries, such as Madagascar, Guyana and Laos, are limited to 70 percent. Americans spend only 10 percent of their income on food—and still buy so much that they throw away 15 percent of it. Haitians, some 600 miles to the south, as well as three-fourths of all Africans, spend more than half their income on food and are undernourished. Surveys by the U.N. Development Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization indicate that eighty-seven countries today can neither produce sufficient food to sustain their population nor have the money to import the missing amount from elsewhere.

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The world’s pattern of energy consumption is just as disparate. Even if there are great disparities in living standards between the industrialized North and the mainly rural South, the averages speak volumes. The average of the few well-off and the many poor Africans, for example, is half a kilowatt hour of commercial electrical energy per person. The corresponding average for Asians and Latin Americans is 2–3 kWh, and Americans, Europeans, Australians and Japanese use up to 8 kWh each. With 4.1 percent of the world population, the United States alone consumes 25 percent of the world’s energy production, much of it wastefully—for example, by heating homes with inefficient gas-powered heaters or electric radiators in the winter, leaving air conditioners on for extended periods in the summer, and using gas-guzzling vans, pick-up trucks, and sport utility vehicles for everyday transportation. The average American burns 5 tons of fossil fuel per year—in contrast with the 0.8 tons of the average Chinese and the relatively modest 2.9 tons of the average German. It is estimated that in the 80-plus years of the expected life span of a child born to a middle-class family in the United States, he or she will consume 800,000 kilowatts of electrical energy. In addition, he or she will also consume 2,500,000 liters of water; 21,000 tons of gasoline; 220,000 kilos of steel; the wood of 1,000 trees, and will generate 60 tons of municipal waste. At these rates the average American child will produce twice the environmental load of a Swedish child, 3 times that of an Italian, 13 times that of a Brazilian, 35 times that of an Indian, and 280 times that of a Haitian.

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Affluent consumption is not the only cause of the unsustainability of the modern world; the way poor people attempt to obtain the resources required for their survival is a problem as well. The 1.3 billion people who, according to World Bank estimates, live at or below the absolute poverty line (defined as the equivalent of one dollar a day or less), destroy the environment on which they depend. In many areas of Africa, central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, women and children spend on average four to six hours searching for fuel wood and as long drawing and carrying water. With rural environments degrading, people abandon their native towns and villages and flee to the cities. Urban complexes have experienced explosive growth: one out of every three people now lives in a city, and by the year 2025 two out of every three are expected to do so. By that year there will be more than five hundred cities with populations of over one million, and thirty megacities exceeding eight million. Such cities are intrinsically unsustainable. The bigger they are, the greater their dependence on the already overexploited countryside.

Sociocultural stresses threaten the stability of life in today’s societies. Traditional social structures are breaking down: the family is a prime example. In many parts of the world the family, sociologists say, has become “defunctionalized.” That is, the functions of family life have been taken over by institutions dominated by outside interest groups. Child rearing is increasingly entrusted to kindergartens and company or community daycare centers. Leisure-time activities are dominated by the marketing and PR efforts of commercial enterprises, and the provision of daily nourishment is shifting from the family kitchen to supermarkets, prepared food industries, and fast-food chains. In many developing countries the state’s promotion of family planning technologies colors the most intimate husband-wife relations.

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In cities the exigencies of economic survival and an insistence on modern lifestyles eliminate the traditional extended family, and extreme poverty breaks apart the nuclear family itself. To make ends meet, women and children must often work, and women are extensively exploited, being offered menial jobs for low pay. Children fare even worse. According to the International Labour Office, 50 million children are working in the world today, for the most part in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They are employed for a pittance in factories, mines, and on the land, and many others are forced to venture into the hazards of life on the street as “self-employed” vendors or just plain beggars.

An even more deplorable consequence of family poverty is the letting-go, and sometimes the outright selling, of children into prostitution. UNICEF names this “one of the most abusive, exploitative and hazardous forms of child labour.” In Asia alone, one million children are believed to work as juvenile prostitutes, exploited by the highly profitable and growing industries of international pedophilia, fueled by widespread sex tourism.

Whether in the cities or in the countryside, poverty is characterized by malnutrition, joblessness, and unjust and degrading conditions of life. At the same time it makes for the overworking of productive lands, the contamination of rivers and lakes, and the lowering of water tables. This creates a vicious cycle. Poverty encourages high birthrates, because children help subsistence families garner the resources needed for survival. Population growth creates more poverty, and more poor people destroy more of the environment while rending the functional structures on which social stability vitally depends.

