Conservation biologists should reject the assumption of a future that's manifestly similar to what we experience today, only more so. There is a major discontinuity coming; it's very close. I doubt very much whether the completely globalized, totally managed, centralized world that the pundits predict is going to happen. Techno-economic globalization is nearing its apogee; the coming slide down the other side of the curve will be very rapid. The machine is breaking down as I speak: the system is self-destructing. There is only a short but very damaging period of remaining expansion left.

Now if I were playing it comparatively safe, I would stick to the more obvious kinds of support for my statement, especially the things I know about as an ecologist. I would fill up the rest of the talk with those. I would talk about growing environmental problems, especially certain kinds of pollution and ecosystem destabilization. Global soil erosion; global deforestation; chemical pollution and exhaustion of freshwater aquifers in major agricultural areas; desertification; saltwater intrusion of aquifers in developing coastal areas; saline seeps, like the ones that have ruined so much prime agricultural land in Australia and in the U.S. southwest; growing, worldwide resistance of insects to insecticides; acid deposition; on-farm transfer of genes for herbicide resistance from crops to weeds; wholesale loss of precious agricultural genetic resources in the form of both wild relatives of crop plants and traditional agricultural varieties; the collapse of the world's fisheries; the decline, especially in Europe, of mycorrhizal fungi needed for the growth of many species of trees; the effects of increasing CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere, including but not limited to global warming; the hole in the ozone layer; the supposed change in the earth's rate of orbital rotation and tilt in the earth's axis because of increased storage of water behind dams in the northern hemisphere; the proliferation of edge-related, fragmented-habitat-related diseases, such as Lyme disease; the accelerated spread of deleterious exotic species, such as the Asian tiger mosquito; the emergence of new, ecologically influenced diseases, and the resurgence of old diseases, including, for example, the return of locally mosquito-transmitted malaria to New Jersey and New York City since 1991; the alleged worldwide decline in the human sperm count possibly related to environmental endocrine disrupters; and so on -- all of these things associated with the techno-economic system now in place.

Then I would widen my cast a bit and bring in such processes as the depletion of non-renewable resources; the breakdown in local communities and family structure, which is now reaching epidemic proportions; the corresponding breakdown in the cultural transmission of agricultural knowledge; unemployment; the widening gap between rich and poor; the widespread displacement of populations; the rampant social pathology of crime, terrorism, and war; the weakening and destabilization of nations, etc. -- all of these breakdowns reinforced by a catastrophic growth of human population.

Some of the problems I mentioned are conjectural, some are not; some are controversial, some are not; but even if only half or a fifth of them materialized as intractable problems, that would be quite enough to bring down this technological power structure.

But that's not what I want to speak about. I'm going to leave this comparatively safe turf and talk about another set of forces that will stop the machine, the forces of internal breakdown that are inherent in its very structure and operations. The first of these internal problems is a catastrophic decline in our ability to use self-criticism and feedback to correct our problems. Here is an example. The Savannah River Nuclear Facility in South Carolina, where nuclear weapons and components used to be made, had, in 1963, five operating nuclear reactors and a workforce of 6,000 people. In the early 1980s, there were three reactors left operating and a workforce of somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 people. The last reactor was shut down in 1988. By 1993, with no reactors working, the workforce was 25,000. By 1996, downsizing had reduced this workforce to 16,000, still 10,000 above the number of workers needed when the facility was functioning at peak capacity.

This example shows a lack of feedback. The results and consequences of the things we do are not being evaluated and used to influence our next actions.

A second internal weakness of the machine that runs the world is incessant reorganization, often facilitated by information technology, and causing frequent disruption of established social relationships among people who work and live together. Changes are occurring too rapidly and too often to permit social evolution to work properly in business, in government, in education, or in anything touched by them. I won't go into the reasons for so much reorganization, but I will give one example.

An unusually virulent attack of reorganization has just struck my university. For a year or so, a university committee convened by the Provost's Office and led by a powerful professor of political science terrorized the five New Brunswick campuses, gathering "information" and threatening major reorganization. Their report was finally delivered to the Provost. We waited anxiously, not knowing where the blow was going to fall. Then it happened. The President suddenly, without warning, abolished the Provost's Office. The report vanished without a trace, all of the activities once coordinated by the Provost fell into chaos, and the administrative survivors were left wandering around like ants whose nest has been poked with a stick. No doubt things will settle down soon, perhaps in time for the next reorganization.

