Conference Closing Remarks
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University; Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan

John Mutter: Okay. John, thank you, thank you very much. We have come almost to the very end. One more presentation, this will be Jeff summing up. But this is, you'll be relieved to know, the last time you'll see me at the podium, so I want to take the opportunity to than all of the attendees for attending, the speakers for speaking, and the moderators for moderating. But I also want to thank two people who are by their jobs invisible, but immensely important, for managing the process by which we got to this conference and managing the success of that conference as well. They are two of the lead staff members of the Earth Institute, Alison Gilmore, who's hiding behind here, and Jennifer Genrich who is the head of the events here. They have managed a staff of many, many people. And I also want to instead of introducing really thank Jeff Sachs for coming to Columbia, coming to the Earth Institute, for being its director, and making this really possible. It's Jeff who's made this sort of event what it could have been and what it is, and has allowed me to have the privilege of chairing the committee that actually sort of put it together. But he was the one who had the ideas and made it all happen. Thank you, Jeff.

Jeffrey Sachs: And let me start of course by having us all thank John Mutter for the extraordinary job.

At this point I'm a little bit reminded of the old saying that if you're not thoroughly confused by now, you just don't understand the problem. This is complicated, and there is no single, simple summing up. There are huge unknowns for the very big questions that we've been discussing in the last two days. I think there's one thing that is absolutely crystal clear from the attendance here and the participation and the reactions in the last couple of days and the questions that have been asked. What is crystal clear is that this is a room of determined people, determined to help make things right. And I want to thank all of you for being here, and for having that commitment and that point of view.

We've talked about complicated problems that are operating at many different scales: economic dimensions, from villages to global industry, temporal problems that are immediate, the 25,000 children that will have died today because we didn't solve the problems yesterday, and they're still likely to die tomorrow because we have not quite settled it today either. That's the most immediate temporal context of sustainable development, the failure of development in the poorest of the poor parts of the world where millions die because they don't have what they need to stay alive from one day to the next. But we're also talking about problems at a scale that's almost unimaginable, as Joel keeps warning us and educating us, we're talking about at least a century ahead on many of the dimensions of this problem, especially energy systems, climate, and also many other of the anthropogenic or the human-made forcings. We're talking about a long-term scale that's very, very hard for us to think about and act on in a consistent way.

We're all looking for things to do to be helpful in this, I think that's clear. I believe, as I think we all do, and the point was made several times in the last couple of days, that by far the most important thing to do is to be individually responsible and try to understand the problems. This is the education issue that came up again and again. Without understanding there is no possibility of solutions. There's no turning back clocks. If you say, well, it worked 100 years ago, it doesn't quite matter because the population 100 years ago was a fourth of what it is now, and about a sixth of what it's going to be before we blink. In Africa the population 100 years ago was closer to a tenth of what it is today. Old strategies, even old successful strategies, of land use or farming just can't apply anymore in the sense that with population densities and land use requirements we're in a circumstance that's different from where we were before.

I think we passed over a little bit too quickly the question at the end; is sustainable development feasible? I want to insist that we actually still don't know. It's not just a matter of being optimistic; we don't know in one very important sense. If we mean simply will unsustainable things end, it is a safe theorem that unsustainable things will come to an end. A wonderful, deceased economist, Herbert Stein, used to say that if something just can't go on, it won't. And in that sense unsustainable practices will end. The question is will they end in disaster, will they end by a requirement for a wrenching and radical, perhaps even violent, change of lifestyles and living standards? It's one thing to say we'll have to change consumption strongly. But a significant decline of material use of resources in this society will not happen easily or painlessly. So if we mean that sustainable development's possible but only if we use half of the resources we use right now on a per capita basis, I would say that sustainable development is not feasible. It cannot be accomplished without a wrenching dislocation. To pose the question with content, it is can we have a transformation that achieves sustainability without a wrenching sense of decline or discord in societies, resulting from massive retrenchment of material activity? I think that remains an open question, unfortunately. It's perhaps the central research question of the Earth Institute. If I felt we had an answer we probably could close at least part of the shop now, but we don't actually know.

