Holger Terp, Editor of the Danish Peace Academy, sends the following announcement: New book in the Danish Peace Academy.

John Scales Avery: Crisis 21: Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century, May 2009. The aim of this book is to explore the links between the various problems facing civilization today. Although the problems are well known, it is useful to list them:

THREATS TO THE ENVIRONMENT
The global environment is being destroyed by excessive consumption in the industrialized countries, combined with rapid population growth in developing nations. Climate change threatens to melt glaciers and polar ice. Complete melting of Greenland’s inland ice would result in a 7 meter rise in sea level. Complete melting of the Antarctic ice cap would produce an additional 5 meters of rise.

GROWING POPULATION, VANISHING RESOURCES
The fossil fuel era is ending. By 2050, oil and natural gas will be prohibitively expensive. They will no longer be used as fuels, but will be reserved as feedstocks for chemical synthesis. Within a hundred years, the same will be true of coal. The reserve indices for many metals are between 10 and 100 years. Reserve indices are determined as the size of the known reserves of metals divided by the current annual rates of production.

THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS
It is predicted that by 2050, the world’s population of humans will reach 9 billion. This is just the moment when the oil and natural gas, on which modern energy-intensive agriculture depend, will become so expensive that they will no longer be used as fuels. Climate change may also contribute to a global food crisis.

Melting of Himalayan glaciers threatens the summer water supplies of both India and China. Rising sea levels threaten to inundate low-lying agricultural land, and aridity produced by climate change may reduce grain harvests. Furthermore, aquifers throughout the world are being overdrawn, and water tables are falling. Topsoil is also being lost. These elements combine to produce a threat of widespread famine by the middle of the 21st century.

INTOLERABLE ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
Today 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day–1.1 billion on less than $1 per day. 18 million of our fellow humans die each year from poverty-related causes. Meanwhile, obesity is becoming a serious health problem in the rich part of the world. In 2006, 1.1 billion people lacked safe drinking water, and waterborne diseases killed an estimated 1.8 million people. The developing countries are also the scene of a resurgence of other infectious diseases, such as malaria, drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR
Despite the end of the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear catastrophe remains severe. During the Cold War, the number and power of nuclear weapons reached insane heights–50,000 nuclear weapons with a total explosive power equivalent to roughly a million Hiroshima bombs. Expressed differently, the total explosive power was equivalent to 20 billion tons of TNT, 4 tons for each person on earth. Today the total number of these weapons has been cut approximately in half, but there are still enough to destroy human civilization many times over. The danger of accidental nuclear war remains severe, since many nuclear missiles are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be red within minutes of a warning being received.

Continued over a long period of time, the threat of accident will grow to a near certainty. Meanwhile, the number of nations possessing nuclear weapons is growing, and there is a danger that if an unstable government is overthrown (for example, Pakistan’s), the country’s nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of subnational groups. Against nuclear terrorism there is no effective defense.

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
In 2008, world military budgets reached a total of 1.47 trillion dollars (i.e. 1.47 million million dollars). This amount of money is almost too large to be imagined. The fact that it is being spent means that many people are making a living from the institution of war. Wealthy and powerful lobbies from the military-industrial complex are able to influence mass media and governments. Thus the institution of war persists, although we know very well that it is a threat to civilization and that it responsible for much of the suffering that humans experience.

LIMITS TO GROWTH
A “healthy” economic growth rate of 4% per year corresponds to an increase by a factor of 50 in a century, by a factor of 2,500 in two centuries and 125,000 in three centuries. No one can maintain that resource-using, waste-producing economic activities can continue to grow except by refusing to look more than a certain distance into the future. It seems likely that the boundaries for certain types of growth will be reached during the 21st century. (Culture can of course continue to grow.) We face a difficult period of transition from
an economy that depends on growth for its health to a new economic system: steady-state economics.

http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/crises.pdf

This new book may be published freely on other websites.

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JE comments:  I always enjoy hearing from our friend in Denmark (statistically, the world’s happiest nation), Holger Terp.  There may indeed be no such thing as a free lunch, but a free book is just as good.  Click the link above to download the handsome 300+-page volume from John Scales Avery.

For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA