In addition, all of us know as individuals that we don’t measure our economic well-being just by the present size of our bank accounts: we also look at our direction of cash flow. When you look at your bank statement and you see a positive $5,000 balance, you don’t smile if you then realize that you have been experiencing a net cash drain of $200 per month for the last several years, and at that rate you have just two years and one month left before you have to file for bankruptcy. The same principle holds for our national economy, and for environmental and population trends. The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital in the bank (its capital non-renewable energy sources, fish stocks, topsoil, forests, etc.). Spending capital should not be misrepresented as making money. It makes no sense to be content with our present comfort when it is clear that we are currently on a non-sustainable course.
In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources. On reflection, it’s no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.
“Look at how many times in the past the gloom-and-doom predictions of fearmongering environmentalists have proved wrong. Why should we believe them this time?” Yes, some predictions by environmentalists have proved incorrect, favorite examples of critics being a prediction made in 1980 by Paul Ehrlich, John Harte, and John Holdren about rises in prices of five metals, and predictions made in the Club of Rome forecast of 1972. But it is misleading to look selectively for environmentalist predictions that proved wrong, and not also to look for environmentalist predictions that proved right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that proved wrong. There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort: e.g., overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage. As regards the first of Simon’s two predictions, continuation of our current population growth rate would yield 10 people per square yard of land in 774 years, a mass of people equal to the Earth’s mass in slightly under 2,000 years, and a mass of people equal to the universe’s mass in 6,000 years, long before Simon’s forecast of 7 billion years without such problems. As regards his second prediction, we learn in our first course of chemistry that copper is an element, which means that by definition it cannot be made from other elements. My impression is that pessimistic predictions that have proved incorrect, such as Ehrlich’s, Harte’s, and Holdren’s about metal prices or the Club of Rome’s about future food supplies, have on the average been much more realistic possibilities at the time that they were made than were Simon’s two predictions.
Basically, the one-liner about some environmentalist predictions proving wrong boils down to a complaint about false alarms. In other spheres of our lives, such as fires, we adopt a commonsense attitude towards false alarms. Our local governments maintain expensive firefighting forces, even though in some small towns they are rarely called on to put out fires. Of the fire alarms phoned in to fire departments, many prove to be false alarms, and many others involve small fires that the property owner himself then succeeds in putting out before the fire engines arrive. We comfortably accept a certain frequency of such false alarms and extinguished fires, because we understand that fire risks are uncertain and hard to judge when a fire has just started, and that a fire that does rage out of control may exact high costs in property and human lives. No sensible person would dream of abolishing the town fire department, whether manned by full-time professionals or volunteers, just because a few years went by without a big fire. Nor would anyone blame a homeowner for calling the fire department on detecting a small fire, only to succeed in quenching the fire before the fire truck’s arrival. Only if false alarms become an inordinately high proportion of all fire alarms do we feel that something is wrong. In effect, the proportion of false alarms that we tolerate is based on subconsciously comparing the frequency and destructive costs of big fires with the frequency and wasted-services costs of false alarms. A very low frequency of false alarms proves that too many homeowners are being too cautious, waiting too long to call the fire department, and consequently losing their homes.
By the same reasoning, we must expect some environmentalist warnings to turn out to be false alarms, otherwise we would know that our environmental warning systems were much too conservative. The multibilliondollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency of false alarms. In addition, the reason that alarms proved false is often that they convinced us to adopt successful countermeasures. For example, it’s true that our air quality here in Los Angeles today is not as bad as some gloom-and-doom predictions of 50 years ago. However, that’s entirely because Los Angeles and the state of California were thereby aroused to adopt many countermeasures (such as vehicle emission standards, smog certificates, and lead-free gas), not because initial predictions of the problem were exaggerated.
