Dr. Kapuscinski espouses a proactive, safety-first approach to strengthening the roles of government, industry, and consumer and public interest groups in the production and use of genetically modified organisms and protecting the environment.
Q: Given that each region has its own issues, what are the greatest threats to environmental sustainability in the United States?
A: The spread of our urban areas and other developments, such as roads, is continuing to transform our natural habitats. Where we do still have somewhat pristine or natural areas, they're fragmented. This has all kinds of cascading effects, including eroding the ability of many native species to survive and thrive on their own. It contributes to problems like soil erosion.
These habitat impacts are also in our coastal areas and freshwater ecosystems because we do things, such as build roads and summer homes around lakes, that interrupt their normal function. Downstream, cascading harms the fish populations people care about. Sometimes we try to control water levels, which backfires on us -- we end up either with more flood problems or local droughts because we transformed the hydrology of the area.
Agriculture, and increasingly aquaculture -- the farming of aquatic animals such as fish -- is also contributing to this transformation. Although in many places, like here where I live in the Twin Cities, our bigger problem is probably the spread of our suburban areas and displacing some of our agricultural lands.
I'm not an expert on climate change issues, but I interact with people who are and who believe climate change should be up at the top of the list too. I am concerned that our government is not taking this issue seriously enough.
Q: What should local and state governments be doing about these issues?
A: The most important is probably also one of the hardest, given the short-term signals in our representative government -- we have rapid, frequent elections. I support frequent elections, but one of the downsides is it discourages taking the long view.
One of the most important steps our state and local governments can take is setting concrete goals for how they want the environment to look in their state and their local communities. How do they want it to function 20, 50, possibly even 100 years from now? Then figure out steps we have to take to bring it about now.
The positive, proactive aspect of what I am proposing is that it would raise us above this negative dynamic of focusing our efforts on what's wrong with the environment, trying to stop a development or some other effort. Instead, the focus would be on setting goals, how we can protect the environment of the future, what kind of steps we could take to restore the wetlands.
The next hard part is figuring out what incentives our government can put in place -- both packages of incentives and disincentives -- to encourage individual citizens, but especially corporations, businesses and government to do the right thing.
So if you lay out a 50-year vision, it may affect where you would decide to build new roads. More broadly, it might affect how the state would decide to meet its transportation needs. Today it may not look economically advantageous to shift from roads for cars to light rail and other forms of mass transit. But if you look 50 or 100 years down the road, and you can persuade people to agree on some goals for the look and functioning of the environment, then maybe placing more emphasis on serious mass transit would look more desirable and mutually beneficial to many of the parties currently fighting with each other over things like mass transit.
This requires incentives and disincentives, such as tax breaks on developments that are more compatible with the environmental vision. You could encourage the development of certification schemes for food production, such as organic certification. There's a lot of activity now in trying to create sustainable farming labels for everything from producing fish in the sea to agricultural products. The incentive, given these labels on food and good public education, is that some people with the means will be willing to pay a higher price for those products. This sends a positive signal back to the economy to encourage that kind of shift in food production.
Governments can help build the base that can make these shifts possible -- for example, investing more in research and development and education about sustainable and organic farming methods. Right now, a lot of states -- Minnesota, for example -- have small programs in these areas, but they are small compared to the price supports, the direct funding for research and development, and the various subsidies that go to conventional, industrial agriculture.
If people sit down and work out the long-term ideal, they may realize we can't keep going with our current, conventional, large-scale industrial ag systems -- or at least we're going to have to think of ways to dramatically change them, so they don't continue to mine our groundwater, they don't continue to put herbicides and pesticides into our groundwater, they don't continue to totally deplete soil nutrients because you're relying too much on farming just one or two species.
Q: Have we gone too far in some of the environmental issues? Should we be focusing on salvaging rather than preserving?
A: Yes, if by salvaging is meant restoration -- a variety of healing or recovery programs are important. If the key stakeholders from the town and state lay out a concrete vision for what they want the environment to look like in the future, to get there they will have to do more than just protection and preservation. Because in some cases, the things they want are already impossible to achieve with our current environmental conditions.
Q: What does this mean for those lakeside roads and houses, for instance?
A: I don't think it's black and white -- I should probably use the word "rehabilitation" instead of restoration. In some places, like near or within a national park, you might want to restore -- try to return that environment as close as possible to the condition it was in at some point in the past, when there were either very few humans in the landscape, or white settlers had been there without dramatically affecting it.
