The Future: six drivers of global change
Chapter 6 : And of course, the number of texts translated by computers is increasing exponentially.

And of course, the number of texts translated by computers is increasing exponentially. Seventy-five percent of the web pages translated are from English to other languages. It is often, and inaccurately, said that English is the language of the Internet. Actually there are more Chinese language users of the Internet than there are people in the United States. But the content of the Internet that is now being dispersed throughout the world is content that still mainly originates in English.

The narratives of national histories that have dominated the curricula of mandatory public education systems now have compet.i.tion from alternative narratives widely available on the Internet. And they often have the persuasive ring of truth-for example, for minorities within nation-states whose historical mistreatment can no longer be as easily obscured or whitewashed.

For these and other reasons, the glue holding some nations together in spite of their ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian, tribal and historical differences appears to be losing some of its cohesive strength. Belgium, for example, has reallocated the power once vested in its national government to its component regional governments. Flanders and Wallonia are not technically nation-states but might as well be.

In many parts of the world, ident.i.ty-driven subnational movements are becoming more impatient and, in some cases, aggressive, in seeking independence from the nations of which they are now part. Nation-states have been described as "imagined communities"; it is, after all, impossible for citizens of a nation-state to interact with all other members of the national community. It is their common ident.i.ty that forms the basis of their national bonds. If those bonds no longer lay as strong a claim on their imagination, their ident.i.ty bonds may attach elsewhere-often to older ident.i.ties that predated the formation of the nation-state.

In many regions, the growth of fundamentalism is also connected to the weakening of the psychological bonds of ident.i.ty in the nation-state. Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish-even Buddhist-fundamentalism are all sources of conflict in the world today. This does not come as a surprise to historians. After all, it was the desperate need to control religious wars and sectarian violence that led to the formal codification of nation-states as the primary form of governance in the first place.

In the midst of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes proposed one of the first and most influential arguments for a "social contract" to prevent the "war of every man against every man" by giving a monopoly on violence to the nation-state and granting to the sovereign of that state-whether a monarch or an "a.s.sembly of men"-the sole authority "to make war and peace ... and to command the army."

Nationalism became a potent new cause of warfare over the three centuries between the Treaty of Westphalia and the end of World War II. As the weaponry of war was industrialized-with machine guns, poison gas, tanks, and then airplanes and missiles-the destructive power unleashed led to the horrendous loss of life in the wars of the twentieth century. And the imposition of order by nation-states within their own borders sometimes created internal tensions that led their leaders to use the projection of violence against neighboring nation-states as a means of strengthening internal cohesion by demonizing "the other." Tragically, the monopoly on violence granted to the state was also sometimes brutally directed at disfavored minorities within their borders.

In the wake of World War I, a number of nation-states were formed in the imagination of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European nations that were seeking to create stability in regions like the Middle East and Africa, where tribal, ethnic, sectarian, and other divisions threatened continued destabilizing violence. One of the premier examples of an imagined community was Yugoslavia. When the unifying ideology of communism was imposed on this amalgam of separate peoples, Yugoslavia functioned fairly well for three generations.

But when communism collapsed, the glue of its imagined nation no longer could hold it together. The great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko described what happened next with the metaphor of a prehistoric mammoth found frozen in the ice of Siberia. When the ice melted, and the mammoth's flesh thawed, ancient microbes within the flesh awakened and began decomposing the mammoth. In like fas.h.i.+on, the ancient antagonisms between Serbian Orthodox Christians, Croatian Catholics, and Bosnian Muslims decomposed the glue that had formed what is now referred to as the "former Yugoslavia."

Not coincidentally, the border between Serbia and Croatia had marked the border 1,500 years ago between the Western and Eastern Roman empires, while the border between Serbia and Bosnia marked the fault line between Islam and Christendom 750 years ago. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the new leader of independent Serbia went to the disputed territory of Kosovo to mark the 600th anniversary of the great battle there in which the Serbian Empire was defeated by the Ottoman Empire; in a demagogic and warmongering speech, he revivified the ancient hatreds wrapped in memories of that long ago defeat and launched genocidal violence against both Bosnians and Croats.

The legacy of empires has continued to vex the organization of politics and power in the world long after nation-states became the dominant form of political organization. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, European countries colonized 10 million square miles of land in Africa and Asia, 20 percent of all land in the world, putting 150 million people under their rule. (Indeed, several modern nation-states continued to govern colonial empires well into the second half of the twentieth century.) To pick one of many examples, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I resulted in the decision by Western powers to create new nation-states in the Middle East, some of which pushed together peoples, tribes, and cultures that had not previously been part of the same "national" community, including Iraq and Syria. It is not coincidental that both of these nations have been coming apart at the seams.

