Sustaining the Human Environment: The Next Two Hundred Years
Author(s)
Starr, Chauncey
Abstract
It is surely presumptuous to look into the two-hundred-year future of this changing world. Yet the questions we pose today about sustaining the world’s habitability, the environment, and the quality of life of its human population force us to stretch our thinking in time. With such ponderous response times, today’s societal institutions strain to accommodate the pressures arising from diverse forces. The visible consequences of this mismatch in the dynamics of forced change and social restructuring have been highlighted by the various environmental movements. Environmentalists emphasize both today’s costs of growth and the dismal implications for the future. The popular, gloomy response to these questions discounts the continuing positive contributions of science and technology, which have created a large share of today’s global resources and life-style options. Many resources currently available would not be accessible or even recognized with the technology of a century or two ago. It is reasonable to ask, therefore, what might new technology contribute to our perceptions.
