A Step Farther Out

by Jerry Pournelle

  Doom takes any of several forms, each less attractive than the others. In each case population rises sharply, then falls even more sharply in a massive human die-off. "Quality of Life" falls hideously. Pollution rises exponentially. All this is shown in Figure 1, which is taken from one of the computer runs.

  According to Meadows and many others, Earth is a closed system, and we cannot continue to rape her as we have in the past. If we do not learn restraint, we are finished.

  Nor can technology save us. Perhaps the worst tendency of the modern era is our reliance on technologic "fixes," the insane delusion that what technology got us into, it can take us out of No; according to the eco-disaster view technology not only will not save us, but will hasten our doom. We have no real alternative but Zero-Growth. As one ZG advocate recently said, "We continue to hold out infinite human expectations in a finite world of finite resources. We continue to act as if what Daniel Bell calls 'the revolution of rising expectations' can be met when we all know they cannot."

  Jay Forrester, whose MIT computer model was the main inspiration for the zero-growth movement, goes much further. Birth control, he strongly implies, cannot alone do the job. It is a clear deduction from Forrester's model that only drastic reductions in health services, food supply, and industrialization can save the world-system from disaster.

  __________

  Figure 1

  FOUR DOOMS

  AS POSTULATED BY THE MIT

  WORLD MODELS

  FAMINE POLLUTION. . .OVERCROWDING. . .

  DEPLETION OF NON-RENEWABLES

  The "standard" model of World Three. The projection assumes no major changes in the physical, economic, or social relationships (as modeled in World Three). Population growth is finally halted "by a rise in death rate due to decreased food and medical services." "THE LIMITS TO GROWTH"

  __________

  Figure 2

  ___________

  It is important to recognize the severe consequences of a policy of Zero-Growth. For Western civilization ZG means increasing unemployment and a falling standard of living; worse than inconvenient, but not quite a total catastrophe. For the rest of the world things are not so simple. Behind all the numbers and computer programs there is a stark reality: millions in the developing countries shall remain in grinding poverty—forever.

  They may be unwilling to accept this. There is then the decision to be made—must they be forced to accept? The advocates of Zero-Growth also advise, on both practical and moral grounds, the massive sharing of Western riches with the developing world. Indeed, under the ZG strategy, the West has only two choices: massive sharing with the developing world, or to retain wealth while most of the world remains at the end of the abyss. Neither alternative is attractive, but there is nothing for it: failure to adopt Zero-Growth is no more than selfishness, robbing our children and grandchildren for our own limited and temporary pleasures.

  So say the computers.

  * * *

  I don't accept that. I want Western civilization to survive; not only survive, but survive with style.

  I want to keep the good things of our high-energy technological civilization: penicillin, stereo, rapid travel, easy communications, varied diet, plastic models, aspirin, freedom from toothache, science fiction magazines, libraries, cheap paperback books, Selectric typewriters, pocket computers, fresh vegetables in mid-winter, lightweight backpacks and sleeping bags—the myriad products that make our lives so much more varied than our grandfathers'.

  Moreover, I want to feel right about it. I do not call it survival with style if we must remain no more than an island of wealth in the midst of a vast sea of eternal poverty and misery. Style, to me, means that everyone on Earth shall have hope of access to most of the benefits of technology and industry—if not for themselves, then certainly for their children.

  This is a tall order. Economists say it cannot be done. My wishes are admirable but irrelevant. The universe cares very little what we want; there are inherent limits, and the models of the world-system prove that what I want cannot be brought about.

  That, however, is not so thoroughly proved as all that. Computers and computer models are very impressive, but a computer can give you no more information than you have put into it. It may be that Forrester and the other eco-doomsters have modeled the wrong system. At least it is worth taking a look; surely it is against man's very nature simply to roll over and die without a struggle.

  Arthur Clarke once said that when a greybearded scientist tells you something is possible, believe him; but when he says it's impossible, he's very likely wrong. That has certainly been true in the past. Surely we are justified in examining the assumptions of those models which tell us we are doomed, and which dictate a policy of Zero-Growth.

  * * *

  The economists' models warn of four dooms: inadequate food supply; increasing pollution; depletion of non-renewable resources; and over-crowding through uncontrolled rise in population. Let us examine each in turn.

  The first, food production, is surprisingly less critical than is generally supposed. This is hardly to deny that there is hunger and starvation in the world. However, given sufficient energy resources, food production is relatively simple. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization reports that there are very few countries that do not, over a ten-year average period, raise enough food to give their populations more than enough to eat.