Another internal problem of the system is the acceleration of obsolescence. Although obsolescence is an inherent part of any technology that isn't moribund, several factors have combined in the last few decades to exaggerate it out of all manageable proportions. One of these factors is the sheer number of people involved in technology, especially information technology, each of whom has to change something or make something new to justify a salary. Another factor is the market's insistence on steadily increasing sales, which in turn mandates an accelerated regimen of planned obsolescence. It's now possible to buy a new computer and find that it's obsolete before you take it out of the crate.

The social disruption caused by accelerated obsolescence is well known, but a less familiar side effect is the loss of valuable knowledge. The technical side of this was described by Jeff Rothenberg in an article in the January 1995 issue of Scientific American, entitled "Ensuring the longevity of digital documents." It turns out that neither the hardware nor the software that underly the information revolution has much staying power. "It is only slightly facetious," says Rothenberg, "to say that digital information lasts forever -- or five years, whichever comes first." Even though the most durable form of digital storage media, the optical disk, has a physical lifetime of only 30 years and an estimated time to obsolescence of ten years, it's the software that gives the most worries. Digital documents are evolving so rapidly that shifts in the basic forms of documents are frequent. New forms don't necessarily subsume their predecessors; translation backwards or forwards in time is often impossible or very difficult and tedious, and takes great effort.

The result is the loss of much of each previous generation's work, a generation being defined as 5-20 years. To give an example not cited by Rothenberg, the information from the first Landsat satellite in the early and mid-1970s, collected at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, is now priceless material for any evaluation of global change. But that information was stored on magnetic tapes, and much, maybe most of it, is irretrievably lost because of deterioration of the tapes, which were never backed up in any other medium. In fact, most were never even looked at.

Another example of information loss, which I mention without elaboration, is the enormous loss of information, reliability, and useability inherent in the widespread conversion from paper library card catalogs to electronic ones.

Technology-driven obsolescence aside, the rapid shifting of ground and superseding of prior forms that now characterizes our entire techno-economic system, including higher education, is causing a wholesale forgetting of useful skills and knowledge -- everything from how to operate a lathe, to how to build a cathedral, to how to identify different species of earthworms. Whole branches of valid and useful learning, such as comparative biochemistry, are disappearing from the universities. The machine is jettisoning both knowledge and diversity (a special kind of information) simultaneously. It is hard to imagine how it can function much longer with this kind of self-mutilation. To give an example of the loss of diversity, Stephen Hall and John Ruane (Conservation Biology 7, 1993) have shown that the higher the GNP in the different countries of Europe -- the more they are part of the system -- the higher the percentage of extinct breeds of livestock. I'm sure that the same relationship could be shown for agricultural crop varieties, or endangered languages and cultures.

A fourth intrinsic problem with the system is its increasing complexity and interlinkage. Ecologists used to think that highly complex systems were extremely stable: it was Robert May, then at Princeton, who showed that this stability-complexity relationship is not so simple. Thus, in addition to their prohibitive cost, complex systems are especially vulnerable to certain kinds of perturbations, and the linkage can cause system-wide failure when the collapse of one component brings down many others that are linked to it.

Also, as the monitoring, evaluation, and attempts at control of our world get more and more complicated, more modelling, with its associated assumptions and simplifications, is needed. This in turn causes all kinds of errors, some no doubt serious, most of them hidden. One small example: according to the British scientist James Lovelock, before the ozone hole was discovered by a lone pair of British observers using an old-fashioned and inexpensive instrument, it was observed, measured, and ignored by very expensive satellite-borne instruments that had been programmed to reject data that were substantially different from values predicted by an atmospheric model.

Another seriously troublesome feature of complexity compounded by centralized control is its unresponsiveness to local conditions. This can be seen contributing to system breakdown in everything from agriculture to managed care medicine to the handling of regional wars.

A fifth intrinsic problem with the system could be called "information glut." We assume these days that information is like money: you can't have too much of it. But in fact, too much information is at least as bad as too little: it masks ignorance, buries important facts, and incapacitates minds by overwhelming that critical capacity for brilliant selectivity that characterizes the human brain. This is compounded by the fact that quantity and quality are so often inversely related in information flux.

A sixth intrinsic problem is the high speed of decision-making (Rifkin's "nanosecond culture"), which is a consequence of modern, computer-assisted communications. This speed short-circuits the evolutionary process in decision-making, eliminating time for empirical feedbacks and measured judgment. I see the collapse of Baring's Bank because of the activities of one of its traders in Singapore as an example.

One final, internal problem of the system -- maybe the most important --deserves some attention: namely, a totally reductionist, managed world is a world without its highest inspiration. With no recognized higher power than the human-made system that the people in charge now worship, there can be no imitation of God, no vision of something greater to strive for. Human invention becomes narrow and pedestrian and shoddy. We lose our best models of durable working systems: people and their communities functioning within a moral order on the one hand; and nature, whose magnificent durability we will never totally comprehend, on the other. A bad model gives bad results. We have adopted a bad model, the global management model, and now we are living with the terrible consequences.

