Can They Stop the Impending Train Wreck?

The fall approaches; a new academic year begins and with it a new class of bright and talented students arrived at the Nicholas School. This year’s class is especially noteworthy, not only for its stellar qualifications and size—one of the best and largest we have ever seen—but also because this is the first class entering Nicholas since the great economic meltdown of 2008-09.

Despite the sobering events of the past year, this year’s group seems as idealistic and energetic as any. They are ready to roll up their sleeves and make the world a better place, and perhaps more so than in previous years, confident that they will help make the world a better place. Perhaps having witnessed and survived the meltdown, they feel empowered. Perhaps having witnessed the meltdown, these young men and women see more clearly than before the unsustainable flaws in the system that caused the crash and what needs to be done to make a more sustainable system. Whatever the reason, being awash in the energy and optimism of our new students is a tonic that we in the academic world can look forward to each year, and this year’s did not disappoint.

I am especially thankful for the energy and optimism of our students at Nicholas, because I fear that we are leaving them with an impending crisis, a train wreck in the making that could make the great economic meltdown of 2008-09 look like small potatoes.

We already know that as a society we are depleting the resources of our planet. Some 60 percent of the world’s ecosystems, that provide us with clean water, timber, fisheries, food, and fiber, have been degraded by human activities. Because of our dependence on fossil fuels we are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate that far outstrips the atmosphere’s ability to process it. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are rising, causing a disruption in climate that is unprecedented in modern times. The critical and very real need for more and more food has necessitated the use of huge amounts of fertilizers, which in turn foul our rivers and streams and cause giant ocean dead zones. Pressures to increase food production also are causing the conversion of enormous swaths of natural habitat to agricultural land at the expense of the genetic treasures of a biodiverse world.

A reasonable response, indeed the only response to the problem of depleting resources, is to adopt a more sustainable approach: use less, conserve more, be more efficient, recycle.

Converting our current unsustainable practices to more sustainable ones would be hard enough under normal circumstances. But these are hardly normal circumstances. Today planet Earth is populated by some 6.8 billion people; a little less than half of these live on less than $2.50 per day according the World Bank. Sometime near the middle of this century, demographers tell us, there will be about 9 billion of us—give or take a billion. Demographers also tell us that much of these 9 billion will be urban, with aspirations similar for the highconsumption lifestyles of people now living in the developed economies of the world. Meeting these aspirations would seem to require more not less of the Earth’s dwindling resources.

And this is the train wreck the next generation of environmental managers is going to have to find a way to avert. They are going to have to figure out a way to sustain a population of 9 billion Earthlings while at the same time sustaining planet Earth. Fail to do the latter and you can’t do the former. But fail to do the former, and I fear that many of the institutions that sustain us as a society will fail.

How can this be done? I have some ideas, but I have to confess I don’t really know. And I suspect that most of my contemporaries at Duke and elsewhere don’t know for sure either. What we can do is impart all the wisdom and knowledge and skills that we know on this new class of students and hope and pray that they will be smart enough to avert the train wreck already in motion. Am I optimistic? Given the optimism of our new class of Nicholas students, it is hard not to be.