With the weakening of cohesion in nation-states, wherever peoples feel a strong and coherent ident.i.ty that is separate from the one cultivated by the nation-state that contains them, there is new restlessness. From Kurdistan to Catalonia to Scotland, from Syria to Chechnya to South Sudan, from indigenous communities in the Andean nations to tribal communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, many people are s.h.i.+fting their primary political ident.i.ties away from the nation-states in which they lived for many generations. Although the causes are varied and complex, a few nations, like Somalia, have devolved into "post-national ent.i.ties."

In many parts of the world, nonstate terrorist groups and criminal organizations such as those who are now wielding power in so-called narco-states are aggressively challenging the power of nation-states. There is an overlap between these nonstate actors: nineteen of the forty-three known terrorist groups in the world are linked to the drug trade. The market for illegal narcotics is now larger than the national economies of 163 of the world's 184 nations.

It is significant that the most consequential threat to the United States in the last three decades came from a nonstate actor, Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. A malignant form of Muslim fundamentalism was the primary motivation for Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack. (According to numerous reports, bin Laden was revulsed by the presence of U.S. military deployments in Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam's holiest sites.) The damage done by the attack itself-the murder of more than 3,000 people-was horrible enough, but the tragic response it provoked, the misguided invasion of Iraq, which, as everyone now acknowledges, had nothing whatsoever to do with attacking the U.S., was ultimately an even more serious blow to America's power, prestige, and standing. Hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily, $3 trillion was wasted, and the reasons given for launching the war in the first place were later revealed as cynical and deceptive.

The decision by the United States government to abandon its historic prohibitions against the torture of captives and the indefinite detention of individuals without legal process has been widely seen around the world as diminis.h.i.+ng its moral authority. In a world divided into different civilizations, with different religious traditions and ethnic histories, moral authority is arguably an even greater source of power. Even though the ideologies of nations vary widely, the values of justice, fairness, equality, and sustainability are valued by the people of every nation, even if they often define these values in different ways.

The apparent rise of fundamentalism in its many varieties may be due, in part, to the pace of change that naturally causes many people to more tightly embrace orthodoxies of faith as a source of spiritual and cultural stability. The globalization of culture-not only through the Internet, but also through satellite television, compact discs, and other media-has also been a source of conflict between Western societies and conservative fundamentalist societies. When cultural goods from the West depict gender roles and s.e.xual values in ways that conflict with traditional norms in fundamentalist cultures, religious leaders condemn what they view as the socially destabilizing impact.

But the impact of globalized culture goes far beyond issues of gender equity and s.e.xuality. Cultural goods serve as powerful advertis.e.m.e.nts for the lifestyles that are depicted, and promotions for the values of the country where such goods originate. In a sense, they carry the cultural DNA of that country. As the global middle cla.s.s is exposed to images of homes, automobiles, appliances, and other common features of life in industrial countries, the pressure they exert for changes in their own domestic political and economic policies often grows accordingly.

The longer-term impact may well be to break down differences. A recent study in Cairo found that there is a strong correlation between the amount of television watched and the decline of support for fundamentalism. One of the sources of the enhanced influence of Turkey in the Middle East is the popularity of its movies and television programs. The dominance of American music has enhanced the impression of the United States as a dynamic and creative society. The ability to influence the thinking of peoples through the dissemination of cultural goods such as movies, television programs, music, books, sports, and games is increasing in an interconnected world where consumption of media is rising every year.

WAR AND PEACE.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a decline in the number of people killed in wars, and a decline in the number of wars in every category, international and civil-even though millions continued to die because of the pathological behavior of dictators. The decline has continued in this century, leading some to argue that humankind is maturing, humane values are spreading, and military power is less relevant in an interconnected world. It is a measure of this change that the people of the United States feel a palpable loss of national power at a time when its military budget is larger than those of the next fifty other nations combined. However, self-described foreign policy "realists" (who believe that nation-states always compete in an inherently anarchic international system) warn that similar predictions made in past eras proved to be false.

History provides all too many examples of unwarranted optimism about the decline of war during previous eras when a new appreciation for the benefits of peace seemed to be on the rise. The best-selling book globally in 1910 was The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, who argued that the increased economic integration that accompanied the Second Industrial Revolution had made war obsolete. Less than four years later, on the eve of World War I, Andrew Carnegie, the Bill Gates of his day, wrote a New Year's greeting to friends: "We send this New Year Greeting, January 1, 1914 strong in the faith that International Peace is soon to prevail, through several of the great powers agreeing to settle their disputes by arbitration under International Law, the pen thus proving mightier than the sword."

