Facing up to global challenges
Universities must play the early- warning role as world faces threats involving disease, food, health and a deteriorating environment, warns Alan Wildeman
As a child on the prairies I was told that if, on a still day with no sounds, I put my ear to a railroad track I’d be able to hear an approaching train before I could see it. A simple thing to do and a bit of satisfaction when the whistle blew some minutes later.
Flashing ahead four decades, mostly spent teaching and studying biology in universities, I again have my ear to the tracks. But a far more menacing engine approaches. It heralds its arrival in the popular press, in the academic literature and in political and public debates. It is the embodiment of what I will refer to as the indisputable global challenges facing mankind.
It is about food, health and the environment. It is about biology, and how humans deal with it. Do we really grasp these challenges, and how a society can respond?
Let’s start with the biology. By 2050, the world’s population will exceed 9 billion. Food Outlook, published quarterly by the U. N., tallies what our species eats and where it comes from. World food production, particularly for cereals, now lags behind population growth. Even China, amid the giddiness about its economic muscle, is drawing down 40 million tonnes a year from its dwindling cereals reserves, and is predicted to soon be reliant on imports.
In the 1960s, the world’s grain stockpiles were sufficient for a year’s worth of consumption. They would now last less than three months.
At the same time, the decline in availability and rise in cost of oil ( which fuels tractors and combines, and powers the production of fertilizer and other inputs) makes the food landscape even more precarious. The relationship between oil and food is more crucial than that between oil and the automobile. At its core, agriculture is about plants and animals — about living systems — and how we produce them.
Health is the second global challenge. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, infections, obesity, and malnutrition gnaw away at our numbers. They, along with new emerging diseases, trump most other spending priorities.
In countries with little money, they gnaw without restraint. The threat of dying evokes the most primal urges of self- interest. Some parts of the world have the best health care ever available to our species. Yet, whether it be SARS or BSE or bird flu, new threats unravel lives and economies. We are afraid, and with just cause. Those diseases are deadly. It matters not that the odds of contracting them may be small. The idea of pandemics is frightening. We react to their aggressions with mass quarantine, with mass slaughter of animals, and with mass vaccinations. We do whatever is necessary to protect ourselves. About three- quarters of the new diseases affecting humans come from animals. The most notorious diseasecausing agents — bacteria and viruses — have the capacity to mutate into forms that further resist antibiotics and antiviral agents.
There is concern that the H5N1 strain of bird flu will mutate into a form that more readily spreads to humans and unleashes a global pandemic. The World Health Organization’s worst-case scenario predicts tens of millions of deaths.
Already 20 million people have died of AIDS, caused by a virus that through mutation also becomes more dangerous for humans.
Bird flu is caused by an influenza virus, and AIDS is caused by a retrovirus. The viruses are different, they are both insidious, and they are not easy to stop. Time has cruelly dulled concern about the ravages of AIDS and its staggering impact in Africa.
Bird flu was first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, and while most outbreaks have been in Asia, it is spreading. Both of these diseases are truly global. They thrive in a world in which cultures mingle and travel is commonplace. No one part of the world can forever keep diseases at bay. This is basic biology tearing at our social and cultural fabrics.
Underpinning food and health is the environment, the biggest challenge of them all. We do not tread lightly on this planet. Depletion of natural resources and arable land, pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and any one of a number of other trajectories are widespread. The U. N. identifies fresh water shortages and global warming as the most ominous threats. As an example, agriculture accounts for at least 70 per cent of all global fresh- water consumption, with more being needed to feed 9 billion. Using the crops we use, there simply is not enough water available. Renowned ecologist Barry Commoner said that everything is connected to everything else. We don’t want dams on waterways or drilling rigs in the ocean, but we want light and heat. We all contribute to environmental depletion. It is how we live. We could change our ways, but only by making ethically responsible choices that are based on knowledge. It will not be easy.
This takes me back to the question of how a society can respond.
U. S. historian Thomas Berry, among others, describes four pillars that define society: government, organized religion, industry and the academy, or, for the purposes here, our universities. Whether or not you agree with him, all four need to be engaged in confronting global challenges. Governments wrestle with things like Kyoto and international movement of food commodities. Religion holds suasion over the moral ballast in people. Industry makes the things we use. Where is the academy?
Universities are places where things that make up our world — science, economics, sociology, philosophy, literature, history and the arts — can be studied, debated and taught.
At the same time, they are increasingly being positioned as underpinning the knowledge- based economy governments are striving for.
This positioning is completely understandable and will create dividends for our economy. But it is far too restrictive. It misses at a deeper level the role of the academy in helping to understand how everything is connected to everything else.
Global challenges dovetail with human behaviour. The academy’s scholarship in the social sciences, arts and humanities can inform relationships of people with their communities and be the engine for understanding our multicultural country. Those disciplines enlighten how humans live. And how humans live is at the heart of decisions they will make about global challenges.
Universities are also where people learn how to do scientific research. It is the only pillar with this clear mandate. We need the best biologists and physicists and chemists to understand how things work. We need to know how viruses spread, how atoms collide, how plants evolve and how energy is created and captured. We need to learn more biology. We need crops that use less water on less land. We need to understand how new infectious diseases emerge and spread. We need to know how to make food healthier. We need to know the impact of losing species. But most critically, the vital role of academy — of universities — must be to provide the place where students put their ears to the tracks.
People should graduate with the skills, but also with the awareness that they have heard the train coming. Alan Wildeman is vice-president of research at the University of Guelph, where he taught in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. He has served for many years on review panels for the Medical Research Council and Canadian Institutes of Health Research.