Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (4 page)

From about 1600 on, a new “mechanics literature” emerged—a torrent of technical works by artisans that proved popular among merchants and businessmen.
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It is unclear how much the “age of invention” actually depended on the intellectual developments associated with the Scientific Revolution. Both invention and scientific thought were unfolding in the same context—a time of pivotal social transformation, when the feudal economy was in collapse, capital accumulation had started, and knowledge had begun to be equated with utility and technology—with the potential for power over nature.
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While this trend and the trend away from religious authority to the reason of the individual may have favored inventiveness, the universities were more engaged with deciphering the laws of the universe than with practical invention, which arose in concrete associations of tradesmen and men with capital. The determining factor in the proliferation of the new technologies was “the opportunity for the profitable use of mechanical inventions” by the newly emerging industrial interests.
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Industrial capitalism did not become dominant until factory technologies took over production, and by the time they did, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, coal was the fuel that drove the steam engines.
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The capitalist system of production, once it was powered by fossil fuels, was set to develop and deploy worldwide an economy capable of accumulating vast amounts of capital and a technology capable of godlike feats such as moving mountains and splitting atoms.

Oil and Exponential Growth

Like coal, oil had been known for centuries, but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that oil wells began to deliver petroleum, mainly for use as kerosene in lighting. The United States pioneered the transition to petroleum; the first large American “gusher” was tapped in Texas in 1901, and world production reached approximately 2 billion barrels a year in 1930. This compares, however, with some 25 billion barrels in 1990 and 30 billion in 2006.
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Thus, significant reliance on oil dates only from the second quarter of the twentieth century and has been with us less than one hundred years, steadily escalating as the decades have passed.

Oil is a miracle fuel. It is compact, liquid, transportable, and cheap to produce; once tapped, large amounts can often be extracted under the oil field’s own pressure. Even today, though much of the “easy oil” has already gushed out, the cost of extraction in many of the large Middle Eastern oil fields remains small compared to its market value.

The development of petroleum revolutionized transportation, making viable the individual private car, aviation, and mechanized agriculture. By 1950, oil had replaced coal in the United States as the principal fuel of industry as well as transport and heating. In the following twenty years, similar transitions occurred in the rest of the industrial world.
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Simultaneously, multiple uses for the range of hydrocarbons found in oil were also developed, until petroleum has become embedded in every aspect of daily life—from fuel to fertilizer and pesticide, from pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to plastics and fabrics, and in an array of industrial chemicals and processes.

The year 1950 represents the approximate moment when the curve of humans’ environmental impact may be said to have become dangerously exponential. The world population stood at 2.5 billion, a level at which a doubling period of three or four decades would, for the first time, produce huge annual increments. Estimates of world GDP in 1900 suggest that it had doubled twice since 1500, nearly half of that growth in the thirty years after 1870. In the next fifty years, from 1900 to 1950, it grew almost as much again as in the four hundred previous years, notwithstanding the slowdown of the Great Depression. Then, from 1950, it doubled very rapidly from an ever more immense base—more than twice in the forty-two years between 1950 and 1992.
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Although world growth slowed after 1973 and reversed in 2009, there has been a further doubling since 1992. The global economy in 2014 is eight to ten times larger than it was at the end of World War II.

The year 1950 also found the mass media on the verge of a rapid expansion into television and, consequently, a singular success as a vehicle for consumerism. The advent of a screen in every home allowed industrial capitalism to maximize its markets in the developed world, as well as to make the consumption of material goods central to everyday life for most people. Over the next fifty years, a progressive democratization of luxury took place in the first world, as aspiration for and access to more and more consumer goods was extended from the rich to the middle class and on to a significant majority of the population. Though exuberant consumption had marked the elites of many cultures throughout history, modern societies of the developed world were the first to extend the option to the mass of people.

Industrial Capitalism and Metabolic Rift

In the
Communist Manifesto
, first published in 1848, Marx eulogized the exponential achievements of industrial capitalism. He celebrated economic growth and the technological advances that it generated and that helped to drive it:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
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Marx regarded the development of such productive forces as the historical predecessor and essential basis for a transition to communism; criticism of this view underpins the widespread characterization of Marx as a technological optimist and cornucopian. The manifest failure of real-world communism to protect its environments lends further support to this critique, though it seems fair to distinguish between the nineteenth-century scholar and the political movements that used his theories. As he was a theorist working before the unprecedented ecological disruption that followed in the wake of twentieth-century growth, it is hardly surprising that Marx did not focus on the environmental impacts of capitalism, though he later addressed its effects on agriculture. Marx concentrated on analyzing capitalism as a system: its history, the nature of its regimes of production, distribution, and exchange, its new class structure, and its tendency toward expansion. He was prescient about such aspects of capitalism’s trajectory as the transformation of social relations into market relations, the progressive commodification of all kinds of goods and services, and the emergence of a world market.
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Alongside his admiration for capitalism’s development of unprecedented productive forces, Marx was aware of its tendency toward exploitation, principally of human beings, but also of the soil.
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He was particularly affected by his study of the work of the German chemist, Justus von Liebig. Liebig’s analysis of soil fertility led Marx to identify the growing split between town and country as “an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life.”
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This amounted to a kind of ecological disjunction, a rift in the Earth’s metabolism:

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres … disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.
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Liebig pioneered the modern understanding of the sources of soil fertility and laid out the role of the essential nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which are taken up by crops as they grow. With the advent of widespread urbanization, crops incorporating these nutrients began to be exported across the country and across the world. At the same time, sewage and food wastes, which once were circulated back to the land, where they helped maintain fertility, instead polluted the rivers of the great new towns. Since the last few decades of the twentieth century, an even more massive metabolic rift has occurred as colossal quantities of animal wastes also drain into watercourses. The grain that has fed these animals is usually grown elsewhere, sometimes on the other side of the world, and the fertility stripped from those distant croplands is lost forever.

