Challenges of the New Century

Lester R. Brown

As we look back at the many spectacular achievements of the century just ended, the landing on the Moon in July 1969 by American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stands out. At the beginning of the century, few could imagine humans flying, much less breaking out of Earth's field of gravity to journey to the Moon. And few could imagine how quickly the world would go from air travel to space exploration.
Indeed, when the century began, the Wright brothers were still working in their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, trying to design a craft that would fly. Just 66 years elapsed from their first precarious flight in 1903 on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the landing on the Moon. Although their first flight was only 120 feet, it opened a new era, setting the stage for a century of breathtaking advances in technology.1
In 1945, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering successfully designed what many consider to be the first electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). This advance was to have an even more pervasive effect than the Wright brothers' invention, as it set the stage for the evolution of the information economy. Computer technology progressed even more rapidly, going from the era of large mainframes to personal computers in just a few decades.2
A new industry evolved. New firms were created. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and America On-Line became household names. Fortunes were made overnight. When the listed stock value of Microsoft overtook that of General Motors in 1998, it marked the beginning of a new era-a shift from a period dominated by heavy industry to one dominated by information.3
The stage was set for the evolution of the Internet, a novel concept that has tied the world together as never before. Although still in its early stages as the new century begins, the Internet is already affecting virtually every facet of our lives-changing communication, commerce, work, education, and entertainment. It is creating a new culture, one that is evolving in cyberspace.
In the United States, the information technology industry, including computer and communications hardware, software, and the provision of related services, was a major source of economic growth during the 1990s. Creating millions of new, higher paying jobs, it has helped fuel the longest peacetime economic expansion in history. It has also induced a certain economic euphoria, one that helped drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average of stock prices to a long string of successive highs, raising it from less than 3,000 in early 1990 to over 11,000 in 1999.4
Caught up in this economic excitement, we seem to have lost sight of the deterioration of environmental systems and resources. The contrast between our bright hopes for the future of the information economy and the deterioration of Earth's ecosystem leaves us with a schizophrenic outlook.
Although the contrast between our civilization and that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors could scarcely be greater, we do have one thing in common-we, too, depend entirely on Earth's natural systems and resources to sustain us. Unfortunately, the expanding global economy that is driving the Dow Jones to new highs is, as currently structured, outgrowing those ecosystems. Evidence of this can be seen in shrinking forests, eroding soils, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, rising temperatures, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, and disappearing plant and animal species.
As pressures mount with each passing year, more local ecosystems collapse. Soil erosion has forced Kazakhstan, for instance, to abandon half its cropland since 1980. The Atlantic swordfish fishery is on the verge of collapsing. The Aral Sea, producing over 40 million kilograms of fish a year as recently as 1960, is now dead. The Philippines and Cote d'Ivoire have lost their thriving forest product export industries because their once luxuriant stands of tropical hardwoods are largely gone. The rich oyster beds of the Chesapeake Bay that yielded more than 70 million kilograms a year in the early twentieth century produced less than 2 million kilograms in 1998. As the global economy expands, local ecosystems are collapsing at an accelerating pace.5
Even as the Dow Jones climbed to new highs during the 1990s, ecologists were noting that ever growing human demands would eventually lead to local breakdowns, a situation where deterioration would replace progress. No one knew what form this would take, whether it would be water shortages, food shortages, disease, internal ethnic conflict, or external political conflict.
The first region where decline is replacing progress is sub-Saharan Africa. In this region of 800 million people, life expectancy-a sentinel indicator of progress-is falling precipitously as governments overwhelmed by rapid population growth have failed to curb the spread of the virus that leads to AIDS. In several countries, more than 20 percent of adults are infected with HIV. Barring a medical miracle, these countries will lose one fifth or more of their adult population during this decade. In the absence of a low-cost cure, some 23 million Africans are beginning a new century with a death sentence imposed by the virus. With the failure of governments in the region to control the spread of HIV, it is becoming an epidemic of epic proportions. It is also a tragedy of epic proportions.6
Unfortunately, other trends also have the potential of reducing life expectancy in the years ahead, of turning back the clock of economic progress. In India, for instance, water pumped from underground far exceeds aquifer recharge. The resulting fall in water tables will eventually lead to a steep cutback in irrigation water supplies, threatening to reduce food production. Unless New Delhi can quickly devise an effective strategy to deal with spreading water scarcity, India-like Africa-may soon face a decline in life expectancy.7

