Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (9 page)

Strong’s comment reflected his awareness of two crucial aspects of the emerging environmental problem: that natural limits apply to the scale of economic activity and that, notwithstanding such limits, latitude had to be found to ameliorate the grim situations hundreds of millions of people still faced. For Strong, this task would be tantamount to “rational global management of the finite resources of the earth” on behalf of all people.

The broad direction of Strong’s approach is worth noting, since the concept of international management was to become a major focus of conflict over what (if anything) needed to be done. Some critics rejected international managers—and even the UN as a whole—because of perceived infringements on national sovereignty and checks on corporate independence; others expressed an opposite fear, that international managers might serve as proxies for unrestrained corporate power.
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Some also felt the idea of technical experts managing the resources and geophysical processes of the planet was a fantasy arising from runaway hubris. However apt Strong’s twin focus on environment and poverty, his solution sounded “technocratic,” and it certainly ignored the kind of free market solution that was to gain ground in the 1980s. Strong hoped that the governments assembled for the Stockholm Conference would make decisions about the allocation and distribution needed to conserve and share the resources of the earth and would establish and fund a UN branch to carry them out.
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Shortly after his inauguration in early 1977, President Jimmy Carter commissioned the
Global 2000 Report to the President
, which directed the US Council on Environmental Quality and the State Department to liaise with other key government agencies in studying “the probable changes in the world’s population, natural resources and environment through the end of the century.”
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Canada’s Pierre Trudeau soon sponsored two parallel reports focused on Canada’s future.
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These initiatives—and those of the UN—demonstrate that the issues raised by scientists and ecological economists were taken seriously among crucial world leaders during the seventies. But by the time President Carter’s
Global 2000
was published, in 1980, enthusiasm at this level was waning, and Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected to the US presidency. The 1970s mark a great shift in the ideological framework that buttressed first world national policies and global institutions. From then on, neoliberalism gained ground, bringing with it a crusade against regulation and an exalting of market forces over human agency, both of which were to militate against the ongoing critique of the growth economy (chapter 6). The neoliberals believed that growth would flow from market freedom and that this was the best way to solve pollution and ecological degradation, even though these were themselves the result of prior growth. Growth slowed in this era, compared to the postwar period, but its pursuit remained the dominant paradigm guiding economic policy almost everywhere on earth.

Precursors to the Limits Debate: Discourses of Scarcity

Mainstream and ecological economists diverge sharply in defining scarcity, along the fault lines of the assumptions described in chapter 2. For the neoclassical mainstream, scarcity is always relative, always reparable. Investment, technology, and the operation of the price system are believed to provide substitution for every scarcity. Physical scientists and ecological economists suggest that this account ignores the ultimately finite character of planet Earth, as well as the essential role of energy in all forms of extraction and production; in their framework,
absolute
scarcity encroaches as essential natural resources—especially energy resources—are dismantled.

Until the recent past, almost all human societies suffered food shortages, intermittent in some luckier places and times, frequent in others. Even now this condition has been transcended only by privileged sectors of the global population and still haunts vast numbers of people. It has been argued that hunting and gathering modes of life were less vulnerable than the settled and ultimately stratified and urbanized communities that proliferated over the last 10,000 years.
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Once communities began to depend on farming, many contingencies could trigger famine—climate shifts, annual weather variations, and the unintended consequences of human efforts to mitigate the problem in the first place. In all stratified societies, including contemporary human society, the consequences of insufficient food production or insufficient food available at affordable prices fall unevenly on people of different rank, class, and gender. The inequalities in the current world economic system reflect this truism just as, though most were affected in the recurrent famines of medieval times, it was the poor who starved.
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Today, women remain disproportionately disadvantaged. Women make up two-thirds of the world’s poor, two-thirds of the world’s hungry, and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate.
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Malthus: Scarcity as a Political Tool

Though Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was not the first economist to dwell on the likelihood of recurrent food crises, he was certainly the most influential in the Western post-Enlightenment tradition. Malthus lived at the beginning of the industrial miracle, which might have delivered all of humanity from chronic food insecurity had it been differently developed. In the event, after two centuries of an apparently endless upward trend, biologists began warning in the late 1940s that the miracle itself was destroying its natural base and might collapse as a result. “Malthusianism” is an epithet that has been commonly applied to the postwar thinkers who have pointed to the limits of the industrial capitalist expansion of the last 250 years—a description that is not always apt.

Malthus advanced the idea of limits in the late eighteenth century on the basis that population was growing faster than food production. Though his status as a household word flows from this population theory, Malthus’s stated agenda was political: to rebut utopian ideas about “the future improvement of society,” ideas in the ascendancy since the recent revolution in France. His examination of the mathematics of population growth was, at least initially, incidental to this argument. His broader objective was reflected in the title of the first version of his essay, published in 1798:
An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Effects the Future Improvement of Society
.
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Malthus’s interest in the unfettered growth of human populations arose in relation to another of his key contentions: that social improvement was both impossible and undesirable since more egalitarian social arrangements would only encourage the poor to breed more rapidly and outgrow the food supply—to their own detriment, he asserted, as well as that of the rich.

Malthus did not tackle general limits to economic growth. He lived before the really big surges of industrial expansion that began in the nineteenth century and made no critique of industrial growth, resource depletion, or environmental degradation. The limits he invoked were agricultural limits, and he was unaware of what petroleum would one day do for crop yields. His quasi-scientific theory held that populations increase geometrically while the food supply expands merely arithmetically, and that this imbalance, a putative “law of nature,” required curbs on the breeding of the poor. Malthus invoked the population argument to justify a punitive workhouse-centered structure for welfare. The campaign he supported led to the Poor Law of 1834, which placed draconian restrictions on the provision of relief.
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Malthus’s ideas and methods bear little resemblance to the investigations of the
Limits to Growth
researchers, or to the work of most of those who have warned about environmental degradation.

