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Ecological armageddon

By Robert Heilbroner

The desirability of economic growth in an affluent industrial society such as the United States has in recent years come under attack from many quarters. Some of the strongest and most pervasive critics have been the ecologists. In a review of an important book, POPULATION, RESOURCES, ENVIRONMENTS, by Paul and Ann Ehrlich, Robert Heilbroner summarizes and analyzes the major ecological problems posed by unlimited growth.

l. The ecological issue has assumed the dimensions of a vast popular fad, for which one can predict with reasonable assurance the trajectory of all fads — a period of intense general involvement, followed by

growing boredom and gradual extinction, save for a die-hard remnant of the faithful.

    2. I have slowly become convinced during the last twelve months that the ecological issue is not only of primary and lasting importance, but that it may indeed constitute the most dangerous and difficult

challenge that humanity has ever faced. Since these are verylarge statements, let me attempt to substantiate them by drawing freely on the best single descriptive and analytic treatment of the subject that I have yet seen, Population, Resources, Environment by Paul and Ann Ehrlich of Stanford University. Rather than

resort to the bothersome procedure of endlessly citing their arguments in quotation marks, I shall take the liberty of reproducing their case in a rather free paraphrase, as if it were my own, until we reach the end of the basic argument after which I shall make clear some conclusions that I believe lie implicit in their work.

3. Ultimately, the ecological crisis represents our belated awakening to the fact that we live on what Kenneth Boulding has called, in the perfect phrase, our Spaceship Earth. As in all spaceships, sustained life requires that a meticulous balance be maintained between the capability of the vehicle to support life

and the demands made by the inhabitants of the craft. Until recently, those demands have been well within the capability of the ship, in its ability both to supply the physical and chemical requirements for continued existence and to absorb the waste products of the voyagers. This is not to say that the earth has been

generous — short rations have been the lot of mankind for most of its history — nor is it to deny the recurrent advent of local ecological crises — witness the destruction of whole areas like the erstwhile granaries of North Africa. But famines have passed and there have always been new areas to move to.The

 idea that the earth as a whole was overtaxed is one that is new to our time.

For it is only in our time that we are reaching the limit of earthly carrying capacity, not on a local

but on a global basis. Indeed, as will soon become clear, we are well past that capacity, provided that the level of resource intake and waste output represented by the average American or European is taken as a standard to be achieved by all humanity. To put it bluntly, if we take as the price of a first-class ticket the

resource requirements-of those passengers who travel in the Northern Hemisphere of the Spaceship, we have now reached a point at which the steerage is condemned to live forever — or at least within the horizon of the technology presently visible — at a second-class level: 5 or a point at which a considerable

change in living habits just be imposed on first class if the ship is ever to be converted to a one-class cruise.

This strain on the carrying capacity of the vessel results from the contemporary confluence of three distinct developments, each of which places tremendous or even unmanageable strains on the life-carrying

capability of the planet and all of which together simply overload it. The first of these is the enormous strain imposed by the sheer burgeoning of population. The statistics of population growth are by now very well known: the earth's passenger list is growing at a rate that will give us some four billion humans by

1975,and that threatens to give us eight billion by 2010. I say «threatens», since it is likely that the inability of the earth to carry so large a group will result in an actual population somewhat smaller than this, especially in the steerage, where the growth is most rapid and the available resources last plentiful.

     6. We shall return to the population problem later. But meanwhile a second strain is placed on the earth by the simple cumulative effect of existing technology (combustion engines, the main industrial processes,

present-day agricultural techniques, etc.). This strain is localized mainly in the first-class portions of the vessel where each new arrival on board is rapidly given a standard complement of capital equipment and where the rate of physical and chemical resource transformation per capita steadily mounts. The strain

consists of the limited ability of the soil, the water, and the atmosphere of these favored regions to absorb the outpourings of these fast-growing industrial processes.

7.The most dramatic instance of this limited absorptive power is the rise in the carbon dioxide content of

the air due to the steady growth of (largely industrial) combustion. By the year 2000, it seems beyond dispute that the CO2 content of the air will have doubled, raising the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere. This so-called «greenhouse» effect has been predicted to raise mean global temperatures

sufficiently to bring catastrophic potential consequences. One possibility is a sequence of climatic changes resulting from a melting of the Arctic ice floes that would result in the advent of a new ice Age; another is the slumping of the Antarctic ice cap into the sea with a consequent tidal wave that could wipe out a sub

stantial portion of mankind and raise the sea level by 60 to 100 feet.

8.These are all «iffy» scenarios whose present significance may be limited to alerting us to the immensity of the ecological problem; happily they are of sufficient uncertainty not to cause us immediate

worry (it is lucky they are, because it is extremely unlikely that all the massed technological and human energy on earth could arrest such changes once they began). Much closer to home is the burden placed on the earth's carrying capacity by the sheer requirements of a spreading industrial activity for the fuel and

mineral resources needed to maintain the going rate of output per person in the first-class cabins. To raise the existing (not the anticipated) population of the earth to American standards would require the annual extraction of 75 times as much iron, 100 times as much copper, 200 times as much lead, and 250 times as

much tin as we now take from the earth.

