Humanity is now faced with an unprecedented series of interconnected global environmental problems resulting from dramatic demographic changes and the continuing worldwide spread of fossil fuel-based industrialization. These include increasing environmental deterioration, water shortages, hunger and malnutrition, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, sharply fluctuating energy prices, increasing threats of pandemics, and, most important of all, the onset of global warming. These problems have their origins in the fact that the “dominant social paradigm” or predominant worldview that has evolved over the course of the Industrial Revolution no longer gives appropriate guidance in confronting a new world of environmental scarcity. While the physical sciences have done an excellent job of documenting these interrelated environmental problems, solutions must come from the social sciences, particularly political science. But in the face of this rapidly deepening global predicament, political science research is still dominated by an agenda that has evolved out of the concerns of a much different world.
Results/Conclusions
Addressing these global environmental problems requires intelligent and informed leadership and public policies in all countries, but particularly in the United States. This, in turn, is closely related to a need to rethink the research agenda that now guides political science research. Among the questions that need to be addressed are the following:
- How to cultivate and retain intelligent and informed leadership.
- How to develop and introduce foresight and anticipatory thinking for policy-making.
- How to strengthen the link between academics and policy-makers.
- How to streamline Congress so that it facilitates rather than frustrates change.
- How to maintain a positive role for the United States in a world of deepening globalization.
- How to design democracy so that an educated electorate selects capable leaders.
- How best to integrate domestic policies with those of other countries in a world of deepening globalization.
- How to redefine security and reallocate security spending as military threats to our well-being are replaced by those coming from our changing relationship with nature.
