Read Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet Online
Authors: Kerryn Higgs
Tags: #Environmental Economics, #Econometrics, #Environmental Science, #Environmental Policy
Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (10 page)
While
Time
magazine and Brandt attacked Osborn and Vogt for calling into question free enterprise economics and the efficacy of scientific progress, equally vehement condemnation has also come from the Left, where Osborn and Vogt have been seen as neo-Malthusians and ideologists for strategies of international domination by Western capital, such as the emphasis on population control instead of land reform and the US-based Green Revolution initiatives that commercialized third world farmers’ lands (box 3.2).
33
Marxist anthropologist Eric Ross argued that, as the taint of Nazism drove eugenic ideas underground, “the principal vehicle for Malthusian fears became, instead, the threat of environmental catastrophe.”
34
Osborn’s book, he claimed, heralded this shift.
Box 3.2
The Green Revolution: Ambiguities
The Green Revolution of the fifties and sixties commercialized land in many third world countries. Though successful at increasing output per worker (and total output of selected grains) and at connecting third world agriculture to the world market, the Green Revolution did not always provide actual food to the hungry. Soybean production expanded in Brazil at the expense of subsistence crops of black bean and rice, a process paralleled in India, where per capita availability of the coarse grains and pulses eaten by the poor was halved between 1956 and 1987.
a
Where agriculture serves export markets and access to food depends on access to money, overflowing granaries can occur alongside famine. The transition from labor-intensive subsistence farming to energy-intensive crops for sale substituted market risks for the age-old risks associated with the weather.
The Green Revolution’s high-yielding varieties of grains required more fertilizer and pesticide and much more water than traditional crops, imperatives that undermined the viability of small peasants, who had no cash for such inputs. As farms were consolidated and cash crops planted, millions of smallholders were severed from subsistence livelihoods. In the Philippines, for example, by the 1970s, 55 percent of the entire farming acreage was devoted to export crops such as sugar, rubber, and coffee, while fertile land in Colombia was turned over to growing carnations for the United States, earning a million pesos a year, compared to only 12,500 for corn. These profitable enterprises were usually owned and controlled not by small farmers but by foreign agribusiness and local landowning elites.
b
In India, traditional tanks, which had harvested the monsoon rains and provided villages with water for thousands of years, fell into disrepair, supplanted by electric and petrol-driven pumps. The hand pumps of poorer farmers soon failed to reach the falling water table. Aquifers throughout northwest and southern India declined rapidly and continue to fall every year, at rates of a meter or more; by now, many are saline or overexploited, and even electric pumps cannot tap usable water in many districts. The aquifers of China underwent similar depletion, with annual falls of three meters and more reported for Hebei Province on the North China Plain in 2001.
c
The Green Revolution shifted agriculture toward the industrial model, establishing monocultures of water-hungry crops, and mined the groundwater, much of which will not be replenished during the lifetimes of the living.
Notes
a
George 1976, 93; Douthwaite 1999, 250.
b
George 1976, 172. Ownership of land in third world countries is often heavily concentrated in elite hands, partly an effect of colonialism. In 1996, for example, 2 percent of Guatemala’s people held 63 percent of the good land, and 0.8 percent of Brazil’s owned 43 percent (Athanasiou 1996, 54). The US invasion of Guatemala in 1954 was undertaken to protect unused lands owned by the United Fruit Company which the government wished to redistribute to peasant farmers. This action was taken despite the provision of due compensation (Greer and Singh 2000), an indication of the level of resistance to land reform.
c
Shiva 2002, 14; Sengupta 2006; Brown 2008, 70.
Hardin and Ehrlich—“Neo-Malthusians”?
Among the concerned biologists of the late 1960s were some who put forward extreme policies to combat ecological decline, policies that were destined to alienate nearly everyone across the political spectrum. Though not identical to the prescriptions of Malthus around 1800, there were similarities, perhaps the most striking being the fact that members of the privileged classes of the world were offering solutions exhibiting considerable indifference to the actual real-world fate of the rest.
Garrett Hardin published his enthusiastically reprinted “The Tragedy of the Commons” in 1968 and his notorious “lifeboat” essays in 1974; Paul Ehrlich’s
Population Bomb
also came out in 1968. Both Hardin and Ehrlich were biologists, both took more overtly political stances than most of their scientific colleagues, and both had a lot to say about population. Ehrlich’s gloom about the immediate future left his predictions (which turned out to be wrong, at least in their timing) open to “doomsday” labeling.
Hardin’s so-called tragedy of the commons lies in the notion that, when many individuals compete for their own personal gain in the use of an unmanaged common resource, overuse will inevitably result: “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
35
The commons—or common property—of human societies has varied with the nature of the society. Before settled communities evolved, virtually all natural resources, including the land and its fruits, were the common property of a resident tribal group. In these societies, land could not be bought or sold, and people belonged to the land rather than vice versa. Even after the transition to tributary and feudal societies, most peasants had traditional access to large tracts of land. In Europe, it was the successive waves of enclosure that transferred these commons to private hands and deprived Europe’s peasants of essential elements of their subsistence, such as pasture, game, and firewood. Indeed, enclosure has been one very prominent aspect of the transformation of property ownership during the history of the past five centuries or so. In 2014 the remaining commons are those that have been difficult or impossible to enclose and privatize. World oceanic fish stocks are an example of this kind of commons, as is the earth’s atmosphere—into which carbon dioxide (among other pollutants) has been poured at will, without any check or price paid. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has argued that the pollution of the atmosphere is an example of de facto privatization, representing the theft of these commons by corporations, especially those operating coal-fired power stations.
