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 (8 page)
Two biologists, Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt, had already warned of an incipient crisis, in 1948. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
brought the impact of toxic compounds to public attention. A few years later, in 1966, Kenneth Boulding published his essay, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” in which he argued that the “closed earth” of the near future would require an economics different from that of the “open earth” of the past, since the expansionary “frontier” stage of modern history was over. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s
Population Bomb
warned that the biosphere would not be capable of supporting projected populations of the near future. At about the same time, Herman Daly and Nicholas Georgescu-Røegen began their critiques of an economic theory that was divorced from biophysical constraints. Ecology was becoming established as a branch of the natural sciences during that decade, and scholars from geography and the biological sciences in particular began to put forward the idea that there are obvious physical limits to economic growth.
The sixties saw the start of a legislative transformation in the United States, away from an existing emphasis on resource extraction and the privatization of national resources and toward a stewardship approach to public lands that would limit economic development in selected areas;
4
this shift in values was reflected in innovative laws to conserve land, water, rivers, and wilderness. On January 1, 1970, President Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, which declared that “Congress recognize[s] the profound impact of man’s activity on the interrelations of all components of the environment, particularly the profound influences of population growth.”
5
During the mid-1960s, the US Congress had also instigated a population policy designed to help finance family planning in the third world. Since population is one of the multipliers contributing to environmental impact (box 3.1), some sort of population policy is necessary. This does not, of course, justify coercive sterilization such as occurred in several countries at this time (including Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia) and which has even been criticized in the World Bank’s own history of family planning.
6
The US initiatives of this period contrast with those of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, which pursued natalist policies that militated against population control of any kind. Marxist commentators
7
also dispute the need for population policies, arguing that birth control in the global south was merely a diversion intended to avoid solutions involving the redistribution of wealth, and especially land reform.
Box 3.1
Population and the Coalition of the Unwilling
It is hardly surprising that wealthy consumer economies would prefer a raw population emphasis—focusing questions about impacts onto poorer countries where populations were still growing rapidly—to a consumption emphasis that not only challenges the level of affluence enjoyed (and expected) by their people but could challenge the very economic growth that has created it.
Marxist critics such as John Bellamy Foster and Eric Ross show that first world countries preferred population control measures to actual development assistance in numerous parts of the third world. From their point of view, the developed world seized upon population control in preference to alternatives that were far less palatable to the interests of US business. The adoption of what was called “birth control” had two main strengths from a business perspective. The various avenues—from coercive sterilization and the provision of devices of dubious safety to supplying women with methods they were actually requesting—were all far cheaper than wholesale development aid would have been. Perhaps more telling still, a birth control program was both ideologically and practically preferable to land reform. At the end of World War II, many parts of the hitherto colonized world aimed for independence. The regimes of property ownership that existed in these ex-colonies had been influenced by the European colonizers, who had often expropriated land, concentrating ownership in the hands of local elites and foreign corporations. The poverty of millions was intimately linked to their lack of access to land, and the case for redistribution of the land was compelling. Focusing on population no doubt assisted in diverting attention from land reform and toward birth control under the rubric, “Too many people, not enough land.”
The growth of the human population is, however, far from irrelevant to questions of poverty and environment. In 1960 the world population reached three billion and was set to double in the next thirty-five to forty years. Though the annual rate of growth eased from a peak of 2.1 percent in the mid-1960s to 1.2 percent in 2006, the gross population grew rapidly. An average of 79.3 million people was still being added annually in the first decade of the new century, a bigger annual gain than that between 1960 and 1975, when the rate of growth was near its peak.
a
Numerous forces worked against population control remaining the key agenda item it had been until the late seventies, a “coalition of the unwilling” in the words of the UK’s then chief scientist, Lord Robert May.
b
The Vatican, which had always opposed contraception, launched a vigorous counterattack against oral contraceptives, exerting substantial influence not only in the United States but also at the UN population conferences that took place in Mexico City (1984) and Cairo (1994). Evangelical Christians, influential in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, joined forces with Catholics to push US policy at home and abroad in the same natalist direction, a trend that intensified under George W. Bush. The Saudi Arabians also supported this approach. In Mexico, the United States withdrew its funding for the UN population program, declared that the advance of free market economies was “the natural mechanism for slowing population growth,” and announced the sharpening of a “family values” focus.
c
Through the same two decades, the rise of the women’s movement brought to the fore issues of women’s right to control their own bodies and shifted the focus of population policy away from environmental implications and toward empowerment for women. While an excellent thing in itself, this is not a complete substitute for awareness of the impact of ever-increasing numbers of people on the natural world. The work of Foster and Ross exemplifies how the Left, too, was disinclined to see population as relevant to environmental degradation, arguing that the redistribution of resources would solve problems attributed to overpopulation.
