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[Here's an OpEd (my first) that appeared today in a New York daily.  After the newspaper's revisions, it's not exactly what I wanted to say -- including the title -- but I'll have to take the heat (locally) for the outcome. PT]

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Global warming of a global village
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It's the inequities of life on this planet that make it hard to work together to save it

BY PETER J. TAYLOR
Peter J. Taylor, author of "Unruly Complexity," teaches critical thinking about environment, science and society at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

December 11, 2005

The 156 signers of the Kyoto global warming treaty ended their meetings in Montreal on Friday with China and India, the two giants of the developing world, still refusing to accept limits on greenhouse gas emissions after the treaty expires in 2012. Kyoto's curbs apply only to industrialized countries, with the hope that developing nations will be covered later. It's unclear now if or how that will ever happen.

The United States, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, withdrew from the protocol soon after George W. Bush became president; and Australia, the biggest per-capita emitter, followed suit the next summer. Both countries left the Montreal talks refusing to budge. Some of the environmental activists who came to Montreal even accused the U.S. delegation of obstructing progress.

We have all heard the term "global warming," but this doesn't sound like a very global response, does it? Before the spotlight fades on Montreal, it's worth considering some difficult questions: What makes us sure that our problems are global, or about climate? Indeed, who are "we"?

I am not saying that climate-change predictions are junk science or that the negotiations in Montreal were unimportant. I raise such questions because they lead us to a parallel track of thinking and action concerning climate and environmental change.

A parallel track - to use an analogy - is what a childless couple is doing if they not only consult doctors about in vitro fertilization, but explore adoption and entertain a different way of making a family. Couples who invest all their time and money in IVF risk ending up without funds, emotional resources or contacts to embark on a new path in case IVF fails.

Here's the way I lead my students to a different way of thinking with respect to the environment: Imagine two islands with the same population size, land area and quality. Both have population growth rates of almost 3 percent, which means the land per family halves each generation. Eventually there won't be enough to subsist on. What, I ask, should be done? Do you want to know anything more before you can act?

Students readily propose to educate the population about using contraceptives, reducing resource consumption and finding technology that uses the land more efficiently (although this only postpones the crunch). It always has been up to me to suggest ideas such as helping women manage their own economic affairs, a change that has contributed to an impressive drop in birth rate in countries such as Bangladesh.



Students almost never ask if all sectors of the population live under equal conditions. But the discussion quickly moves to a new level when I tell them that on island B, 2 percent of the people own 60 percent of the land, while 70 percent have only 2 percent of the island to live on - a typical land distribution for Central America in the 1970s. This means that five generations before anyone would be malnourished on island A - where everyone has the same amount of land - all of the poorest 70 percent in country B would be below subsistence.

Now what should be done? Students' answers depend on whether they're assigned to the rich, poor or middle group. The rich talk about purchasing weapons to guard their property and vote to control the government. They talk of hiring some poor to work their land.

The poor group discusses armed uprising to take the unused land of the rich, marrying their children into better-off families or leaving the island. The middle group proposes to educate the poor about contraception and build factories to employ them.

The poor, however, are inclined to see the push for population control as an ideologically motivated effort to distract attention from unequal distribution of land. Some in the middle will decide to push for land reform or join the poor in revolt, but others side with the rich in getting control of the government.

Population control and reduction of resource use, although not forgotten, are no longer the central focus for thought and action. The problems on island B are no longer simply an environmental crunch that arises in the long term from population growth.

Of course, the class exercise is simpler than the real world, but, as I point out, there is no country with anywhere near the equality of island A. The real planet Earth is certainly not an island A.

The point is not just that rich and poor coexist in any district, country or ecosphere, but that groups with varying amounts of wealth and power exist, change and become involved in crises because of their dynamic interrelations. Anyone focusing on population control could justifiably be viewed by the poor in a country like B as siding with those who benefit from the inequitable access to productive resources.



How to apply this kind of exercise to global warming? We might talk not just about the urgency of global environmental problems, but about how people are acting inside their individual nations, in a world of interlinked, locally centered, socioeconomic-environmental problems.

We know, for example, that the problems of New Orleans began well before Katrina hit, just as problems in Central America began before Mitch hit seven years earlier. The nature of the responses to these crises tells us a lot about who shapes emergency plans and investment in infrastructure and which groups have access to government resources. Extreme-climate events like these hurricanes may be hard to link directly to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but they do open a window on a whole complex of changing economic, political and ideological dynamics.

Talking up the impending crisis may help activists or voters pressure governments and industries to implement targets under the Kyoto protocol. It may also encourage many to put their fate in the hands of international summits and national programs. But, at the same time, the focus on emission controls may be viewed by those who are struggling with socioeconomic-environmental problems as a way to avoid tackling or even naming the power dynamics they face.

It may be a coincidence that Australia withdrew from the Kyoto protocol at the same time that it was being drawn into the coalition of countries willing to make the U.S. invasion of Iraq look like a multinational venture. It is definitely the case that the current health of the Australian economy - a major factor in the government's re-election last year - is very much tied to exports of coal to China. Perhaps the Senate and President Bush were right in claiming that abiding by the Kyoto protocol would hurt the U.S. economy.

But, we might ask, whose economy - rich, middle or poor - is it that they are concerned about? "We the people" is not the only way to think and act when it comes to moving toward a world free of local and regional climate-related crises. Those frustrated by the lack of progress toward a post-Kyoto world might do well to pursue a parallel track.

Copyright (c) 2005, Newsday, Inc.

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This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-optay104546997dec11,0,5939567. story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com

--  David Levy  Professor, Department of Management  University of Massachusetts, Boston  100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA 02125, USA  Tel: 617-287-7860  http://www.faculty.umb.edu/david_levy/