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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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51. Harrison Brown

Dr. Harrison Brown is professor of geochemistry and professor of science and government at the California Institute of Technology. He is also foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
He was born in Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1917. He studied chemistry at the University of California and obtained a Ph.D. at John Hopkins University in 1941.
From 1942 to 1943 he worked as research associate at the plutonium project of the University of Chicago; from 1943 to 1946, assistant director of chemistry at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; from 1948 to 1951 he was associate professor at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago.
He has published numerous books, among them Must Destruction Be Our Destiny? (1946), The Challenge of Man's Future (1954), The Next Hundred Years (1957) and A World Without War (1961).

You are the foreign secretary of what is considered the largest consulting operation in the world, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. How do you view the international community of scientists in the seventies?

 

The primary task of my office in the National Academy of Sciences is to maintain and develop close working relationships with our colleagues in other countries, no matter where these countries might be and no matter what the political differences between our governments might be. We have very good relationships with the socialist countries. We have very good relationships with the countries in the Third World. We have very good relationships with our sister academies in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

And China?

 

We are just beginning to develop relationships with China. We have hosted now two groups of Chinese: The first group was a medical group, which spent three weeks in the United States; the second group is a group of natural scientists. Including physicists, biologists and chemists, and that group is just now touring the United States as our guests. I must say that here again, although there are very real political differences between our governments, as scientists we get along extremely well together.

There are apparently about seven hundred and fifty thousand working scientists worldwide. We are able to communicate with each other. We are able to talk with each other. There are gaps of course, stemming from the fact that we are in different fields. A biologist might have some kind of trouble communicating with a physicist, but we scientists are able to communicate with each other far more effectively, I think, than nonscientists are, coming from different cultures. It is startling to me how the members of the scientific community worldwide tend to look at the problems of the world in the same way. We have the same general view of just what the major problems really are that require solution.

 

A United Nations university has been now decided upon.

 

The ‘United Nations’ of the scientific world is called the International Council of Scientific Unions. It is made up not of nations but of organizations of scientists. We believe that every group of scientists should have access to the workings of the International Council of Scientific Unions. As a result we have as members a major scientific society in West Germany and the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, the Academies of Sciences of both North Vietnam and South Vietnam, the Academies of Sciences of both North Korea and South Korea.

 

In The Challenge of Man's Future,1 you discussed among others the exponential growth of amebas - which brings me to the Forrester Law and the Club of Rome - how do you feel this initiative is being looked upon in the United States or in the community of world's scientists?

 

It is quite clear that the study Limits of Growth has aroused man's passions both pro and con. My own view is the following: It is absolutely essential that we attempt to look into the future. Unless we do so, it's

almost certain that mankind is going to paint itself into a corner from which it will not be able to extricate itself. Our ability to look into the future is not very good. We are learning a great deal about how to forecast. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that our current competence is not very extensive, it is important that we try and continue to improve our techniques. It is very important, for example, that we look at the interrelationships between population growth and technological change, between technological change and our natural resources, between technological change and the human environment. It is very important that we look at technological change in terms of social change. How are new techniques changing the ways in which people live? When we look at the full scope of human history, we see major changes in society which have resulted from the adoption of relatively simple technologies. Basically, for example, the change from a food-gathering technology to an agricultural technology produced perhaps the greatest single social and cultural change in mankind's entire existence.

 

How to describe your concept of four futures?2

 

If I were a cosmic gambler looking at the world from a great distance, examining what goes on, I would outline the planet's future in the following order of probability. I think the most probable, basically, is that the instabilities will be so great and that nationalism will influence our existence to such an extent that it is only a matter of time before somebody drops ‘the bomb.’ Then, of course, there would be a major catastrophe. I don't believe that such a catastrophe would destroy all humanity. But I do believe that it would be extremely difficult for a new civilization to emerge from the ruins of the old. We saw that happen in the Middle Ages, when the fantastic civilization of Rome disappeared and the generations which followed cannibalized the old civilization. It took centuries before something new could be created. We must keep in mind that we are now living in an age when there are no longer resources of the high grade which were available to us when we built our civilization. As each year passes our resource base will diminish still further. This does not mean we cannot keep going, we certainly can. It is solely a matter of developing adequate technology and a matter of energy. If need be, we could maintain a very high level of civilization using ordinary rock, which is the lowest common denominator of resources. But suppose such a civilization were to stop? A primitive group without the tools cannot live off ordinary rock.