“The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase of the world’s population is decreasing, such that world population will level off at less than double its present level.” While the prediction that world population will level off at less than double its present level may or may not prove true, it is at present a realistic possibility. However, we can take no comfort in this possibility, for two reasons: by many criteria, even the world’s present population is living at a non-sustainable level; and, as explained earlier in this chapter, the larger danger that we face is not just of a two-fold increase in population, but of a much larger increase in human impact if the Third World’s population succeeds in attaining a First World living standard. It is surprising to hear some First World citizens nonchalantly mentioning the world’s adding “only” 2½ billion more people (the lowest estimate that anyone would forecast) as if that were acceptable, when the world already holds that many people who are malnourished and living on less than $3 per day.
“The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The more people, the better, because more people mean more inventions and ultimately more wealth.” Both of these ideas are associated especially with Julian Simon but have been espoused by many others, especially by economists. The statement about our ability to absorb current rates of population growth indefinitely is not to be taken seriously, because we have already seen that that would mean 10 people per square yard in the year 2779. Data on national wealth demonstrate that the claim that more people mean more wealth is the opposite of correct. The 10 countries with the most people (over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP) are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only country on both lists is the U.S.
Actually, the countries with large populations are disproportionately poor: eight of the 10 have per-capita GDP under $8,000, and five of them under $3,000. The affluent countries have disproportionately few people: seven of the 10 have populations below 9,000,000, and two of them under 500,000. Instead, what does distinguish the two lists is population growth rates: all 10 of the affluent countries have very low relative population growt
h rates (1% per year or less), while eight of the 10 most populous countries have higher relative population growth rates than any of the most affluent countries, except for two large countries that achieved low population growth in unpleasant ways: China, by government order and enforced abortion, and Russia, whose population is actually decreasing because of catastrophic health problems. Thus, as an empirical fact, more people and a higher population growth rate mean more poverty, not more wealth.
“Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens what they should be doing.” This view is one that I have heard mainly from affluent First World yuppies lacking experience of the Third World. In all my experience of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, Peru, and other Third World countries with growing environmental problems and populations, I have been impressed that their people know very well how they are being harmed by population growth, deforestation, overfishing, and other problems. They know it because they immediately pay the penalty, in forms such as loss of free timber for their houses, massive soil erosion, and (the tragic complaint that I hear incessantly) their inability to afford clothes, books, and school fees for their children. The reason why the forest behind their village is nevertheless being logged is usually either that a corrupt government has ordered it logged over their often-violent protest, or else that they signed a logging lease with great reluctance because they saw no other way to get the money needed next year for their children. My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can’t afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.
Another view that is widespread among affluent First World people, but which they will rarely express openly, is that they themselves are managing just fine at carrying on with their lifestyles despite all those environmental problems, which really don’t concern them because the problems fall mainly on Third World people (though it is not politically correct to be so blunt). Actually, the rich are not immune to environmental problems. CEOs of big First World companies eat food, drink water, breathe air, and have (or try to conceive) children, like the rest of us. While they can usually avoid problems of water quality by drinking bottled water, they find it much more difficult to avoid being exposed to the same problems of food and air quality as the rest of us. Living disproportionately high on the food chain, at levels at which toxic substances become concentrated, they are at more rather than less risk of reproductive impairment due to ingestion of or exposure to toxic materials, possibly contributing to their higher infertility rates and the increasing frequency with which they require medical assistance in conceiving. In addition, one of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die. As for First World society as a whole, its resource consumption accounts for most of the world’s total consumption that has given rise to the impacts described at the beginning of this chapter. Our totally unsustainable consumption means that the First World could not continue for long on its present course, even if the Third World didn’t exist and weren’t trying to catch up to us.
“If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time far off in the future, after I die, and I can’t take them seriously.” In fact, at current rates most or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems discussed at the beginning of this chapter will become acute within the lifetime of young adults now alive. Most of us who have children consider the securing of our children’s future as the highest priority to which to devote our time and our money. We pay for their education and food and clothes, make wills for them, and buy life insurance for them, all with the goal of helping them to enjoy good lives 50 years from now. It makes no sense for us to do these things for our individual children, while simultaneously doing things undermining the world in which our children will be living 50 years from now.