36
Quite erroneously, Hardin used the extensive feudal commons as the template for his tragedy. These were not, in fact, an instance of unmanaged commons subject to overexploitation but a common resource controlled by community mores and traditions and in practice not vulnerable to ruination by overexploitation.
37
Hardin’s elision of historical common property with the modern global commons brought into play by postwar capitalism (fish stocks, atmospheric absorption, and so on) served to suggest that human nature itself, assumed to be governed by human greed, was the underlying problem and one consistent across human societies for centuries. The work of historians of the medieval commons and that of Vandana Shiva
38
in relation to traditional Indian irrigation systems—where water was regulated and conserved at the level of the village—shows that humans have been and remain capable of social and political arrangements that protect their shared resources. Elinor Ostrom, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, spent much of her career studying the management of what she termed common pool resources. Ostrom showed that even though cooperative management is not easy and success is not guaranteed, it is still often achieved in practice, through local negotiation and organization.
39
The perception expressed by both Osborn and Vogt—that free enterprise competition in the pursuit of profit has been the main source of extreme pressure on common resources—seems far closer to the actual historical tragedy than Hardin’s medieval tale.
Hardin’s argument has, however, served as ammunition for those economists who believe that all commons should be privatized to the maximum extent possible. In this view, private individuals should own and control the commons, because private ownership will supply an incentive to use the resource wisely and avoid the “tragedy” of overuse. Under this logic, popular with the emerging neoliberal ideology, private ownership should be extended to water supplies, rivers, forests, and everything for which ownership can possibly be designated and enforced.
In the “lifeboat” essays of 1974, Hardin went further and proposed that rescuing the drowning multitudes in the metaphorical lifeboats of the industrial world might afford “complete justice,” but would also lead to a “complete catastrophe” in which everyone would drown (i.e., starve). Hardin thought food aid only encouraged the poor of the global south to breed, similar to Malthus on the subject of aid to the poor in Britain around 1800. While he acknowledged colonial expropriation, he aimed to draw a line in the sand, resisting the notion of redressing past wrongs. Like Malthus, he thought that “we cannot safely divide the wealth equitably between all present peoples, so long as people reproduce at different rates.”
40
In saying this, he ignored the question of the differential consumption rates of the “drowning multitudes” of the third world and the lucky people who already occupied the lifeboats.
Ehrlich’s
Population Bomb
(1968) examined ecological deterioration, the pollution of air and water, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources, as well as population growth, but emphasized population control as the most pressing requirement to relieve the pressure on the environment. Ehrlich announced that food production could not keep pace with population and that “the battle to feed humanity” had been lost—a claim that focused on the idea of “too many people” and overlooked the relationship between people and their access to land, which might afford them a livelihood. Though his prediction turned out to be somewhat premature, he recently pointed out, in his own defense, that any of the 200 million or so people who have starved to death in the interim would be entitled to argue that the battle had indeed been lost.
41
At home in the United States, Ehrlich recommended population control—by compulsion if voluntary methods failed. Once successful at home, he proposed “triage” for the rest of the world: the United States would help countries that it judged to be capable of reaching “self- sufficiency” with a program of birth control, agricultural intervention, and industrialization in suitable cases. The rest of the world (which he thought might include India) should be abandoned.
42
In some cases, local insurrection and the secession of more promising parts of the triaged countries would be welcomed and even assisted. Ehrlich’s agricultural strategy hinged on training local residents in developed world agricultural methods and introducing these to the poor. Ehrlich did not mention the Green Revolution but advocated its methods—which relied on significant inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery, largely dependent on petroleum, as well as on far more water than traditional methods had required. Such off-farm inputs had already supplanted human labor and turned first world farming over to corporate control during the twentieth century. While the Green Revolution did increase gross food production, it also had disastrous effects on groundwater, soil fertility, and the viability of small farmers.
Neither Hardin nor Ehrlich shrank from advocating coercion; their politics, which influenced the agenda and values of the early environment movement, has been described as “undemocratic, authoritarian, pessimistic, repressive, illiberal, static and closed.”
43
Hardin certainly merited much of this reproachful description—as well as the “Malthusian” tag. The Ehrlich of that era, whose triage recommendations sounded similar, did not, however, believe that the rich should make their getaway in the boats and leave the rest to drown. Subsequently, he revised and reassessed his findings. Moreover, the egregious policies spelled out by Hardin in particular were not broadly generalized throughout the work of other scientists, especially in the work commissioned by the Club of Rome, to which I now turn.
4
The Limits to Growth
and Its Critics
The latest wave of environmentalism may turn out to be a fad.… It may also be a result of the first glimmerings of human understanding about total systems and the first human perception of the worldwide negative impact of man’s activities on the ecosystem.
—Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III, 1973
Soon after the Club of Rome was founded in 1968, it instigated the
Limits to Growth
project. The Club of Rome was an exclusive think tank, the creation of the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei in association with the Scottish scientist Alexander King. They brought together a select group of prominent, mostly wealthy individuals who wanted to address what they called the
problematique
, translated as “the predicament of mankind”: how could growing populations, locked into ever-expanding industrialization, avoid immense (if not terminal) environmental degradation, exhaustion of the resources on which everything depended, and the social chaos that would be likely to follow? They were primarily intellectuals, businessmen, and bureaucrats grappling with the problems of a world that had just been through two whirlwind decades of unprecedented economic growth and was apparently on the verge of more. Peccei described himself as “perplexed and worried by the orderless torrential character of this precipitous human progress.”
1
They were conscious of the warnings of scientists that all was not well with the natural environment, and skeptical about indefinite expansion of industrial production as the template of economic development for the world’s burgeoning populations. Above all, they wanted to stimulate a much longer-term perspective—something little seen in policymaking anywhere. For this, they aimed to instigate public awareness of these questions and to advance public debate.