Human nature has not changed and the history of almost every nation contains sobering reminders that the use of military power has often been decisive in changing their fate. Nationalist politicians in many countries-including the United States and China-will, of course, seek to exploit fears about the future-and the fear of one another-by calling for the buildup of military strength. In the present era, some Chinese military strategists have written that a well-planned cyberattack on the United States could allow China to "gain equal footing" with the U.S. in spite of U.S. superiority in conventional and nuclear weaponry. And as has often been the case in history, fear begets fear; the buildup of a capacity for war leads those against whom it might be used to infer that there is an intent to do just that.

The fear of a surprise military attack has itself had a distorting influence on the priority given to military expenditures throughout history, and is a fear inherently difficult for the people and leaders of any nation to keep in proper perspective. That is one reason why national security depends more than ever on superior intelligence gathering and a.n.a.lysis in order to protect against strategic surprise and to maintain alertness to strategic opportunities.

In addition, new developments in technology have frequently changed the nature of warfare in ways that have surprised complacent nations who were focused on the technologies that were dominant in previous wars. The Maginot Line painstakingly constructed by France after World War I proved impotent in the face of new highly mobile tanks deployed by n.a.z.i Germany. Military power now depends more than ever on the effective mastery of research and development to gain leverage from the still accelerating scientific and technological revolution, which has an enormous impact on the evolution of weaponry.

While the utility of military power may indeed be finally declining in significance in a world where the people and businesses of every nation are more closely linked than ever before, the recent decline in warfare of all kinds in the world-particularly war between nation-states-may have less to do with a sudden outbreak of empathy in mankind and may have more to do with the role played by the United States and its allies in the postWorld War II era in mediating conflicts, building alliances, and sometimes intervening with a combination of limited military force and economic sanctions-as it did, for example, in the former Yugoslavia to limit the spread of violence between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia.

Supranational ent.i.ties have also been playing an ever growing role, intervening in nations unable to halt violent conflicts and mediating the resolution of disputes. These international groups include not only U.N.-sponsored global efforts, but also, increasingly, efforts by regional supranational ent.i.ties like the African Union, the Arab League, the European Union, NATO, and others. Nongovernmental organizations, faith-based charitable groups, and philanthropic foundations are playing an increasingly significant role in providing essential public goods in areas where nation-states are faltering. When sustained military operations are necessary and established supranational ent.i.ties are unable to reach consensus, "coalitions of the willing" have been formed.

But in many of these interventions-particularly where NATO and coalitions of the willing were involved-the United States has played a key organizing and coordinating role, and has often provided not only the critical intelligence collection and a.n.a.lysis but also the decisive military force as well. If the equilibrium of power in the world continues to s.h.i.+ft in ways that weaken the formerly dominant position of the United States, it could threaten an end to the period some historians have labeled the Pax Americana.

The recent decline in war may also be related to two developments during the long Cold War between the United States and the USSR. First of all, when these two superpowers built vast a.r.s.enals of nuclear bombs mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, and bombers, the quantum increase in the probable consequences of all-out war became so obviously and palpably unacceptable that both the U.S. and the USSR soberly backed away from the precipice. The escalating cost of maintaining and modernizing these a.r.s.enals also became a burden for both superpowers. (The Brookings Inst.i.tution has calculated that since 1940, the U.S. has spent $5.5 trillion on its nuclear war fighting capability-more than on any other program besides Social Security.) Though the risk of such a war has been sharply reduced by arms control agreements, the partial dismantling of both a.r.s.enals, and enhanced communications and safeguards (including a recent bilateral nuclear cybersecurity agreement), the risk of an escalation in tensions must still be continually managed.

Second, during the last third of the twentieth century, both the U.S. and the USSR had bitter experiences in failed efforts to use overwhelming conventional military strength against guerrilla armies using irregular warfare tactics, blending into their populations and fighting a war of attrition. The lessons learned by the superpowers were also learned by guerrilla forces. Partly as a result, the continued spread of irregular warfare tactics is now seriously undermining the nation-state monopoly on the ability to use warfare as a decisive instrument of policy.