But in many places, it'll be more rehabilitation. In medicine, for example, a person undergoes physical rehabilitation for a severe break to a leg. They may never recover the complete function they had before the break. But by going through the rehabilitation, you can return most of it. So in the case of homes or roads along the shorelines of lakes, I don't think it's realistic to say we will remove a large highway, but maybe we could redirect certain critical segments of it.
In Minnesota years ago, for instance, there was an effort to remove most of our railroad tracks and replace some of them with bicycle paths. Now there's actually talk of returning some of these to railroad tracks to have better mass transit corridors in the state. Some people are saying it might be a more effective solution to dealing with our mass transit as our metropolitan region grows, and also to have better transit between metropolitan and rural areas, than to build a new highway. That would be an example of rehabilitating or going partly back in an area that's already been greatly transformed by people. But it might fit into the larger picture of rehabilitation.
In some places, you will want to return to fairly natural conditions. In others, you will want to find ways people can change their practices or the way they are using the land, without uprooting whole communities or homes. For example, homes along shorelines would greatly reduce their impact on water quality in the lakes if they simply changed the vegetation planted along their property/water's edge and changed the fertilizers they use. There are some practices that can reduce the harmful impact.
It is similar to the principles in recycling -- "reduce, reuse and recycle." We need a mantra like that for achieving a 50-year environmental vision. The concept would be: Partly protect what you already have; partly rehabilitate, including not only actual structures but through our practices; and partly restore.
Q: It seems your mission is, in part, to interpret and provide solutions from science to the general public.
A: Yes, carrying out that interpretation and provision in a way that encourages the public to participate and make their own decisions. Scientists have important and privileged information because of their expertise and the work they do, and it's important to contribute to the public in the policy arena. But I don't believe it's appropriate for scientists to tell people what to do. Scientists can advise people and provide them with quality information, but at the end of the day, the people have to decide what they want.
I am a strong believer in building a strong link between the best quality science -- making sure science is also integrated -- and the best quality participatory, hopefully in our country, democratic processes. I think that's how you end up with the most effective policy decisions and implementations of those policies. You have to get the people behind it.
Q: Obviously there are different situations around the country, but can you detail technology that can be used in some of the situations you have covered so far?
A: Let's look at food production. There's a lot of activity and debate about two clusters of technologies that, by and large, seem to be moving in different directions. One is the cluster around the whole idea of biotechnology in agriculture, especially the current emphasis on genetically engineered organisms. The other is the cluster of practices and some technologies around the idea of organic farming, including a growing organic aquaculture.
The two differ in a number of ways. The path of the biotechnology approach, for example, has been primarily scientists tinkering with something, discovering a gene in one instance they think moved from a soil bacteria into a crop, could produce a silver-bullet for controlling a pest. This describes genetically engineered BT corn, which is farmed broadly today in the United States -- BT being the abbreviation for a bacterium in which scientists have found a gene that produces a protein that acts like a pesticide for one of corn's main pests.
This silver-bullet approach tends to start in the lab, with great pressure to come up with an application that will be useful for the real world, and then convincing farmers to adopt it. Its other distinctive feature is it usually required farmers buy something new. In the case of the BT corn, the seeds are more expensive than regular corn, but the idea is that it should be profitable to the farmers if it can greatly reduce pest infestations and their need for more harmful pesticides.
In the organic-agriculture approach, they start from the perspective of the farmers, driven by the farmers' needs. As a matter of fact, in this country, organic agriculture started as a movement led and implemented by farmers. Somewhat late, some of the scientists and universities climbed on the bandwagon and said, "This is a great way to go, and we'd like to become involved in this research."
The approach of organic agriculture tends to be skeptical of silver bullets. It tends to believe you can't just change one thing, or apply technology and miraculously solve all your problems. It focuses instead on the fact that farmers deal with living, interconnected organisms. That one change someone might make to their plants, either through traditional breeding or through genetic engineering, may have a bunch of cascading effects -- some of which may be good, some of which may be harmful to either their economic viability or to the environment.
Organic farmers think much more about the whole context in which they are farming. They think much more about the overall environment in which they are producing. The solutions organic agriculture tends to develop rely less on one specific product or input the farmer has to buy, and more on training farmers to adopt a set of different practices.
For example, they try to reduce relying on farming only one or two crops; they promote crop rotation with a field one year used for livestock grazing, then allowing it to lie fallow the next year, and the next year growing a crop on it. It depends less on input; it's trying much more seriously to have the farm behave as much as possible like the surrounding natural ecosystem -- or at least have the attributes the surrounding natural ecosystem has, to allow that system to persist -- even when there are big events that happen in the natural environment we can't control, such as hurricanes, floods or periods of drought.
Whereas the biotechnology approach is a brute force approach to permit more control over the natural ecosystem and not be influenced by natural variations.