9.Only the known reserves of iron allow us to entertain such fantastic rates of mineral exploitation (and the capital investment needed to bring about such mining operations is in itself staggering to contemplate).

All the other requirements exceed by far all known or reasonably anticipated ore reserves. And, to repeat, we have taken into account only today's level of population: to equip the prospective passengers of the year 2010 with this amount of basic raw material would require a doubling of all the above figures.

   10. I  will revert later to the consequences of this prospect. First, however, let us pay attention to the third source of overload, this one traceable to the special environment-destroying potential of newly developed

technologies. Of these the most important — and if it should ever come to full-scale war, of course the most lethal — is the threat posed by nuclear radiation. I shall not elaborate on this well-known (although not wellbelieved) danger, pausing to point out only that a nuclear holocaust would in all likelihood exert its

principal effect in the Northern Hemisphere. The survivors in the South would be severely hampered in their efforts at reconstruction not only because most of the easily available resources of the world have already been used up, but because most of the technological know-how would have perished along with the populations up North.

1l.But the threats of new technology are by no means limited to the specter of nuclear devastation. There is, immediately at hand, the known devastation of the new chemical pesticides that have now entered more

or less irreversibly into the living tissue of the world's population. Most mothers' milk in the United States today — I now quote the Ehrlichs verbatim — «contains so much DDT that it would be declared illegal in interstate commerce if it were sold as cow's milk»; and the DDT intake of infants around the world is twice

the daily allowable maximum set by the World Health Organization. We are already, in other words, being exposed to heavy dosages of chemicals whose effects we know to be dangerous, with what ultimate results we shall have to wait nervously to discover. (There is something to think about in the archaeological

evidence that one factor in the decline of Rome was the systematic poisoning of upper-class Romans from the lead with which they lined their wine containers).

12.But the threat is not limited to pesticides. Barry Commoner predicts an agricultural crisis in the

United States within fifty years from the action of our fertilizers, which will either ultimately destroy soil fertility or lead to pollution of the national water supply. At another comer of the new technology, the SST* threatens not only to shake us with its boom, but to affect the amount of cloud cover (and climate) by

its contrails**. And I have not even mentioned the standard pollution problems of smoke, industrial effluents into lakes and rivers, or solid wastes. Suffice it to report that a 1968 UNESCO Conference concluded that man has only about twenty years to go before the planet starts to become uninhabitable because of air pollution alone. Of course «starts to» is imprecise; I am reminded of a cartoon of an

industrialist looking at his billowing smoke-stacks, in front of which a forlorn figure is holding up a placard that says: «We have only 35 years to go», The caption reads, «Boy, that shook me up for a minute. I thought it said 3 to 5 years».

*SST — supersonic transport plane

**contrail — the visible condensation of water droplets or ice crystals from the atmosphere, occurring in the wake of an aircraft or missile under certain conditions.

 

13. I have left until last the grimmest and gravest threats of all, speaking now on behalf of the steerage. This is the looming inability of the great green earth to bring forth sufficient food to maintain life, even at the miserable threshhold of subsistence at which it is now endured by perhaps a third of the world's

population. The problem here is the very strong likelihood that population growth will inexorably outpace whatever improvements in fertility and productivity we will be able to apply to the earth's mantle (including the watery fringes of the ocean where sea «farming» is at least technically imaginable).

175     14. Here the race is basically between two forces: on the one hand, those that give promise that the rate of population increase can be curbed (if not totally halted); and on the other, those that give promise of increasing the amount of sustenance we can wring from the soil.

180   15. Ultimately the problem posed by Malthus must be faced — that population tends to increase geometrically, by doubling; and that agriculture does not; so that eventually population must face the limit of a food barrier.

16.The Malthusian prophecy has been so often «refuted», as economists have pointed to the astonishing

185 rates of growth of food output in the advanced nations, that there is a danger of dismissing the warnings of the Ehrlichs as merely another premature alarm. To do so would be a fearful mistake. For unlike Malthus, who assumed that technology would remain constant, the Ehrlichs have made ample allowance for the

190 growth of technological capability, and their approach to the impending catastrophe is not shrill. They merely point out that a mild version of the Malthusian solution is already upon us, for at least half a billion

195 people are chronically hungry or outright starving, and another 1 1/2 billion under or malnourished. Thus we do not have to wait for «gigantic inevitable famine»; it has already come.