The large excess inventories of rifles and automatic weapons manufactured during previous wars are increasingly available not only to insurgent guerrilla forces, but also to individuals, terrorist groups, and criminal organizations. When a new generation of weapons is manufactured, the older generation is not destroyed. Rather, they find their way into the hands of others, often magnifying the bloodshed in regional and civil wars. Unfortunately, the lobbying power and political influence of gun and munitions manufacturers and defense companies has contributed to this spread of weapons throughout the world. President Barack Obama reversed U.S. policy in 2009 and resumed advocacy of a treaty to limit this destructive trade, but progress is slow at best because of opposition from several countries and the dysfunctionality of global decision making.

The U.S. continues to dominate the international trade in weapons of all kinds-including long-range precision weapons and surface-to-air missiles-some of which end up being trafficked in black markets. In his final speech as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned the United States about the "military industrial complex." As the victorious commanding general in World War II, Eisenhower could hardly have been accused of being soft on national security. Although there are undeniable benefits to the United States from weapons deals, including an enhanced ability to form and maintain useful alliances, it is troubling that more than half (52.7 percent in 2010) of all of the military weapons sold to countries around the world originate in the United States.

More significantly, the dispersal of scientific and technological knowledge and expertise throughout Earth Inc. and the Global Mind has also undermined the monopoly exercised by nation-states over the means of inflicting ma.s.s violence. Chemical and biological agents capable of causing ma.s.s casualties are also on the list of weapons now theoretically accessible to nonstate groups.

The knowledge necessary to build weapons of ma.s.s destruction, including nuclear weapons, has already been dangerously dispersed to other nations. Instead of the two nuclear powers that faced off at the beginning of the Cold War, there are now thirty-five to forty countries with the potential to build nuclear bombs. North Korea, which has already developed a handful of nuclear weapons, and Iran, which most believe is attempting to do so, are developing longer-range missile programs that could over time result in the ability to project intercontinental power. Proliferation experts are deeply concerned that the spread of nuclear weapons to some of these countries could markedly increase the risk that terrorist groups could purchase or steal the components they need to make a bomb of their own. The former head of Pakistan's nuclear program, A. Q. Khan, developed extensive ties with Islamic militant groups. North Korea, strapped for cash as always, has already sold missile technology and many believe it is capable of selling nuclear weapons components.

National security experts are also concerned about regional cascades of nuclear proliferation in regions like the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia. In other words, the development of a nuclear a.r.s.enal by Iran would exert pressure on Saudi Arabia and potentially other countries in the region to develop their own nuclear a.r.s.enals in order to provide deterrence. If North Korea were to gain the credible ability to threaten a nuclear attack against j.a.pan, the pressure on j.a.pan to develop its own a.r.s.enal would be intense in spite of j.a.pan's historic experience and opposition to nuclear weapons.

Because leaders.h.i.+p in the community of nations is essential, there is an urgent need to restore the integrity of democratic decision making in the United States. And there are hopeful trends, not least the awakening of reformist activism on the Internet. Throughout the world, the Internet is empowering the rapidly increasing members of the global middle cla.s.s to demand the kinds of accountability and reform from their governments that middle-cla.s.s citizens have historically always been more likely to demand than the poor and underprivileged. Stanford political science professor Francis f.u.kuyama notes that this is "most broadly accepted in countries that have reached a level of material prosperity sufficient to allow a majority of their citizens to think of themselves as middle cla.s.s, which is why there tends to be a correlation between high levels of development and stable democracy."

The trends a.s.sociated with the emergence of Earth Inc.-particularly robosourcing, the transfer of work from humans to intelligent interconnected machines-threaten to slow the rise of the global middle cla.s.s by diminis.h.i.+ng aggregate wages. But a recent report from the European Strategy and Policy a.n.a.lysis System (ESPAS) calculates that the global middle cla.s.s will double in the next twelve years from two billion to four billion people, and will reach almost five billion people by 2030.

The report adds: "By 2030, the demands and concerns of people in many different countries are likely to converge, with a major impact on national politics and international relations. This will be the result mainly of greater awareness among the world's citizenry that their aspirations and grievances are shared. This awareness is already configuring a global citizens' agenda that emphasizes fundamental freedoms, economic and social rights and, increasingly, environmental issues."

The awareness of higher living standards, higher levels of freedom and human rights, better environmental conditions, and the benefits of more responsive governments will continue to spread within the Global Mind. This new global awareness of the myriad ways in which the lives of billions can be improved is certain to exert a profound influence on the behavior of political leaders throughout the world.

Already, the spread of independence movements committed to democratic capitalism in states throughout the former Soviet Union, and the explosive spread of the Arab Spring in nations throughout the Middle East and North Africa, also serve as examples of the real possibility that such changes can occur even more quickly in a world empowered by its connections to the Global Mind.

