Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  To be sure, the very idea that there are environmental problems cannot be taken for granted. From the vantage point of an individual, the Earth seems infinite, and our effects on it inconsequential. From the vantage points of science, the view is more troubling. The microscopic vantage point reveals pollutants that insidiously poison us and the species we admire and depend on; the macroscopic one reveals effects on ecosystems that may be imperceptible one action at a time but add up to tragic despoliation. Beginning in the 1960s, the environmental movement grew out of scientific knowledge (from ecology, public health, and earth and atmospheric sciences) and a Romantic reverence for nature. The movement made the health of the planet a permanent priority on humanity’s agenda, and as we shall see, it deserves credit for substantial achievements—another form of human progress.

  Ironically, many voices in the traditional environmental movement refuse to acknowledge that progress, or even that human progress is a worthy aspiration. In this chapter I will present a newer conception of environmentalism which shares the goal of protecting the air and water, species, and ecosystems but is grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism.

  * * *

  Starting in the 1970s, the mainstream environmental movement latched onto a quasi-religious ideology, greenism, which can be found in the manifestoes of activists as diverse as Al Gore, the Unabomber, and Pope Francis.1 Green ideology begins with an image of the Earth as a pristine ingénue which has been defiled by human rapacity. As Francis put it in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise be to you), “Our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life . . . [who] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.” The harm, according to this narrative, has been inexorably worsening: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” The root cause is the Enlightenment commitment to reason, science, and progress: “Scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history,” wrote Francis. “The way to a better future lies elsewhere,” namely in an appreciation of “the mysterious network of relations between things” and (of course) “the treasure of Christian spiritual experience.” Unless we repent our sins by degrowth, deindustrialization, and a rejection of the false gods of science, technology, and progress, humanity will face a ghastly reckoning in an environmental Judgment Day.

  As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer. For example, Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society wrote, “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. . . . Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.”2

  Recently an alternative approach to environmental protection has been championed by John Asafu-Adjaye, Jesse Ausubel, Andrew Balmford, Stewart Brand, Ruth DeFries, Nancy Knowlton, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and others. It has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.3

  Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When people use energy to create a zone of structure in their bodies and homes, they must increase entropy elsewhere in the environment in the form of waste, pollution, and other forms of disorder. The human species has always been ingenious at doing this—that’s what differentiates us from other mammals—and it has never lived in harmony with the environment. When native peoples first set foot in an ecosystem, they typically hunted large animals to extinction, and often burned and cleared vast swaths of forest.4 A dirty secret of the conservation movement is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been decimated or forcibly removed from them, including the national parks in the United States and the Serengeti in East Africa.5 As the environmental historian William Cronon writes, “wilderness” is not a pristine sanctuary; it is itself a product of civilization.

  When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.”6 And as Brand has pointed out (chapter 7), “natural farming” is a contradiction in terms. Whenever he hears the words natural food, he is tempted to rail:

  No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!7

  A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization has been good for humanity.8 It has fed billions, doubled life spans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children (chapters 7, 15, and 17). It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts. As the economist Robert Frank has put it, there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. Cleaner is better, but not at the expense of everything else in life.

  The third premise is that the tradeoff that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving. Economists speak of the environmental Kuznets curve, a counterpart to the U-shaped arc for inequality as a function of economic growth. As countries first develop, they prioritize growth over environmental purity. But as they get richer, their thoughts turn to the environment.9 If people can afford electricity only at the cost of some smog, they’ll live with the smog, but when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they’ll spring for the clean air. This can happen all the faster as technology makes cars and factories and power plants cleaner and thus makes clean air more affordable.

  Economic growth bends the environmental Kuznets curve by advances not just in technology but in values. Some environmental concerns are entirely practical: people complain about smog in their city, or green space getting paved over. But other concerns are more spiritual. The fate of the black rhinoceros and the well-being of our descendants in the year 2525 are significant moral concerns, but worrying about them now is something of a luxury. As societies get richer and people no longer think about putting food on the table or a roof over their heads, their values climb a hierarchy of needs, and the scope of their concern expands in space and time. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, using data from the World Values Survey, have found that people with stronger emancipative values—tolerance, equality, freedom of thought and speech—which tend to go with affluence and education, are also more likely to recycle and to pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment.10

  * * *

  Ecopessimists commonly dismiss this entire way of thinking as the �
�faith that technology will save us.” In fact it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us—that knowledge will be frozen in its current state and people will robotically persist in their current behavior regardless of circumstances. Indeed, a naïve faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

  The first is the “population bomb,” which (as we saw in chapter 7) defused itself. When countries get richer and better educated, they pass through what demographers call the demographic transition.11 First, death rates decline as nutrition and health improve. This does swell the population, but that is hardly something to bewail: as Johan Norberg notes, it happens not because people in poor countries start breeding like rabbits but because they stop dying like flies. In any case, the increase is temporary: birth rates peak and then decline, for at least two reasons. Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children. Figure 10-1 shows that the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline. Fertility rates have fallen most noticeably in developed regions like Europe and Japan, but they can suddenly collapse, often to demographers’ surprise, in other parts of the world. Despite the widespread belief that Muslim societies are resistant to the social changes that have transformed the West and will be indefinitely rocked by youthquakes, Muslim countries have seen a 40 percent decline in fertility over the past three decades, including a 70 percent drop in Iran and 60 percent drops in Bangladesh and in seven Arab countries.12

  Figure 10-1: Population and population growth, 1750–2015 and projected to 2100

  Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016d. 1750–2015: United Nations Population Division and History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (undated). Post-2015 projections: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Medium Projection (aggregate of country-specific estimates, taking education into account), Lutz, Butz, & Samir 2014.