Until Peruvian guano and nitrate deposits were exploited in the 1840s, European graveyards and battlegrounds were ransacked for bones in an attempt to improve British soils. While Peru’s guano and nitrate were mined and shipped back to Europe, numerous Pacific islands were annexed by the North Americans to secure their own sources of fertilizer. The story of the headlong hunt for fertilizer during the nineteenth century reveals a resource scarcity that persisted for a long period without a technological solution being found. In the meantime, colonial possessions again played a crucial role in the accumulation of European-based wealth: ships bent on discovering gold led the way to islands encrusted with millions of years of bird droppings.

This fertility crisis continued for nearly a century. Soluble phosphorus was synthesized from phosphate rock and sulfuric acid in 1842, but Europe relied on imports of guano and nitrates until synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, sourcing nitrogen from the atmosphere, was invented shortly before World War I. While the technical solutions were eventually found and the shortage of fertilizer was banished for the time being, it is clear that the availability of hitherto untapped resources was, for nearly a century, absolutely necessary to avoid severe agricultural decline. The interim solution through the nineteenth century depended on sheer luck in the context of a world largely unexploited. This vast unexplored world no longer exists, and such solutions, though they may emerge, cannot be relied on by living generations today.

The long process of enclosure of peasant land and the gradual transfer of manufacture from artisans’ workshops to the urban factories owned by the new industrial bourgeoisie progressively separated European people from the land—a process that is proceeding rapidly in so-called emerging economies today. Industrial solutions to the separation of farming and consumption are themselves in trouble. After a century of intensive inputs in the farming of the developed world and nearly fifty years of similar techniques in the global south, introduced under the Green Revolution, problems such as groundwater contamination and “dead zones”
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on continental shelves remain unsolved, while many of the raw materials for fertilizer are dwindling.

Phosphate rock is argued to be only twenty-five years from peak or maximum production and likely to reach effective exhaustion before the end of the century.
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Phosphorus, an element, is one of the indispensable building blocks of DNA, so no substitute is likely to be invented, though it is possible to recover and recycle it from human waste. Nitrogen fertilizers are extracted from the atmosphere or from natural gas feedstock; this requires large energy inputs and uses approximately 1 percent of the world’s annual energy budget, still largely derived from fossil fuels.
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The scale of this industry is such that humans convert more nitrogen into reactive forms than the earth’s entire combined terrestrial processes.
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Difficult or diffuse reserves of both oil and phosphate rock will continue to be found, but the era of each as a cheap resource is almost certainly over. Topsoil is also in trouble. The gross area of degraded land worldwide is reckoned to be in the tens of millions of square kilometers, and about 24 billion tons of topsoil continue to be lost every year.
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A complex and living medium, soil has not fared well under industrial agricultural regimes—as well as disappearing under urban asphalt.

Marx argued that the rift between town and country could be solved in a socialist society, where the land would be returned to the associated producers, “rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature.” In this world, he saw agriculture and manufacture reintegrated and the distinction between town and country ameliorated by “a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.”
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Whether such a form of socialism might succeed in minimizing destruction of the natural environment is an open question, since it has not been tried—with the partial exception of post-Soviet Cuba. Clearly, neither Soviet Russia nor contemporary China provides a real-world model for such a transformation. Soviet communism replicated metabolic rift, as well as precipitating environmental catastrophe in numerous places, such as the Aral Sea. The Soviet system operated as a form of state-based capital accumulation—partly to compete with the capitalist world during the Cold War period and partly because it embraced industrial production as a bringer of wealth. The establishment of sophisticated technology requires a capital base whatever form of ownership prevails, making full-scale industrialization impossible without capital accumulation. In any case, the Soviet regime was not a system controlled by the associated producers in Marx’s sense.

China’s situation is similar, though it is less a matter of being pitted against the capitalist world than of imitating capitalism’s economic expansion and integrating into the late twentieth-century world market. The industrialization under way in China since 1979 also replicates metabolic rift. Urbanization gallops along just as surely as it does in democratic India. Five or six decades after Chinese peasants were freed from the arbitrary power of their feudal landlords and given access to land, and only forty years after the Cultural Revolution uprooted urban people and drove them into the countryside to be “reeducated,” peasants are now routinely separated from their land by party officials bent on taking it over in the interests of industrial expansion, property speculation, and the wealth generated by economic growth. This process proceeds rapidly, especially in eastern China, just as it did in Europe 150 years earlier. Factories cluster in huge urban concentrations along the great rivers, which are just as toxic now as the rivers of the English Midlands were then. Economic growth now, as then, appears to be predicated on the extension of metabolic rift, the separation of most people from the land.