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In China social and ecological unsustainability is more critical than in most other countries of the world. Though it is generally thought that China is only now moving into the Industrial Age, it is actually moving out of it—into an uncertain future. Modern China has a checkered past to look back on, and an uncertain future to look forward to. Under Chairman Mao a supposedly enlightened dictatorship became repressive and inhumane. In the post-Mao era a more enlightened but hardly less hierarchical structure has been created to bring China into the global world of production and competition. It has made fabulous progress, but whether its success will be enduring will depend not on what its leadership wants but on what it refuses to face: the country’s fundamental socioecological unsustainability.

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Currently China’s population is five times that of the United States, while its cultivated land is one-tenth as much. As a result, China is feeding 22 percent of the world’s population on 7 percent of the world’s agricultural land, with 7 percent of the world’s fresh water reserves. For now China manages this feat by employing an enormous agricultural labor force, estimated at 40 percent of the world total, and by pumping vast quantities of chemical fertilizers and other chemicals into the soil. The result is a high level of soil rigidity and aridity. Of her 100 million hectares of cultivated land, one-tenth is already highly polluted; one-third is suffering from water loss and soil erosion; one-fifteenth is salinized, and nearly 4 percent is in the process of turning into a desert. Due to urban sprawl and building roads and factories in the three decades from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, 15 million hectares of cultivated land were turned to nonagricultural use—an area equal to the agricultural lands of France and Italy combined. The remaining lands face a productivity crisis. The shortfall in grain, for example, is expected to reach 10 percent of the country’s requirement within the next few years.

Nearly half of China’s industrial output is generated by village enterprises, which require high inputs, have low productivity, and produce high levels of pollution. The biggest pollutants are the small paper mills. Though the government ordered the most dangerous ones closed, the majority refused, and only 3 percent of those that refused were forced to shut down. The industrial pollution problem is aggravated by the country’s dominant mode of energy production: 75 percent is based on burning coal. As a result, 40 percent of the country’s total land area is subject to acid rain. Another cause of pollution is the rapid increase in the population of cars: the air over 99 percent of the 600 major cities is below internationally recognized air quality standards. Some 85 percent of the industrial wastewater and 90 percent of the urban effluents are discharged into rivers, lakes, and the sea without treatment. More than four-fifth of the 191 tributaries of the Huaihe River, for example, are blackish-green. Some 80 percent of the rivers and 45 percent of the underground water tables have been polluted, and 76 percent of the drinking water fails minimal health standards. Half the waste treatment equipment acquired as part of the 23.4 billion yuan of investment in preventing and controlling pollution in the 1980s is either not in regular operation or has been abandoned altogether. Urban and industrial refuse remain unsorted in open garbage heaps that choke the principal cities.

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China’s unsustainability is a consequence of the current condition of her cities and countryside, an annual loss of 700,000 hectares of land, and an annual population increase of fourteen million. A country of more than 1.2 billion people facing urban health problems and diminishing agricultural yields makes for a catastrophe that is of local origin but is likely to have a global impact.

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Sufficient investment in the resources and the infrastructures people and economies truly need could remedy the vicious cycle of poverty breeding more poverty; there is enough money in the world economy to help the poor countries overcome the worst aspects of deprivation and penury. The $214 billion owed by the most indebted developing countries is equivalent to just 4.5 months of Western military spending. Some $19 trillion is currently invested in the world’s stock markets alone—the equivalent of the combined gross domestic product of the G-8 industrialized countries, and nearly 80 percent of the whole world’s GDP. Where this money goes has an enormous impact on the direction taken by the global economy, putting unparalleled power in the hands of international investors to influence the state of the world. More than two-thirds of direct foreign investment goes to the richest 20 percent of the population; only 1 percent reaches the poorest 20 percent.

The financial community operates on the classical assumption that “the market ensures optimal capital allocation through the efficient incorporation of all available and relevant information into share prices.” This is true provided that the available information includes all the relevant items. This, unfortunately, is not the case. Global corporations, the major sources of investment-related information, do not consider sustainability issues relevant to investment analysis and decision making, and they seldom provide information on the sustainability of the practices and projects they fund by external investments. Independent investment professionals could fill this gap, yet the typical professional lacks the competence to assess issues of ecological and social sustainability. Most of those who do have such competence work for international organizations and public-benefit social and environmental institutions. Their reports, though well-meaning and relevant, are aimed at the general public and usually are not standardized, are inconsistent, and sometimes are unverified. As such they are of little use to investors who categorize them as stating an emotional issue that is irrelevant to day-to-day investment decisions.

The bottom line is that the world today is both ecologically and socially unsustainable. This situation cannot be prolonged indefinitely. One cannot globalize one sector of the world and rend another. The new technologies of information and communication drive toward a global world, but the institutions and mechanisms responsible for managing the globalizing process lag behind.

It is time to recognize that the macroshift we are living through has brought profound change. Its processes of rapid but one-sided globalization have led to a chaotic period. The outcome is undetermined, but the basic alternatives are evident. They are either breakdown in conflict and crisis, or breakthrough to a new civilization. The choice is in our hands.