The present global world power system is a transient and terminal phase in a process that began 500 years ago with the emerging Age of Reason and its founders, Niccolo Machiavelli and Ignatius Loyola; and which has reached its zenith in the twentieth century, powered by the global arms trade and war and enabled by a soulless, greed-based economics backed by a hastily developed and uniquely dangerous technology (Saul 1992). This power system, with its transnational corporations, its giant military machines, its globalized financial system and world trade, its agribusiness used to build up industrial infrastructures at the expense of the world's farmers -- with its growing numbers of jobless people and people in bad jobs, with its endless refugees, with its trail of damaged cultures and damaged ecosystems, and with its fatal internal flaws, is now coming apart. As the great British philosopher Mary Midgley has said, "The house is on fire; we must wake up from this dream and do something about it."

What can we do? That's a very large question. Fortunately, I have only to try to answer a very small part of it here: "What can conservation biologists do to prepare themselves for the next century?"

We can start by understanding the changes that are now beginning to affect us. First, the oil which runs our whole economic and technical system -- even nuclear power -- is beginning to run out, and that, along with high costs associated with the internal problems I described, has left the industrial and non-industrial nations broke. Already, the flow of money for non-commercial, non-military "frills" such as guaranteed health care and conservation biology is being turned off at the tap. When most of the grants and fellowships disappear, when the field stations are deemed too expensive to keep, when the foundations see their corporate stock portfolios rapidly losing value, what can conservation biologists do?

Environmental awareness is declining. Direct experience of nature, especially among children in metropolitan areas, is way down. As Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble (1994) have put it: "We are concerned about how few children now grow up incorporating plants, animals, and places into their sense of home." How can a public that doesn't know nature be expected to support conservation biology, especially in a time of social and economic upheaval?

Also, until now, conservation has been able to depend on a rich resource of plant and animal taxonomists, both professional and amateur, to identify species and define taxonomic relationships. During the late 1960s and 1970s, however, it became evident that biology departments would no longer support taxonomy and natural history: it was molecular biology that occupied the entire stage. Thirty years later, classical taxonomists are an aging lot; there are few graduate students who call themselves taxonomists or systematists; and natural history is vanishing from the academic scene (Ehrenfeld 1993). True, molecular systematics is thriving, but most of its practitioners are lab-based rather than field-based. The near demise of classical taxonomy and natural history has left an enormous void. Today, there are many genera, even families, of organisms that have only one or no practicing taxonomists familiar with them. The situation is worsening, and is especially troublesome for tropical species (Parnell 1993). How can conservation biologists function if neither we nor anyone else knows anything about the organisms we are trying to save?

The beginning of the twenty-first century is certain to be unsettled and often dangerous for the majority of people in both the industrial and non-industrial worlds. There will be no magic formula to guarantee that a conservation biologist can work effectively under these conditions, although some individuals will be lucky. But I believe that there is a strategy that can help us cope with some of the problems I have described -- a strategy that may, at the very least, tip the odds in our favor.

This strategy has six elements. I advise conservation biologists to consider them carefully:

1. Minimize the cost, logistic complexity, and technological demands of your research.

2. Design your research to be flexible, so that your methods and even some of your objectives can be modified as changing circumstances warrant.

3. Take every opportunity that you can find to learn, in depth, the taxonomy of the groups you are studying and the natural history of as many parts of your ecosystem as it is possible to know.

4. Have a practical trade, a skill, or an alternative occupation that you can resort to if conservation biology cannot support you on a full-time basis. There are trades that are always in demand, regardless of circumstances. Pick one.

5. Whenever possible, design your research to include the participation and wisdom of the local community. Make it your goal that local people understand, approve of, participate in, and benefit from your work. Make a special effort to involve local schools and schoolchildren; work with the teachers and try to budget some money to help them incorporate your project into their curricula.

6. Before the project ends, develop a mechanism to monitor the system and continue local involvement after you are gone.

And beyond conservation biology there is a larger lesson to learn. Both George Orwell and Wendell Berry have said that we are going to have to learn how to live a little poorer. Not poorer in spirit, not poorer in happiness, just poorer in the material things we don't need. If we can learn this lesson, maybe the best parts of civilization and nature will survive after all. We shouldn't ask for more than that.

Elements of this talk have been published as part of a more extensive article entitled: "The Coming Collapse of the Age of Technology," by David Ehrenfeld, Tikkun, Jan./Feb. 1999, pp. 33-38, 71-72.