Since 1985 the Choices and Challenges Project has offered 18 forums at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, VA. They have ranged over a wide variety of topics -- from breakthroughs in the biological sciences to advances in physics and engineering. Two of the most recent forums have been devoted to "Quality of Life in the Global Environment," one on "Sharing the Earth's Water Supply" on 17 October 1996, the other on "Preparing for the Next Century" on 3 April 1997. Both forums were moderated by Richard Collins, Director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia. They were broadcast nationally by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Adult Learning Service as teleconference sessions. Virginia Tech hosts Choices and Challenges forums
The "Sharing the Earth's Water Supply" forum focused on "our uses and manipulations of water and the repercussions of those actions on human life and the natural environment." Participating in this forum were Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project and formerly Vice President for Research at the Worldwatch Institute; Donald Pisani, History Professor at the University of Oklahoma, Dan Tarlock, Law Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and member of the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council; Henry Lickers, Director of the Department of the Environment for the Mohawk Council of the Akwesasne (Cornwall, Ontario, Canada); and Anthony Weston, Philosophy Professor at Elon College.
Postel noted that two thirds of the fresh water extracted by humans is for agricultural use and that some of this is being pumped from the ground or diverted unsustainably. Demands in the future for more fresh water to feed an increasing population, she observed, would cause more unsustainable pumping of groundwater or further destruction of aquatic habitat, by diverting sources of surface water, symptoms of which have already been seen in the U.S. in the Florida Everglades and Colorado River Basin. With increasing water scarcity, Postel saw competition for water between farms and cities and ultimately between nations. She added, though, that a better alternative to new water sources is conservation of the sources we already have.
Pisani pointed out that American exploitive use of water had historically been regarded as a right to be exerted at the local level by a people who opposed central concentration of power and didn't even mention anything about water in their Constitution. In the case of the Colorado River Basin, Tarlock continued, water rights were determined by "prior appropriation" (the first to use a water source acquired perpetual rights to it); in the Everglades, the system of "riparian rights" granted usage of a stream to bordering property owners.
The last two speakers deviated from the sense of the others, in which water was regarded as a commodity. Weston, who cited the cultural and spiritual aspects of water, termed the commodity approach to water "resourcism." Lickers, who recounted the role of water in the history of his people, told how the St. Lawrence Seaway destroyed the hydrology of his people's lands and focused on our responsibility to the Earth rather than on the right to use its resources.
Speakers at the "Preparing for the Next Century" forum, which looked at the year 2050, were Allen Hammond, Director of the World Resource Institute's Resource and Environmental Information Program; Eugene Linden, Environmental Journalist for TIME; Mary Hill Rojas of Rojas International; Tom Fricke, Anthropologist at the University of Michigan; and Mark Sagoff, Senior Research Scholar at the University of Maryland.
Hammond noted the sixfold increase in world population during the twentieth century, most of it occurring in developing countries and migrating from rural to urban areas. "Most of the world's children from here on out are basically going to grow up in . . . the polluted city slums of developing countries," he deduced. Present reliance on nonrenewable fossil fuels, he went on, means that "we are going to leave a world that has a different climate to our grandchildren." But even renewable resources are limited, he emphasized -- and there will be scarcity of both land and water if agriculture doesn't find ways to use them more effectively to feed the large populations of future generations. Meanwhile, the differential in per capita incomes between developed and developing countries continues to be huge: "a person who graduates from college in this country can earn more in two years than a person in rural China or India or Africa can expect to earn in a lifetime."
Rojas and Fricke addressed their experiences with developing countries, Rojas her efforts to secure economic equity for women with her "community-based ecological approach," and Fricke in terms of his research among the Nepalese. Noting that Hammond had projected a future largely by extrapolating from present trends and observing that the last half of the twentieth century has been relatively stable, Linden recognized that pressures such as climate, disease, and population can trigger instabilities. He also cited U.S. reaction (in contrast to Chinese inaction) to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which staved off her predictions.
Sagoff concluded with several other examples of changes which disproved other extrapolations, such as those predicted by Paul Ehrlich's The End of Affluence in 1974. For example, predicted energy shortages were thwarted by technological advance which enhanced recovery of oil. Predicted materials shortages have been circumvented by substitutions. Sagoff's "third reason we're able to work around scarcity . . . is that with each of these changes we get much more economic output per input."
"All of these technological changes make it possible for us to have a decent economy and a decent life . . .," he stated. "But the rest is really up to us, and I'd suggest four principles to follow if we want to make things better rather than worse." First, "we must move from fossil fuels to renewable systems of energy because of global warming." Second, "Instead of cutting down old growth forests we must turn to silvaculture." Third, "we have to bring the world's poor into the picture . . . if they can't export anything else . . ., they will export their misery." "And finally," Sagoff concluded, "I think it's important for us to recognize that nature has value for its own sake. . . ."
To obtain information about ordering transcripts of either of these forums, see Resource #17, this issue.
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