The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [111]
The second decisive issue will be environment. Today the issues of climate change, water scarcity, resource depletion, and biodiversity seem like special problems that can be relegated to the Sunday talk shows and newspaper science sections. Within a generation, and probably much sooner, these will loom as the largest challenges facing the planet. The world is headed over the cliff, exceeding or soon to exceed the safe global boundaries on countless ecological fronts: greenhouse gas emissions, pollution from nitrogen-based and phosphorus-based fertilizers, water scarcity, habitat destruction, and much more.5 The United States will experience water stress in the Midwest, drought in the Southwest, extreme weather events in many parts of the country but most seriously the hurricane-impacted Gulf Coast, hypoxic zones in the estuaries, and profound coastal erosion and threats from rising sea levels. The vulnerability of the poorer countries is likely to be far worse, with at least some experiencing violent conflict as a result of encroaching droughts, floods, and other climate-induced calamities.6
Once again, social networking and the promise of new IT technologies will make a profound difference. Mobile telephony and wireless broadband are already making possible new breakthroughs in environmental surveillance (soil mapping, drought monitoring, discovery of deforestation and illegal fishing, crop estimation, tracking of population movements and disease transmission, and much more) and disaster response. The IT revolution created the new globalization; it can lead to the “new sustainability” as well. Once again, Millennials will take the lead in these breakthrough prospects.
The third decisive issue is geopolitics. No matter what success the United States has in recovering its dynamism and vitality in the years ahead, it is almost inevitable (barring global catastrophe) that America’s relative economic position will decline. We are, I have stressed repeatedly, in the age of convergence, in which the emerging economies have the prospect of decades of economic growth that is more rapid than that of their high-income counterparts. The United States currently represents around 20 percent of gross world product (GWP), measured in purchasing-power-adjusted dollars. That is likely to decline by midcentury to perhaps 10 to 12 percent of GWP, with China and India both being larger in absolute size than the United States, though still with roughly half of its per capita GDP.7
Managing the shifting relations of leading and upcoming major powers has never been easy. The competition between the United Kingdom and Germany in the first years of the twentieth century played a major role in Germany’s launch of World War I. Similarly, the competition among Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France in Europe, and between the United States and Japan in Asia, contributed to World War II. The potential dangers must therefore be understood and consistently averted. This will tax our diplomacy, patience, and capacity to cooperate to the maximum degree.
The fourth and greatest area of challenge, implicated in all of the first three, is managing diversity. This challenge seems to be humanity’s hardest task of all. The great religions all preach the universal brotherhood of humanity, but they also simultaneously warn against the perfidy of the nonbeliever, the “other,” the heathen. This duality—the capacity both to cooperate and to segregate—probably