Environmental Trends Shaping the New Century

As the twenty-first century begins, several well-established environmental trends are shaping the future of civilization. This section discusses seven of these: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the loss of plant and animal species.
The projected growth in population over the next half-century may more directly affect economic progress than any other single trend, exacerbating nearly all other environmental and social problems. Between 1950 and 2000, world population increased from 2.5 billion to 6.1 billion, a gain of 3.6 billion. And even though birth rates have fallen in most of the world, recent projections show that population is projected to grow to 8.9 billion by 2050, a gain of 2.8 billion. Whereas past growth occurred in both industrial and developing countries, virtually all future growth will occur in the developing world, where countries are already overpopulated, according to many ecological measures. Where population is projected to double or even triple during this century, countries face even more growth in the future than in the past.8
Our numbers continue to expand, but Earth's natural systems do not. The amount of fresh water produced by the hydrological cycle is essentially the same today as it was in 1950 and as it is likely to be in 2050. So, too, is the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries, of forests, and of rangelands. As population grows, the shrinking per capita supply of each of these natural resources threatens not only the quality of life but, in some situations, even life itself.
A second trend that is affecting the entire world is the rise in temperature that results from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). When the Industrial Revolution began more than two centuries ago, the CO2 concentration was estimated at 280 parts per million (ppm). By 1959, when detailed measurements began, using modern instruments, the CO2 level was 316 ppm, a rise of 13 percent over two centuries. By 1998, it had reached 367 ppm, climbing 17 percent in just 39 years. This increase has become one of Earth's most predictable environmental trends.9
Global average temperature has also risen, especially during the last three decades-the period when CO2 levels have been rising most rapidly. The average global temperature for 1969-71 was 13.99 degrees Celsius. By 1996-98, it was 14.43 degrees, a gain of 0.44 Celsius (0.8 degrees Fahrenheit). (See Figure 1-1.)10
If CO2 concentrations double pre-industrial levels during this century, as projected, global temperature is likely to rise by at least 1 degree Celsius and perhaps as much as 4 degrees (2-7 degrees Fahrenheit). Meanwhile, sea level is projected to rise from a minimum of 17 centimeters to as much as 1 meter by 2100.11
This will alter every ecosystem on Earth. Already, coral reefs are being affected in nearly all the world's oceans, including the rich concentrations of reefs in the vast eastern Pacific and in the Indian Ocean, stretching from the east coast of Africa to the Indian subcontinent. For example, record sea surface temperatures over the last two years may have wiped out 70 percent of the coral in the Indian Ocean. (See Chapter 2.) Coral reefs, complex ecosystems that are sometimes referred to as the rainforests of the sea, not only serve as breeding grounds for many species of marine life, they also protect coastlines from storms and storm surges.12
The modest temperature rise in recent decades is melting ice caps and glaciers. Ice cover is shrinking in the Arctic, the Antarctic, Alaska, Greenland, the Alps, the Andes, and the Quinghai-Tibetan Plateau. A team of U.S. and British scientists reported in mid-1999 that the two ice shelves on either side of the Antarctic peninsula are in full retreat. Over roughly a half-century through 1997, they lost 7,000 square kilometers. But then within a year or so they lost 3,000 square kilometers. The scientists attribute the accelerated ice melting to a regional rise in average temperature of some 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1940.13
In the fall of 1991, hikers in the southwestern Alps near the border of Austria and Italy discovered an intact human body, a male, protruding from a glacier. Believed to have been trapped in a storm some 5,000 years ago and quickly covered with snow and ice, his body was remarkably well preserved. And in the late summer of 1999, another body was found protruding from a melting glacier in the Yukon territory of western Canada. Our ancestors are emerging from the ice with a message for us: Earth is getting warmer.14
One of the least visible trends that is shaping our future is falling water tables. Although irrigation problems, such as waterlogging, salting, and silting, go back several thousand years, aquifer depletion is a new one, confined largely to the last half-century, when powerful diesel and electric pumps made it possible to extract underground water at rates that exceed the natural recharge from rainfall and melting snow. According to Sandra Postel of the Global Water Policy Project, overpumping of aquifers in China, India, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and the United States exceeds 160 billion tons of water per year. Since it takes roughly 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this is the equivalent of 160 million tons of grain, or half the U.S. grain harvest. In consumption terms, the food supply of 480 million of the world's 6 billion people is being produced with the unsustainable use of water.15
The largest single deficits are in India and China. As India's population has tripled since 1950, water demand has climbed to where it may now be double the sustainable yield of the country's aquifers. As a result, water tables are falling in much of the country and wells are running dry in thousands of villages. The International Water Management Institute, the world's premier water research body, estimates that aquifer depletion and the resulting cutbacks in irrigation water could drop India's grain harvest by up to one fourth. In a country that is adding 18 million people a year and where more than half of all children are malnourished and underweight, a shrinking harvest could increase hunger-related deaths, adding to the 6 million worldwide who die each year from hunger and malnutrition.16
In China, the quadrupling of the economy since 1980 has raised water use far beyond the sustainable yield of aquifer recharge. The result is that water tables are falling virtually everywhere the land is flat. Under the north China plain, which produces 40 percent of the country's grain harvest, the water table is falling by 1.6 meters (5 feet) a year. As aquifer depletion and the diversion of water to cities shrink irrigation water supplies, China may be forced to import grain on a scale that could destabilize world grain markets.17
Also making it more difficult to feed the projected growth in population adequately over the next few decades is the worldwide shrinkage in cropland per person. Since the mid-twentieth century, grainland area per person has fallen in half, from 0.24 hectares to 0.12 hectares. If the world grain area remains more or less constant over the next half-century (assuming that cropland expansion in such areas as Brazil's cerrado will offset the worldwide losses of cropland to urbanization, industrialization, and land degradation), the area per person will shrink to 0.08 hectares by 2050.18
Among the more populous countries where this trend threatens future food security are Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan-all countries with weak family planning programs. As a fixed area of arable land is divided among ever more people, it eventually shrinks to the point where people can no longer feed themselves. Unfortunately, in the poorer nations of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, subsistence farmers may not have access to imports. For them, land scarcity translates into hunger.
Pakistan's population, for example, is projected to grow from 146 million today to 345 million in 2050, shrinking the grainland area per person in this crowded nation to a minuscule 0.04 hectares by 2050-less than half of what it is today, and an area scarcely the size of a tennis court. A family of six will then have to produce all its food on roughly one fifth of a hectare, or half an acre-the equivalent of a small suburban building lot in the United States. Similar prospects lie ahead for Nigeria, where numbers are projected to double to 244 million over the next half-century, and for Ethiopia, where more than half the children are undernourished and where population is projected to nearly triple. In these and dozens of other developing countries, grainland area per person will shrink dramatically.19
If world grainland productivity, which climbed by 170 percent over the last half-century, were to rise rapidly over the next half-century, the shrinkage in cropland area per person might not pose a serious threat. Unfortunately, the rise is slowing. From 1950 to 1990, world grain yield per hectare increased at more than 2 percent a year, well ahead of world population growth. But from 1990 to 1999 it grew at scarcely 1 percent a year. While biotechnology may reduce insecticide use through insect-resistant varieties, it offers little potential for raising yields.20
Humanity also depends heavily on the oceans for food, particularly animal protein. From 1950 until 1997, the oceanic fish catch expanded from 19 million tons to more than 90 million tons. This fivefold growth since mid-century has pushed the catch of most oceanic fisheries to their limits or beyond. If, as most marine biologists believe, the oceans cannot sustain an annual catch of more than 95 million tons, the catch per person will decline steadily in the decades ahead as world population continues to grow. This also means that all future growth in demand for food will have to be satisfied from land-based sources.21
These three parallel trends-falling water tables, shrinking cropland area per person, and the leveling off of the oceanic fish catch-all suggest that it will be far more difficult to keep up with the growth in world demand for food over the next half-century if the world remains on the U.N. medium population trajectory of adding nearly 3 billion people and if incomes continue to rise.22
Forests, too, are being overwhelmed by human demands. Over the past half-century, the world's forested area has shrunk substantially, with much of the loss occurring in developing countries. And the forested area per person worldwide is projected to shrink from 0.56 hectares today to 0.38 hectares in 2050. This figure reflects both population growth and the conversion of some forestland to cropland. In many situations, the rising worldwide demand for forest products-lumber, paper, and fuelwood-is already overwhelming the sustainable yield of forests.23
In some ways, the trend that will most affect the human prospect is an irreversible one-the accelerating extinction of plant and animal species. The share of birds, mammals, and fish vulnerable or in immediate danger of extinction is now measured in double digits: 11 percent of the world's 8,615 bird species, 25 percent of the world's 4,355 mammal species, and an estimated 34 percent of all fish species. The leading cause of species loss is habitat destruction, but habitat alterations from rising temperatures or pollution can also decimate both plant and animal species. As human population grows, the number of species with which we share the planet shrinks. As more and more species disappear, local ecosystems begin to collapse; at some point, we will face wholesale ecosystem collapse.24

Replacing Economics with Ecology

As noted earlier, global economic trends during the 1990s were remarkably bullish, but environmental trends were disastrous. The contrast could scarcely be greater. An economic system that worked well in times past when the demands of a smaller economy were well within the capacities of Earth's ecosystems is no longer working well. If the trends outlined in the last section cannot be reversed, we face a future where continuing environmental deterioration almost certainly will lead to economic decline. The challenge is to redesign the economic system so that it will not destroy its environmental support systems, so that economic progress can continue.
The time has come for what science historian Thomas Kuhn describes as a paradigm shift. In his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn observes that as the scientific understanding of reality in a field advances, reaching a point where existing theory no longer adequately explains reality, then theory has to change. It has to be updated, replacing the old paradigm with a new one. Perhaps history's best known example of this is the shift from the Ptolemaic view of the world, in which the sun revolved around Earth, to the Copernican view, which argued that Earth revolved about the sun. Once the Copernican model was accepted, relationships not only within the solar system but between the solar system and the rest of the universe suddenly made sense to those who studied the heavens, leading to an era of steady advances in astronomy.25
We are now facing such a situation with the global economy. The market is a remarkably efficient device for allocating resources and for balancing supply and demand, but it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. In a world where demands of the economy are pressing against the limits of natural systems, relying exclusively on economic indicators to guide investment decisions is a recipe for disaster. Historically, for example, if the supply of fish was inadequate, the price would rise, encouraging investment in additional fishing trawlers. This market system worked well. But today, with the fish catch already exceeding the sustainable yield of many fisheries, investing in more trawlers in response to higher seafood prices will simply accelerate the collapse of fisheries. A similar situation exists with forests, rangelands, and aquifers.
The gap between economists and ecologists in their perception of the world as the new century begins could not be wider. Economists look at grain markets and see the lowest grain prices in 20 years-a sure sign that production capacity is outrunning effective demand, that supply constraints are not likely to be a problem for the foreseeable future. But ecologists see water tables falling in key food-producing countries. Knowing that 480 million of the world's 6 billion people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping aquifers, they are worried about the effect of eventual aquifer depletion on food production.26
Economists see a world economy that has grown by leaps and bounds over the last half-century, but ecologists see growth based on the burning of vast quantities of cheap fossil fuels, which is destabilizing the climate. They are keenly aware that someone buying a gallon of gasoline pays the cost of pumping the oil, of refining it into gasoline, and of distributing the gasoline to the service station, but not the cost to society of future climate disruptions. Again, while economists see booming economic indicators, ecologists see an economy that is altering the climate with consequences that no one can foresee.
Today ecologists look at the deteriorating ecosystem and see a need to restructure the economy, the need for a paradigm shift. For example, stabilizing Earth's climate now depends on reducing carbon emissions by shifting from fossil fuels to a solar/ hydrogen energy economy. Solar is here defined broadly, including not only direct sunlight but also indirect forms of solar energy-wind power, hydropower, and biological sources, such as wood. Fortunately, the technologies for tapping this enormous source of energy already exist. We can now see electricity generated from wind being used to electrolyze water and to produce hydrogen. Hydrogen then becomes the basic fuel for the new economy, relying initially on the distribution and storage facilities of the natural gas industry. Put simply, the principles of ecological sustainability now require a shift from a carbon-based to a hydrogen-based energy economy.
There is a similar need for restructuring the world food economy. Some 40 percent of the world's food is produced on irrigated land, with much of the water used for irrigation being heavily subsidized. Encouraging water use with subsidies at a time when water tables are falling sends the wrong signal, one that encourages the inefficient use of water. As world water use has tripled over the last half-century, often pressing against the limits of local supply, water has become scarcer than land. With water emerging as the principal constraint on efforts to expand food production, restructuring the world food economy to make it more water-efficient is a necessary, though not sufficient, precondition to feeding an expanding world population adequately. Among other things, this means shifting to more water-efficient crops and more grain-efficient sources of animal protein, such as poultry.27
As the global economy outgrows the various natural capacities of Earth, as just described, it imposes new demands on the political system that is responsible for managing the interaction between the two. Managing this increasingly stressed relationship between the global market economy, which is expanding by a trillion dollars per year, and Earth's ecosystems, whose capacities are essentially fixed, becomes ever more demanding. The demands on political institutions to reverse deterioration will intensify. At issue is whether our political institutions are capable of incorporating ecological principles into economic decisionmaking.28