If I were to take the long view, I would predict that 50 years from now, we may find they have both influenced each other and the approach to farming a mixture of each camp.
I say this because genetically engineered crops today are in the infancy of that technology. Even the strongest proponents of it realize the first generation of genetically engineered crops are not necessarily meeting the most important needs of farmers and especially not of consumers, and may be taking a way too simplistic approach to minimizing environmental harm. Some of their future products may not involve genetic engineering at all, instead taking advantage of our technical ability to look at individual genes in an organism, whether a plant crop or a fish, and use that knowledge to direct more effective, traditional breeding. People refer to this as "marker-assisted selection." We may find the tools of our technology will be used in a different way in 50 years.
If agriculture is going to contribute to setting a 50-year vision for what you want the environment to look like, these two poles will probably need to learn from each other
Q: A synthesis seems plausible. How about the use of information technology?
A: The computer revolution, especially the Internet, has dramatically changed the way people weigh in on all kinds of decisions. It has placed a greater expectation on scientists and technologists to post their information on the Internet in ways the general public can understand. The Internet is creating a renaissance involving more democratic participation. It's still unclear as to whether it's going to lead to well-thought-out or knee-jerk democratic decisions. At the very least, we've already seen over the last few years many cases of environmental and farmers' rights groups and organic agriculture groups -- and in many other sectors one can think of similar things -- coming together and establishing amazing networks through the Internet, with groups working in countries far-flung across the planet. Then, all together, they bear down to influence their country's negotiators at the WTO, for example, or the negotiations at the convention on biological diversity or negotiations about how to solve world hunger problems.
One of the most recent examples is the pressure on pharmaceutical companies in the United States and on our government to implement policies that make it possible for poor countries to buy drugs for treating diseases like AIDS at much lower prices, so they don't have to pay the big patent royalty.
There were all kinds of pressures that bore down to convince our government finally to agree that this is important. Much of that pressure came from amazing networking over the Internet.
Q: Looking at a different environment, megacities, how can we make them more livable?
A: The short answer is not easy to implement, but it's at least a way of thinking about it. We have to figure out a way to reduce what some environmental economists refer to as the "throughput" of megacities -- reducing the amount of goods and energy in the form of fossil fuels, etc., that enter the megacity, and the amount that goes out as waste -- either processed waste or unused energy.
In other words, we have to increase the effectiveness or efficiency of almost everything that happens in those cities that has a feedback effect on the environment. In the case of sheer volume of materials used, we need to take seriously the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle." We have to do that in everything from the way we build our buildings to the way we package our food and the amount of paper we use in our offices.
We have to find more efficient ways of generating energy and heat, and providing that in megacities. We have to find ways to reduce the waste stream -- everything from toxic pollutants to domestic sewage.
One way of thinking about it is, we have to treat megacities as if they were ecosystems. They're human-created ecosystems, but each is still an ecosystem. We have to make these ecosystems behave more like the natural ecosystems that have been on the planet for millions of years. If you look at them, they rarely waste. Everything is reused somehow or recycled. So we've got to find a way to do that in our megacities, or we are going to cause more and more problems for ourselves. We're going to harm our quality of life, our human health. People go crazy when they live in ugly and polluted surroundings where there is too much noise, where they don't feel safe. We have to find ways to make these cities more livable and behave more like what I would refer to as a "resilient ecosystem," meaning you are reducing as much as possible the total input, and reducing the waste stream outputs.
A simple example, to go back to farming, are all kinds of projects going on all around the world -- even on the rooftops of Manhattan -- to find ways of producing food right in the city. Now clearly they cannot produce everything -- we're not going to be able to produce in cities the amount of wheat and corn in our daily diet. But why can't we produce a lot of our fresh vegetables and even some of our fruits?
I've been involved with a couple of efforts to raise funds for small-scale farming of fish in small circular tanks, with the water either static or recycled through integration with hydroponic production of lettuce, basil, tomatoes. These things can both reduce the input from the outside of at least some of our foods, and improve people's lives tremendously.
I have friends in Manhattan who have been involved in turning abandoned, ugly lots into beautiful community gardens, cutting across their misuse by dangerous elements, such as drug users, and bringing together the community. People frequent these gardens on hot summer evenings and hang out there. The children are involved in things like putting on plays on a small stage. These gardens are part of what keeps their spirits lifted and are strengthening their community -- and it's just downright beautiful! All while producing fresh tomatoes and other foods for the table at home.
Q: You touched on the interrelationship of environmental sustainability and economic sustainability -- or ecological economics -- in considering throughput. Can you add anything to the debate on this connection?
