Charles Dickens opened his Victorian-era novel "A Tale of Two Cities" with these famous lines: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness .. ."

I found Dickens' contradictions particularly helpful for understanding the totality of global environmental problems, as recently documented by my bedside reading: two peer-reviewed articles published in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Science.


..."It was the worst of times ... the age of foolishness." These phrases helped me understand the policy forum "Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions" by 10 authors from Australia, Sweden, the United States, Greece and the Netherlands. As the title suggests, the fate of the world lies less in the hands of technical expertise than in humanity's ability to develop new institutions that deal with coalescing issues that transcend sovereign borders.

Indeed, it's foolish to rely on existing global initiatives because most concentrate on a single topic, for example the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's focus on disruptions of carbon cycles, the World Health Organization's focus on antibiotic resistance, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's concern about nuclear proliferation, the G8's (the main industrialized countries) emphasis on international trade, and many others.

These specific drivers of change are complexly intertwined with world population and its concentration in cities, poverty, terrorism, increased per-capita use of natural resources, and the connectivity of economic, social and ecological systems. The unwanted outcomes of these interactions are emerging faster than existing transnational institutions can adapt to them.