Crossing the Sustainability Threshold

Most environment ministers understand the need to restructure the global economy so that progress can continue, but unfortunately not enough of their constituents understand this. The ministers must also contend with interests that are vested in the existing economic system, interests that are more than willing to bribe political leaders either directly or in the form of campaign contributions and to mount disinformation campaigns to confuse the public about the need for change. Eventually, if enough people in a country are convinced of the need for change, they can override these vested interests, crossing a threshold of social change.
A threshold-a concept widely used in ecology in reference to the sustainable yield of natural systems-is a point that, when crossed, can bring rapid and sometimes unpredictable change. In the social world, the thresholds of sudden change are no less real, though they may be more difficult to identify and anticipate. Among the more dramatic recent threshold crossings are the ones that led to the political revolution in Eastern Europe and to the dramatic decline in cigarette smoking in the United States.
The change in political systems in Eastern Europe came with no apparent warning. It almost seemed that people woke up one morning and understood that the era of the one-party political system and the centrally planned economy was over. Even those in power at the time realized this. No analysts writing in political science journals forecast this essentially bloodless political revolution, one that led to a fundamental change in the form of governance. Although we do not understand the process well, we do know that at some point a critical mass had been reached-that a time arrived when so many people were convinced of the need for change that the process achieved an irresistible momentum.
A similar story can be told about smoking. In the early 1960s, smoking in the United States was an increasingly popular habit, one that was being aggressively promoted by the cigarette manufacturers. Then in 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report on the relationship between smoking and health, the first in a series that appeared almost every year for the rest of the century. These reports, and media coverage of the thousands of research projects they spawned, fundamentally altered the way people think not only about their own smoking but also about inhaling secondhand smoke from the cigarettes of others.29
This shift in thinking was so strong that in November 1998 the tobacco industry, which for decades had argued under oath that there was no proof of a link between smoking and health, agreed to reimburse state governments for the past Medicare costs of treating the victims of cigarette smoking. This settlement with 46 state governments, plus separate agreements reached earlier with 4 other states, totaled $251 billion, nearly $1,000 for every person in the United States. (In September 1999, in a stunning display of the new official attitude toward cigarettes, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was filing suit to reclaim smoking-related federal health care expenditures.)30
This revolution in attitudes toward smoking is spreading fast in other countries. Following the industry agreement with state governments in the United States, governments of several developing countries-including Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela-filed suits in U.S. courts for similar reimbursements because their people, who had been smoking the cigarettes manufactured by the same companies, were suffering from the same smoking-induced illnesses.31
The agreement in the United States represented an implicit acceptance by the tobacco industry of responsibility for the indirect effects of using their products. In effect, the payments to state governments are a retroactive tax on the sale of cigarettes over the past several decades. This is a massive precedent for the idea of a carbon tax on fossil fuels. As with the health-care-related costs of smoking, an analysis of the indirect effects of burning fossil fuels, including air pollution, acid rain, and climate disruptions, would be needed to determine the amount of the carbon tax.
Whether a similar revolution in the environmental field will follow that in smoking remains to be seen. Some 34 years passed between the first Surgeon General's report and the landmark agreement between the tobacco industry and state governments. In Eastern Europe, it was fully four decades from the imposition of socialism until its demise. Thirty-eight years have passed since biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, issuing the wake-up call that gave rise to the modern environmental movement.
Signs that the world is approaching a key environmental threshold are perhaps as strong within the corporate community as in any sector. The shifts have been particularly dramatic in the oil industry, led by Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum. And in February 1999, Mike Bowlin, the chief executive officer of ARCO, startled an energy conference in Houston by saying: "We've embarked on the beginning of the Last Days of the Age of Oil." He went on to discuss the need to convert our carbon-based energy economy into a hydrogen-based energy economy.32
Two months later, Shell Oil and DaimlerChrysler announced they were leading a consortium of corporations whose goal is to make Iceland the world's first hydrogen-based economy. Iceland-with an abundance of geothermal energy, widely used for heating buildings, and cheap hydropower-is an ideal place to begin. Cheap electricity from hydropower makes it economically feasible to split the water molecule by electrolysis, producing hydrogen that can be used in new, highly efficient fuel cell engines that are under development. DaimlerChrysler, a leader in the development of these engines, which are expected to replace the traditional internal combustion engine, plans to market its new fuel cell-powered automobiles in Iceland within the next few years. (See Chapter 8.) Shell has also opened its first hydrogen station-the future equivalent of today's gasoline station-in Hamburg, Germany.33
In the United States, the threshold for responsible forest management appears to have been crossed. In effect, the principles of ecology are replacing basic economics in the management of national forests. After several decades of building roads with taxpayers' money to help logging companies clearcut publicly owned forests, the Forest Service announced in early 1998 that it was imposing a moratorium on road building. For decades the goal of the forest management system, which had built some 600,000 kilometers of roads to facilitate clearcutting, had been to maximize the timber harvest in the short run.34
The new chief of the Forest Service, Michael Dombeck, responding to a major shift in public opinion, introduced a new management system-one designed to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem and to be governed by ecology, not by economics. Henceforth, the 78 million hectares of national forests-more than the area planted to grain in the United States-will be managed with several goals in mind. The system will recognize the need, for example, to manage the forest so as to eliminate the excessive flooding, soil erosion, and silting of rivers, and the destruction of fisheries associated with the now banned practice of clearcutting. Under the new policy, the timber harvest from national forests, which reached an all-time high of 12 billion board feet per year during the 1980s, has been reduced to 3 billion board feet.35
The United States is not the only country to institute a radical change in forest management. In mid-August 1998, after several weeks of near-record flooding in the Yangtze river basin, Beijing acknowledged for the first time that the flooding was not merely an act of nature but was exacerbated by the deforestation of the upper reaches of the watershed. Premier Zhu Rongji personally ordered a halt not only to the tree-cutting in the upper reaches of the Yangtze basin, but also to the conversion of some state timbering firms into tree-planting firms. The official view in Beijing now is that trees standing are worth three times as much as those cut, simply because of the water storage and flood control capacity of forests.36
A chastened tobacco industry, oil companies investing in hydrogen, reformed forest management in the United States and China-these are just some of the signs that the world may be approaching the kind of paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn wrote about. Across a spectrum of activities, places, and institutions, attitudes toward the environment have changed markedly in just the last few years. Among giant corporations that could once be counted on to mount a monolithic opposition to serious environmental reform, a growing number of high-profile CEOs have begun to sound more like environmentalists than representatives of the bastions of global capitalism.
If the evidence of a global environmental awakening were limited to only government initiatives or a few corporate initiatives, it might be dubious. But with the evidence of growing momentum now coming on both fronts, the prospect that we are approaching the threshold of a major transformation becomes more convincing. The question is, Will it happen soon enough? Will it happen before the deterioration of natural support systems reaches a point of no return?