This paradoxical behavior is one of which I personally was guilty, because I was born in the year 1937, hence before the birth of my children I too could not take seriously any event (like global warming or the end of the tropical rainforests) projected for the year 2037. I shall surely be dead before that year, and even the date 2037 struck me as unreal. However, when my twin sons were born in 1987, and when my wife and I then started going through the usual parental obsessions about schools, life insurance, and wills, I realized with a jolt: 2037 is the year in which my kids will be my own age of 50 (then)! It’s not an imaginary year! What’s the point of willing our property to our kids if the world will be in a mess then anyway?
Having lived for five years in Europe shortly after World War II, and then having married into a Polish family with a Japanese branch, I saw at first hand what can happen when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children’s future world. The parents of my Polish, German, Japanese, Russian, British, and Yugoslav friends also bought life insurance, made wills, and obsessed about the schooling of their children, as my wife and I have been doing more recently. Some of them were rich and would have had valuable property to will to their children. But they did not take good care of their children’s world, and they blundered into the disaster of World War II. As a result, most of my European and Japanese friends born in the same year as I had their lives blighted in various ways, such as being orphaned, separated from one or both parents during their childhood, bombed out of their houses, deprived of schooling opportunities, deprived of their family estates, or raised by parents burdened with memories of war and concentration camps. The worst-case scenarios that today’s children face if we too blunder about their world are different, but equally unpleasant.
This leaves us with two other common one-liners that we have not considered: “There are big differences between modern societies and those past societies of Easter Islanders, Maya, and Anasazi who collapsed, so that we can’t straightforwardly apply lessons from the past.” And: “What can I, as an individual, do, when the world is really being shaped by unstoppable powerful juggernauts of governments and big businesses?” In contrast to the previous one-liners, which upon examination can be quickly dismissed, these two concerns are valid and cannot be dismissed. I shall devote the remainder of this chapter to the former question, and a section of the Further Readings (pp. 555-59) to the latter question.
Are the parallels between the past and present sufficiently close that the collapses of the Easter Islanders, Henderson Islanders, Anasazi, Maya, and Greenland Norse could offer any lessons for the modern world? At first, a critic, noting the obvious differences, might be tempted to object, “It’s ridiculous to suppose that the collapses of all those ancient peoples could have broad relevance today, especially to the modern U.S. Those ancients didn’t enjoy the wonders of modern technology, which benefits us and which lets us solve problems by inventing new environment-friendly technologies. Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of climate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environment by doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvesting wild animal sources of their protein, watching their topsoil erode away, and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish leaders who didn’t have books and so couldn’t learn from history, and who embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about staying in power, and didn’t pay attention to problems at home. They got overwhelmed by desperate starving immigrants, as one society after another collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the societies that weren’t collapsing. In all those res
pects, we moderns are fundamentally different from those primitive ancients, and there is nothing that we could learn from them. Especially we in the U.S., the richest and most powerful country in the world today, with the most productive environment and wise leaders and strong loyal allies and only weak insignificant enemies—none of those bad things could possibly apply to us.”
Yes, it’s true that there are big differences between the situations of those past societies and our modern situation today. The most obvious difference is that there are far more people alive today, packing far more potent technology that impacts the environment, than in the past. Today we have over 6 billion people equipped with heavy metal machinery such as bulldozers and nuclear power, whereas the Easter Islanders had at most a few tens of thousands of people with stone chisels and human muscle power. Yet the Easter Islanders still managed to devastate their environment and bring their society to the point of collapse. That difference greatly increases, rather than decreases, the risks for us today.
A second big difference stems from globalization. Leaving out of this discussion for the moment the question of environmental problems within the First World itself, let’s just ask whether the lessons from past collapses might apply anywhere in the Third World today. First ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation, or both. The ecologist would answer: “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others” (map, p. 497).
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