We have to find out certain parts of that answer pretty quickly. It's clear that the time dimension for answering even the long term questions is pressing down very hard on us. That's because change is cumulative. The accumulation of carbon isn't something that disappears or is easily reversed. If it turns out that some of the promising avenues towards using fossil fuels-- one that we probably didn't discuss quite enough given its potential importance and need is carbon sequestration just about the only safe way that anybody has found to continue to use fossil fuels without massive climate change by capturing the carbon and putting it under the ground someplace safe-- pan out as the engineers believe they they can, that's one path or one direction on this analytical tree. If it turns out that the technology sounded great but just doesn't work because there aren't enough places to store the carbon, it's not safely stored geologically, or it turns out to be too expensive, then we're in a very fundamentally different situation on the question that we've been grappling with. This is the kind of uncertainty I'm afraid that we are living with right now, and that we're going to have to resolve. If you go back to Andy Dobson's pictures of an hour ago, there was a parameter in there. A parameter's a great thing if you're doing a spreadsheet or running some differential equations, because you can put it in any way you want. If our ecosystems are vital because of the services they provide for agriculture, so that destroying the forests means that we can't grow enough food to stay alive, we could face one kind of outcome. If those ecosystem services are of a different nature, if they're more aesthetic and so forth, losing them may be a disaster from one point of view and not from another. I mention this as just one of the many areas that we talked about in the last couple of days in which we don't understand a crucial fact, or set of facts, or a very complicated underlying reality very well, because the necessary ecological sciences are still, understandably, rudimentary. The complexity of these systems is beyond our ability to be sure of the answers.

I think the state of affairs for us is that we live in enormous uncertainty. Uncertainty doesn't mean inaction. That is the mistake—or maybe the political gamble-- of the White House. Uncertainty may make action far more urgent than certainty does, but it does mean that you can't walk away from here thinking that we really know the answers to the most critical questions that we face in the world. It's truly shocking that people on the cutting edge of knowledge can have maintained radically different hypotheses about this most fundamental question. Are we way over the cliff, are we still within bounds, or will the wonders of science and technology safely deliver us once we get it a little bit right? That's a very unsatisfactory place to be, but I think it's the truth.

Now what does it mean for us? I think it means first that we really have to work hard, and I think with a sense of deep responsibility, to continue to master these issues and to promote the mastery of these issues. We're so proud to be working together with Scientific American, with the New York Academy of Sciences, with many other groups, to help on the massive public education and debate about these issues. This is sorely lacking right now, aside from these few wonderful possibilities. We have to operate as a community to get these issues into the forefront where they belong. And we have to help everybody, including ourselves, to exist with the state of uncertainty, but also with the commitments to close that and even act with the uncertainties in mind.

