Reflections on Thirty Years of Worldwatching

It’s been a fascinating experience watching the human family’s response to the emerging sustainability challenges of the past 30 years. Over a career writing on the topic, largely at the Worldwatch Institute, I often marveled at the ingenuity displayed by many changemakers but also bemoaned the blindness and stubborn resistance to change apparent in many sluggards.

We are certainly a complex species with contradictory impulses. Where that complexity will take us as we wrestle with humanity’s greatest-ever developmental challenge is not yet clear. We’ll know soon enough, as the future is arriving quickly! For now, I offer a few simple reflections on sustainability’s ups and downs over the past three decades.

For most of my tenure at Worldwatch, I believed humanity would get its act together and learn to build clean and innovative sustainable economies. We had (and have) plenty of tools to work with: the steep decline in the cost of renewable energy, the creative thinking represented by circular economies and biomimicry, the renewed appreciation of appropriate technologies such as the bicycle, and the small but vibrant movements preaching the gospel of simple living, to name a few.

On the social side, I was encouraged by the emergence of simple and affordable technologies and practices for making a difference in people’s lives.  The simple paste made from peanuts, sugar, milk powder, oil, and vitamins that has saved millions of children from malnutrition. The power of education and healthcare to raise the status of women and open a world of opportunity to them. Decentralized solar-powered electricity, which delivered power “the last mile” to rural people in Africa. Solar lamps that stoked educational advances for kids, who now had light for studying at night. And mini-grids that spurred income-enhancing entrepreneurial activity among their parents, who could now run small devices like sewing machines.

Even behavioral science seemed to offer advances for creating a better future. In 2001 I wrote a chapter for Worldwatch’s annual State of the World report entitled “Accelerating the Shift to Sustainability” which explored the drivers of societal change. It touted research showing that peer influence, direct appeals, and enticing incentives are excellent tools for prompting behavior change. One study from the UC Santa Cruz athletic center showed that when a sign was placed in the shower asking people to turn off the water while soaping up, only 6 percent did so. But when a researcher modeled this behavior, the compliance rate shot up to 49 percent. And when two researchers modeled the behavior, compliance was 67 percent.

Surely these and myriad other ideas were the seeds of a new economy and society that would blossom into a bright future. We would meet the challenge.

But signs of trouble percolated persistently around me. Friends and family—well-educated people with good hearts—seemed unable or unwilling to grasp what I was learning. “If only you could see the reports that come across my desk,” I would say to my wife, believing that information was surely enough to change minds. That’s why I was at Worldwatch, after all: to digest the science and translate to a broad audience the story of a planet and people in peril.

Yet year after year, Worldwatch’s annual Vital Signs publication documented the steady decline of the planet’s health. An increasingly feverish global temperature. Steady shrinkage of the lungs of the planet, the Amazon rainforest. Clogged arteries as rivers loaded up with pollutants. The cancer-like spread of suburban sprawl. Incomplete nutrition as soils were fed too much potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen, and too little organic matter. Despite a medicine chest filled with inspiring, nature-friendly treatments, the patient was largely allowed to languish and grow ever sicker.

Eventually, I kept a mental tally of global issues that were getting better and those that were getting worse. It was an easy list to keep, with the healing of the ozone hole the only entry in the “Good News” column. Everything else—climate change, water scarcity, deforestation, species loss, ocean salinization, desertification, soil erosion, coral reef loss, and virtually every other global environmental issue—fit in the “Troubling Developments” column.. For three decades I saw little movement in my lists, even if advances in energy and other technologies have brought limited and localized relief.

As the years passed at Worldwatch, I was increasingly frustrated with the media’s recklessly negligent treatment of the biggest story in human history: the relentless destruction of our one and only home. (The Guardian is the closest thing to an exception among mainstream media.)

I was puzzled, too. What journalist could resist covering humanity’s most colossal misstep ever? Well, nearly all of them, it seemed, despite the story’s potential to be spellbinding.

