Green Planets (22 page)

LIFEBOAT ETHICS

The so-called population problem was never simply about “too many,” to quote a 1969 book by the Swedish food scientist Georg Borgstrom.
⁵¹
It was not primarily the absolute number of the world's population, reaching three billion by the 1960s, that alarmed his contemporaries. Rather, population ecologists pointed to the disastrous effects of some parts of world population outbreeding others. Respectively, Hardin's aim was not to realize the
maximum
population that the nineteenth-century British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham might have had in mind when formulating his goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
⁵²
Hardin aimed to achieve the
optimum
population, proportionately and responsibly composed and numerically safely below Earth's carrying capacity.

Hardin formulated his “Lifeboat Ethics” in the mid 1970s.
⁵³
He abandoned the idea of Spaceship Earth, criticizing that it presupposed a powerful captain on its
bridge to take a decision. Viewing Earth as a lifeboat prescribed rules of selection independent from Darwin's biology and from the (possibly fatal) choices of a steering elite. Survival on a lifeboat depended solely on its carrying capacity: the number of occupants in relation to the amount of provisions, their economic allocation, and the disposal of deadweight. The lifeboat enforced new criteria of eligibility: its physics determined its ethics.
⁵⁴
Hardin himself took on a godlike authority when framing the basic law of the lifeboat in the Old Testament formula
Thou shalt not
: “Thou shalt not exceed the carrying capacity” became his quasi-biblical commandment of ecological correctness.
⁵⁵

On the ethical basis of Earth presenting a lifeboat Hardin made his “Case against Helping the Poor.” He argued against the “fundamental error of the ethics of sharing” in international aid programs and urged wealthy nations to close their doors to acts of charity like immigration and food aid to the poor. The population of poor countries, his argument went, would simply “convert extra food into extra babies.”
⁵⁶
The optimum world population, able to survive on the planetary lifeboat, would have to be reached via a Darwinian process of selection that reflected a nation's “fitness.” Fitness he defines according to orthodox liberal logic of achieved economic prosperity, and so determines that top nations or groups should be rewarded while communities not able to cleverly economize be punished. Hardin's disposition of human lives entirely ignores the historical roots of disparities of wealth through colonial exploitation and postcolonial power relations. Socially and historically developed problems he describes as biological in origin and individual in character. All the while, the good cause he claims to support deflects from the genocidal logics that inform his judgment.

EXIT STRATEGY

The concluding chapter of Hardin's book follows the Argotes preparing their return to Earth. The
Beagle
's nuclear energy pack has been used up. Besides, after five thousand years of the ship's journeying through space, three young women have discovered the entrance into the Argotes' hiding place. Following the Eve principle of spoiling any sophisticated mission, the intruders have turned what began as a rational endeavor into a luxury cruise. The women introduced sex and brought genetic variety to the Argotes, meanwhile great-grandmothering a new population of Argotes. The price of sex has been mortality. Fourteen people are left in the secret hub of the ship, and essentially nothing distinguishes them from the Quotions outside.

The shuttle to Earth can carry twenty people. The Argotes discuss the question
of who may go, displaying the ultimate lifeboat predicament. Should they draw lots? Should they give up their place voluntarily to one of the Quotions? In the end, the fourteen Argotes enter the shuttle, leaving six seats empty—for the safety factor—and leaving behind the millions of Quotions blissfully ignorant of their fate of certain death. This passage clearly exhibits the deeper meaning and consequence of Hardin's ethics for survival. Lifeboat ethics is not about an absolute morality that binds every human being in the same way at all times and all places. Lifeboat ethics calls for a situational morality. The truly knowledgeable and responsible will not take in more people than their lifeboat's carrying capacity allows for.

At least one question remains unanswered: Where will the lifeboat go? After the
Beagle
's voyage of thousands of years, the state of planet Earth is utterly unknown. The last message arrived twenty years after the
Beagle
left; it is very probable that the Earth fell victim to nuclear destruction. Can this be a return home? Hardin leaves this part of the story untold—perhaps to him this is where true science fiction begins. As a population ecologist he takes no interest in visions of terraforming new planets and reinventing paradise. Hardin is engaged solely with numerical aggregates of living beings and with the distribution of countable resources and measurable living space. Noticeably, with his focus so narrow, there are things that escape him, first of all the insight that his science has been fiction all along.

Hardin misses out on the reflection that the science of ecology has been constructing the closed worlds it describes. The movie
ZPG
: Zero Population Growth
I began this text with explores how an escape from philosophies of sufficiency and efficiency in the spaceship, the ark, and the lifeboat might be performed. By way of the junk-littered canals beneath the city, the couple Russ and Carol with their newborn can flee the state authorities in a tiny rubber dinghy. This lifeboat is not designed as an economic container but as a makeshift rescue vehicle. It takes the family to an abandoned beach, a former radioactive zone where they set out to make a new start. The wasteland serves as a metaphor of what may lie beyond the realm of rigid population control: an open wilderness, deserted and anything but pure, but also unrestrained and free to inhabit in new ways. This is not a return. The story presents the ship as an exit strategy to claim an environment that is not within but
outside
the confines of ecology.

Notes

1
.
ZPG: Zero Population Growth
, dir. Michael Campus (2008; Los Angeles: Paramount, 1971), DVD. The epigraph for this chapter quotes from the opening sequence.

