gracchusdixit

Less than a month ago, several hundred thousand people crowded onto the streets of New York to demonstrate against the world’s passivity in the face of climate change.  Although this was by far the largest demonstration of its kind anywhere at any time, it was largely ignored by the national news media, whose attention was riveted on some poor fool with a pocket knife who clambered over the White House fence and thereby embarrassed the Secret Service.   This easy surrender to distraction shouldn’t surprise us.  We have been ignoring, or denying, man’s impact on the planet so long that it has become almost second nature.  Indeed, we’ve doing it for more than 200 years.

In 1798, an English cleric, scholar and political economist named Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population,  which became instantly controversial.   Malthus was a contrarian of the most fundamental sort, who argued that ideas of social progress, human perfectibility, and a utopian technological future were delusions.  He was particularly vexed by global population growth, which he judged to be an unstoppable force that would inevitably exceed the food supply, and, when a tipping point was reached, would contract and collapse because of famine, pestilence or wars fought for the possession of diminishing resources.  In the decades after An Essay on the Principle of Population appeared, Malthus’ predictions were sometimes ignored but more often vehemently rebutted.

And in truth, he got a few things wrong.

Malthus published his essay just as the Industrial Revolution was getting underway.  He did not foresee the consequences of the scientific and technological innovations it spawned.  In particular, he did not foresee the capacity of global capitalism to expand and sustain consumption.  Indeed, the word “capitalism” hadn’t been invented yet.  Adam Smith, the so-called “father of capitalism,” never used the word.  It took another 50 years for Karl Marx to do that and to produce the first detailed analysis of its social and economic effects.

Later acolytes of market capitalism lambasted Malthus, pointing to the fact that global food production was expanding; technology had found ways of replacing, or circumventing, limited natural resources; and population wasn’t contracting but growing steadily, albeit with “temporary setbacks” during times of depression, epidemic, or war.  As a result, the arbiters of conventional wisdom all but consigned Malthus’ thesis to the dustbin of history.   They decreed that this prophet of natural calamity had got it all wrong, that humankind could, in fact, have its cake and eat it.

While Malthus may have missed some of the details, it now seems abundantly clear that he got one very important thing right: natural resources do indeed have their limits.  Malthus worried that productive capacity would not grow fast enough to feed a growing population.  But the problem we confront turns out to be growth itself, which, like a cancer, is consuming everything in its path.

It can no longer be denied that the earth is getting warmer, the climate is becoming more violent, sea levels are rising, lakes and oceans are acidifying, and large swathes of the globe are turning into desert.  Endless growth—more people, more production, more pollution—has outstripped the planet’‘s ability to cope.  No one can say with certainty what the ultimate costs will be, except that they will be devastating, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable peoples and nations.

While nearly all sane people now accept this reality, few are as yet prepared to accept its cause.  The consumption of fossil fuels is merely a symptom.  The ultimate cause is our economic system.

Growth is the engine of capitalism, and growth is merely a euphemism for consumption.  The cancer of consumption has metastasized to the point that it permeates, and poisons, not only the natural environment but our mental environment—the very way we think.  We judge the health of our economy entirely by the metrics of consumption.  When consumption slows, we call it a “recession;” when it stops altogether, we call it a “depression”.  It never occurs to us that another choice exists, that we can live with less, that living with less may soon be the only way to live at all.

Technology isn’t going to save us.  Recycling won’t rescue us.  “Green” energy will not spare us.  The system that replaced wood with coal, and coal with oil, and now aims to replace oil with natural gas, will not lead us to the promised land.  There is no promised land other than the earth that sustains us.  We cannot continue to consume more and more and expect that earth to comply forever, absorbing infinite amounts of the junk, waste and toxins.

Those who believe that our economic system can somehow forestall the looming catastrophe are indulging in the utopian fantasies that Robert Malthus analyzed with devastating clarity two centuries ago.  Malthus did not say when the tipping point in man’s relationship with nature would come, but he surely would not be surprised that it has come at last.  Nor should we.   It turns out that Malthus was right after all.  If we ignore him again, there won’t be a second chance for any of us to get it right.