  There are two catches to this. First, even in the West, birds, rodents, and fungi eat more of man's crops than ever does man. True we harvest more than most nations; but to do so requires high technology.

  The second catch is the "over a ten year period" part. The average crop production is sufficient, but drought, flood, and other natural disasters can produce famine through crop failures over a one, two, or three year period. In much of the world there is no technology for storing surpluses. The West has known for a long time about the seven fat years followed by seven lean years, but it took us centuries to come up with reliable ways to meet the problem of famine.

  Our solutions have been three-fold: increased production; better food storage, including protection from vermin; and weaving the entire West into a single area through efficient transportation. Drought-stricken farmers in Kansas can be fed wheat from Washington state, beef from the Argentine, and lettuce from California.

  All this takes industrial technology on a large scale. Western farming methods use fertilizers. The transportation system is clearly a high-energy enterprise. Even providing Mylar linings for traditional dung-smeared grain storage pits (animal dung is often the only waterproofing material available) requires high-energy technology.

  And in the West we waste land because we have land to waste; our agricultural technology produces surpluses.

  A hard-working person needs about 7000 large Calories, or 7 million gram-calories, per day. The sun delivers nearly 2 gram-calories per square centimeter per minute; assume about 10% of that gets through the atmosphere, and that the sun shines about five hours (300 minutes) per day on the average. Further assume that our crops are about 1% efficient in converting sunlight to edible energy. Simple multiplication shows that a patch 35 meters on a side will feed a man—about a quarter of an acre.

  Granted, that's an unfair calculation; but it isn't that far off from reality. My greenhouse, 2.5 meters on a side, can produce enormous quantities in hydroponics tanks, and there's no energy wasted in transportation and distribution of the food. I do use electricity to run the pumps, but that could be done, if necessary, by hand labor.

  In Japan and in some of the oil-rich sheikdoms, hydroponics farming has been carried to fantastic lengths; acres of covered territory, with vegetables growing in the sandy deserts of Abu Dhabi, watered by desalinated seawater.

  This is high-technology, of course. The chemical nutrients needed in my greenhouse take a lot of energy to manufacture. The greenhouse itself is made of aluminum tubing and Mylar plastic reinforced with nylon strands. The piping and tray
s are plastic. All high-technology items, as are the fungicides I use, and even the water-testing kit that lets me balance off the pH in the nutrients.

  Given the energy we can produce food. I think few would deny that. It is true enough that if the average Indian farmer could reach the productivity per acre achieved by the Japanese peasant of the 12th Century, India would have few food problems; but he's not likely to get there without industrial help (at the very least a television and satellite-relayed instructions). Moreover, the Japanese have had to move far ahead of their 12th Century output levels.

  But I hope the point is obvious. Given sufficient energy, we have the technology to produce food. We may not have the energy; but famine is not a primary problem. With sufficient levels of industrialization we could even feed cities from greenhouses on the roofs of city buildings: if 1% of New York City were covered with greenhouses, they could feed 10% of the New York population. One percent of the surface area of Los Angeles would feed 1/3 that city's population.

  We haven't even looked at the potential of the seas. True, our fish catches have about peaked out and may be declining—but man was never meant to be a hunter-gatherer.

  Our exploitation of the seas is on a par with our use of land before we learned about agriculture and domestication of animals.

  Sea-farming is a technology in its infancy; but experiments at St. Croix in the Virgin Islands (supported in part by the Vaughn Foundation which supported research for this book) show that fantastic levels of food production per acre can be achieved. The St. Croix research consisted of pumping cold nutrient-rich water from the sea bottom into pens where sunlight could energize plant growth; food harvested was shellfish and the like.

  Other sea-farming enterprises in France and Britain show similar results. Selective fertilization of sea areas can increase sea-plant growth by orders of magnitude; one then introduces edible creatures which thrive on the plants. The production levels are again astounding, ten times what a given land area can produce.

  Once again these are high-technology enterprises; but there is nothing far-out about them.

  Clearly food production per se is not going to be a limit to growth for a very long time. Food production can only be limited by an enforced halt in industrialization and technology; given the energy, technology can easily feed far larger world populations than any projections anticipate for centuries.

  * * *

  If food production is not a primary problem, but rather an aspect of the energy shortage, pollution is doubly so. We already have the technology to clean up any and all pollutants.

  It takes energy, of course. A lot of energy. But given the energy we can, if we must, take pollutants apart down to their constituent atoms.