2
. The Population Connection, “30 Years of ZPG,” [ZPG]
Reporter
, December 1998, 12–19,
http://www.populationconnection.org/site/DocServer/1219thirtyyears.pdf?docID=261
.

3
. Ibid. According to the article about the history of the organization between 1968 and 1998, “the years between 1969 and 1972 saw the membership of ZPG briefly blossom to more than 35,000 members” (13).

4
. See Paul R. Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb
(1968; New York: Ballantine, 1969).

5
. Matthew Connelly, “To Inherit the Earth: Imagining World Population, from the Yellow Peril to the Population Bomb,”
Journal of Global History
1, no. 3 (2006): 300. For more-encompassing treatment, see Matthew Connelly,
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). On population models and laws see Sharon E. Kingsland,
Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology
(1985; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

6
. Sabine Höhler, “The Law of Growth: How Ecology Accounted for World Population in the 20th Century,”
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory
14 (2007): 45–64.

7
. Next to Ehrlich's
Population Bomb
the best known are perhaps Fairfield Osborn,
Our Plundered Planet
(1948; Boston: Little, Brown, 1950); Fairfield Osborn,
The Limits of the Earth
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Fairfield Osborn,
Our Crowded Planet: Essays on the Pressures of Population
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962); Karl Sax,
Standing Room Only: The World's Exploding Population
(1955; Boston: Beacon Press, 1960),
Standing Room Only: The Challenge of Overpopulation
); Georg Borgstrom,
Too Many: A Study of Earth's Biological Limitations
(New York: Macmillan, 1969); Michael Hamilton, ed.,
This Little Planet
(New York: Scribner, 1970). The 1972 study
The
Limits to Growth
developed future scenarios termed the “behavior modes of the population-capital system.” Donella H. Meadows et al.,
The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind
(New York: Universe Books, 1972), 91–92.

8
. Science fiction is too broad a genre to be defined uniformly or conclusively. See Vivian Sobchack,
Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film
(1987; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), chap. 1, “The Limits of the Genre,” 17–63.

9
. Connelly, “To Inherit the Earth,” 314.

10
. Ibid., 301.

11
. J. H. Fremlin, “How Many People Can the World Support?”
New Scientist
415 (1964): 285–87.

12
. Garrett Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle
(New York: Viking Press, 1972).

13
. Ibid., 114.

14
. Ehrlich repeatedly speaks of “human surplus”: see
Population Bomb
, 167. See also Sabine Höhler, “‘Carrying Capacity'—the Moral Economy of the ‘Coming Spaceship Earth,'”
Atenea: A Bilingual Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences
26, no. 1 (2006): 59–74.

15
. A number of twentieth-century science fiction writers have set their stories on “interstellar arks,” self-contained generation spaceships on their way to distant worlds, to explore how societies evolve in closed environments, from Robert A. Heinlein's
Orphans of the Sky
(1941) to Brian Aldiss's
Non-Stop
/
Starship
(1958), to more recent works like Molly Gloss's
The Dazzle of Day
(1997).

16
. “It is obvious that we cannot exist unaffected by the fate of our fellows on the other end of the good ship Earth. If their end of the ship sinks, we shall at the very least have to put up with the spectacle of their drowning and listen to their screams.” Ehrlich,
Population Bomb
, 132.

17
. Rafael M. Salas,
International Population Assistance: The First Decade; A Look at the Concepts and Politics Which Have Guided the UNFPA in Its First Ten Years
(New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 125.

18
. Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 92.

19
. Ibid., 12.

20
. Peter Sloterdijk,
Sphären
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998–2004), vol. 2,
Globen (Makrosphärologie)
(1999), chap. 3: “Archen, Stadtmauern, Weltgrenzen, Immunsysteme. Zur Ontologie des ummauerten Raumes,” 251–64. Translations are mine.

21
. Ibid., 252.

22
. “The earth is a spaceship.” Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 16.

23
. Ibid.

24
. Ibid., 17.

25
. Barbara Ward,
Spaceship Earth
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 15. On the figure of Spaceship Earth in environmental discourse see Sabine Höhler, “‘Spaceship Earth': Envisioning Human Habitats in the Environmental Age,”
Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
42 (2008): 65–85; Sabine Höhler, “The Environment as a Life Support System: The Case of Biosphere 2,”
History and Technology
26, no. 1 (2010): 39–58.

26
. Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” in
Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy
, Essays from the Sixth RFF Forum on Environmental Quality held in Washington, D.C., March 8 and 9, 1966, ed. Henry Jarrett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 9. Hardin recommends Boulding's vision; Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 242.

27
. Richard Buckminster Fuller,
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1971; originally published by Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). See also Peder Anker, “Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth,”
Minerva
45, no. 4 (2007): 417–34.

28
. These views were two early versions of the programmatic term “sustainable development” emerging in the late 1980s. World Commission on Environment and Development (Chairman Gro Harlem Brundtland),
Our Common Future
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

29
. Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 92.

30
. Ibid., 96.

31
. Ibid., 118.

32
. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”
Science
162 (1968): 1243–48.

33
. Hardin,
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, 102.

34
. Ibid., 118.

35
. Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers
(London, 1798). On mid-twentieth-century Neo-Malthusianism see Björn-Ola
Linnér,
The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-war Population-Resource Crises
(Leverburgh, Isle of Harris, UK: White Horse Press, 2003); Paul Neurath,
From Malthus to the Club of Rome and Back: Problems of Limits to Growth, Population Control, and Migrations
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

36
. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1246.