Читать книгу Environmental Political Theory - Steve Vanderheiden - Страница 15

In this chapter, we shall examine how the idea of ecological limits arose; how it came into conflict with other received ideas – initially slowing its wider acceptance but later disrupting, and in some cases forcing a transformation of, those older ideas in order to accommodate it; and then consider three possible kinds of response to it (recommending one of those three). First articulated by Thomas Malthus in his 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population, the idea of ecological limits to growth has long been associated with class-based equity conflicts, albeit in various and opposing ways. Malthus, who cast the “population problem” in terms of a crisis that would eventually arise as exponential increases in population growth exceeded an arithmetically increasing food supply, described the “actual distresses” of England’s poor, in being “disabled from giving the proper food and attention to their children” (with the avoidable suffering and death that resulted), as providing a “positive check to the natural increase in population.” Rejecting the egalitarian social policies advocated by William Godwin, which he devoted a quarter of his book to refuting, Malthus adopted a form of Social Darwinism in which state interference in these “positive checks” on population from starvation and disease were to be understood as contributing toward this population crisis, and claiming that poor laws “create the poor which they maintain.” From his point of view, it would be preferable to allow those poor to starve rather than to interfere in the natural processes that had previously kept the English population size in check.

Revived in the late 1960s by Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich, among other neo-Malthusians (so-called because they were influenced by Malthus), the focus on the bivariate relationship between population and food supply would give way to the five-variable (adding resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution) analysis of the Club of Rome’s influential 1972 The Limits to Growth report. Formed in 1968 as an “invisible college” of scientists, political elites, and philanthropists “to rebel against the suicidal ignorance of the human condition,”⁵ the Club (based on the computer modeling work in system dynamics by Jay Forrester at MIT) popularized the idea of ecological limits, selling 30 million copies of their report and galvanizing a generation of ecologically minded population control advocates as well as popularizing related ideas such as carrying capacity and overshoot. While the report’s methodology and predictions have been the subject of heated debates, it is properly credited with bringing the idea of limits into public consciousness and calling for urgent and ambitious action. Wide shifts in elite opinion and the sort of action that the report recommends have largely remained elusive, however, with the Club’s 30-Year Update report (published in 2004) lamenting that “humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but halfhearted, responses to the global ecological challenge.”⁶