Crossing the Decline Threshold

As noted earlier, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and falling water tables illustrate how human demands are exceeding the sustainable yield of natural systems. Exactly when these sustainable yield thresholds are exceeded is not always evident. When expanding demand for a resource first surpasses the sustainable yield, the additional demand can be satisfied, and it typically is, by consuming the resource base. At first the shrinkage is scarcely detectable, but with each passing year the excess of demand over sustainable yield typically increases and is satisfied by consuming ever more of the fish stocks, the forests, or the aquifers.
As a result, fisheries that appear stressed and show signs of a shrinking catch can suddenly collapse. Similarly with an overpumped aquifer. At first the year-to-year fall of the water level is barely perceptible. But over time, as the gap between the rising demand for water and the sustainable yield of the aquifer widens, each successive annual drop in the water table is greater than the year before. Almost overnight a falling water table can become a depleted aquifer, reducing the rate of pumping to the rate of recharge.
The risk in a world adding nearly 80 million people annually is that so many sustainable yield thresholds will be crossed in such a short period of time that the consequences will become unmanageable. Historically, when early civilizations lived largely in isolation, the consequences of threshold crossings were strictly local. Today, in the age of global economic integration, a threshold crossing in one major country can put additional pressure on resources in other countries. When Beijing banned logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River basin in 1998, for example, the increased demand for forest products from neighboring countries in Southeast Asia intensified the pressure on the region's remaining forests.37
A similar situation exists with water. As countries press against the limits of their water supplies, they often satisfy growing urban demand by diverting irrigation water from the countryside to the cities. They then offset the reduction in food production by increasing imports. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this is a highly efficient way of importing water.38
This helps explain why the semiarid North Africa and Middle East region, stretching from Morocco eastward through Iran, has been the world's fastest-growing grain market in recent years. Both rapid population growth and oil-driven gains in affluence are steadily boosting grain demand. Meanwhile, the growing demand for water in the cities is often satisfied by diverting irrigation water from agriculture. With every country in the region facing irrigation water shortages, grain imports are climbing. Last year, the water required to produce the grain and other farm commodities imported into the region was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River.39
In effect, water scarcity is crossing national borders through the international grain trade. While the world has responded easily to the rising demand for imported grain in North Africa and the Middle East, expanding grain imports into China and India as their aquifers are depleted simultaneously could destabilize the world grain market. China, which has a huge balance-of-trade surplus with the United States, can easily afford to import massive quantities of grain. Stated simply, falling water tables in China could lead to rising food prices for the world.40
A similar situation exists for oceanic fisheries. Given the capacity of fishing fleets to roam the oceans today accompanied by factory processing ships, scarcity can quickly move from one fishery to another. This is why, regardless of local demand for seafood, fisheries everywhere are being fished at or beyond capacity.
Given increasing economic integration, trends tend to emerge simultaneously in many countries, whether it be the acceleration of population growth that began a half-century ago in developing countries or the depletion of aquifers, a more recent phenomenon. In the first case, the international availability of basic medical technology, such as vaccines, and of advancing agricultural technology led to the nearly simultaneous fall in mortality rates after mid-century in scores of developing countries. This in turn led to rapid population growth when fertility rates did not follow suit. Similarly, it is the near universal availability of diesel and electrically powered pumps in both industrial and developing countries that enables farmers everywhere to pump water from aquifers faster than they can recharge.
Many countries that have failed to rein in their population growth are already facing potentially unmanageable problems. When developing countries embarked on the development journey a half-century ago, they followed one of two demographic paths. In the first, illustrated by South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, early efforts to shift to smaller families set in motion a positive reinforcing cycle of higher savings, rising living standards, and falling fertility rates. (See Table 1-1.) These countries are now approaching population stability.41
In the second category, which prevails in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, fertility has remained relatively high, setting the stage for a potentially dangerous downward spiral in which rapid population growth reinforces poverty. After several decades of incessant population growth, some countries are simply being overwhelmed. Governments struggling with the simultaneous challenge of educating growing numbers of children coming of school age, of creating jobs for swelling ranks of young job seekers, and of dealing with the environmental effects of population growth are stretched to the limit. When a major new threat arises-such as a new infectious disease or the collapse of an ecosystem-governments often cannot cope.42
In countries with continuing rapid population growth, three of the trends cited earlier-the spread of HIV, falling water tables, and shrinking cropland per person-either are already replacing progress with decline or have the potential to do so. Problems routinely managed in industrial societies are becoming full-scale humanitarian crises. For example, all industrial countries have managed to hold the HIV infection rate in their adult populations below 1 percent, but in several sub-Saharan African countries, as noted earlier, more than 20 percent of adults are HIV-positive. The resulting high mortality trends are more reminiscent of the dark ages than the bright new millennium so many had hoped for. Tragically, they suggest that some countries may already have crossed a deterioration/decline threshold.43
In sub-Saharan Africa, home to some 800 million people, the HIV epidemic is devastating society. Death rates are rising, infant mortality is rising, and life expectancy-perhaps the most basic measure of economic development-is falling. Before the onslaught of AIDS, life expectancy in Zimbabwe was 65 years. In 1998, it was 44 years. By 2010, it is projected to fall to 39 years. The figures for Kenya are 66 years before AIDS and 44 years expected by 2010. For Namibia, the decline is 65 years to 39 years in 2010; for South Africa, 65 years to 48 years; and for Botswana, 61 years to 38 years.44
In these countries where the HIV epidemic is spiraling out of control, several other negative trends are set in motion, trends that collectively are reversing the process of development itself. AIDS patients are overwhelming health care systems in many sub-Saharan societies. In some hospitals in South Africa, 70 percent of the beds are occupied by AIDS patients. In Zimbabwe, half of the health care budget now goes to care for AIDS patients. The risk is that this unanticipated pressure on health care systems will deprive many people of even the most basic health services, no doubt raising death rates further.45
The loss of so many working-age adults in rural Africa is adversely affecting food production. The number of able-bodied workers is reduced not only by deaths, but also by the number who are sick and unable to work, as well as by those who are obligated to care for the sick. Godfrey Ssewankambo of Uganda observes that in rural areas, "from the time one adult family member is bedridden, AIDS compromises the nutrition and food security of the whole family."46
Governments are having difficulty grasping the dimensions of the epidemic. Despite the extraordinarily damaging effects of HIV in Zimbabwe, where 25 percent of the adult population is HIV-positive, the government is spending $70 million a month on the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but only $1 million on prevention of AIDS.47
Companies operating in countries with high infection rates find their health insurance costs doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling. As a result, many companies that were operating comfortably in the black suddenly find themselves in the red. The combination of rising costs of health care insurance, the heavy loss of workers to AIDS, and the associated need to recruit and train new workers is making investment in these areas increasingly unattractive, which means that capital inflows are likely to decline and may even dry up altogether. What began as an unprecedented social tragedy is translating into an economic disaster.46
To make matters worse, in Africa it is often the better educated, more socially mobile populations who have the highest infection rate. Africa is losing the agronomists, the engineers, and the teachers it needs to sustain its economic development. In South Africa, for instance, at the University of Durban-Westville, where many of the country's future leaders are trained, 25 percent of the student body is HIV-positive.49
The long-term social consequences of the HIV epidemic remain to be seen, but for the first time in the modern era, progress is turning into a sustained decline for an entire region. With the virus continuing to spread, there is no reversal of the situation in prospect.
One of the results of the failure of governments to protect their people-whether it is from a deadly infectious disease or from aquifer depletion-may be the loss of political legitimacy. When this happens, the ability of governments to actually govern is impaired, making it even more difficult to respond to new threats to their people.

