Do as I say, not as I do

February 2002

Sites of meetings often set the tone of conversations. In August 2001 we had the first tri-national meeting in the border village of Assis Brasil with over 50 persons from Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru gathering to talk about logging activity in the region. The town of Assis Brasil has all of 2,000 people, and the participants were scattered about in several small hotels around town and in the neighboring Peruvian village of Inapari. The meeting was held in a large room that doubled as a discothèque on weekends.

We found a magical way of beginning the sessions on time: breakfast was served in the same room where we had the sessions. Then a rumor circulated that those who arrived late ran the risk of getting no breakfast. One day the meeting could have started 15 minutes early, a miracle in Latin America.

At one such breakfast I chatted with a Bolivian social scientist who has American collaborators and felt relaxed enough to talk frankly about such collaboration. Guillermo was tired of hearing Americans lecturing about how Bolivia needs to stop deforestation. "One American colleague," he said, "tells us that we must stop deforestation and carbon release to the atmosphere. At the same time, he commutes from his suburban home, emitting a plume of smoke from his gas-guzzling SUV. He has an expansive home that could house several Bolivian families, but he talks about us limiting our economic growth in order to preserve biodiversity."

In truth, many of us have built our careers precisely on helping poor countries limit deforestation and preserve biodiversity. Would we want to abide by Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, i.e., behave as if your acts would become universal laws? This is not only a question for individuals--be they bleeding heart environmentalists or hardheaded businessmen--but also of countries.

If everyone emitted carbon to the atmosphere as Americans do, then instead of 6 billion tons of carbon a year (BTC/yr) being spewed upward to the sky, we would have a world emission rate of 30 BTC/yr. If 6 BTC/yr is bad, imagine five times worse. The world couldn't take 6 billion Americans. So then, what is seen as the implication of our current model of development? It has to be limited to the few, meaning us. Mid-east oil is "ours," and even the newly conservative CNN ran a piece about the U.S. building an empire in central Asia, probably to maintain access to oil supplies. If we accept the implications of accelerated climate change from fossil fuel use, we need to be sure that others don't follow our current model. It seems that we have two possible choices.

One would be to stifle the consumption of others in the world, or more crassly, keep them poor. This is the growing conclusion of many (most?) outside the U.S. about our society goals; their perception becomes our reality, with all its ramifications for world peace, terrorism. Thirty years down the road, well within the life span of young Brazilians whom I advise, the world of this choice won't be at all pretty. More than 95% of the world won't be American but will be feeling that Americans are keeping them down.

The other choice would be for the U.S. to develop a model of use that could be extended to other countries. The technological challenges for such a model are not as great as those that would be caused by the restructuring of our social goals. One such goal might be to become truly democratic and reduce our emissions rate to the current global average of 1 ton of carbon per year per human being. This would be a five-fold drop in our emissions. Maybe we can't get there right away, but at least it gives us a direction.

Once I heard a man from Somalia speak about such goals. We are all hypocrites, he said, because our actions don't attain our rhetoric. The real issue, he added, is how close we can get.

If we embark seriously on the second choice, maybe Guillermo will find wisdom rather than irritation in our advice.

©Woods Hole Research Center, 2008