Saving the planet: how to lose a cause
After decades of trying, Norwegian environmentalist Jurgen Randers concludes we lack the will to save the earth, writes Sue Blaine
ENVIRONMENTALIST Jurgen Randers says he has found contentment in giving up the fight to save the planet, but the fact that he is still on the campaign trail gives the lie to this assertion.
It is true Randers no longer believes there is any chance that humanity will make the sacrifices to save the earth from the negative effects of climate change, despite having the technological means to do so without too much cost.
What is apparent, however, is that although he says this no longer keeps him up at night, he does still care.
You can’t blame him for throwing in the placard.
For 40 years, Randers campaigned, as a scientist, a businessman and an environmentalist.
He held to the belief that once people really “got” the message, they would reduce and adapt the ways in which they consumed the earth’s finite resources.
It all began in 1972 with the book that made Randers famous in certain circles. The Limits to Growth, which explored how exponential growth interacts with finite resources, sold 9-million copies and was printed in 26 languages. It sparked a lot of thinking and talking, and no real action.
Although the problem is now a crisis, Randers views it as a fact that people the world over will still not do what it takes to avert the crisis.
When you recall the endless rounds of climate change talks that take place under the United Nations every year, you almost feel compelled to cede the point.
“The climate problem will not be solved simply because we choose not to solve it. Humanity is in the process of postponing action until it is too late. Not too late that the world will come to an end, but so late that our grandchildren will have a harder life than if we had acted decisively today.”
Randers’s disillusionment — if it is that, and at least part of it is — is set out in a new book, 2052: a Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, which he wrote last year.
“It’s the story of humanity not rising to the occasion,” he says. It is not catastrophic, but it is not a pretty picture.
Randers, however, has figured out that, at 67, he will not live to see any real crisis. For this, he is grateful. Sort of.
“The good thing, for me, is that, over the next 20 years, I don’t see any big, new, catastrophic event. Not for an upper middle-class Norwegian individual,” he says.
“Am I happy? Probably yes. I have got used to this idea. I am happier now than I was before I wrote the book, because I know what has been lost. The big moral dilemma for me is that my ultimate goal is to improve the world. I must not demotivate those who have energy left.”
“People ask what should be done, but I say that is not an interesting question because whatever it is, it won’t be done,” he says.
Randers locates his environmentalism in a deepseated respect and love for “untouched wilderness” that reaches back to his Oslo childhood, when the forest to the north of the Norwegian capital lay on his doorstep.
“Untouched wilderness is fabulous. I happened to grow up on the boundary of the wilderness…. That forest is 70km deep. We never even got into it. It’s awe-inspiring, interesting, rich. I am much less interested in human cultural achievements,” he says.
But Randers was 25 before he became conscious of this aspect of his persona. That was 1970, when he went to the US’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study physics “because my father was a physicist and the apple does not fall far from the tree”.
The good thing, for me, is that, over the next 20 years I don’t see any big, new, catastrophic event
During his time at MIT he realised, to his shock, that nature was not infinite or strong. “I found there were no spots on earth that were untouched, where the trees were not cut down or the water untouched, or very few. Nature was second class to urban living, parks and things.”
Randers used his mathematics and physics training to perform systems analysis to forecast scenarios for the planet.
The result was The Limits to Growth, and his 40-year fight to save what was left.
“For the first 10 years, I was embedded in the belief structure that says that if you just make people aware, they will stop cutting down the trees, bleaching the coral. That is not so. People are much more interested in destroying nature. I realised we would have to wait 20 years for humanity to mature.”
In the meantime, Randers ran a business school and was on many bank and investment house boards — “all exceedingly helpful because it shows you how decisions are made and priorities set”.
After 15 years in the business world, Randers was appointed deputy director-general of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Switzerland.
It was 1994 and the idea of sustainability was just going mainstream.
It was also the period just after the Soviet Union came apart at the seams, and a consultant suggested that the WWF issue certificates to countries that protected ecosystems, so a sceptical Randers advertised the WWF’s Gifts to the Earth certificate and was stunned when, four days later, he got a phone call from the Sakha Republic. He grins. “Yes, it exists, it’s in Siberia,” he says of the republic, a “federal subject” of Russia and a place Wikipedia describes as “larger than Argentina and just smaller than India”.
“The phone call said that the prime minister and four cabinet ministers wanted to come to Geneva to obtain the certificate. The president had decided, not very democratically, to protect a quarter of the country. That was more land than we had been able to protect in decades.”
The Gift to the Earth campaign did well, and for a time hope lifted in Randers’s heart.
“Even the capitalists looked like they cared. The governor of Florida said he would save the underwater environment of the Keys. For a while it looked like we could achieve harmony between man and nature.” It was not to be. Then Randers left the WWF to return to Norway to raise his children in his homeland.
In 2005, he was asked by the Norwegian government to devise a plan through which Norway would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds by 2050.
“What a tremendously positive experience for a man who had been worrying about this for decades,” he says.
In 2006, the commission he headed came up with a plan that involved the need for about 15 parliamentary decisions to meet the target at a capital outlay that would by no means cripple the economy.
What happened next was a replay of Randers’s post-Limits to Growth experience.
It was also the final straw for him.
“Norway has probably passed about one-and-a-half of these decisions.”