Two Keys to Regaining Control of Our Destiny

The overriding challenges facing our global civilization as the new century begins are to stabilize climate and stabilize population. Success on these two fronts would make other challenges, such as reversing the deforestation of Earth, stabilizing water tables, and protecting plant and animal diversity, much more manageable. If we cannot stabilize climate and we cannot stabilize population, there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save. Everything will change. If developing countries cannot stabilize their populations soon, many of them face the prospect of wholesale ecosystem collapse.
The exciting thing about the climate and population challenges is that we already have the technologies needed to succeed at both. Restructuring the energy economy to stabilize climate requires investment in climate-benign energy sources. It is the greatest investment opportunity in history. Stabilizing population, though it requires additional investment in reproductive health services and in the education of young women in developing countries, is more a matter of behavioral change-of couples having fewer children and investing more in the health and education of each.
Stabilizing climate means shifting from a fossil-fuel or carbon-based energy economy to alternative sources of energy. Nuclear power, once seen as an alternative to fossil fuels, has failed on several fronts. Within a few years, the closing of aging power plants is expected to eclipse the new plants still coming online, setting the stage for the phaseout of nuclear power. Electricity from the power source that was once described as "too cheap to meter" has now become too costly to use. The issue is no longer whether it is economical to build nuclear power plants but-given the high operating costs-whether it even makes economic sense in many situations to continue using those already built.
The only feasible alternative is a solar/hydrogen-based economy, one that taps the various sources of energy from the sun, such as hydropower, wind power, wood, or direct sunlight. (See also Chapter 8.) The transition to a solar/hydrogen economy has already begun, as can be seen in energy use trends from 1990 to 1998. (See Table 1-2.) Coal burning, for example, did not increase at all during this period. Meanwhile, wind power and photovoltaic cells-two climate-benign energy sources-were expanding at 22 percent and 16 percent a year, respectively. But the transition is not moving fast enough to avoid potentially disruptive climate change.
Although the use of all sources of energy that derive from the sun directly and indirectly will probably expand, wind and solar cells are likely to be the cornerstones of the new energy economy. Already Denmark gets 8 percent of its electricity from wind. For Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in Germany, the figure is 11 percent. Navarra, a northern industrial state in Spain, gets 20 percent of its electricity from wind. In the United States, wind generating capacity is moving beyond its early stronghold in California as new wind farms come online in Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon, Wyoming, and Texas, dramatically broadening the industry's geographic base.50
Within the developing world, India, with 900 megawatts of generating capacity, is the unquestioned leader. With the help of the Dutch, China began operation in 1998 of its first commercial wind farm, a 24-megawatt project in Inner Mongolia, a region of vast wind wealth.51
The world wind energy potential can only be described as enormous. Today the world gets over one fifth of all its electricity from hydropower, but this is dwarfed by the wind power potential. For example, China is richly endowed with wind energy and could double its national electricity generation from wind alone. An inventory of wind resources in the United States by the Department of Energy indicates that three states-North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas-have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs.52
With the costs of wind electric generation dropping from $2,600 per kilowatt in 1981 to $800 in 1998, wind power is fast becoming one of the world's cheapest sources of electricity, in some locations undercutting coal, traditionally the cheapest source. Once cheap electricity is available from solar sources, it can be used to electrolyze water, producing hydrogen-an ideal means of both storing and transporting solar energy.53
In 1998, sales of solar cells, the silicon-based semiconductors that convert sunlight into electricity, jumped 21 percent, reaching 152 megawatts. This growth reflected the sharp competition emerging among major industrial countries in the solar cell market as the world looks for clean energy sources that will not destabilize climate. The development of a solar cell roofing material in Japan has set the stage for even more rapid future growth in solar cell use. With this technology, the roof becomes the power plant for the building.54
In Japan, nearly 7,000 rooftop solar systems were installed in 1998. The German government announced in late 1998 the goal of 100,000 solar roofs in that country. In response, Royal Dutch Shell and Pilkington Solar International jointly are building the world's largest solar cell manufacturing facility in Germany. Italy joined in with a goal of 10,000 solar rooftops.55
While wind and solar cell use are soaring, the worldwide growth of oil use has slowed to less than 2 percent a year and may peak and turn downward as early as 2005. The burning of natural gas, the cleanest of the three fossil fuels, is growing by 2 percent per year. It is increasingly seen as a transition fuel, part of the bridge from the fossil-fuel-based energy economy to the solar/hydrogen energy economy.56
The goal is to convert small positive growth rates for fossil fuels into negative rates, as they are phased down, and to boost dramatically the growth in wind power and solar cells. Because wind energy is starting from such a small base, and because the urgency of stabilizing climate is mounting, it should perhaps be growing at triple-digit annual rates, not just in the double digits. If coral reefs are dying and if the Antarctic ice cap is beginning to break up because Earth's temperature is rising, maybe wind-generating capacity should be doubling each year, much as the number of host computers linked to the Internet did each year from 1980 to 1995.57
One way of dramatically boosting the growth in wind power would be to reduce income taxes and offset them with a carbon tax on fossil fuels, one that would more nearly reflect the full costs associated with air pollution, acid rain, and climate disruption. Such a move would raise investment not only in wind power, but also in solar cells and energy efficiency. It could push wind power growth far above the current rates, greatly accelerating the shift to a solar/hydrogen energy economy.
Sharply accelerating the wind power growth rate depends on restructuring tax systems to reduce taxes on income and wages while increasing those on environmentally destructive activities, such as carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning. Some countries have already begun to do this, including Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the
United Kingdom. And in late 1998, the new coalition government in Germany announced the first step in a massive restructuring of the tax system, one that would simultaneously reduce taxes on wages and raise them on energy use. In April 1999, the first of four annual tax shifts was implemented. This ecological tax shift of some $14 billion-the largest yet contemplated by any government-was taken unilaterally, not bogged down in the politics of the global climate treaty or contingent on steps taken elsewhere. The framers of the new tax structure justified it primarily on economic grounds, mainly the creation of additional jobs. It would also help reduce carbon emissions.58
This bold German initiative is setting the stage for tax restructuring in other countries. If the world is going to make the economic changes needed in the time available, tax restructuring must be at the center of the effort. No other set of policies can bring about the needed changes quickly enough. In an article in Fortune magazine, which argued for a 10-percent reduction in U.S. income taxes and a 50￠-per-gallon hike in the tax on gasoline, Professor N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard noted: "Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming-all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer."59
While stabilizing climate is largely a matter of investing in new energy sources, stabilizing population is more a matter of changing reproductive behavior. The annual addition to world population increased steadily from 38 million in 1950 to the historical peak of 87 million in 1989. After that, it dropped to 78 million in 1998. While the annual additions in many developing countries have been increasing, they have been declining elsewhere. Some 32 countries-virtually all of industrialized Europe, from the United Kingdom to Russia, plus Japan and Canada-have succeeded in stabilizing their population size. Births and deaths are essentially in balance, as they must be in a sustainable society. This group of countries contains some 15 percent of the world population.60
Another, much larger group of countries has reached replacement level of fertility of 2.1 children per couple, but this does not immediately translate into population stability because of the disproportionately large number of young people moving into their reproductive years. This group, containing over 40 percent of the world's people, includes two of the most populous countries: China and the United States. In each of these, population is growing at just under 1 percent a year.61
One of the keys to the needed changes in reproductive behavior is information that will help people understand the consequences of not shifting quickly to smaller families. Few people intentionally want their children or grandchildren to be deprived of adequate water supplies or of education because they themselves have too many children. Thus information is vital. Governments can provide this information through national carrying capacity assessments-studies to determine how many people the cropland, water, grassland, and forest resources of a country can sustain. This also involves a tradeoff between the size of population and the level of consumption. The carrying capacity calculations provide the information needed for that choice.
The key to stabilizing world population is for national governments to formulate strategies for stabilizing population humanely rather than waiting for nature to intervene with its inhumane methods, as it is in Africa. Once these strategies are developed, it is in the interest of the international community to support the stabilization effort.
At the U.N. Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, it was estimated that the annual cost of providing quality reproductive health services to all those in need in developing countries would be $17 billion in the year 2000. By 2015, this would climb to $22 billion. Industrial countries agreed to provide one third of the funds, with developing countries providing the remainder. While developing countries have largely honored their commitments, industrial countries-including the United States-have regrettably reneged on theirs. And, almost unbelievably, in late 1998 the U.S. Congress withdrew all funding for the U.N. Population Fund, the principal source of international family planning assistance.62
Fortuitously, the same family planning services that provide reproductive health counseling and that supply the condoms to help slow population growth also help to check the spread of HIV. Investment in efforts to slow population growth can thus also help to check the spread of the virus.
In stabilizing climate and stabilizing population, there is no substitute for leadership. Examples of this abound in both initiatives. Denmark, for instance, has simply banned the construction of coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, it has adopted a series of economic incentives for investment in wind power that has fostered the development of the world's largest wind turbine manufacturing industry. As a result, in 1998 wind turbines of Danish design accounted for half of all turbines installed worldwide. Though scarcely a major industrial power, Denmark has a commanding position in this fast-expanding new industry.63
In every developing country where population growth has slowed dramatically, family planning programs have enjoyed strong government support. The same is true for containing the HIV epidemic. In the two countries that have successfully curbed the spread of HIV after it reached epidemic proportions-Uganda and Thailand-the heads of state led the containment campaign. In Uganda, President Museveni personally led the effort and continuously referred not only to the dangers of the virus but also to the behavioral changes needed to check its spread. In Thailand, Prime Minister Anand Punyarachun both provided the personal leadership to direct the campaign and was instrumental in raising the appropriations for containing the virus from $2.6 million in 1990 to $80 million in 1996.64
Leadership and time are the scarce resources. The world desperately needs more of both. Saving the planet, including the stabilization of climate and the stabilization of population, is a massive undertaking by any historical yardstick. This is not a spectator sport. It is something everyone can participate in. Few activities offer more satisfaction.
We can participate not only as individuals, but also in an institutional sense. All of society's institutions-from organized religion to corporations-have a role to play. Although many individuals and corporations want to do something about the environment, few recognize the need for systemic change. Corporations take pride in listing in their annual reports the steps they have taken to help protect the environment. They will cite gains in office paper recycling or reductions in energy use. These are obviously moves in the right direction. And they are to be applauded. But they do not deal with the central issue, which is the need to restructure the global economy quickly. This is not likely to happen unless corporations use some of their political leverage with governments to actively support tax restructuring.
There is no middle path. The challenge is either to build an economy that is sustainable or to stay with our unsustainable economy until it declines. It is not a goal that can be compromised. One way or another, the choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on Earth for all generations to come.

