They will do so with methods that are often brutal but may only have partial success. What is a profound human and social problem may not be treated as such but communalised and nationalised via a politics of national hatred, social contempt and cultural exclusion. This politics has taken four main forms and exists everywhere, in the third, the former second, and in the first world. It is the politics of ethnicity, religion and nation that is marching forward at varying speeds and for the overwhelming part represents an extremely negative form of identity politics determined to 'join' humanity not by what unites but by what divides it. Unless there is some dramatic turnaround in current patterns of economic behaviour, sometime in the next century certain negative effects on the environment will have become irreversible.
Sustainable development is many a country's mantra but no country's programme.
Northerners do not want to sacrifice living standards or potentials and Southern elites share Northern elite aspirations. Historically, the North bears primary responsibility for bringing matters to such a pass but that can neither be consolation nor justification for Southern elites in India or China, for example, to pursue the same model of energy-intensive, ecologically destructive models of development. The earth simply cannot take it. In the 1980s and '90s, democracy spread as never before to bring in some 800 million more people under its umbrella. East Timor is finally free and there is no way authoritarian rule in China can last another two or three decades.