After all, it featured power plays, in the national and corporate jockeying for resources.¹ Greed, in the liquidation of old-growth forests and other resources for fleeting profit. Hubris, as decision-makers stubbornly refused to recognize the long run. Criminality, as corporations stole resources from indigenous people. Delusion and folly, in the human insistence on standing separate from nature. Thrills, in the courageous actions of heroes from Chico Mendes to Greta Thunberg. And suspense, in the long-running, insistent question: Would we beat the advancing threats?

Maybe the story lacked a singular villain. Maybe it unfolded too slowly for the news cycles. Maybe a global story was too hard to wrap one’s head around. Whatever the reason, journalists seemed to take a pass on the scoop of a lifetime.

Today’s journalists, despite greater understanding of the issues and episodic coverage of fires, floods, and other disasters, continue to underestimate the dangers rushing toward us. “Enlightened” reporters smugly wag their fingers at climate deniers. But where were these journalists over the past three decades, when sustained coverage could have helped put humanity on a much steadier course?

Indeed, where are they today, even the “progressive” ones, who give only occasional, fragmented attention to the climate crisis, yet provide endless coverage of every twist in the modern saga of political corruption? Reporters today seem not to understand that the climate emergency qualifies as a—what’s the word?—emergency, requiring emergency-level coverage.

Nor do they understand that the crisis is likely much worse than we realize because current emissions have yet to do their full damage and because emissions continue to rise. Read that emphasis again: emissions continue to rise. Shouldn’t media outlets report emissions levels as faithfully as they do the Dow Jones average?

Even worse, journalists haven’t absorbed that climate is just one of an array of intertwined challenges known as the polycrisis. Any issue from my Troubling Developments list would be of serious concern alone and would require robust policy attention. But the basket of problems taken together is hugely impactful and challenging. A simple example is the chain of causality from fossil fuel burning to climate change to natural disasters to human migration. Who reports on these not as discrete challenges, but as a set of stacked issues?

Worse still, few journalists dig to uncover the origins of the polycrisis. The climate crisis, water scarcity, species loss, and other discrete pieces all stem from the same root: economies built on rapaciousness, and ever-growing rapaciousness at that. In other words, the problem is the system, and the growth engine that drives it. Despite pleas for precisely such coverage, when did you last hear any journalist report on that?

While I clung to optimism at Worldwatch, I often wondered what our failure to act might look like decades ahead, meaning about now. As the truth of planetary degradation and societal breakdown became clear, would we “get it” suddenly, all of us together? Or would our grasp of the crisis emerge slowly across the population?

Would the conservative media and politicians admit their errors and make amends with a rash of enlightened policies, even if most of these were too little, too late? Or would they double down in their obstinacy, like the officials from the previous U.S. administration who vow to roll back environmental protections if the former guy is elected in 2024?

And what about the liberal politicians and even “environmental” organizations pitching the “win-win rhetoric” of green growth? Would they come to recognize the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection? Or, for the sake of GDP growth, would they keep us eating our environmental cake while pretending we could have it too?

Maybe panic would arise sector by sector, as with the metals executives who penned a letter last week to European leaders requesting an emergency summit to discuss the energy shortage they say has shuttered 50 percent of aluminum and zinc capacity since 2021 and increased gas and electricity prices tenfold over the past year. Excited language like “alarm,” “crisis,” and “critical” pepper the letter, along with phrases like “permanent deindustrialization” and “the existential threat to our future.” This is not standard corporate whining but the language of panic and desperation.

My work at Worldwatch regularly brought to mind the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  We certainly do. Are we indeed cursed, or might we be on the threshold of a new and sustainable chapter in human history? It’s not clear. But even the hope-filled Solitaire Townsend is arguably hedging her bets when she declares, “The next few years are going to be a wild ride.”

¹ John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Penguin Random House, 2004).