Long after we intellectually acknowledge that dilution isn’t really a “solution” to pollution created through human activity, human societies continue to act as if it is. The continued existence of an atmospheric commons that is almost entirely open to nearly unlimited greenhouse gas pollution, despite the ample observable indicators of dangerous climate change, attests to that power. Intellectual acknowledgment is one thing, but accommodating the ideas within our system of related ideas and practices is another and more daunting challenge. Ideas such as resource abundance, which allows for unlimited growth, can create a kind of path dependence through which they continue to exert influence long after they have been formally discredited, acting (to preview a term from chapter 5) as a kind of zombie, dead in some technical sense and yet still able to cause a zombie apocalypse alongside other ideas.
Ecological limits: origins and possible responses
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
Ecological limits and their discontents
An indirect legacy of this revival of the Malthusian tradition was a rift opened between the global North and South about who or what was most damaging to the global environment, with neo-Malthusians typically blaming rapid population growth in the global South (with what Hardin characterized as their “under-equipped lifeboats,” in reference to their high poverty rates and chronic food insecurity), while others faulted the high impacts of the global North’s patterns of industrialization and consumption. Its race and class dimensions added to the perception that environmentalism was an upper-middle-class white movement for affluent societies only, and the xenophobic pronouncements of neo-Malthusians calling for the withholding of famine aid and closed borders suggested a concern with the safeguarding of privilege rather than planetary stewardship. This image would persist for decades, with the idea of ecological limits motivating some misogynistic social views and heightening conflict and division within and between countries. Resource scarcity, that is, was held by some to vindicate or require wide and growing environmental inequality as the zero-sum nature of allocating finite resources forced uncomfortable choices about which claims to deny. As Hardin casts the dilemma through his lifeboat metaphor, to spare the global poor from deprivation by admitting them into one of the well-equipped boats of the global North would lead to global ecological ruin rather than confining this to the poor countries where it was, in his view, inevitable (as he writes: “The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe”).7
Limits to growth make scarcity more palpable, and intensify conflict over increasingly scarce resources, awakening avarice and often leading to the abandonment of aspirations toward a more equitable society or world. Treating the world’s poor as drivers of overpopulation and ecological degradation, while denying them the agency needed to escape their fate without northern intervention, simultaneously patronized and infantilized entire peoples. Then, when the death toll fell short of the hundreds of millions over two decades that Ehrlich had predicted would starve in his 1968 The Population Bomb, charges of alarmism and intentional exaggeration became narratives for what still were (and continue to be) real and preventable humanitarian atrocities, with real ecological drivers.
Denial of the idea of ecological limits comprises another response, whether by persons associating it with despair and resignation or those (like industry-sponsored climate science deniers) spreading false information to influence public opinion for economic gain. In this context of a disruptive idea being actively contested and members of the lay public seeking to rationalize its dismissal, mis-steps by advocates of the idea can have the opposite effect from what they intend. By impugning their own credibility, advocates may embolden deniers.
When Ehrlich’s apocalyptic prediction about famine deaths didn’t come to pass, skepticism about the idea, rather than urgency in meeting its challenges, was a common reaction. Ehrlich’s confidence about future mineral prices rising as the result of their increasing scarcity led him to accept a public wager with the Promethean economist Julian Simon, pitting Ehrlich’s Malthusianism against Simon’s contrarian view that such resources would remain abundant into the indefinite future.8 When those resource prices declined, owing to quirks of the particular ten-year period over which the bet was made rather than longer-term trends, Ehrlich’s credibility was again called into question, sowing further doubt about limits. The seeds of public doubt about human causes of the environmental crisis were planted well before those industries most responsible for intensifying global resource scarcity and ecological degradation had grown savvy to the threat to corporate profits from an emerging environmental concern among the public (which would later lead them to finance what Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway call “merchants of doubt” to shape public opinion through industry-sponsored science denial campaigns9), but have in the decades since been magnified by campaigns of misinformation.
International responses to ecological limits
International reactions to the revival of ecological limits were several and varied. Its influence on the development of international environmental law and governance can be seen in the role of such limits at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, which issued the Stockholm Declaration, calling for international cooperation on environmental protection. Persuaded by
