See how it looked in 1976

America’s tricentennial—a look ahead

Three problems that concern futurologists

By Richard L. Strout | Staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Washington

As the United States puts the second 100-year candle on its birthday cake, it seems inevitable that an even more challenging future lies ahead before it lights the third.

National problems will become global; critical decisions will be made that, as always, are only dimly perceived as critical at the time. Awesome difficulties loom.

Meanwhile, the humdrum tasks of commonplace people will continue and will sustain the life of the republic, as they have in the past.

At each of America’s previous landmarks, people discerned problems that sooner or later had to be faced. But facing them was another matter. Thomas Jefferson put a philippic against slavery into the first draft of the Declaration of Independence; it was thrown out. It took the Civil War to settle the matter.

In 1876, in the Grant administration, a recession emphasized the need of a central banking system and a curb on lawless corporations. But it took half-a-dozen more panics to get the Federal Reserve system enacted, and the anti-trust law passed in the next century. Today, world problems do not come by ones or twos; sometimes it looks like a fire storm of crises ahead. Middle-age citizens silently rejoice that their children, not they, must face them: it sometimes takes all their resources merely to find a parking place downtown.

Three problems most concern futurologists: the population explosion; possible environmental deterioration; nuclear war.

The number of people on earth - presently 4 billion - will double at present rates in 30 years. Then, if unchecked, it will double at faster rates, so that theoretically by A.D. 2076 it would be 40 billion. But Lester R. Brown, former administrator of the International Development Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and now head of the nonprofit World Watch Institute, says that is absurd; spaceship
Earth cannot accommodate so many passengers.

The President’s Science Advisory Panel on World Food Supply (1967) reported that malnutrition already affects 60 percent of the population of underdeveloped nations; a committee of the National Research Council in a report, “Population and Food” (1975), hints that world population will level off (by war or famine) at not more than a billion: “In the long run, attainment of an average rate of increase very close to zero is inevitable.”

The issue is hotly debated. It is noted that the global birthrate is already coming down, particularly in urbanized, industrial countries and in authoritarian China by social pressure.

How to feed newcomers? The prospects for expanding food supplies depend on the economic, ecological, and technological factors. Present food sources can be expanded and stretched. But nearly every change requires expansion elsewhere; the so-called “green revolution” (development of strains of higher yielding grains) requires more fertilizer, more machines, more fuel, chemicals, and energy. A generation ago, Western Europe was the only food-importing region; today, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe (including the Soviet Union) are net grain importers. Virtually the entire world depends on North American (Canadian, U.S.) food exports. Population and food are problem No. 1 for America’s century No. 3.

Environment

Global energy consumption increases about 4 percent a year and doubles every 18 years, according to one computation. Industrial production grows around 7 percent a year and doubles every 10 years.

“If this trend were to continue for 50 years,” Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, declares, “raw-material demands would double five times and require a volume of resource extraction 30 times greater than the present demands of affluent countries.” By A.D. 2076 this would be multiplied again. Already some critical materials are short, he says, and there is no evidence that the world’s supplies are limitless.

In George Washington’s day, virtually all taxpayers were farmers and self-employed.

It is so no longer. The feeling of the inevitability of technological progress continues; people move into cities where 39 percent of the population is now located. A 50 percent figure is expected by A.D. 2000.

Technology still brilliantly raises living standards for the fortunate industrial countries, but now challenges earth, air, and water resources. Certainly with a potential of 40 billion people, and with a potential of output increased 1,000 times, the United Sates will be celebrating its tricentenary in A.D. 2076 on a busy little planet. Some environmentalists argue that the tolerance of the atmosphere for heat absorption will be reached by that time, with the inevitable climate changes.

So that is problem No. 2 for the third century.

Nuclear War

Social changes like those forecast bring global strains on political institutions, and some wonder if the United States can maintain its present industrial superiority. The story of the next 100 years may depend on whether America yields its supremacy gracefully or grudgingly.

America spends around $80 billion a year for the military (not including veterans’ pensions and the like). According to one estimate (Ruth Leger Sivard, “World Military and Social Expenditures, 1974”) worldwide national military expenditures in 1972 were around $225 billions – and this is probably conservative. One guess is that the United States has 11,000 nuclear warheads and Russia considerably less. A single H-bomb, according to Hans A. Bethe (“The Hydrogen Bomb II”) releases 1,000 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, with a 10-mile radius of destruction of buildings and perhaps 20 miles of life. One bomb, according to this estimate, could wipe out Chicago in a single flash.

‘Common sense will prevail’

Nothing like this will ever happen, optimists feel, nor will individual nuclear blackmail be permitted – the consequences are so devastating that common sense will prevail. Some even argue that this is a hopeful factor: a kind of peace-through-terror obtained already, they argue, between nuclear powers.
No nation will ever dare, they contend, to use the bomb first.

These are three problems most frequently mentioned for the United States and humanity in the next 100 years. How will this country respond?

History shows that America normally reaches for and supports strong leaders in time of strain: Lincoln stretched the Constitution in his day, for example; again in the 1932 depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted extraordinary power.

If America’s third century is one of tension, the same pressure for strong government and social restraint could occasionally be powerful. Already in modern times, the swift force of change is visible; the middle-age generation complains of a partial failure to pass on its values to its children.

Basic attitudes may change in the next 100 years; a widespread questioning of the inevitability of “progress” is now going on, and there is a widespread feeling of not being in control of things.
Management-consultant Stephen Rose notes certain signs of so-called Future Shock – “social dislocation, rootlessness, alienation, confusion, sensory overload.” He does not take them too seriously, however; basically he believes (as so do most observers) that, given time, America can cope.