We are all familar with the bromide that American's, with 5 percent of the world's population, consume about 30 percent of the world's resources. We ignoe the corollary: If everyone consumed at the American level, our oil reserves would shrink to just a few years' supply; global warming would accelerate to the point where even Dixie Lee Ray might be concerned; the world's old growth rainforests would disappear swiftly.

The world's biological systems are already reaching their limits. Food and fiber production everywhere has leveled out over the last five years. The best land is all in production, as is much marginal land that cannot be sustained. The world's deserts are spreading at the rate of 70 square miles a day -- in Africa, Asia, Australia, and North America. Recent years have shown no significant gains from additional fertilizer. All the world's major fisheries have plateaued, and several have collapsed. We are permanently losing 80 square miles of rainforest every day.

Today, Homo Sapins consumes, directly and indirectly, about 40 percent of the net biological productivity of the planet -- 40 percent of the sunlight that is fixed by photosynthesis and that, through oxidative phosorolation, provides all the energy that sustains life on earth. As we take 40 percent, we are squeezing out other species at a rate that Professor Edward Wilson of Harvard now estimates at 100 species per day. Four species are going extinct every hour. If Wilson is even close to being right, this is the most calamitous period of biological collapse since the disappearance of dinosaurs.

I am not saying that it is inconceivable that the current world population could lead lives of comfort, dignity, and productivity. One can envision an attractive world in which the recycling of basic metals approaches 100 percent; in which all energy is derived from renewable sources powered by the sun; in which healthy, low-meat diets are within the biological carrying capacity of the planet; in which information-dense, super-efficient, pollution-free technologies guide commerce, transportation, and residential living.

What I am saying, however, is that such prosperity cannot be reached following the current American model. We need to adopt, and then propagate, a new definition of prosperity.

Equity

The problem of global equity is not just that the greedy self-indulgence beamed worldwide on American television series, like Dallas, cannot be widly replicated. The problem is not merely the self-parody of conspicuous consumption larded onto The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The problem is that the average American lifestyle is not remotely a sustainable model for global development. If embraced by 5.5 billion people, it would vastly exceed the ability of the planet to pump oil, refinemetals, produce plastic, dispose of waste, absorb pollution, raise meat, and grow trees.

We all have some sense of the enormous disparity between rich and poor, but it is an abstraction. Let me try to make it a bit more personal.

Whenever you fly on a jumbo jet, you and your fellow passengers are using about as much oil as the nation of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone uses three times as much energy as Chad or Burundi.

The poorest of the world's population do not earn enough in a year -- total -- to purchase a single pair of Nike running shoes.

The average American 12-year-old receives an allowance that is higher than the per capita income of the poorest 500 million people. (Remember, 500 million people is twice as many as the total population of the United States.

The world's poor are not lazy people, or stupid people. They are desperately poor people. And as we hypothesize about a sustainable planet, with unlimited potential for intellectual growth but severe constraints on physical growth, simple ethics require us to reconsider the distribution of physical wealth. The promise of growth has always provided a moral escape valve, and that promise is increasingly chimerical.

Population

All my remarks so far have assumed that world population will stop growing this afternoon. However, the structure of the global population -- the sheer numbers of women now entering their prime reproductive years -- virtua;;y guarantees one more doubling of the human population, even if we slammed on the brakes today. Moreover, no one knows how to slam on the brakes.

Because we are biological organisms, we might gain useful insights by observing the natural history of our fellow creatures. In most cases, when biology controls -- food limits, disease, predators -- are removed from a population of deer (see Raindeer of St. Mathew Island) or for that matter bacteria, there follows a huge population explosion. Eventually, the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, and there is a catastrophic collapse. This is the standard ecological model of a system out of homeostasis. It happens time after time to all different species.

The most important question in the world is whether human beings are wise enough to see what's coming and avoid this pattern.

There is not much reason for robust optimism.

Two-thirds of all the human beings 65 and older who have ever inhabited the earth are alive today.

The human population will grow by about 92 million people this year. 92 million equals more than the population of England, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece, and Switzerland -- combined. The human population is growing about 10,000 people an hour.

During the past several years in Somalia, our television cameras have captured unending scenes of starvation and misery; of children with bony limbs and distended stomachs suffering from kwashiorkor syndrome; of mothers and infants, frail arms draped protectively around each other, slowly starving to death. An estimated 300,000 people have starved to death in Somalia over the last few years. Here in America, in a society that stares with gaping horror at a half dozen victims of a subway killer, that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to save the life of a single premature baby, the idea of 300,000 deaths by starvation defies our capacity to sensitively absorb the information. The tragedy is simply too enormous.