IMPLEMENTING THE RIPARIAN BUFFER STRATEGY FOR NONPOINT SOURCE WATER POLLUTION CONTROL: AN ILLUSTRATION OF "SMART REGULATION"

Janet B. Johnson
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations
University of Delaware
Newark, Delaware

Prepared for the Korean Association for Public Administration Conference on Environmental Vision and Strategy for a New Millenium, held May 12, 2000 in Seoul, Korea.

Introduction
Nonpoint source pollution, pollution that can not be attributed to single discharge point and commonly referred to as runoff, is a significant source of water pollution in the United States. While assessment data are incomplete, a 1996 report concluded that about "40% of the Nation's surveyed rivers, lakes, and estuaries are not clean enough for basic uses such as fishing and swimming." This is despite considerable investment in water pollution control; it is estimated that between 1972 and 1996, taxpayers and the private sector spent at least $700 billion on water pollution control, mostly on the construction of municipal wastewater treatment facilities and end-of-pipe industrial controls. One report attributed 65% of the remaining stream pollution to nonpoint sources such as agricultural runoff and urban runoff from paved areas and roads. It is recognized that if further progress is to be made in improving water quality, nonpoint sources must be addressed. In 1987 the Clean Water Act was amended to require states to develop plans for controlling nonpoint source pollution. These plans must include "best management practices", but it is up to the states to decide whether to make use of the practices mandatory or required.
Nonpoint source pollution is inextricably linked to land use. Thus, solutions to the problem involve a plethora of land uses and land management practices. One of the strategies to minimize nonpoint source pollution that is receiving a great deal of attention is the concept of riparian buffers - zones of vegetation along the margins of streams in which livestock are not allowed. This paper discusses the benefits or ecological services provided by riparian buffers, reports on results of recently conducted research investigating the attitudes of riparian landowners toward riparian buffers, and explores the applicability of "smart regulation" within the context of implementing the riparian buffer strategy.

Benefits of Riparian Buffers
Riparian buffers perform a number of valuable ecological services. These include excess nutrient and sediment removal from surface runoff and shallow groundwater; pesticide effects reduction; wildlife habitat enhancement; and flood reduction. A U.S. Forest Service representation of a streamside forest buffer includes three zones with a total width of ninety-five feet: starting from the stream's edge, zone 1 is a fifteen feet wide band of undisturbed forest; zone 2 consists of sixty feet of managed forest in which periodic harvesting of trees is not only allowed, but necessary; zone 3 is for runoff control with controlled grazing or haying allowed. Beyond this buffer is cropland and pasture. Watering facilities and livestock are kept out of the buffer insofar as practicable. Streamside forests function as filters, transformers, sinks and sources.
Nutrient removal. Phosphorus and nitrogen are the main components of agricultural fertilizers. Their excess presence in water has a negative impact on water quality. Their presence in streams promotes algae blooms. When the algae die, they consume dissolved oxygen needed by other aquatic life. The blooms also block sunlight from the stream. Nitrogen in the form of nitrate in drinking water poses a threat to human and animal health by reducing the blood's ability to carry oxygen. At least 80% of the nitrogen in runoff and shallow groundwater is removed by the buffer through plant nutrient uptake (sink), the trapping of sediment containing nitrogen (filter), and the process of denitrification, a process in which microbes in anaerobic soils convert dissolved nitrogen into nitrogen gases (transformation). The filtering action of the buffer removes about 80% of the phosphorus which is primarily attached to soil particles. Periodic harvesting of trees in zone 2 is necessary to remove the nutrients which have been taken up by the plants. In addition, younger trees with their faster rate of growth have a faster nutrient uptake rate.
Sediment removal In addition to the fact that nutrients and pesticides are attached to sediment particles, sediment itself has a harmful impact on stream quality. Sediment blocks sunlight, killing aquatic plant life. It also clogs fish gills and clogs gravel stream bottoms necessary for feeding and fish reproduction. Furthermore, sediments may fill the stream channel and lead to increased flooding. Vegetation in the buffer strip slows the flow of water, filtering out sediments. It also helps to stabilize stream banks, thereby reducing stream bank erosion. Minimizing the presence of livestock in streams lessens the destruction of stream banks and the disturbance of stream bottoms, and limits the deposition of manure. It is healthier for livestock to have sources of drinking water other than a stream in which they are standing.
Habitat protection and enhancement Buffer strips provide habitat for aquatic and terrestrial life. Trees shade the stream which lowers water temperature and blocks excessive light from stimulating algae growth. Tree roots and fallen trees provide cover for aquatic life. Detritus from vegetation is a source of food and energy for aquatic life (source). The buffer strip provides habitat for birds, amphibians and mammals and is an important transition habitat between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. It often provides a corridor for the movement of wildlife.
Flood reduction Riparian buffers reduce the speed of surface runoff, thereby reducing downstream flooding and the destructive force of water. The roots of trees also slow underground movement of water. Finally, a buffer area helps to preserve the meandering effect of streams which lessens the destructive forces of flooding.
Landowner Attitudes Toward Riparian Buffers
Although the ecological importance of riparian buffers has become widely recognized among ecologists and natural resources managers and there have been public and private actions taken to promote riparian buffers, selecting the best policy approaches for reforesting riparian zones and protecting existing buffers has not received systematic exploration. Much of the land along rivers and streams is privately owned, used in a variety of ways, and consists of large and small parcels. Designing a policy strategy in order to achieve effective riparian zone management depends on communicating the benefits of riparian buffers to landowners and on understanding how landowners make land management decisions.
Several reports emanating from advisory committees and conferences provide insight into how riparian buffers are perceived. For example, a report issued by the Technical Advisory Committees for Pennsylvania's Riparian Buffer Initiative Implementation Plan identified five categories of barriers to riparian forests in Pennsylvania: economic; education and awareness; marketing; policy, planning, and legislation; physical, chemical, or biological barriers; and attitudes. Economic barriers included the need for farmers to maximize production, the fact that smaller farms may suffer more than larger farms from loss of riparian land from production, and the costs of planting and maintenance. Within the category of education and awareness, fear of government control, failure to consider buffers in site designs, and failure to understand the need for or function of buffers were mentioned. In terms of marketing, landowners may not know where to go for help. Under policy, planning and legislation, the Report identified several issues such as that engineered flood control projects do not take buffers into account, that transportation, utility, and other corridors are often located along streams, that landowners lack incentives, and that Pennsylvania has no driving legislation. Lack of space in urban areas and the use of streamside lands for active recreation were listed as physical barriers. Under attitudes, numerous concerns were raised: landowners think that buffers harbor invasive plants or undesirable wildlife; people want access to streams; people value tidiness; people lack time to establish or manage riparian forests; riparian forests interfere with viewsheds; and landowner-rights issues may interfere with efforts to protect and create riparian buffers. Several papers presented at a 1995 conference at the University of Minnesota addressed issues related to motivations and social perceptions related to riparian buffers. One participant reported on his experiences in private riparian land management:

[My] experience has been that managers and people in general want to do the right thing. There is some debate about specifically what the right thing is, but I think it is pretty rare to find anyone who is intentionally planning to do irreversible damage to our lakes, our streams, or our wetlands. I think if we provide good information, make it understandable and easily accessible, people will use that information to improve their management.

Another participant raised a point that should be of particular interest to those interested in the sociological aspects of environmental behavior and values when she noted that "Our natural environments are important ingredients of experiences shared by individuals and by groups. The natural world is as much a part of a group experience as individual members of the group" and that people's normative behaviors "address what is right or appropriate in our relations to the natural world." On the whole, however, there is a lack of systematic research into the societal perceptions of riparian buffers and, in particular, the role of environmental and community values.
In order to gain a clearer understanding of how landowners use their land along streams and their attitudes toward the creation and protection of riparian buffers on their property, a study of owners of streamside land in several areas in the states of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland was conducted in 1998 and 1999 by a team of researchers including the author. Personal, semi-structured interviews were conducted with roughly eighty property owners. These interviews took place on the property owner's land and provided insight into their use of their land, their concerns about water quality and their response to the concept of riparian buffers. Information from these interviews was used to construct a mail survey that was subsequently sent to a larger sample of streamside property owners.

The major findings of the interviews may be summarized as follows:

• Existing riparian forests tend to have survived more by default than by design. Although some landowners appreciated their ecological functions, riparian forests were typically located on lands that were not accessible or suitable for other uses. Landowners typically gave little thought to riparian ecology in the management of their land.
• Except for the owners of forested streamlands, riparian landowners shared an overriding concern about flooding. The prevailing strategy for coping with high water was to keep riparian lands clear of woody vegetation in order to keep flood waters and all the debris they carried moving through.
• Riparian landowners regarded their streams as amenities and place a fundamental value on clean water.
• Riparian landowners generally wanted to feel good about how they managed their land and believed that caring for streams was a matter of good citizenship.
• Riparian landowners usually did not appreciate their own contributions to stream impairment and tended to blame others in the watershed for poor water quality. Point-source pollution and on-lot sewage were commonly named caused of water-quality impairment.
• Riparian landowners gave little thought to sediment, thermal pollution, excess sunlight, and the ecological roles of small streams; they did understand the idea of cumulative impacts once it was explained.
• Riparian landowners already understood many of the components of riparian buffer systems and, with some assistance, could readily integrate those components into a general understanding of riparian forests.
• Riparian landowners whose streamlands were not forested were not quick to accept the idea of riparian forest buffer systems for their own land.
• To give more serious consideration to creating riparian forests on their own land, riparian landowners did not need scientific certainty but credible information that riparian forests were necessary.
• Although riparian landowners held foresters in high regard, they were suspicious of scientists, academics, government bureaucrats, and urban environmental politics, and their biggest complaint was inflexibility. Riparian landowners wanted to be in control of the decisions affecting their own land.
• Riparian landowners favored education and incentives over more coercive policy options for encouraging private-property owners to maintain and create riparian forests; even landowners who favored regulation of riparian lands thought education was a necessary next step.
• Farmers favored a government offer to purchase conservation easements on riparian lands at a price that would make selling worthwhile.
• Riparian landowners like the views they were used to. Woodlot owners valued the look of their woods, and others valued the look of their lawns or fields.
• Mowing and clearing were habits and normative behaviors. Keeping their riparian property neat and orderly was a basic value among owners of deforested streamlands. Many landowners, however, were interest in alternative to mowing and clearing and in technical advice.
• Practical barriers to streamside reforestation included fear of snakes, small lot sizes, damage to crops and farm equipment from standing and fallen tree limbs, shading of crops, and the tendency of forested areas to expand.

Analysis of responses to the mail survey confirm these impressions and give further indication about the prospects for the use of a riparian buffer strategy to reduce nonpoint source pollution. Table 1 reports responses to a series of questions about the management of streamside land. Generally respondents indicated a concern for those living downstream. They did not seem to think that letting streamside areas grow would show a lack of care for their property, but they did seem to think that keeping the banks clear of vegetation and logs out of stream reduces flood damage to their property. Fifty-seven percent either agreed or strongly agreed that having a forest along a stream is the best land use for water quality. However, when asked elsewhere in the survey, 64.4% reported that they had heard little or nothing about how streamside forests can protect streams. This would seem to indicate a general awareness of the benefits of streamside forests, although not due to any specific informational program.

Table 1
Attitudes Toward Streamside Land Management
(Percent Selecting Response)
1=strongly disagree, 2=moderately disagree, 3=neither disagree nor agree, 4=moderately agree, 5=strongly agree

There was considerable variation in the willingness of respondents to create streamside forests, as seen in Table 2. Many respondents (30.5%) were unsure if they were willing. However, Table 3 shows that respondents were very willing to maintain their streamside forests. Respondents reported that providing wildlife habitat, maintaining or improving stream bank stability, contributing to the improvement of down steam areas, and protecting the stream were the most important reasons for creating or maintaining streamside forests on their property. They reported lesser concern about the cost and maintaining pastoral views (see Table 4). Preliminary analyses show that willingness to create streamside forests is predicted by a general concern for the environment, reported past environmental behaviors, and beliefs about the beneficial impacts of streamside buffers on local and downstream water quality.

Table 2
Willingness to Create Streamside Forest
(among those whose streamside frontage is not already completely forested, N=151)

Table 3
Willingness to Maintain Existing Streamside Forests
(among those whose streamside frontage already includes at least some forest, N=196)

Table 4
Most Important Factor Affecting Willingness to Create or Maintain Streamside Forest on Own Property (Percent Selecting Factor)

When asked about government policies for streamside forests, there was considerable support for financial incentives for property owners who maintain or create forests either directly or through tax breaks and for compensation to farmers taking streamside land out of production (see Table 5). Respondents were optimistic about and seemed to prefer educational strategies. Opposition to a regulatory approach was clear.

Table 5
Attitudes Toward Government Policies for Streamside Forests
(Percent Selecting Response)
1=strongly disagree, 2=moderately disagree, 3=neither disagree nor agree, 4=moderately agree, 5=strongly agree

This research as well as the experiences of public and private groups involved in promoting and implementing riparian buffers indicates that getting landowners to create and maintain riparian buffers along their streamside lands will involve a variety of policy approaches and participants. Thus, the strategy of riparian buffers seems to fit very well within the "smart regulation" framework.
"Smart Regulation"
"Smart regulation" is the term used by Neil Gunningham and Peter Grabosky to describe an approach to environmental policymaking that they argue will produce more effective and efficient policy outcomes. Smart regulation in characterized by:

• Use of a mix of policy instruments, rather than a single one, tailored to specific environmental goals and circumstances, and
• A broad range of participants capable of implementing them.