With the ongoing emergence of the world's first truly global civilization, the future will depend upon the outcome of the struggle now beginning between the raw imperatives of Earth Inc. and the vast potential inherent in the Global Mind for the insistence by people of conscience that excesses be constrained with the imposition and enforcement of standards and principles that honor and respect human values.

Lest this sound impractical or hopelessly idealistic, there are many examples of new global norms having been established by this mechanism in the past-well prior to the enhanced potential we now have available for promoting new global norms by using the Internet. The abolition movement, the anti-Apartheid movement, the promotion of women's rights, restrictions on child labor, the anti-whaling movement, the Geneva Conventions against torture, the rapid spread of anticolonialism in the 1960s, the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing, and successive waves of the democracy movement-all gained momentum from the sharing of ideas and ideals among groups of committed individuals in multiple countries who pressured their governments to cooperate in the design of laws and treaties that led to broad-based change in much of the world.

No matter the nation in which we reside, we as human beings now face a choice: either to be swept along by the powerful currents of technological change and economic determinism into a future that may threaten our deepest values, or to build a capacity for collective decision making on a global scale that allows us to shape that future in ways that protect human dignity and reflect the aspirations of nations and peoples.

* Mercenary armies have always been present in the history of warfare, but are more prominent than ever in some long-running conflicts, such as those that have killed 400,000 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Though Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the 1848 French revolution had been the first "cla.s.s struggle."

For a larger version of the following image, click here.

4.

OUTGROWTH.

THE RAPID GROWTH OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION-IN THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, the power of technology, and the size of the global economy-is colliding with approaching limits to the supply of key natural resources on which billions of lives depend, including topsoil and freshwater. It is also seriously damaging the integrity of crucial planetary ecological systems. Yet "growth," in the peculiar and self-defeating way we define it, continues to be the princ.i.p.al and overriding objective of almost all national and global economic policies and the business plans of almost all corporations.

Our primary way of measuring economic growth-gross domestic product, or GDP-is based on absurd calculations that completely exclude any consideration of the distribution of income, the relentless depletion of essential resources, and the reckless spewing of prodigious quant.i.ties of harmful waste into the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, soil, and biosphere.

Growth of GDP used to be roughly correlated with an increase in the number of jobs and the size of average personal incomes. During the postWorld War II years, when the American model of democratic capitalism was spreading, many experts believed that GDP was the simplest and most accurate measure of whether economic policy was moving in the right direction. Even then, however, the economist who had created it in 1937, Simon Kuznets, warned that it was a potentially dangerous oversimplification that could be misleading and subject to "illusion and resulting abuse" because it did not account for "the personal distribution of income" or "a variety of costs that must be recognized."

In the twenty-first century, especially since the emergence of Earth Inc., policies aimed at maximizing GDP have been driving the world toward more concentrated wealth and power, more inequality of incomes, higher long-term unemployment, more public and private debt, more social and geopolitical instability, greater market volatility, more pollution, and what biologists refer to as the Sixth Great Extinction. Some of these negative consequences are actually counted as positive outcomes in the functionally insane definition of growth that we still use as our compa.s.s. The heading it gives us points straight off the edge of a cliff.

The world's abject failure to acknowledge the danger to the future of civilization-and to change course-reflects the absence of coherent global leaders.h.i.+p and the imbalance of power, as the insistent imperatives of Earth Inc. dominate decisions at the expense of partic.i.p.atory democracy. Even though growth of GDP no longer increases prosperity or the sense of well-being for the average person, it is still correlated with the incomes of elites.

The combination of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind now provides elites with an enhanced ability to manufacture consent for political decisions that serve their interests rather than the public interest-and provides corporations with an enhanced ability to manufacture wants in order to increase consumption of commodities and manufactured products. The result is rising levels of per capita consumption, with an impact that is magnified by the continuing increases in human population.

The global middle cla.s.s will grow by an incredible three billion people in just the next seventeen years. And the globalization of culture on television and the Internet is linking their aspirations to living standards that no longer reflect those of their neighbors, but instead reflect standards that are more common in the wealthiest nations. That is one of the reasons why the growth in per capita consumption of food, water, meat, commodities, and manufactured goods is exceeding the rate of growth in the number of people in the world.

Earth Inc.-and its impact on ecological systems and the supply of key resources-is being driven by this combination of many more people and much larger per capita consumption rates. The advertiser-driven ideology that's pervasive in the Global Mind equates more consumption with more happiness. It is a false promise, of course, just like the promise that GDP growth will bring more prosperity.

