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The next worldwide challenge: Y21E

Eugene P. Odum

A major reason Y2K computer breakdowns did not occur is the fact that a great deal of effort and money was spent worldwide to prevent such breakdowns. As the 21st century begins, we face the possibility of serious breakdowns in environmental infrastructures that stabilize climate changes and maintain air and water quality, energy production, and human quality of life in general. I suggest highlighting the challenge to avoid such disasters with the acronym Y21E, where Y21 stands for the 21st century and E for environmental infrastructure and overall environmental quality. Y21EQ could be an alternative acronym, where EQ is environmental quality, a reminder of the massive effort required to avoid the breakdown of essential life-support environmental goods and services. These goods and services are given little attention or value in today's market economy or politics, both of which in recent years have contributed to increasing the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide.

Systems and infrastructures that face possible breakdowns resulting from human mismanagement and pollution include not only natural life-support systems that provide clean air, water, and other ecosystem services but also our energy production systems, agroecosystems, and urban-industrial technosystems (cities, for example). Recent problems with energy production in California emphasize the need to move away from dependence on large, centralized power plants with their energy-wasting networks of power lines to more locally distributed multiple systems involving solar photovoltaics (PVs), wind, bioenergy, hydrogen fuel cells, microturbines and ocean thermal energy conversion. Clean coal technology that eliminates acid rain and perhaps some new form of atomic energy also can be part of this mix.

A similar transition will have to be made in agriculture, from current unsustainable fossil-fuel subsidized monocultures in both crop and meat production to more sustainable reduced-input conservation tillage and more dispersed and diverse animal culture. Pesticide pollution, nutrient eutrophication, and non-point pollution in general must be eliminated or at least reduced by source reduction.

Since policies and decisions ultimately involve economics, the current market system that is mostly limited to human-made goods and services must be extended to include nature's goods and services, an extension that is being widely discussed by both ecologists and economists (see symposia in Ecosystems, Vol. 3, No. 4 and Bioscience, Vol. 50, No. 4).

Many of these changes and transitions will be costly and take time, but we all know that prevention now will pay off in the future. The Y21E challenge differs from Y2K in that everyone, everywhere must be involved, not just technologists.

Eugene Odum (Institute of Ecology, University of Georgia) received a 2001 Distinguished Service Award from SCB in recognition of his extraordinary vision in merging ecology, ethics, and economics; and, through this vision, opening new ways to protect healthy ecosystems.

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