TRANSNATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE ENVIRONMENT

 

So much important work has been done to bring to the attention of the public the inherently transnational nature of environmental problems that it hardly seems necessary to stress that the society of market-states, like that of nation-states before it, will have to devise ways of coping, as a collectivity, with these matters. Here I want only to discuss two issues: environmental problems that have the potential for disconcerting the society of states, and the contribution that rapid computation, perhaps in conjunction with telecommunications, can make to the resolution of these problems.

Three major environmental events have occurred since 1970 that manifested this potential to bring about rapid and profound disquiet: the AIDS epidemic, the nuclear core accident at Chernobyl, and the scientific confirmation that the earth's ozone layer is being destroyed. Each of these events arose as a function of the interactions among the states of the new global economy, the mass movement of peoples and products, the transfer of previously familiar technologies to new settings, and the development of new technologies and materials.38 Part of what is disconcerting about these three events is precisely their links to this new world; the eruption of Mount Saint Helens perhaps had a greater environmental consequence than any of the three, but it did not have their unsettling quality.