Simon Says

A global report is otherworldly

The Global 2000 Report to the President, issued last summer, was trumpeted by its sponsors as the most detailed and authoritative review yet of the planet's population, natural resources and environmental problems. Three years in the making, the 800-page report pulled together statistics and analyses from 13 Government agencies, ranging from the Department of Agriculture to the Central Intelligence Agency. The study painted a starkly pessimistic view of the world two decades from now. Its grim conclusion: "If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now."

The report was widely praised round the world--and also subjected to some telling criticism. The most blistering attack has been launched by Julian Simon, a professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the winter issue of the Public Interest, a neoconservative quarterly, Simon charges that the presidential panel and staff who wrote the report consisted almost entirely of well known Cassandras of the environmental movement. In making their predictions Simon argues, these prophets of doom relied on shoddy research and dubious analytical tools.

Simon ticks off a series of the report's specific conclusions--"Arable land will increase only 4% by 2000, real prices for food are expected to double, significant losses of world forests will continue over the next 20 years"--and attempts to undercut them by either citing different statistics or showing that the panel relied on inadequate data. Says Simon: "I'm not saying all is well now, and I do not promise that all will be rosy in the future. What I am saying is that, for most or all the relevant matters I have checked, the trends are positive rather than negative."

Members of the Global 2000 staff strongly dispute Simon's assertions. Gerald Barney, a Washington consultant who served as the panel's director, denounces Simon's article as "full of factual errors, distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods." Bill Long, director of the State Department's Office of Food and Natural Resources and a participant in the study, points out that the report focused on a 20-year span, while Simon relies on statistics that cover periods ranging from four to 100 years to reach his conclusions. More important, Simon almost always cites figures only for the U.S., rather than for the entire world. Says one federal official: "Cleaner air and water in this country don't do much for Bombay or Calcutta."

The State Department and the President's Council on Environmental Quality, the report's sponsors, are preparing point-by-point rebuttals of Simon's article. One example: in contesting the report's projection that food prices will double by 2000. Simon displays a graph of the historical decline of wheat prices. Yet Simon offers no evidence that wheat prices are indicative of food prices in general.

Simon also has his supporters. University of Chicago Professor D. Gale Johnson, a leading authority on agricultural economics, found the quality of the report "pretty poor" and fears that its "gloom and doom approach" will be self-fulfilling. Says Johnson: "If you say the situation is impossible, then that paralyzes action." Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future, in Menlo Park, Calif., agrees with Simon that the panel failed to take into account mankind's imaginative capacity to solve problems. Says Amara: "If someone takes the past and projects it into the future, there's no question he will conclude that we are going to hell in a handbasket. Life isn't like that. Corrective action will remedy some of the problems."

Many experts seem to agree with Dennis Meadows, a Dartmouth engineering professor, that the report is a "broad canvas of concern," and nitpicking at bits of data does not necessarily destroy its larger warnings. "Anybody who looks at the globe today and doesn't admit to the possibility of important problems is either blind or dishonest," says Meadows. Taking potshots at the report clearly is easier but far less helpful, than taking action on the problems it addresses.

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