A: Neoclassical economists talk about efficiency, but there is debate about how does one decide whether an economic activity is being conducted efficiently? Our economies have to follow this same principle that has worked for ecosystems for eons, which is to reduce that throughput.
If we took that approach, we would have more sustainable economies in the sense that they could persist in a particular form for much longer, and a lot of people participating in them would have a better chance of having livelihoods. That economy would be more compatible with environmental goals.
But it would be too simplistic to say that's the only thing needed for economic sustainability. There are many other issues, which I am not an expert in. But one example I can think of is the issue of property rights. Hernando de Soto [a Peruvian economist] has been making the argument for a long time -- and winning increasing support -- that the only way to pull the poor around the world out of poverty is if countries establish systems where they can gain rights to property. Right now it's almost impossible for them to have adequate rights to property. Some are squatters and don't have the rights to the homes where they are living.
Then it'll become easier for them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become active participants in the economy. That will have feedback to environmental sustainability because we have study after study showing when people are desperate, because they are really poor, they are more likely to destroy their environment -- like cut down the last tree for firewood because they don't have any other choices. They're stuck with having to survive. Economic security is totally tied to environmental sustainability, and therefore, to economic sustainability.
Q: As you have touched on the global perspective, perhaps you'd like to comment on achieving environmental and economic sustainability in a global economy?
A: We have to do the same thing, but the problem with economic relations at the global level -- with treaties and mechanisms to regulate them like the WTO -- is that one loses good connections between an economic action that might either benefit that kind of economic sustainability we talked about, or that might harm it and the community causing that action.
One of the most egregious examples is the generation of toxic waste by a rich country like the United States -- dead batteries, for example -- and instead of dealing with the problem here at home, the global economy allows us to export those waste batteries to factories that are supposedly able to reprocess those batteries, but the reality is horrifically dangerous conditions for the workers with acid water running all over the place. If we were forced to deal with the waste at home, we might decide we didn't want to keep generating thousands of tons of toxic batteries, that we should find a way to change that technology. Talk about challenging innovative chemical and electrical engineers to come up with new kinds of batteries, or even switch to solar technologies, etc., so we don't generate that waste stream.
This is the downside of the global economy. To amplify the missing feedback signal, that missing connection in the global economy between the cause of the action and its effect, let's continue the battery story. The average American who buys batteries for her radio or his flashlight or whatever, is blissfully ignorant of the disposal problem because the harm is happening to people and an environment on the other side of the planet. They don't see the feedback immediately in their community.
So for the global economy to be compatible with this idea of reducing throughputs to make our economy more environmentally sustainable, we have to find a way to manage that disconnect. I don't know what the answer to that is. It is a serious challenge.
Q: We're able to live without the consequences of our own actions.
A: That's the main point. If you look at the issues surrounding labor rights, it's the same situation. An average American mother goes into a shoe store with her teenage kid and buys him a pair of basketball shoes or whatever, and unless they are assertive about finding out how these sneakers were produced, they have no way of knowing whether they were produced in a sweat-labor factory, where workers are badly treated and workers' labor rights -- that would never be trampled on in this country -- are being totally trampled on.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to say about what local and state governments can do to promote sustainability and what technologies they can use to that end?
A: It is really important for everybody to understand sustainability isn't just one specific end point that everybody on the planet has to reach in the exact same way. It's not just one outcome or one solution. Communities have to decide what they want to sustain -- which is why it is so important to have a participatory democratic process. We've been talking about aspects of the environment, but there may be other things they also want to sustain. What do they want to sustain? For how long do they want to be sure they can sustain it? This implies they will want to figure out what kinds of monitoring systems and government systems should be put in place to increase the chances of being able to sustain that ideal for that long. What trade-offs are they willing to accept? Because there is no free lunch in the world.
People have to realize sustainability is not a magic bullet; it's not one end point. It's more a way of framing where you want to be in the future. It should not be up to some government commissioner of some state agency or the Department of Agriculture or of Trade and Economic Development to decide unilaterally, or with a close set of advisers, "We're going to promote technology X, and we think it's going to achieve sustainability in ways A, B and C." There has to be some kind of bottom up, more participatory process. First to decide what the sustainability goals are, then to lay out what the options are, and then make decisions. This is where our legislators and people in the administrative branch have to play a role in the making of those decisions, but with as much public input as possible, and then implementing those decisions.
None of this makes it easier, but I think it's the only way. You have to go through that hard "thinking through deliberation" at the beginning if you want to end up with policies that will be implemented and will make a difference. Otherwise it's just going to be a lot of hand waving, and 50 years from now, we'll be in a worse condition than we are today.