  The California Department of Public Health reports that the cleanest-running stream in the state is the outfalls of the Hyperion Sewage Disposal Plant for Los Angeles County. This is not a sad commentary on California's rivers; there are plenty of unspoiled streams in the High Sierra, but they do contain animal wastes from the deer and bears who inhabit the region.

  I have on my desk a bottle of water taken from a sewage-treatment plant flowing into Lake Tahoe. Tahoe's problems are not technological; most of the water in the lake is reclaimed, and is indistinguishable from the cleanest mountain streams. True enough there are certain political jurisdictions which have not adequately cleaned up their act; but one must not blame technology for that. I use the Tahoe sewage water for ice cubes when I have a party that will have "concerned ecologists" as guests. It does no harm to show dramatically just how good our pollution-control technology can be.

  Again I see no point in belaboring the obvious. Given the energy resources, pollution is not a real problem. Certainly pollution cannot be the limiting factor in industrial growth. It is another aspect of the energy shortage.

  * * *

  If famine and pollution do not define the limits to growth, then what of rising population? The view that we shall in the near future become so over-crowded that we will die of the resulting stresses is examined in detail in another chapter; for now let us look at the long-term prospects.

  Throughout history there has been only one means of controlling population growth. It is not war; populations often rise in wartime. Famine and pestilence have of course reduced populations drastically, but the recovery from even these horsemen is often rapid, with birth rates skyrocketing so that within a generation population is higher than it was before the catastrophe. No: the only reliable means of limiting population is wealth.

  The United States has a fertility rate below the replacement value; were it not for immigration the US population would begin to decline. (There is a "bow wave" effect from the WWII "baby boom" that distorts the picture, but the "boom babies" are rapidly reaching the end of their fertility epoch.)

  France, Ireland, Japan, Britain, West Germany, Netherlands; where there is wealth there is decline in the birth rate. David Riesman in his THE LONELY CROWD pointed out many years ago that the Western nations were probably best described as in a condition of "incipient population decline," and it seems his prophecy was true.

  Now it's true enough that if we manipulate exponential curves and thus mindlessly project population growth ahead, we will come to a point at which the entire mass of the solar system (indeed, of the universe) has been converted into human flesh. So what? It isn't going to happen, and no one seriously believes that it will. Obviously something will stop population growth long before that.

  On a slightly more realistic scale, I have calculated how long it takes, at various growth rates, to reach "standing room only" on the Earth: that point at which there are four of us on each square meter of the Earth's surface (even counting the oceans and polar areas as "standable" surface), Figure 3 shows that those times are surprisingly near -if we have unlimited population growth. Yet the fact remains that as societies get wealthier, their ability to sustain larger populations increases—but their actual population growth declines or even halts.

  Of course there are powerful religions whose adherents control large portions of the globe, and which condemn birth control and seemingly all other usable means of population limitation.

  Yes. And I'm no theologian. But I cannot believe that any rational interpretation of scripture commands us to breed until we literally have no place to sit. Realistically we are not going to increase our numbers to that point: and, realistically, no religious leader is going to order it done.

  "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

  __________

  Figure 3

  "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth UFOs the earth."

  Area, sphere: A= 4 π R2

  Radius, Earth: 6.371 x 108 cm.

  Area, Earth: 1.700215 x 1018 cm2

  Standing room area requirement: 50 cm2 = 2500 sq. cm.

  (About 4 people/sq. yard)

  Number of people when Standing Room Only:

  6.80086 x 1014

  Present population: 4 x 109 (4 billion)

  Assuming growth rate of 2% a year, it's SRO in 2584

  At 1% growth, we get there in 3186 AD

  At 4%, we get there in 2283.

  QUERY: At what point will the command be fulfilled?

  ___________

  I will leave theology to the theologians; but the command was, "Multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it;" and surely there must come a time when that has been done? When there can be no doubt that we have been su
fficiently fruitful? And surely dominion over the wild things of the earth does not mean that we are to exterminate and replace them? Surely even those of the deepest faith may without blasphemy wonder if we are not rapidly approaching a time when we shall indeed have replenished and subdued the earth?

  I cannot believe that we will continue to breed until we have destroyed our world; and frankly, I think of no more certain way to insure that the developing countries continue to increase in population than to condemn them to eternal poverty through Zero-Growth. So let's leave the bogeyman of unlimited population expansion. We have the technology to limit family size when, inevitably, there comes the time when everyone, no matter what his religious conviction, believes that the earth has been replenished and subdued.