Yet -- globally -- population growth will restore 300,000 people in about 29 hours. The deaths of 300,000 people by starvation does not even cause a squiggle in world population charts. Even Somalia itself, it is barely a squiggle. The United Nations forcasts that the Somali population will grow from 7.6 million to 18.9 million in the next 30 years.

Even if we got the whole world to pay attention to birth rates, it is not clear it would make any difference. People don't have birth rates. Have you ever had a birth rate? People have babies. Many of us have now learned that high birth rates are bad, but virtually everyone thinks more babies are good. Quickly, around the whole world, we have to close the loop. Hopefully, next year's (1994) UN Population Summit in Cairo will provide some moratorium.

Energy

If there is ever to be a Golden Age, clearly "energy" will be central to its success.

The world today uses accountable "industrial" fuel at a rate of about 11.7 Terawatts (TW). (One Terawatt-Year equals about 1 billion tons of High Quality Coal. Each year we use the energy equivalent of about 12 billion tons of coal.).

Notice the phrase I used: "accountable industrial fuel." This consciously excludes much energy that is vital to life and civilization, but that never enters anyone's ledger books. If you dry your laundry on a clothes line you use no accountable fuel. If you walk or ride a bicycle to work you use no accountable fuel. The hydrological cycle which purifies our water and grows our crops is not counted. The sunlight that drives all photosynthesis is not counted.

If the sun didn't shine, your buildings would be a few hundred degrees below zero when you turned on the furnace.

But the flows of energy from the sun are so huge that they dwarf all anthropogenic sources. Moreover, they are so dependable that we take them for granted. The amount of sunlight is not at issue; the only real question is how well we will harness them. For the time being, we will ignore natural flows of energy.

This 11.7 Terawatts breaks down as follows:

If we add in biological sources, mostly fuel wood and dung in the Third World, the total climbs to 13.1 Terawatts:

That's how much energy we use. How much energy do we need? Or rather, how much energy will we need a half-century from now, when we have completly turned over our housing stock, re-built our transportation system around something other than gasoline, entered the "information age," and stabilized the world's population? (I assume we achive all these ends; if we don't, the results become unbearably bleak.)

We cannot really imagine 2050, anymore than someone in 1930 could have imagined 1990. However, it is useful to begin with a survey of per capita energy usetoday:

This is not Dunkink without the boats. But it is Dunkirk with no surplus boats at all.

America led the world into the petroleum era.

America led the world into the nuclear cul dr sac.

America should lead the world out again, into an efficient, renewable era.

Prospects

Today, I sence the beginnings of what could be a profound cultural change. For decades, the fundamental drive and the principal accomplishment of the industrial world has been material abundance. The goal is shared from the far left to the far right. When asked, 50 years ago, what unions want, Samuel Gompers simply answered, "More!" But more, like tomorrow never comes. As we get more, we want still more, and we measure ourselves against our peers on the basis of how much we've got.

Somehow, it has not proven satisfying. Study after study has shown that, once a population has escaped utter poverty, the correlation between affluence and happiness is almost random. Other things are more important.

With each passing year, we have seen a more profound unease, a deeper disquiet in the soul of our nation. In its most stark form, when our prison population doubles in a single decade without making a dent in crime; when more African Americans are murdered by other African Americans every year than have been lynched in the nation's history; there is something fundamentally wrong.

Collectively, as we work to achive an American peristroika,we must be guided by a vision of what we hope to build -- a vision of prosperity and sustainability that must be more lofty than unconstrained economic growth.

The recent explosion of interest in sustainable development acknowledges that all investments are not created equal. Some bestow their fruit only on the privileged; others advance social justice. Some are centralized and require authoritarian means of control; others promote decentralization and resilience. Some investments anchor us to the past; others embrace the future.

All investments will increase the GNP, but that by itself is not enough. For a political leader to maximize GNP as his vision for the country is like Beethoven trying to maximize the number of notes in a symphony. Quality -- not just quantity -- is what makes a symphony,or a nation, something special.

If our species hasafuture, it will mean that we have enough wisdom "hard-wired" in our collective consciousness to recognize this simple truth. It means that we will redefine prosperity in a way that brings meaning to our own lives, and that constitutes a realistic model that others can follow.

No place on earth is more suited - by culture, politics, resources, and infrastructure -- to pioneer this change than the Pacific Northwest. If not us --the people in this room -- who?

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