Sombre prospect
In his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement
of Science in February, of which an abridgement has been published in
Science for 9 August, Peter H. Raven, director of the Missouri
Botanical Garden, St Louis, paints a sombre picture of the future of humanity
on this planet. He starts by acknowledging that enormous challenges face
a world that has grown rapidly in population, in individual consumption
levels, and in changing technologies. Our collective neglect of these
relationships has helped to bring about the "dangerous and unstable state
of the world in which we find ourselves". Serious neglect of the problems
we face has gone on too long, and we have to find "new ways to provide
for a human society that presently has outstripped the limits of global
sustainability".
Over 400 generations, totalling 10,000 years, the world's population
of humans has grown from several million to about 6.1 billion, but we
continue to depend on ancient, genetically and socially determined habits
and attitudes that may have suited our hunter-gatherer ancestors but no
longer suffice to ensure our future. We have manufactured pesticides of
increasing toxicity to saturate our agricultural lands at the rate of
three million metric tons per year, and fix atmospheric nitrogen in excess
of that seen in natural processes.
In the past 50 years alone we have lost a fifth of the world's topsoil,
a fifth of its agricultural land, and a third of its forests. We have
changed the composition of the atmosphere until global temperature keeps
rising and stratospheric ozone is depleted. We have decimated world habitats
by intentionally or accidentally introducing new plants and animals. Worst
of all, we have induced an irreversible loss of biodiversity. In view
of the way in which plants and animals enrich our lives, we continue to
destroy them to an incredible degree.
Then our resources are unfairly distributed, with one quarter of humanity
surviving on less than one dollar per day and up to half of them being
malnourished. Meanwhile the United States, with 4.5 per cent of the world's
population, controls 25 per cent of its wealth and produces 30 per cent
of its pollution.
We must pay attention to what specific contributions science and technology
can make to the development of a sustainable society. Energy is a vital
consideration. A combination of wind turbines, solar cells, hydrogen generators
and fuel cell engines promises both energy independence and an alternative
to the fossil fuels that drive global warming, with its sad consequences.
Increased attention is essential to develop educational systems everywhere
that will bring the understanding of scientific activity. This is necessary
for truly representative democracies and co-operation with science-poorer
nations.
Dr Raven believes that within a few years most of the world's population
will have moved into cities, for which better models are urgently required.
Nevertheless, increasing attention will be required to the rights and
needs of rural dwellers throughout the world. Globalisation may have become
irresistible, but we must make it humane. Diversity must become the cornerstone
of society. A better understanding of such regions as India and Africa
is called for among the western cultures.
And Raven recalls the wise words of Mahatma Gandhi: "The world provides
enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
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Those humans
who fondly imagine that they belong to a race apart from other inhabitants
of this earth and are unique in their brain-power should think again after
learning of observations recently carried out on the reasoning faculties
of the New Caledonian crow, Corvus moneduloides. A note by three
Oxford zoologists published in Science for 9 August (and taken
up widely by the national press) describes how a captive female crow spontaneously
bent a length of straight wire into a hook, which it used to lift a bucket
containing food from a vertical pipe. In a series of experiments a male
and a female crow were given the choice of a straight and a hooked wire,
but the male had removed the hooked wire and left the straight length
for the attention of the female.