The next most likely future is one in which we in some way manage to avoid the catastrophe of ‘the bomb.’ If things continue the way they're going now, it is quite clear that humanity will remain divided into two quite separate cultures - the culture of the rich and the culture of the poor. No matter what indicator we use, whether it be gross national product per capita, energy consumption per capita or steel consumption per capita, these are increasing in both the rich countries and in the poor, and they are increasing at the same rate. What this means is that the rich countries will continue to remain, per person, twenty times as rich as the poor countries. They will continue to consume twenty times as much energy per person as will the poor countries. Yet the poor countries are increasing their energy consumption and at the same time they are becoming more crowded. As a result one can foresee the perpetuation of a minority of rich and an expanding population of poor. One can visualize the emergence of conflict between the two groups and a continuing complete separation between the two from the point of view of ways of life.

A third possibility is that in light of the sensitivity of highly industrialized civilization to disruption and also in the light of the very slow rates at which countries are developing under democratic systems and the more rapid rates at which they appear to develop under strong totalitarian systems, it seems to me that in both cultures - both the culture of the rich and the culture of the poor - we are gravitating more and more towards strong totalitarian control. We see this in Latin America. We see this today in China, where many of my Chinese friends say quite freely that China cannot possibly develop under a democracy. My Latin American friends say, Argentina cannot develop under a democracy. Brazil cannot develop under a democracy.

 

Or Indonesia?

 

Indonesia is another example. When we couple this with the situation which is emerging in the West, where we see more and more conflict - conflict resulting from the fact that it is so easy to disrupt society - we see the effects of highjacking, of blackouts, of strikes. A single well-placed bomb in a power system in an eastern city could disrupt the entire eastern coast. It is only natural that governments react and exhort stronger and stronger control. It is not difficult to imagine the emergence of a totalitarian world.

I am not saying that I am advocating any of these three futures. These

are indeed three terrible prospects. The last, the fourth future, I believe is attainable. It also is the least probable. I am convinced that man has it within his power to create a world in which all people worldwide can lead free, abundant and even creative lives. We have that power. It remains to be seen whether we're really going to be able to mobilize that power and use it. We have fantastic power, when it comes right down to it, power given to us by the fact that we have such unlimited quantities of energy, a fantastic technology. Hunger in the world today is absolutely inexcusable. Poverty, disease, the traditional scourge of mankind, are inexcusable.

If I had to point to one enemy that is preventing us from using this power, I would point to nationalism. We live in a world of a hundred and thirty sovereign countries. There was a time in history when this made some sense, since the world then was large. Today the world is very, very small. The thought of perpetuating this fiction of a hundred and thirty sovereign countries is the most dangerous notion one can have today. It is terribly important that in some way these countries come together under a common rule of law, under a common government for all of mankind.

When we look back over the history of my own country, in our very early stages of development, we were in grave danger of ending up as thirteen separate, sovereign states. Fortunately this did not happen simply because we had a remarkable array of extraordinarily intelligent, competent individuals, such as Thomas Jefferson,3 Benjamin Franklin,4 Alexander Hamilton.5 Hamilton once formulated a question which he asked himself: Why was government instituted at all? His answer was: Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint. He was arguing for a federal rule of law as applied to the individual. That is what we ended up with in the United States. Thus far it's worked fairly well. I suspect very strongly that if the world really is going to get itself out of the present mess, we must look forward to a rule of law in the world as applied to the individual. We must recognize that nationalism is an anachronism. We must recognize in the long run there must be one world, otherwise there will be none.


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