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6. Jorge A. Sabato
Professor Jorge A. Sabato was born June 4, 1924, in Rojas, Argentina. He studied in Buenos Aires and Birmingham, England. He founded, organized, and directed the department of metallurgy of the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission. Professor Sabato is corresponding member of the Institute of Metals, member of the Fundación Bariloche,
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and member of the Club of Rome. A number of papers on metallurgy, nuclear metullurgy, physics, and the relationship between scientific policy and economic development have been published by him. He is consultant to the Organization of American States, the Interamerican Bank, the Andean Pact, and other international organizations.
In Argentina we have organized a team to study the ‘problématique’ raised by the Club of Rome in their first major project, Limits to Growth. The team is under the leadership of Professor Amilcar Herrera, a geologist and a specialist in natural resources. I myself belong to a Latin American advisory committee together with Dr. Helio Jaguaribe, from Brazil, Dr. Victor Urquidi, from Mexico - both of them members of the Club of Rome - Osvaldo Suntsel, from Chili, Enrique Oteiza, and Carlos Mallman, from Argentina. Dr. Herrera is a member of the committee and the executive director of the project now known as A Latin American World Model. The team under the direction of Herrera is sponsored by the Fundación Bariloche, a private, high-level, interdisciplinary institution in Argentina organized to undertake graduate studies in disciplines such as the study of natural resources, sociology, mathematics, and music. The Fundación Bariloche is unique in Argentina and in Latin America.
When and how was the committee organized?
Our committee was organized in 1971 during a meeting in Rio de Janeiro sponsored by the Club of Rome. We had already seen the first draft of Limits to Growth as it was presented at the Club of Rome meeting earlier that year in Montreal. When we learned of these efforts, some of us Latin delegates to the Montreal meeting got together and proposed to the executive committee of the club to hold a special meeting in Rio to consider the point of view of the underdeveloped nations in these matters studied by Forrester and Meadows. Our very first impression was that the Limits to Growth study was overcharged with points of view of the developed world. We felt something was missing - the views of the developing world.
The developing nations....
Indeed. We then organized the Rio meeting of 1971, where some twenty Latin American scientists from various nations were present to analyze the Meadows report. It was decided that a special Latin American team would study the problématique tackled by the Club of Rome.
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And your approach to these problems was a different one?
The difference was an essential one. The main hypothesis behind the Meadows report was that there is going to be a global crisis, a world explosion, fundamentally due to the way in which man is exploiting his natural resources. From there on follow several conclusions, as you well know, so I will not elaborate on them here. The Forrester-Meadows approach could be summarized as follows: ‘We live on one planet. If we do not take care of this spaceship earth, it will explode.’
Our own way of judging the future global crisis is that on the one planet there are in fact two worlds. The spaceship earth will eventually explode as a consequence of the collision between these two worlds.
If a world catastrophe is not going to happen we must change the present situation of one planet, two worlds to one planet, one world. If the developed world continues to use eighty percent of the earth's resources - most of which belong to the underdeveloped world - we certainly will have that explosion, due to the fact that a minority of mankind is exploiting the majority.
Therefore, as seen through Latin American eyes, the disaster is not going to be caused by ecological factors. It will be a result of ecopolitical reasons. The combination of the stupid exploitation of resources plus the fact that three-quarters of mankind already lives in the type of the world that Limits to Growth describes for the future, will eventually lead to a worldwide crisis. It is interesting to observe that the Meadows report foresees - in forty or fifty years - a drastic shortage of water, air, housing, education, and so on. But this is exactly the state of the world for about two thousand million persons already today! Right now, not in forty years, two thousand million people have insufficient water supplies or no water at all. They live mostly without sanitation, education is miserably lacking, and so on and so forth. The catastrophe forecast by Meadows is already here.
All of a sudden, the people of the rich world have become aware that something very bad is going to happen. Perhaps I am being brutal to say these things, but take the problem of pollution. My own cynical ‘Oscar Wilde definition’ on pollution is that the rich began to talk about pollution when pollution became a danger for their children. What they forget is that hundreds of millions of children already live amidst the worst kinds of pollution everywhere. Go and visit any one of the -
I just crossed Southeast Asia and India -
OK, go to India. You do not need to look into the future. Everything is already there!
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But the underdeveloped world is also a sharply divided world. A minority live in luxury in the cities, in splendid and beautiful residential areas, while at the same time these cities are surrounded or immersed in a world of misery, of hopelessness.
Our team decided, therefore, that our approach to the problématique, to the approaching catastrophe, should be the following. The crisis foreseen is going to come if this inequal state of distribution of wealth and exploitation of resources remains. Mankind as a whole will not accept this anymore. We are going to have a succession of political crises, leading quite possibly to the destruction not only of natural resources but of human resources. Hundreds of millions of people will sooner or later decide to get what they need. Let me give a simple metaphor. When the barbarians ‘decided’ to break the Roman Empire, they were not actually guided by logic. But they arrived at a political decision and invaded and destroyed the unique civilization that was Rome. My impression is that the same might well happen in connection with the ‘barbarians’ of today - the two thousand million people in the world who can no longer accept prevailing injustices.
Back to Rousseau....
Exactly. It is this way of looking at the problématique that makes the Latin American World Model different from the MIT one: The central objective of our model is not to show what could happen in case the present world trends continue, but to propose a possible way to attain, within a reasonable period of time, say a hundred years, the goal of a humanity freed from the restrictions which at present hinders its development in the widest sense. And the model intends to demonstrate that this goal is compatible with the total resources available to mankind - as long as they are rationally used.
The basic principle is that every human being, by the simple fact of his or her existence, has an absolute right to the satisfaction of those needs - food, health, housing, and education - that are essential to full and active incorporation into his or her culture.
