Unfortunately, much of our thinking about commerce, governance, and society and our relationship to the environment is still bound up in the old scientific paradigm. The new science needs to be more firmly imprinted in the public mind as well as in public policy to make a real difference. Still, the European Union is the first political unit to seriously entertain the new vision of the Earth as an indivisible living community deserving of respect.
By championing a host of global environmental treaties and accords and institutionalizing the precautionary principle into its regulatory policies, the EU has shown a willingness to act on its commitment to sustainable development and global environmental stewardship. The fact that its commitments in most areas remain weak and are often vacillating is duly noted. But at least Europe has established a new agenda for conducting science and technology that, if followed, could begin to wean the world from the old ways and toward a second scientific Enlightenment, one more in accord with its dream of inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, quality of life, and harmony.
Walking the Walk
The European Union is currently engaged in a number of initiatives, some small, others more grandiose, that represent a breakthrough in the way it approaches science and technology. All of these initiatives share a common theme. They are ecologically sensitive and designed and executed with an eye toward systems thinking and sustainable development. Together, they are vanguard projects of a second Enlightenment science.
At the very top of the list is Europe’s new plan to become a fully integrated renewable-based hydrogen economy by mid-century. The EU has led the world in championing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. To ensure compliance with the terms and deadlines outlined in the Kyoto Protocol, the EU has made a commitment to produce 22 percent of its electricity and 12 percent of all of its energy using renewable sources of energy by 2010.
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Although a number of member states are lagging behind on meeting their renewable-energy targets, much to the consternation of Brussels, the very fact that the EU has set benchmarks at all puts them far ahead of the United States in making the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The Bush Administration has consistently fought back attempts in the U.S. Congress to establish similar benchmarks for ushering in a renewable-energy regime in America.
In June 2003, the EU announced a bold plan to become a clean hydrogen economy by mid-century.
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Interestingly enough, when U.S. industry got wind of Europe’s plan, it lobbied the White House for an American initiative, fearing that the EU might leap ahead of the U.S. in the race to a hydrogen future. President Bush announced his administration’s intentions to lead the world to a hydrogen economy in his State of the Union Address in 2003. But President Bush’s approach to hydrogen differs significantly from the European undertaking.
Hydrogen is the basic element of the universe, the lightest element in existence, and, when used, emits only two by-products, pure water and heat. It is not, however, free-floating in nature but, rather, has to be extracted from other sources. Hydrogen can be extracted from fossil fuels, especially natural gas and coal, but then we’re still left with CO
2
emissions. Nuclear power can also be harnessed to the task, but then we’re left with nuclear waste that is dangerous to transport and not yet safe to bury. The other approach is to use renewable sources of energy—solar, wind, hydro, geothermal—to create electricity, and then use some of the excess electricity to electrolyze water, separating out hydrogen for storage and later use for transport needs or for backup generation for the power grid. Hydrogen can also be extracted from renewable energy crops and garbage. In other words, there’s black hydrogen and green hydrogen, depending on the source from which the hydrogen is extracted.
Here’s the problem. While Europe is committed to making a green hydrogen future, the Bush White House plan is to promote a black hydrogen future, using coal and nuclear power as the favorite means to extract the hydrogen. Critics accuse the administration of using hydrogen as a Trojan horse to bolster the interests of the old-energy industries. That’s not to say that Europe is not engaged in the old energies as well, but its objective is to quickly wean the continent off of fossil fuels and nuclear power and move it toward a renewable-based hydrogen economy.
In his opening speech at the EU Conference on the Hydrogen Economy in June 2003, President Prodi warned that “our current approach to energy relies overwhelmingly on fossil and nuclear fuels. And this cannot go on forever.”
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The real issue, observed Prodi, “is whether we have enough air, land, and sea to dispose of the gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes from spent fossil and nuclear fuels used to produce energy. The answer is a clear ‘no.’ ”
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“The rational solution,” said Prodi, “would be to turn resolutely towards renewable energies . . .” with hydrogen as the means to store them.
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Prodi acknowledged that other countries were moving toward extracting hydrogen from the old-energy sources but said that he wanted to be “clear about what makes the European hydrogen programme truly visionary. It is our declared goal of achieving a step-by-step shift towards a fully integrated hydrogen economy, based on renewable energy sources, by the middle of the century.”
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When President Prodi announced the European hydrogen initiative, he said it would be the next critical step in integrating Europe after the introduction of the euro. He likened the effort to the American space program in the 1960s and 1970s, whose multiplier effect helped spawn the high-tech economy of the 1980s and 1990s.
The European game plan is being implemented with a sense of history in mind. Great Britain became the world’s leading power in the nineteenth century because it was the first country to harness its vast coal reserves with steam power. The U.S., in turn, became the world’s pre-eminent power in the twentieth century because it was the first country to harness its vast oil reserves with the internal combustion engine. The multiplier effects of both energy revolutions were extraordinary. The EU is determined to lead the world into the third great energy revolution of the modern era, with the hope that it can combine its goal of sustainable development with new commercial opportunities that fit its new superpower ambitions.
