Charles Perrow GLOBAL CATASTROPHES AND TRENDS: The Next Fifty Years. Vaclav Smil. xii + 307 pp. The MIT Press, 2008. $29.95. 
Prolific writer Vaclav Smil characterizes his latest book, Global Catastrophes and Trends, as “a multifaceted attempt to identify major factors that will shape the global future and to evaluate their probabilities and potential impacts.” Smil is fluent in many languages of the East and the West, and his voluminous citations demonstrate an impressive command of the literature. His two major themes are sudden, catastrophic events and unfolding trends that are catastrophic in their accumulative consequences. The past 50 years have been exceptionally stable and unusually benign in global terms, Smil says, but this will change. The risks of what are, in his view, the two most likely cataclysmic future threats—nuclear war and pandemic influenza—can be substantially reduced, he believes. He does not see terrorism as a great risk. He also notes that mega-eruptions of volcanoes are quite rare and that the risk of a near-Earth object striking our planet is even more remote and can be handled. Instead, it is unfolding trends that worry him most and occasion the book’s most striking observations. … It takes Smil but a few pages to dismiss Europe as a world power and foresee its misery. At its peak in 1900, Europe accounted for about 40 percent of global economic product; by 2050, it may account for as little as 10 percent. It has had a population implosion—the fertility rate there, now 1.5 children per mother, is well below the replacement level of 2.1 children and is unlikely to rebound meaningfully. … Japan will fare no better than Europe. In the 1980s it was seen as an unbeatable economic titan; now its population is shrinking to the point that whole villages have been abandoned. By the middle of this century it will have become the most aged of all the aging high-income societies, with few pensions and too few workers to provide for the elderly. As for China, Smil treats the skyrocketing of its economy with considerable irony:
What a remarkable symbiosis: a Communist government guaranteeing a docile work force that labors without rights and often in military camp conditions in Western-financed factories so that multinational companies can expand their profits, increase Western trade deficits, and shrink non-Asian manufacturing.
… China’s population is aging rapidly (with almost no pensions), and the sex ratio is unfavorable (too few females). Income inequality is quickly increasing, and the degradation of the environment is extreme. With 20 percent of the world’s population in 2005, China had only 9 percent of the world’s farmland and 7 percent of the world’s freshwater. All of the world’s grain exports together would fill less than two-thirds of the country’s projected demand for food. It is already the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. In Smil’s analysis, it will not become a superpower in the next 50 years. … But humankind’s fortunes will have less to do with the economic policies and strategic moves of nations than with transformations brought about by climate change, environmental destruction and even antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Much of chapter 4, “Environmental Change,” is dauntingly technical, but this material rewards close attention. It is evident that we have a great deal of knowledge about these topics, but the complexity of the interactions between environmental factors is so great that we end up with absolutely contradictory findings in many areas.
The Worst Is Yet to Be