There are certain things we can do right now, and many, many people in the last couple of days have asked me about how to get involved and what can be done. There's no single way to do this. The beauty of our world and our community here is that there are probably many dozen groups represented here that are contributing, and there's no one template for doing so. So I'm loath to be too programmatic or too prescriptive. I do feel that one thing we really ought to be doing, and it's in line with what Nick Kristof has been telling us in two columns a week for several brave wonderful and eloquent years, and that's that we should take seriously the lives of all of our fellow citizens and people on the planet and understand that there are some very urgent issues that require our attention every day. That means that we are in the situation that Peter Singer showed us yesterday; we have the ability to save a child from drowning. We need about 300 million bed nets to protect people from malaria in Africa. That's just one example. Everyone here with $10 can do something to save a life. And there are countless other ways to do that. A group of philanthropists in New York, this is not really a plug but just an opportunity for those who are looking for it, a group of philanthropists in New York, and the Earth Institute is very much involved, has started an organization around the Millennium Development Goals called Millennium Promise. It's meant to find ways to partner with everybody who is equally committed and determined to do something about this. We will be launching in Millennium Promise a campaign to help Americans understand the malaria challenge, the fact that two to three million children will die this year of a disease that can be prevented by a bed net and can be treated with one dollar medicine. And this doesn't even require doing the heroic things that Nick is rightly asking us to do, such as overturning tyrants or sending troops. It's just sending a bed net to peaceful places that are otherwise too poor to get one. I would ask you to take an opportunity to mobilize our resources, your resources, your community's resources, your school's resources, your organization's resources, your business' resources, to answer this question: what am I doing today to help keep people alive who will die if we don't act? The possibilities are wonderful for us to contribute meaningfully every day. That's the most urgent challenge of sustainable development for the people who can't wait. So I would like to invite any and all to partner with Millennium Promise, to look at the web site of millenniumpromise.org. Depending on what your organization does, where you're coming from, where you're going to, I urge you to find ways to help, say with the Millennium Villages which are reaching hundreds of thousands of people. Or support the kind of work that Engineers Without Borders is doing-- and that's just a wonderful, fabulous organization, congratulations-- to reach the millions and millions of people who can be helped with the kinds of technological approaches and knowledge that we have.

More generally, we really are going to have to change the politics in this country. I'm not talking about individuals, although I have some ideas. I think the most important point that I take from the last two days is that the discussions that we're having in the last two days need to be the discussions for every day. These are the most important issues on the planet. This is not a parochial statement of saying listen to my position, listen to my area of study. The point that is overwhelming is that all of the us versus them views that I mentioned in my opening remarks and that I can't help thinking about in everything that we spend our time on, pale into insignificance compared with all that we've heard in the last two days. We urgently need to find a way in this country to change the discussion. We're not even close right now. And this I think is really our most important responsibility, to find effective, concrete, practical ways to let people understand the real challenges of politics, in the best sense, of collective action and collective responsibility, for our common fate. The real question is a political question in a way, though it's not electoral politics necessarily. The real question is how we organize our collective behavior to meet collective challenges. We heard a lot about what markets can do, we heard a lot about what markets, even markets without government, are doing and Abby [Joseph Cohen]'s wisdom and lessons and data on that are fabulous, because they show that even social wisdom and norms can make a big difference well before Washington moves. But we also know that there are going to be limits to what's going to happen unless this conversation we've been having, and which is now spreading, really becomes the centerpiece of our public debate and our public discussion and our public focus.

The Earth Institute is committed to the research, the teaching, and the action on sustainable development. Since this is a global problem and a 100-year problem, we're committed to being around for quite a while, and we're especially committed to a broad and expanding network of partners in this common enterprise. For all of the university faculty from around the world who are here, we view this as an open for the world, and as an institution that is global and wants to partner. We know technologies make this possible in ways that have not been the case before. As I said, with Scientific American, with the New York Academy of Sciences, with Earth and Sky, with many other media outlets, we view this institute as committed to public education and public debate in every way, and we want to make sure that the word can be amplified and that the debate that we've just started-- the questions, the discussions-- can go on in the future.

We know from all of the businesses that have been here that the business community has a fundamentally important role to play in all of these issues. Business is where the lifeblood of the world economy lies, and it's what meets our needs. We are grateful for so many of the businesses that have been represented here-- BP, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and many others-- who are stepping up to leadership on these issues. We count on that leadership. There's no escape from it; the leadership is absolutely vital and central, and in the Earth Institute you will find a partner to help you take this farther, because that's where it needs to be taken.

I'm afraid that I can't summarize any better than those remarks, because the issues are too rich and too complex. We have been treated to an absolutely extraordinary two days of wisdom by some of the truly great thinkers and practitioners on the planet. And I would like us to end with a round of applause to thank all of them, and to thank all of you, and to say we'll see you at the State of the Planet 2008.