17.What is more important is that the Ehrlichs see the matter in a fundamentally different perspective

200 from Malthus, not as a problem involving supply and demand, but as one involving a total ecological equilibrium. The crisis, as the Ehrlichs see it, is thus both deeper and more complex than merely a shortage of food, although the latter is one of its more horrendous evidences. What threatens the Spaceship Earth is a

205 profound imbalance between the totality of systems by which human life is maintained, and the totality of demands, industrial as well as agricultural, technological as well as demographic, to which that capacity to support life is subjected.

18. I have no doubt that one can fault bits and pieces of the Ehrlichs' analysis, and there is a note of

210 determined pessimism in their work that leads me to suspect (or at least hope) that there is somewhat more time for adaptation than they suggest. Yet I do not see how their basic conclusion can be denied. Beginning within our lifetimes and rising rapidly to crisis proportions in our children's, a challenge faces humankind

215 comparable to none in its history, with the possible exception of the forced migrations of the Ice Age. It is with the responses to this crisis that I wish to end this essay, for telling and courageous as the Ehrlichs' analysis is, I do not believe that even they have fully faced up to the implications that their own findings

220 present.

19. The first of these I have already stated: it is the clear conclusion that the underdeveloped countries can never hope to achieve parity with the developed countries. Given our present and prospective

225 technology, there are simply not enough resources to permit a «Western» rate of industrial exploitation to be expanded to a population of four billion — much less eight billion — persons. It may well be that most of the population in the underdeveloped world has no ambition to reach Western standards — indeed, does

230 not even know that such a thing as «development» is on the agenda. But the elites of these nations, for all their rhetorical rejection of Western (and especially American) styles of life, do tend to picture a Western standard as the ultimate end of their activities. As it becomes clear that such an objective is impossible, a

235 profound reorientation of views must take place within the underdeveloped nations.

20.The implications of the ecological crisis for the advanced nations are not any less severe, although they are of a different kind. For it is clear that free industrial growth is just as disastrous for the Western

240 nations as a free population growth for those of the East and South. The worship in the West of a growing Gross National Product must be recognized as not only a deceptive but a very dangerous avatar; Kenneth

245 Boulding has begun a campaign, in which I shall join him, to label this statistical monster Gross National Cost.

21.The necessity to bring our economic activities into a sustainable relationship with the resource

250 capabilities and waste absorption properties of the world will pose two problems for the West, On the simpler level, a whole series of technological problems must be met. Fume-free transportation must be developed on land and air. The cult of disposability must be replaced by that of reusability. Population stability must be attained through tax and other inducements, both to conserve resources and to preserve

255 reasonable population densities. Many of these problems will tax our ingenuity, technical and sociopolitical, but the main problem they pose is not whether, but how soon they can be solved.

22. But there is another, deeper question that the developed nations face — at least those that have

260 capitalist economies. This problem can be stated as a crucial test as to who was right — John Stuart Mill or Karl Marx. Mill maintained, in his famous Principles, that the terminus of capitalist evolution would be a stationary state, in which the return to capital had fallen to insignifficance, and a redistributive tax system

265 would be able to capture any flows of income to the holders of scarce resources such as land. In effect, he prophesied the transformation of capitalism, in an environment of abundance, into a balanced economy, in

270 which the capitalist both as the generator of change and as the main claimant on the surplus generated by change, would in effect undergo a painless euthanasia.

23.The Marxian view is of course quite the opposite. The very essence of capitalism, according to Marx, is expansion— which is to say, the capitalist, as a historical «type», finds his raison d'etre in the insatiable

275 search for additional moneywealth gained through the constant growth of the economic system. The idea of a «stationary» capitalism is, in Marxian eyes, a contradiction in terms, on a logical par with a democratic aristocracy or an industrial feudalism.

24.Is the Millian or the Marxian view correct? I do not think that we can yet say. Some economic growth is certainly compatible with a stabilized rate of resource use and disposal, for growth could take the form of the expenditure of additional labor on the improvement (aesthetic or technical) of the national

environment. Indeed, insofar as education or cultural activity are forms of national output that require little use or resources and result in little waste product, national output could be indefinitely expanded through

these and similar activities. But there is no doubt that the main avenue of traditional capitalist accumulation would have to be considerably constrained; that net investment in mining and manufacturing would effectively cease; that the rate and kind of technological change would need to be supervised and probably

greatly reduced; and that as a consequence the flow of profits would almost certainly fall.

25.Is this imaginable within a capitalist setting — that is, in a nation in which the business ideology permeates the views of nearly all groups and classes and establishes the bounds of what is possible and

300 natural, and what is not? Ordinarily I do not see how such a question could he answered in any way but negatively, for it is tantamount to asking a dominant class to acquiesce in the elimination of the very activities that sustain it. But this is an extraordinary challenge that may evoke an extraordinary response.

305 Like the challenge posed by war, the ecological crisis affects all classes, and therefore may be sufficient to induce sociological changes that would be unthinkable in ordinary circumstances.

 


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