The tendency to confuse increased commercial consumption with increased happiness was the subject of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Was.h.i.+ngton in early 1784: "All the world is becoming commercial. Was it practicable to keep our new empire separated from them we might indulge ourselves in speculating whether commerce contributes to the happiness of mankind. But we cannot separate ourselves from them. Our citizens have had too full taste of the comforts furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them."

Jefferson would not be surprised by the recent voluminous research into the causes of happiness, which shows that over the last half century the United States has tripled its economic output with absolutely no gain in the general public's happiness or sense of well-being. Similar results have been found in other high-consumption countries. After basic needs are met, higher incomes produce gains in happiness only up to a point, beyond which further increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being.

The c.u.mulative impact of surging per capita consumption, rapid population growth, human dominance of every ecological system, and the forcing of pervasive biological changes worldwide has created the very real possibility, according to twenty-two prominent biologists and ecologists in a 2012 study in Nature, that we may soon reach a dangerous "planetary scale 'tipping point.' " According to one of the coauthors, James H. Brown, "We've created this enormous bubble of population and economy. If you try to get the good data and do the arithmetic, it's just unsustainable. It's either got to be deflated gently, or it's going to burst."

In the parable of the boy who cried wolf, warnings of danger that turned out to be false bred complacency to the point where a subsequent warning of a danger that was all too real was ignored. Past warnings that humanity was about to encounter harsh limits to its ability to grow much further were often perceived as false: from Thomas Malthus's warnings about population growth at the end of the eighteenth century to The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by Donella Meadows, among others.

We resist the notion that there might be limits to the rate of growth we are used to-in part because new technologies have so frequently enabled us to become far more efficient in producing more with less and to subst.i.tute a new resource for one in short supply. Some of the resources we depend upon the most, including topsoil (and some key elements, like phosphorus for fertilizers), however, have no subst.i.tutes and are being depleted.

RISING PRESSURES, CLEARER LIMITS.

On every continent, the population and economy are placing new demands for more food, freshwater, energy, commodities of all kinds, and manufactured products. And worryingly, over the past ten years, multiple indicators have been showing that real physical limits are being reached.

World food prices spiked to all-time record high levels in 2008 and again in 2011. Both times, food riots and political upheavals struck several countries. Important groundwater aquifers are being depleted at unsustainable rates-especially in northern China, India, and the Western United States. Water tables are falling in countries where 50 percent of the world's people live. The unsustainable erosion of topsoil and loss of soil fertility are depressing crop yields in several important food-growing regions.

The prices of almost all commodities in the world economy have surged simultaneously in the last eleven years. After declining steadily throughout the twentieth century by an average of 70 percent-with the expected ups and downs for the Great Depression and the postWorld War I depression, the two world wars, and the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979, all of those price reductions were wiped out by price increases between 2002 and 2012-increases larger than those that accompanied either World War I or II.

Among the commodities with the fastest price increases are iron ore, copper, coal, corn, silver, sorghum, palladium, rubber, flaxseed, palm oil, soybeans, coconut oil, and nickel. An influential investor, Jeremy Grantham, warns that the growth in demand for commodities creates the danger that we may soon reach "peak everything."

The cause of these continuing price hikes is a surge of demand that reflects population increases, and even more significantly, sharply rising per capita consumption levels. This has proven particularly true in China and other emerging economies whose growth rates (since the middle of the 1990s) have been at least three times faster than those in the industrial world. China, in particular, is now consuming more than half the world's cement, nearly half of all the world's iron ore, coal, pigs, steel, and lead-and roughly 40 percent of the aluminum and copper.

Almost one quarter of the new cars being produced each year are now made in China. The largest U.S. automobile manufacturer, General Motors, now sells more automobiles in China than in its home country. In the last forty years, the world's population of cars and trucks quadrupled from 250 million to slightly over one billion in 2013. The number of cars and trucks in the world is projected to double again in the next thirty years-driving ever higher oil consumption. The production of automobiles in developing and emerging economies will overtake production in developed countries by 2015 and auto sales in the same countries will overtake those in developed economies by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has also found that "All of the net growth [in the IEA's scenario, which a.s.sumes that new proposed policies to reduce emissions will be put into effect] comes from the transport sector in emerging economies."

Within the last two years, there have been some indications that consumption levels in the United States-where they are still the highest in the world-and in other developed countries may be slowing, and in some cases may have peaked. Some optimists believe that as a result, concerns about continued high growth rates may be overblown. However, even if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world's population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today's unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries.

Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was pa.s.sed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive.

The balance of geopolitical power s.h.i.+fted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases.

Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well, China's coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade-and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades.

The prediction of global peak oil is fraught with controversy, largely because of uncertainty about the size of reserves yet to be discovered deep underneath the ocean floor in regions that have been difficult to access, and in unconventional sources such as the exceptionally dirty tar sands of Canada, the carbon-rich extra-heavy oil in Venezuela, and tight oil resources discovered in deep continental shale formations. Some experts are predicting that even larger new oil supplies in the U.S. will soon be produced with the same water-intensive hydraulic fracturing (commonly called fracking) techniques-combined with horizontal drilling-that have been used to exploit the newly discovered abundance of deep shale gas. Yet even if supplies are increased significantly, global demand is growing even faster-and in any case, no sane civilization would add so much additional CO2 to the already oversaturated global atmosphere.

At current levels of growth, the global economy is now projected to require a 23.5 percent increase in the consumption of oil in less than twenty-five years-even as the marginal cost of increased supplies reaches all-time record highs, and even as the political instability in the world's largest oil-producing region threatens wars, revolutions, and the disruption of supply routes.

Global oil production from conventional wells on land actually seems to have peaked more than thirty years ago. The growth of oil production since 1982 has been of more expensive unconventional onsh.o.r.e sources, and particularly offsh.o.r.e, where production is increasingly in risky deepwater wells-like BP's Deepwater Horizon (Macondo) well in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the same accident-p.r.o.ne deepwater drilling technology is being recklessly deployed in the unforgiving and environmentally fragile Arctic Ocean. And unfortunately, oil companies are also ratcheting up the political pressure to produce oil from exceptionally carbonintensive tar sands, which would make the problem of global warming that much worse.

The projected reserves in these dirty sources, as well as in the deep reserves underneath the ocean floor, yield much more expensive oil than the world has enjoyed in the past. Even if we do not reach global peak oil in the near future, the prices we pay for oil are likely to be permanently higher than those we became accustomed to during the century and a half over which we exploited the cheaper, more easily recoverable reserves.

These higher petroleum prices have already had a big impact on food prices because modern industrial agriculture consumes prodigious quant.i.ties of diesel fuel for locomotion, and poorly contained methane for 90 percent of their fertilizer costs. According to Berkeley professor and author Michael Pollan, "it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food." No wonder the demand for both oil and food is continuing to skyrocket-particularly in fast growing emerging economies. The impact of higher food prices is significantly larger in developing countries, where low-income families frequently spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.

In spite of the impressive increases in food production in the last half century, and in spite of premature warnings in centuries past that humanity was reaching hard limits in its ability to provide more food for more people, many experts are nearly unanimous in pointing to multiple threats confronting the ability of the world to expand food supplies: * Erosion of fertile topsoil at unsustainable rates; each inch of topsoil lost diminishes grain yields by 6 percent; * Loss of soil fertility; each reduction of organic matter in soil by 50 percent reduces many crop yields by 25 percent; * Increasing desertification of gra.s.slands; * Increasing compet.i.tion for agricultural water from cities and industry, even though agriculture is projected to require 45 percent more water by 2030; * A slowing rate of agricultural productivity gains since the Green Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century-from 3.5 percent annually three decades ago to a little over one percent now; * Increasing resistance of pests, weeds, and plant diseases to pesticides, herbicides, and other agricultural chemicals; * The loss of a significant amount of the world's remaining plant genetic diversity; as much as three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have already been lost; * An increased risk of export bans by large producers facing their own domestic price hikes; according to the Council on Foreign Relations, data from the U.N.'s World Food Programme show that "over forty countries in 2008 imposed some form of export ban in an effort to increase domestic food security"; * Erratic and less predictable precipitation patterns a.s.sociated with global warming-which leads to less frequent but larger downpours, interrupting longer periods of deeper drought; * The looming impact of catastrophic heat stress on important food crops that cannot survive the predicted global temperature increase of 6 degrees C (11 degrees F); each one degree C increase in temperature is expected by experts to produce a 10 percent decline in crop yields; * Growing consumption of food, driven both by population growth, the growth in per capita consumption, and the increasing global preference for resource-intensive meat consumption; * Diversion of more cropland from food crops to crops suitable for biofuel; and * Conversion of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl.

We already know that extreme shortages of food, fertile land, and freshwater in countries with growing populations can lead to a complete breakdown of social order and a sharp increase in violence. Studies have shown conclusively that this deadly combination was a major contributing factor in the years leading up to the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which at the time had one of the five highest population growth rates in the world, with 67 percent of its people under the age of twenty-four.

Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote, "modern Rwanda ill.u.s.trates a case where Malthus's worst-case scenario does seem to have been right.... Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don't succeed in solving them by our own actions."

Several experts now worry that there is a danger that several large food-growing countries-China and India among them-will run into a wall. Were that to occur, the resulting global food shortages and price hikes could be catastrophic. In Gujarat, India, the head of the International Water Management Inst.i.tute's groundwater station, Tushaar Shah, said of the looming water crisis in his region, "when the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India."

India would not be alone. For example, rapid population growth and gross overexploitation of soil, water, and other natural resources are contributing to the anarchy and increasing radicalism in Yemen. Tap water flows in the capital city of Sana'a only one day in four. Partly because of water shortages and soil erosion, the harvest of grain has declined more than 30 percent in the last four decades. Yemen is becoming, in the words of Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Inst.i.tute, "a hydrological basket case."

THE GROWTH OF CITIES.

The collective failure to clearly see the most likely future consequences of realities evolving along easily measurable trend lines also reflects a well-known human vulnerability when we try to think about the future. Neuroscientists and behavioral economists have established that we have a kind of brain glitch when it comes to making choices in the present that require an evaluation of the future. The geeky term for this glitch in our thinking is "social discounting"-which simply means that we are p.r.o.ne to dramatically overminimize the future effects of choices we make now.

This vulnerability is an even bigger problem for us when the particular changes we have to evaluate are part of a pattern of exponential change-the kind of change that is common in the age of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind-because we are more comfortable thinking about change as a slow, linear process. There is one exponential change in particular over the last several generations whose implications we have been slow to recognize: the change in global population.

DURING THE LAST century alone, we quadrupled the human population. By way of perspective, it took 200,000 years for our species to reach the one billion mark, yet we have added that many people in just the first thirteen years of this century. In the next thirteen years, we will add another billion, and yet another billion just fourteen years after that-for a total of nine billion souls by the middle of this century. In only thirty-seven years, our population will grow by a number equivalent to all the people in the world at the beginning of World War II. And more than 95 percent of the new additions will be in developing countries.

Moreover, 100 percent of this huge net increase in global population will take place in cities, with the largest increases in the largest cities. In all, there will be more city-dwellers in the world than the entire population of the world at the beginning of the 1990s. In fact, the population of megacities already has increased tenfold over the last forty years. In this period of hyper-urbanization, cities with less than one million people will see a reduction in their share of the world's urban population. This is a new trend that has surprised population experts, who note that it is a reversal of past urbanization patterns.

This historic transformation of human civilization from a predominantly rural pattern to a predominantly urban pattern has significant implications for the organization of society and the economy. The trend is so powerful that even with the enormous increase in overall population now under way, rural populations have leveled off and are expected to decline significantly, starting in the next decade.

Again, some perspective: for almost all of the ten millennia since the first cities were built, no more than 10 to 12 percent of people ever lived in urban areas. In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution began to increase urban populations, but the percentage was still only 13 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1950, roughly a third of the world's people lived in cities, and as of 2011, for the first time, more than half of us lived in cities. Already, more than 78 percent of people in developed countries live in cities, and by 2050 that number is projected to increase to 86 percent, with 64 percent of the population in less developed countries living in cities.

Forty years ago, only two cities in the world-New York and Tokyo-had populations of 10 million people; in 2013, twenty-three cities will have more than that number. And by 2025, thirty-seven such megacities will sprawl across the Earth. The sheer geographic size of cities and their rapid expansion into surrounding rural areas that used to be primarily agricultural land is also a challenge in many nations. The sprawl is increasing even more rapidly than the population-with a projected increase of 175 percent between 2000 and 2030.

The fastest growing of the new megacities is Lagos, Nigeria-which will grow from 11 million today to just under 19 million in 2025. All five of the fastest growing cities are in developing countries. The others, in addition to Lagos, are Dhaka, Bangladesh; Shenzhen, China; Karachi, Pakistan; and Delhi, India-which is projected to have a population of almost 33 million people by 2025. The largest megacity today, Tokyo, has more than 37 million people and is expected to grow to 38.7 million people by 2025. By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world's population will be city dwellers.

One of the challenges posed by this hyper-urbanization is to the ability of munic.i.p.al governments to provide adequate housing, freshwater, sanitation, and other essential needs. More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities. Without significant changes in policy and governance, the number of slum dwellers is projected to double to two billion people within the next seventeen years. The urban poor population-defined as those living on $1.25 a day or less-is growing at a rate even faster than the overall urban growth rate.