Earth Day, And Problematic Predictions

There are few more polarizing issues than environmental ones: climate change, the feasibility of alternative energy, and, in recent news, Earth Day. My 2016 Earth Week was spent scrounging for recyclables for a school project in which my son built a robot statue out of milk jugs, cereal boxes, and empty yogurt cups. From where I sit Earth Day is a good thing, a message of "don't be so anthropocentric that you think you can just throw your crap anywhere and let Mother Nature take care of it."

The original 1970 Earth Day was by contrast marked by apocalyptic predictions and fear-based thinking. Americans were surrounded by grim reminders of industrial pollution, such as the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, the labeling of Lake Erie as a "gigantic cesspool," and heavy smog in urban areas. The original Earth Day saw the prediction of mass starvations, worldwide famines, the extinction of 80% of all living animals, the reduction of ambient sunlight by 50%, 45-year lifespans, and the elimination of all crude oil, all by the year 2000.

All of these predictions fell well short, of course. The 1970 prognosticators were concerned about pollution and fossil fuels but were mostly anxious about overpopulation, a topic that arouses little fear 46 years later. If anything, our world is looking to be in better shape. We're seeing significantly higher crop yields using the same amount of land, lower staple food prices, and no more DDT; we have at least as much fossil fuel to last us for about another century, maybe; and population looks to level off within the next few decades. The Earth Day doomsters, particularly Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, exercised faulty and outdated logic in assuming that Negative Impact = (Population)(Affluence)(Technology). What they didn't plan for is that technology has the power to boost positive inputs like food production and medicine, and we've learned effective strategies to reduce pollution along the way.

The problem with predictions is that for every correct one, there are countless more that are dead wrong, even those based on rigorous data and scientific extrapolation. So-called futurists predict like it's their job, often assigning a target date to the year, and are typically wrong. Consider, for example, Arthur C. Clarke's predictions for the 21^st century. The occurrence of a technological singularity is still a hot topic in AI communities, and most thinkers--building on the assumption that Moore's Law will continue unabated--agree that self-improving artificial general intelligence will occur within the next 50 years or so. At the 2012 Singularity Summit, Stuart Armstrong acknowledged the uncertainty in predicting advanced AI by stating that his "current 80% estimate [for the singularity] is something like 5 to 100 years." Now that's how to make a prediction...

This isn't to say that long-term thinking isn't valuable or honorable. In grad school I became intrigued by the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit working to foster slower/better thinking rather than the prevailing faster/cheaper activities of modern times. Aside from hosting seminars and advocating a five-digit date structure (ie, 02016 for 2016) to anticipate the Year 10,000 problem, the group keeps a record of long-term predictions and bets made by its members for fun and accountability. They're also constructing a clock designed to run for 10,000 years with minimal maintenance using simple tools, and are working on a publicly accessible digital library of all known human languages for posterity.

While the Long Now's activities may seem radical, most examples of true long-term thinking are, given our blindly rushing existence. Shortly before his death, Kurt Vonnegut proposed a presidentially appointed US Secretary of the Future, whose sole duty is to determine an activity's impact on future generations. The Great Law of the Iroquois famously mandated that current generations make decisions that would benefit their descendants seven generations (about 140 years) into the future. The difficulty, of course, is satisfying ourselves in the now as well as in the future. As environmental skeptics point out, it's nearly impossible to plan out our fossil fuel dependency and use for the next decade, let alone for the next hundred years.

Perhaps our best bet is to view the future in terms of possibility. To paraphrase Clarke's first law of prediction: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he's almost certainly correct."

Image credit: futureatlas.com / CC BY 2.0