A “Bottleneck for Humanity”
“I’m not thinking about today, I’m thinking about the future for my grandkids and children of the future: how we can sustain ourselves during this change in our atmosphere.”
—Mayor Thomas M. Menino at the release of the City of Boston’s sweeping plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050
“Once again, Boston is firing the shot heard round the world.”
—Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey, Chair, House Select Committee on Climate Change
An assessment of change and progress in Boston—hub of the nation’s fifth largest metropolitan area and a world center of education and innovation— must take place in a global context. A long view of key global trends and major external forces will help to enhance the region’s capacity to plan, innovate, and compete.These long-term trends are sobering. It appears that the world community has entered a rare time, referred to by evolutionary biologists as “punctuated disequilibrium,” when business as usual gives way to sudden disjuncture. Most scientists believe that the next half century will test humanity’s singular ingenuity and that current trends, if not abated, will negatively and irrevocably alter life on Earth as it has been lived for thousands of years. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson calls the coming decades a “bottleneck for humanity.”
Humanity is growing at an unprecedented pace, particularly in less developed nations that are modernizing rapidly and shifting the center of economic gravity eastward for the first time in 500 years. Economic globalization is also intensifying the competition for talent, jobs, and natural resources. And after 150 years, fossil-fueled industrialization is reaching its environmental limit in documented global warming.
Whether expressed as a tightening bottleneck, a sudden collapse, or a successful transition to an environmentally sustainable global economy, the convergence of these trends is likely to be highly disruptive.
MIT president Susan Hockfield and other experts have said that the world community has less than a decade to put in place policies and practices that may forestall the most catastrophic effects of global climate change. Averting the worse-case scenario will require unprecedented levels of global collaboration, the efficient use of resources, and innovation.
In this extraordinary period of change, one thing is certain. With its unparalleled innovative capacity, Greater Boston will be pushed or pulled to embrace once again the region’s historic role as the “City on a Hill.” What follows are brief summaries of global trends that are already buffeting Greater Boston.