Gunningham and Grabosky argue that much of the debate over the appropriate policy response to environmental problems has been between the supporters of direct regulation and its critics, often supporters of deregulation and market and property rights approaches, but that it is time to consider a wider range of instruments and to recognize the important roles performed by a variety of participants in the achievement of environmental goals. The various instruments available for use in environmental policy fall into five categories: command and control or direct regulation; self-regulation; voluntarism; education and information strategies; economic instruments; and free market environmentalism. Participants include government and industry, traditionally the regulators and the regulated, as well as third parties. Public interest groups and nonprofit environmental organizations are perhaps the best known of the third parties, but a variety of commercial interests such as green consumers, buyers and suppliers, institutional investors, financial institutions/lenders, insurance institutions, and environmental consultants also may play important roles in achieving environmental goals. After a brief review of the categories of instruments, I will discuss how riparian buffer activities already involve a variety of instruments and participants and why this is likely to continue to be the case.
Direct regulation. Direct regulation involves setting standards or environmental targets with penalties for failure to meet the targets. A regulatory agency is given responsibility for monitoring and policing compliance with legal standards for behavior. In the United States direct regulation has been associated with technology based standards in which a particular technology is prescribed for an industrial process, but direct regulation may also include other kinds of standards such as performance standards which set goals and are focused on outcomes leaving open a degree of choice in the selection of methods for their achievement. These standards may be based on available technologies, but do not require that specific technologies be used.
The term command and control regulation is now commonly used instead of direct regulation and reflects dissatisfaction with direct regulation on a number of grounds. Uniform technology based standards or across the board reductions in emissions have been criticized as being economically inefficient as firms face differing marginal costs of pollution reduction and lacking incentives for firms to reduce pollution below required levels. Direct regulation is considered to be more effective when it is possible to establish clear standards and firms are readily accessible and identifiable. Gunningham and Grabosky point out that it is "not as effective in dealing with transitory, mobile, and/or remote firms which are difficult to identify and keep track of; diffuse, non-point sources of pollution; the transference of pollution from one medium to another; and rapidly changing technologies and economic circumstances." They also point out that direct regulation requires regulators to have comprehensive and accurate knowledge of the workings and capacity of industry, substantial resources to monitor compliance in order to pose a credible deterrence threat, and a commitment to enforcement. To the extent that compliance interferes with efficient and competitive operation of a firm and enforcement is heavy handed, direct regulation may be met with resistance. This approach has been discussed at some length as it is the approach to which the other instruments are most often compared.
Self-regulation Self-regulation ranges from voluntary or total self-regulation in which an industry establishes codes of practice, enforcement mechanisms and other mechanisms for regulating itself to situations in which the government mandates self-regulation in some areas while engaging in direct regulation in other areas. Self-regulation is most likely to succeed in win-win situations in which the interests of the industry or polluters and the public coincide. They also work best when there is a community of shared fate, that is, where the poor performance of one member has an adverse impact on the whole industry or community creating peer pressure for adhering to codes of behavior. Self-regulation has the advantage of being conducted by those who are most knowledgeable about activity, internalizing responsibility for compliance, and fostering ethical standards that lead to greater integration of environmental issues into management practices. The main disadvantage is that self-regulation can be a charade used by polluters to ward off governmental regulation.
Voluntarism Individual firms or landholders make do the right thing without coercion. Government may offer financial incentives for favorable private action. Community and environmental groups may also help in assisting the voluntary actions of others. Public recognition of good deeds may provide additional incentive.
Educational and Information Instruments These include such things as education and training, corporate environmental reporting, community right-to-know and pollution inventories, product certification, and award schemes. These are more likely to be effective if they overlap with the self-interest of the target audience or participants.
Economic instruments Economic instruments are numerous. Replacing the commons with clear and enforceable property rights giving the owner an incentive to protect the right and conserve resources is one approach. Other economic approaches include marketable pollution rights or permits, fiscal instruments and charge systems such as emissions charges or financial subsidies such as tax credits or deductions, financial instruments such as revolving loan funds or subsidized interest rates, liability instrument, performance bonds, deposit refund systems, and removing perverse incentives that encourage resource consumption and pollution.
Free Market Environmentalism This instrument involves wide scale allocation of property rights for natural resources letting the private market govern exchanges backed up by government monitoring and enforcement of liability rules. While environmentalists often have problems with this approach due to past failure of liability rules to protect the environment and compensate victims of pollution, there are examples of this approach in combination with other approaches being used successfully to protect riparian buffers.

Examples of "Smart Regulation" and the Riparian Buffer Strategy

• Free market environmentalism is reflected in the purchase of property by environmental organizations which place conservation easements, including protection of the riparian zone, and then resell the property. There are numerous agricultural land preservation programs in which governments have set aside funds for the purchase of development rights from farmers. In return for payment for the development rights, farmers may have to develop land management plans that include the creation and protection of riparian buffers and fencing to keeping livestock out of streams.
• Watershed organziations as well as government agencies are promoting riparian buffers through education and technical assistance programs.
• High school environmental biology classes, youth and community service organizations and other groups provide volunteer labor to plant trees and install fencing.
• Fishing and hunting organizations have approached landowners and asked to exchange making improvements in riparian habitat for permission to fish or hunt.
• Stream quality monitoring by environmental groups, scientists and local educators helps to draw attention to the status of community water resources. Continued monitoring to document improvements in water quality provides feedback on the effects of riparian buffers and helps to foster community awareness and pride in local streams.
• Various government agencies provide cost share programs to help landowners defray the cost of riparian buffer improvements. In some cases, improvements may be a requirement for participation in programs such as crop subsidies.
• State and local governments have adopted ordinances prohibiting the destruction of vegetation in riparian buffer areas and requiring developers to create buffers in riparian areas if none currently exist.
• Tax incentives exist to encourage landowners to donate conservation easements.

Conclusion
While direct regulation may be an important and necessary instrument for the protection of riparian buffer zones and for reducing nonpoint source water pollution, our research into the attitudes of riparian landowners indicates that there is considerable potential for other instruments to be successful and that numerous third parties are already involved in implementing the riparian buffer strategy. Better understanding of the motivations of property owners and the norms and methods of communication among communities will help to develop an appropriate mix of strategies and to enlist the energies of a wide variety of participants.

Endnotes

1. EPA, Office of Water, Water Quality Conditions in the United States: Water QualityInventory Report to Congress: A profile from the 1994 National Water Quality Inventory Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.:EPA, 1996).
2. J. Clarence Davies and Jan Mazurek, Pollution Control in the United States: Evaluating the System (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1998), 70.
3. EPA, Environmental Progress and Challenges: EPA's Update (Washington, D.C.: EPA, 1988) 46.
4. David J. Welsch, , Riparian Forest Buffers: function and Design for Protection and enhancement of Water Resources (Radnor, PA: USDA Forest Service, 1991).
5. The following description of riparian buffer benefits is based on Welsch, op. cit.
6. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Releaf, Pennsylvania Riparian Buffer Initiative Implementation Plan, Report of the Technical Advisory Committees, Final Draft (Harrisburg, PA: PADEP, 1998).
7. John Johnson, "Riparian Habitat: Applied Research Efforts in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan," in S.P. Laursen, ed., At the Water's Edge: The Science of Riparian Forestry: Conference Proceedings (St. Paul, MN: The University of Minnesota, 1996) 75.
8. P.J. Jakes, "Evaluating the Social and Economic Impacts of Riparian Management Practices," in S.P. Laursen, ed., At the Water's Edge: The Science of Riparian Forestry: Conference Proceedings (St. Paul, MN: The University of Minnesota, 1996), 131.
9. Ibid., 132
10. This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
11. Daniel D. Dutcher, Landowner Perception of Protecting and Establishing Riparian Forests in Central Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Dissertation in Forest Resources (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1999), 93-95.
12. Neil Gunningham and Peter Grabosky, Smart Regulation: Designing Environmental Policy (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1998).
13. This review is based on Gunningham and Grabosky discussion of policy instruments.
14. Ibid.,. 44.