How is your model built?
Our model is built around three basic assumptions related to the most central aspects of social and economic development: First, the ultimate goal is an egalitarian society, both socially and internationally. Second, production will be determined by human needs and not by profit. Third, it will be a nonconsumer society, that is, a society in which consumption is not a value per se. This is of course an utopian world, but in the good sense of the word: a prospect for mankind both desirable and possible.
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What about resources?
The resources we analyzed were natural resources, capital, and land, and we studied the question of whether it would be possible to satisfy the needs of ten thousand million persons or thereabouts in a time horizon of about one hundred years. Therefore, our main objective is to consider the question of whether the basic needs for all mankind could be satisfied over a period of one hundred years from now. Some of the preliminary results are most interesting. On the question of natural resources, for instance, our answer is different from the conclusions drawn by the Meadows team at MIT. We do not think that in the coming period of one hundred years any natural resources will be lacking. Take mineral resources. We do not agree with the Limits to Growth study that there are going to be scarce minerals during these hundred years if already available technology is used.
There will certainly be growth in technology as well.
Exactly. We could, however, even without a future technological breakthrough, and with the technology already available, say that there is no problem with energy as far as we can analyze.
In other words, the present difficulties in Europe, Japan, and the United States are the outcome of a political conflict.
The present energy crisis is a good demonstration of our main hypothesis: it is clearly a political crisis and not a crisis produced by shortage of resources. The central issue is power - not energy-power, but political power - and the only possible answer is a political one, namely a new distribution of power among nations.
What about pollution?
We have likewise studied the problems concerning pollution, and concluded that all pollution problems can be met effectively, spending money, of course. We have figured out that about three to five percent of capital cost in each capital investment would be needed to fight pollution. Therefore, pollution should be brought back to the problems of cost. Except one form, which is thermal pollution, the sole form that is irreversible, as is shown by the second principle of thermodynamics. All energy degrades. The main question to figure out will be to what extent thermal degradation will cause problems. So we analyzed a submodel of the atmosphere based upon a hypothesis of energy consumption a century from now. We studied the dissipation of this energy into the atmosphere to see what kind of effect this produced.
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And food?
We studied the food situation resulting from land-use problems and achieved most interesting results. There should not be a scarcity of food supplies if we use the technology already available now. It is who owns the land, the matter of property, that has to be changed forthwith. We are not faced here with any technical barriers. What we do face is once more a deep political problem. If the land were utilized, not to make money by raising rent from miserably poor farmers; if the land of this earth were divided and used in a socially responsible way, we would not be faced with the catastrophe that may announce itself shortly.
If we could intelligently exploit land as the property of all mankind - a rather strong proposition from the political point of view, as you can well imagine - it could produce all the food necessary for our Utopia.
Another fascinating problem we studied is the demographic question - population. Some years ago, people in the developed world began talking about the world's population problem - in the underdeveloped world of course. If you yourself live in the underdeveloped world, naturally you become rather suspicious if someone coming from the developed world feels it necessary to give you advice! In particular, one becomes suspicious listening to a man like Robert S. McNamara.
The man who first ordered the destruction of Vietnam and then turned super Santa Claus.
Exactly. So one begins to question why -
- all of a sudden, the rich are so concerned.
Yes. As a matter of fact, we first became suspicious years ago. We are satisfied, that at present, at least, we in Latin America are fully capable of presenting our own models when discussions on the future, as originated by the Club of Rome, arise. We have a complete model of world problems now, consisting of several small models linked together. We have a model for food. We have a model for land. We have a model for energy. We have a model for population. The last is of particular interest since it stresses, as I told you before, to what extent the so-called population explosion is linked to political causes.
What would be your conclusion, since all problems end up by being political questions, or semipolitical, at least?
Each of us, I think, has his own image of how these problems are going to be solved or not solved. We do not consider it the purpose of our work to
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propose or suggest solutions. We are trying to point out, among other things, that one cannot describe the future of mankind by forgetting what kind of world we are living in from a political point of view. At the same time, we don't like to give the impression that we are interested only in the political origins of our problems. We at Bariloche consider it to be a rather naïve approach in any analysis of the problems of mankind to forget or neglect the political circumstances in which man will find himself during the next few decades. This is, for instance, the reason we prefer to talk about ecosystem, since it means the relationship between the ecology of nature and that of humans. Ecosystem means man in his organized society, as human being, the interrelationship between the ecocycle and the human-cycle, how they interact with one another. It is nonsense to talk about natural resources as an entity without remembering that natural resources are produced, are in a sense invented by man. Man made copper. Prior to the discovery of electricity copper was a material of few uses, not very important. But when man invented electricity, copper, which was then a resource available in ‘unlimited’ quantities, was transformed into a scarce commodity. The same happened to aluminium. If one would be willing to pay the price in energy to use aluminium instead of copper, one could forget about copper for electrical transmission and use aluminium instead. As you know, over the next hundred years our resources of aluminium are virtually inexhaustible.
That sounds like Herman Kahn.
No, this is not Kahn. This is a fact. Check with anyone in the world studying natural resources.
Overall, you seem to me considerably more optimistic than the authors of
Limits to Growth.
Yes and no. In one sense I am optimistic. If we count and use our resources intelligently, we will have plenty. If we do not, then of course the catastrophe will arrive.
‘Use our resources intelligently....’ Is what you mean to say, ‘Use them intelligently from the political point of view?’
Yes. Right. It is actually a way of saying we must not forget that this poor planet contains not one, but two worlds, and that a global crisis will certainly come if the values and productive systems of the earth are not rationally organized in order to be intrinsically compatible with its ecosystem.
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