  The other scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth and similar philippics, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. (In 1980 Paul Ehrlich famously bet the economist Julian Simon that five of these metals would become scarcer and hence more expensive by the end of the decade; he lost all five bets. Indeed, most metals and minerals are cheaper today than they were in 1960.)13 From the 1970s to the early 2000s newsmagazines periodically illustrated cover stories on the world’s oil supply with a gas gauge pointing to Empty. In 2013 The Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.”

  And then there are rare earths like yttrium, scandium, europium, and lanthanum, which you may remember from the periodic table in your chemistry classroom or from the Tom Lehrer song “The Elements.” These metals are a critical component of magnets, fluorescent lights, video screens, catalysts, lasers, capacitors, optical glass, and other high-tech applications. When they started running out, we were warned, there would be critical shortages, a collapse of the technology industry, and perhaps war with China, the source of 95 percent of the world’s supply. That’s what led to the Great Europium Crisis of the late 20th century, when the world ran out of the critical ingredient in the red phosphor dots in the cathode-ray tubes in color televisions and computer monitors and society was divided between the haves, who hoarded the last working color TVs, and the angry have-nots, who were forced to make do with black-and-white. What, you never heard of it? Among the reasons there was no such crisis was that cathode-ray tubes were superseded by liquid crystal displays made of common elements.14 And the Rare Earths War? In reality, when China squeezed its exports in 2010 (not because of shortages but as a geopolitical and mercantilist weapon), other countries started extracting rare earths from their own mines, recycling them from industrial waste, and re-engineering products so they no longer needed them.15

  When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times.16 Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

  Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground. When one idea no longer works, another can take its place. This doesn’t defy the laws of probability but obeys them. Why should the laws of nature have allowed exactly one physically possible way of satisfying a human desire, no more and no less?18

  Admittedly, this way of thinking does not sit well with the ethic of “sustainability.” In figure 10-2, the cartoonist Randall Munroe illustrates what’s wrong with this vogue word and sacred value. The doctrine of sustainability assumes that the current rate of use of a resource may be extrapolated into the future until it rams into a ceiling. The implication is that we must switch to a renewable resource that can be replenished at the rate we use it, indefinitely. In reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before the old one was exhausted. It’s often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well. “Plenty of wood and hay remained to be exploited when the world shifted to coal,” Ausubel notes. “Coal abounded when oil rose. Oil abounds now as methane [natural gas] rises.”19 As we will see, gas in turn may be replaced by energy sources still lower in carbon well before the last cubic foot goes up in a blue flame.

  Figure 10-2: Sustainability, 1955–2109

  Source: Randall Munroe, XKCD, http://xkcd.com/1007/. Credit: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com.

  The supply of food, too, has grown exponentially (as we saw in chapter 7), even though no single method of growing it has ever been sustainable. In The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, the geographer Ruth DeFries describes the sequence as “ratchet-hatchet-pivot.” People discover a way of growing more food, and the population ratchets upward. The method fails to keep up with the demand or develops unpleasant side effects, and the hatchet falls. People then pivot to a new method. At various times, farmers have pivoted to slash-and-burn horticulture, night soil (a euphemism for human feces), crop rotation, guano, saltpeter, ground-up bison bones, chemical fertilizer, hybrid crops, pesticides, and the Green Revolution.20 Future pivots may include genetically modified organisms, hydroponics, aeroponics, urban vertical farms, robotic harvesting, meat cultured in vitro, artificial intelligence algorithms fed by GPS and biosensors, the recovery of energy and fertilizer from sewage, aquaculture with fish that eat tofu instead of other fish, and who knows what else—as long as people are allowed to indulge their ingenuity.21 Though water is one resource that people will never pivot away from,
farmers could save massive amounts if they switched to Israeli-style precision farming. And if the world develops abundant carbon-free energy sources (a topic we will explore later), it could get what it needs by desalinating seawater.22

  * * *

  Not only have the disasters prophesied by 1970s greenism failed to take place, but improvements that it deemed impossible have taken place. As the world has gotten richer and crested the environmental curve, nature has begun to rebound.23 Pope Francis’s “immense pile of filth” is the vision of someone who has woken up thinking it’s 1965, the era of belching smokestacks, waterfalls of sewage, rivers catching fire, and jokes about New Yorkers not liking to breathe air they can’t see. Figure 10-3 shows that since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner, a point to which we will return. The declines don’t just reflect an offshoring of heavy industry to the developing world, because the bulk of energy use and emissions comes from transportation, heating, and electricity generation, which cannot be outsourced. Rather, they mainly reflect gains in efficiency and emission control. These diverging curves refute both the orthodox Green claim that only degrowth can curb pollution and the orthodox right-wing claim that environmental protection must sabotage economic growth and people’s standard of living.