PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
concluding that the work was spurious. At the same time the Defense
Department ordered 5,000 paperback copies for “routine distribution to
overseas libraries”. Then, in 1972 Lewin admitted authorship of the entire
document. He commented as follows:
What I intended was simply to pose the issue of war and peace in
a provocative way. To deal with the essential absurdity of the fact
that the war system, however, much deplored, is nevertheless accepted
as part of the necessary order of things. To caricature the
bankruptcy of the think tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientistic
thinking to its logical ends. And perhaps, with luck, to extend
the scope of public discussion of “peace planning” beyond its usual
stodgy limits.
While reading Lewin’s fictitious report, I realized that his prediction
on pollution is now proving ominously realistic. One to one-and-a-half
generations from the mid-1960s brings us to the early twenty-first century.
The damage we have done to our environment during this period
can be equated to the major destruction caused by war. The billions of
dollars that will be required, along with new technologies to replace the
old, to rescue the environment can be likened to the vast economic and
technological resources necessary to repair the damage caused by a major
war. In this sense, then, pollution is proving to be a successful
surrogate for war, but at the same time, there is some good news. Pollution
abatement today in the Unites States uses around 2 percent of the
Gross National Product. If as a war-substitute it must reach 10 percent,
the expenditures for pollution abatement growing along a natural growth
curve will “tunnel through” the current economic recession and contribute
significantly to the economic recovery leading to the prosperity
predicted in the first quarter of the next century.
The West’s favorite candidate for a major war in the 1990s has always
been expected from the East, but this notion had to be abandoned
as Communism went through end-of-life spasms. What still remains a
credible alternative is an all-out war on pollution. It could be argued that
we have not yet marshaled the vast resources necessary to win that war,
but it might be noted that Earth Day falls on Lenin’s birthday!
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