Several notorious passages give insight into the beliefs underlying Malthus’s outlook:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents … and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food.… At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him.
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His approach to unwanted children, whether illegitimate or not, was similarly implacable. He would deny all assistance to any child whose parents could not provide support.
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The costs of assisting the indigent could be avoided by allowing them and their children to starve—for their own and everyone else’s good. He also favored separating small farmers from their tenuous but self-supported living so that the land could be properly exploited, advocating that a “great part” of the subsistence potato farmers of Ireland needed to be “swept from the soil into large manufacturing and commercial towns.” Not only was he eager to dispossess the Irish peasantry, he was clearly unconcerned about their subsequent fate—as he also reported that the demand for labor was weak.
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A keen proponent of agricultural enclosure and industrial expansion, Malthus was squarely allied with those who had a seat at the feast. His ruminations on population flowed from these preoccupations.

To be “Malthusian” (i.e., like Malthus) thus involves several key elements over and above a fear of exploding population, and these are more central to his ideas than the population theme. They include resistance to notions of social improvement and social welfare, punitive policies for the poor, a tendency to blame the poor for their own plight, and recourse to speculative theorizing in the service of an essentially political argument. Malthus’s population theory was closely associated with his callous and elitist political views, and the label was happily adopted by some American eugenics organizations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; for these reasons, the term “Malthusian” is often used pejoratively. The expression works as a shorthand not simply to denote fear of exponential population growth but also as a label for those who appeal to questionable science, are empirically wrong about limits, favor the rich and powerful over the poor, or are grotesquely inhumane. Some of the scientists who began raising the alarm about ecological damage from 1946 on were vulnerable to parts of that description, but for most it doesn’t really fit. Few could be accused of poor science, few were advancing any explicit political agenda, and all had concerns that went well beyond population or its control.

Osborn and Vogt and Their Critics

Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt, both biologists, issued the first in a long line of postwar science-inspired warnings. Both argued that free enterprise and the profit motive were inimical to the natural world and, though they did not much use the word “capitalism,” they wanted to see extensive regulation of “free enterprise” in the interests of all citizens.

While concerned about escalating rates of population growth, Osborn’s big worry was the degradation of the soil—in cropland as well as forests and water catchments. The soil was a living thing, he argued, not ultimately amenable to cure by chemistry: “the earth is not a gadget.” Osborn also pointed to what Marx had earlier called metabolic rift—the “steady movement of organic material to towns and industrial centers—there to be consumed or disposed of as waste but never to go back to the land of origin.” Instead, it poisoned rivers and ran to waste in the ocean.
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The sources of human life were being choked by what Osborn described as “vast industrial systems” proliferating at frightening speed. One can only guess at what he might have said about the situation sixty-five years later.

Long before more recent researchers such as Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond, Osborn reviewed historical agricultural disasters and declines, and concluded that the main causes of these failures lay in the headlong destruction of forests, the overgrazing of grasslands, and the pressure that was exerted on the land when cash crops were grown for export. He was a forerunner of the emphasis on sustainability and thought that renewable resources were the property of all the people and should be deployed for the benefit of all, through government planning and regulation. In pleading for the protection of the public lands of the western United States, he described as theft the depredations of interest groups such as cattlemen and lumbermen.
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Vogt’s position was broadly similar, though his use of words like “backward,” “ignorant,” “illiterate,” “hordes,” and “Japs” conveyed an explicit belief in white racial superiority. He regarded medical improvements as a tragedy that would only perpetuate the tribulations of the poor by allowing more of them to survive. However, he explicitly called on Europe and North America to curb their populations as well. He described Europe as a long-term parasite on the rest of the world—it had not been able to feed its own for centuries and had survived only because of its extractive relationship to its colonies. He too was deeply worried by soil erosion and the disruption of water supplies by clearing, overgrazing, and overpumping. Like Osborn, Vogt pointed to the irrational “system of sanitation which every year sends millions of tons of mineral wealth and organic matter … to be lost in the sea.”
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Vogt laid much of the blame for this decline at the door of the “free enterprise system” and its economists, who did not include “the highly vulnerable biotic potential” in their concept of capital. He argued that America had been living on its resource capital since 1607 and warned that resources are renewable only if they are managed on a sustained-yield basis. The pursuit of profit, he thought, encouraged profligate practices. Vogt also saw the extractive colonial system ruining the land of Africans, who were, he argued, being forced to produce crops for export. Though he did not use the term, Vogt pointed to the immense ecological footprint of European cities.
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The responses of economists varied from utter scorn to a plea for economics to embrace and deal with the issues raised, a pattern that would be duplicated when
Limits to Growth
was published twenty-five years later.
Time
magazine panned Vogt’s book as “neo-Malthusian propaganda,” arguing that soil can easily be “created.” The Stanford University agricultural economist Karl Brandt was also contemptuous, calling the book “deliberate propaganda,” describing it as “bad,” “immoral,” “distasteful” and “irresponsible,” and arguing that Vogt had no understanding of the “basic issues of the creation of wealth.” The resource economist Joseph Fisher, on the other hand, while critical of Vogt’s “purple prose” and “sweeping generalizations,” accepted the existence of “fundamental dangers” and pointed to the need for economic theory to cover resource conservation more adequately and to look at the economic advantages conservation might bring.
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Fisher went on to head the think tank Resources for the Future, which explored the policy implications of these issues and was involved in the development of environmental economics as a distinct field. Environmental economists argue that negative externalities (unaccounted costs) can and should be integrated into mainstream economic thinking through various techniques for pricing nature into the economy.