The EU’s commitment to sustainable development and a systems approach to the application of science and technology is showing up in a diverse number of fields and endeavors. Not surprisingly, given its deep cultural identification with rural life and food, Europe is taking the lead in the shift to sustainable farming practices and organic food production. While the U.S. sports a growing organic food sector—it represents the fastest-growing sector of the food industry—the U.S. government has done little to encourage organic food production and sustainable agricultural practices. Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture fields a small organic food research program, it amounts to only $3 million, or less than .004 percent of its $74 billion budget, hardly a serious effort. Moreover, while American consumers are increasing their purchases of organic food, still less than 0.3 percent of total U.S. farmland is currently in organic production.
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By contrast, many of the member states of the European Union have made the transition to organic agriculture a critical component of their economic development plans and have even set benchmarks, just as the EU did for bringing renewable sources of energy online. Germany, which has long been the economic engine of Europe and, more often than not, the leader in setting new environmental goals for the continent, has announced its intention to bring 20 percent of German agricultural output into organic production by 2020. (Organic agricultural output is now 3.2 percent of all farm output in Germany.)
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The Netherlands, Sweden, the U.K., Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, France, and Austria also have national programs to promote the transition to organic food production.
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Denmark and Sweden enjoy the highest consumption of organic vegetables in Europe, and both countries project that their domestic markets for organic food will soon reach or exceed 10 percent of domestic consumption.
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Sweden has set a goal of having 20 percent of its total cultivated farm area in organic production by 2005. Italy already has 7.2 percent of its farmland under organic production, while Denmark is close behind with 7 percent.
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The U.K. doubled its organic food production in 2002 and now boasts the second-highest sales of organic food in Europe, after Germany. According to a recent survey, nearly 80 percent of U.K. households buy organic food.
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By comparison, only 33 percent of American consumers buy any organic food.
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The contrast between American and European approaches to the future of farming highlights the differences between an older Enlightenment view of science and the new biosphere perspective. As we noted earlier in the chapter, in the U.S., more than half the agricultural fields are already given over to the production of genetically modified food crops. GM food crops, say critics, represent the ultimate expression of the Baconian approach to science, with its emphasis on waging war against nature and creating greater distance between human beings and the natural world. GM food crops are like tiny warriors in the fields. Armed with genes to ward off pests and viruses and tolerate large amounts of herbicides, the goal is to keep the forces of nature away—to create, if you will, islands of artificial order that are impenetrable by the wild.
Organic agriculture is organized along an entirely different set of principles. The idea is to use an array of agricultural practices to integrate farm production back into its local environment. The goal is not autonomy but, rather, embeddedness. To make that happen, farmers take a systems approach to agriculture, based on establishing symbiotic and mutually reinforcing relationships between crops, insects, birds, microorganisms, and the soil. Organic farms rely on organic fertilizers rather than petrochemical fertilizers, and natural pest controls as opposed to toxic-producing genes, insecticides, and pesticides. Organic farms treat the soil as a “living community” and use state-of-the-art technologies to nourish microbial inhabitants that release, transform, and transfer nutrients, always with an eye toward working with nature rather than holding it at bay. Organic farmers also use cover crops and crop rotation as a way of preventing weeds, insects, and disease organisms from inflicting harm on their fields. They also use various means to attract beneficial insects and birds to keep pests checked. Organic farmers plant crop strains whose genomic makeups are compatible with local ecosystem dynamics while paying close attention to the natural rhythms of recycling. Organic agriculture takes a systems approach, bringing together plant pathologists, entomologists, microbiologists, plant geneticists, breeders, and others to reconfigure arable land into mini-ecosystems made up of networks of symbiotic relationships that function together as total communities.
The science of organic agriculture challenges everything we know about how Enlightenment science ought to function. While we have traditionally thought of science as a tool to exploit nature’s resources, a new generation of researchers has in mind a different course—using science to re-establish environmental relationships and build up natural communities.
The Rights of Animals
The new science doesn’t eliminate reason and utility in its approach to nature, but it makes these values partially conditional on empathy and intrinsic value. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the EU’s approach to our fellow creatures. Mohandas Gandhi once remarked that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
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His view is in sharp contrast to René Descartes’s belief that animals are merely “soulless automata,” resources to be put to work or consumed, with little regard for their welfare. The plight of the Earth’s creatures has changed little since. Some say their fate has worsened. While hard to imagine, our scientists tell us that we are approaching the absolute end of “the wild” after millions of years of life on Earth. In less than a century, there will be no wild left, strictly speaking, only parks.
If the thought of loss of the wild is sad to entertain, the mass extinction of our fellow species is even more disquieting. According to a study conducted by an international group of scientists and published in the journal
Nature
in 2004, 15 to 37 percent of all the remaining plant and animal species on Earth might be heading toward extinction by 2050. Species are now going extinct at alarming rates—between one hundred and one thousand times as fast as in the past.
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This time around, it is “man” himself, not meteorites from outer space or volcanic eruptions, who is responsible for the mass death. Global warming, say the researchers who carried out the study, is the primary contributing cause of the increased extinction rates.
While wild animals are seeing the shrinking of their habitats and a precipitous decline in their numbers, research animals and domestic farm animals face, perhaps, the grimmest existence of all the creatures on Earth. Subject to barbaric experiments in research laboratories and raised under horrific conditions on factory farms, these animals suffer cruel fates.
Now, the European Union and its member countries have embarked on a series of initiatives designed to create a far more humane environment for wild animals as well as for animals used in scientific experiments or raised for human consumption. The new European agenda extends the idea of universal rights—although tentatively—to our fellow creatures, in ways that would have been considered inconceivable in public policy just a decade or two ago.