The case of Thailand demonstrates that family planning can be both noncoercive and beneficial. In 1975, Thailand and the Philippines had a similar population size, with a high growth rate, a high fertility rate, and a high proportion of people living below the poverty line. Thailand’s GDP was slightly smaller. Thailand’s annual rate of population growth fell from 3.2 percent in the early 1970s to 0.06 percent in 2010, largely as a result of its family planning program. The Thai campaign has had the advantages of sustained government support, the work of the inspired campaigner Mechai Viravaidya, and a Buddhist culture that does not forbid contraception. By 2008, Thailand’s population was 25 million less than that of the Philippines and its per capita GDP was more than twice that of the Philippines.
d
Though a tricky area, population is one key driver of environmental impact and cannot be excluded from an examination of the dynamics of unfettered growth. Clearly, the rate of consumption, or “affluence,” is an equally significant determinant of impact, and it is often argued that the level of technological sophistication is a third key factor that can reduce impact by minimizing the amount of pollution generated per product made. Ehrlich and Holdren expressed the relationship mathematically in their famous I = PAT formula (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology).
e
Rather than argue that population itself is not the main issue, it is preferable to acknowledge all aspects of the human impact. Australians and Americans, for example, have a per capita impact many times greater than the world average and as much as seventy or eighty times that of a Bangladeshi;
f
each extra Australian or US birth should be seen in that light.
Notes
a
Worldwatch Institute 2006, 75; 2011, 88.
b
May 2007.
c
Kraft 1994, 632.
d
Bello 2011; Bristol 2008.
e
Ehrlich and Holdren 1971.
f
McNeill 2001, 16.
It was during the late 1960s that, among other disasters, the rubbish and oil on the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland, Ohio, and Lake Erie seemed in danger of biological death. Public opinion was shifting: in the United States, polls showed a sharp rise in public concern about the environment: membership in such groups as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society was on the rise, and media coverage of mounting environmental degradation increased.
8
In the UK, the BBC’s 1969 Reith Lectures were given by the celebrated human ecologist Sir Frank Fraser Darling, who identified three key areas of incipient environmental crisis: pollution, damage to the services provided by nature, and the threat of uncontrolled population growth.
9
An avalanche of books appeared at that time dealing with the emerging concept of “the environment” from a variety of angles.
10
At the beginning of 1972, two books outlined an incipient general crisis in the relationship between humans and the natural world.
The editors of the UK journal the
Ecologist
devoted the entire February issue to their essay “A Blueprint for Survival,” which was published in book form by Penguin later that year. They argued that governments, however reluctant they might be, had to address the growth of population, consumption, and economic activity and the intensity of the ecological impact involved—and take urgent steps to moderate it. They thought a complete social revolution would be needed, resting on decentralization of population and industry and the adoption of numerous strategies for “the invention, promotion and application of alternative technologies which are energy and materials conservative.”
11
The other book,
The Limits to Growth
, had meteoric popular success at its debut and is cited as the biggest-selling environmental book ever published. It was written by a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had been commissioned by the Club of Rome to report on the “predicament of mankind.” The MIT team relied on the newly emerging field of systems analysis; their data were fed into and generated out of a computerized model called World3, designed to project into the future the complex relationships among multiple interacting trends. A central concern was exponential economic growth in a finite world, and the researchers identified five key areas of crisis: “accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.”
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The team used data observable since 1900 and aimed to model into the future the dynamic interrelationships of trends in that data. They incorporated extensive feedback between factors and the effect of time lags on the impacts delivered. Systems analysis opened an avenue to the modeling of nonlinear processes, a more complex undertaking than the short-term econometric modeling routinely done by economists.
The Limits to Growth
was a brief and accessible summary of the team’s findings, which they hoped would launch a wide-ranging debate not only among scientists but among governments and people in general. Though their work was ultimately characterized as a “doomsday” scenario by most economists and much of the popular press, their message was more optimistic than that. They warned that unimpeded economic growth would very likely collide with planetary limits within the next one hundred years (by about 2070), but counseled that action could be taken to moderate the impact, and that the earlier this was done, the better the prospects were for avoiding catastrophic decline.
By 1972 the United Nations had also begun to engage with perceived environmental dangers. In 1970 the UN General Assembly voted to convene the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and appointed the Canadian geographer Maurice Strong to head it; the gathering was held in Stockholm in June 1972. This event was the forerunner of the Brundtland Commission (1983–1987) and the Rio Earth Summit (1992), as well as a host of regular conferences and specific studies dealing with areas such as water, desertification, and renewable sources of energy. It also gave rise to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which later became the cosponsor of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and marshalled scientists from across the world to produce regular reports on the state of the natural world. UNEP is responsible for the
Global Environmental Outlook
(GEO) reports, of which the fourth, GEO-4, was released in October 2007 and the fifth, GEO-5, coincided with the Rio+20 conference in 2012. GEO-4 expressed warnings uncannily similar to those of the Club of Rome, the
Ecologist,
and allied scholars thirty-five years earlier.
13
During a pre-Stockholm meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in April 1972, the British government’s resource expert, Ralph Verney, suggested that it was no longer desirable “to devote our resources to the achievement of the highest possible growth rate.”
14
At the same meeting, Strong told British geographers he welcomed the debate brought on by
Blueprint
and
Limits
:
We still may not know where the limits are, but we know that there are limits to the scale of the present human population and to the scale of its interventions in the natural system.… In the final analysis, any viable solution will be contingent upon bold new steps to bring about vastly improved conditions of life for all people.
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