Only One Earth – Ward & Dubos

The One-Sentence summary: It is possible to care for and maintain our planet by using a simple conceptual framework.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • This book was originally produced in 1972 as a report commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. It was prepared with help from 152 committee members from 58 countries.
  • As well as being something of a classic, it is fascinating to read it 50 years later, containing as it does a range of accurate predictions, warnings and suggestions – much of which have been ignored for half a century. The broad outcome is that, had the world paid attention to its contents and taken suitable action, we would not be in the mess we are in.
  • It predicted that by 1985, all land surfaces will have been occupied and utilized by man except for those which are so cold or at such high altitudes that they are incompatible with human habitation or exploitation.
  • It states that man must accept responsibility for the stewardship of the earth. Man was the commonly used word for all humanity at the time, and stewardship means management for the sake of someone else. The power, extent and depth of man’s interventions seems to presage a revolutionary epoch in human history, and this was predicted 50 years ago, with humans substituting the controlled for the uncontrolled on every level.
  • With so many opinions to accommodate, the author notes that agreement is difficult not from uncertainties about scientific facts, but from the differences in attitudes towards social values. In other words, even 50 years ago no one was disputing the trajectory of planetary decline, just what or how much to do about it depending on national interests.
  • In 1965, an ambassador called Adlai Stevenson referred to earth as a little spaceship on which we travel together, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • The hinge of history describes the inordinate increase in population and related effects after the Industrial Revolution.
  • In the forties, Buckminster Fuller calculated that the consumption of the average American had the equivalent muscular energy of 153 slaves working for him. By 1972 that figure had risen to 400 so-called energy slaves. Who knows what that figure would be today.
  • The price of prosperity has been the breakdown of communities and social imbalance. Another side effect is what economists call external diseconomies, in which one factory’s soot dirtied the next one’s windows or upstream chlorine poisoned downstream fish. In other words, these are the costs an enterprise can cause to others while escaping damage itself.
  • Out of this unintended order come a range of impacts on the environment. The expansion of national power brought science and state together in the pursuit of war. Skilled technical innovators since the 16th century created all the machinery with which to pursue war, and thus laid the ground for consumer durables, including the motorcar. Even in 1972 the world’s spending on armaments was $200 billion.
  • The distribution of prosperity is dangerously skewed. Within each affluent economy, minorities who are handicapped by ethnic prejudice or age or sickness tend to be left behind to observe vicariously how the luckier three-quarters live.
  • We need to exercise extreme caution, develop a sense of the complexity of the forces at play in the world, and the delicacy of the arrangements that exist.
  • Market and social costs cannot be avoided when coming to terms with the problem.
  • When it comes to tourism, one of the chief difficulties citizens confront when they go off to seek refreshment from unspoiled nature is the number of people doing the same thing. At the time of writing, international tourism was tripling every ten years, and wilderness was rapidly disappearing.
  • The author offered survival strategies including the need for knowledge, an improvement in decision-making that sets aside issues of sovereignty, and collaboration based on the idea that no nation is able to offset the risk of deepening disorder on its own.
  • The earth deserves all the inventiveness and courage and generosity of which we are capable to preserve it from degradation and destruction. By applying it, we can secure our own survival.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • The book is 50 years old but it remains fascinating.