Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2000/09/18/dartmouths_doomsday_prophet.php
Monday, September 18, 2000
Thomas Malthus would be happy today, if still gloomy.
In his seminal 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, the economist Malthus argued that population, growing exponentially, would always overtake food production, growing linearly—leading to cyclical episodes of mass starvation.
Two hundred years later, modern Malthusians are still trying build a scientific framework around immanent global doom. From Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich to Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown to Vice President Al Gore, author of the chilling Earth in the Balance, Malthus's modern disciples have deemed untenable the Western World's 'throwaway lifestyle' and the resource extraction, energy production, and waste disposal it requires.
All predict dramatic consequences as the unavoidable result of unchecked growth. Warning that 'economic growth is the disease, not the cure,' Ehrlich foresaw in his 1968 book massive food shortages in India by 1980 and the death of millions on the subcontinent from starvation. In fact, India was able to support many more than the 200 million Ehrlich predicted and, by 1980, was exporting surplus grain to the Soviet Union.
Too often, doomsayers fail to account for human ingenuity when making dire predictions. India, for example, was able to increase agricultural efficiency as part of the Green Revolution, which spread specially developed high-yield seeds across much of the developing world.
Technology can be a powerful force.
That's why the 1972 Limits to Growth and the updated 1992 Beyond the Limits, are such influential works in the environmental community. The authors of the Limits series, Dartmouth's adjunct ecology professor Donella Meadows and several collaborators, claim to account fully for technological innovation in their computerized modeling of the 'World System.'
Despite national exposure through her books and weekly 'Global Citizen' newspaper column, few students are familiar with Meadows. She has taught environmental studies at Dartmouth since 1972, but resigned her tenured professorship in 1983 to spend more time on writing and research. She has lived away from campus on a communal organic farm and is organizing a larger farm and 'eco-village' in Vermont, where she plans to research the 'sustainability, equity, and stability of commodity systems.' She is best known academically for her application of systems analysis to the environment.
Thus, Beyond the Limits is a rigorous work. It begins, in standard Malthusian form, with population growth. Using the lingo of systems, such as 'feedback loops' and 'structural capacity,' the authors reformulate the essential argument: that the world's population is too large and growing too quickly with respect to its carrying capacity.
The world's population, oriented in First and Third World alike towards growth, uses the earth's resources with abandon. Reserves of nonrenewable resources, like fossil fuels and minerals, will eventually be depleted, even if the question of when is of some debate. Renewable resources, such as forests and fish, are being used faster than their replacement rates, leading to depletion of these resources as well. Finally, pollutants, from nuclear waste to carbon dioxide, are being emitted more quickly than the earth can absorb them.
These runaway processes will lead to, in the authors' parlance, an 'overshoot,' in which society is living beyond its means. As of 1992, the authors warn that we may already be beyond our means. 'If a correction is not made,' they explain, 'a collapse of some sort is not only possible but certain.'
Using their World3 computer model, the authors examine different scenarios of resource availability, technological innovation, and structural organization. Each scenario projects resource extraction, food production, industrial output, population, and pollution until 2100.
The results are startling. In the 'Standard Run,' without major policy change, the world reaches a peak of industrial output, population, and food production around 2015. After then, all three fall steeply, checked by environmental and natural resource constraints. Even a scenario with natural resource reserves doubled ends similarly.
Scenarios including specific technological innovations don't fare any better. At best, with pollution technologies, land yield enhancement, erosion protection, efficiency technologies, and shorter development and implementation delays, the world manages to support its population, but at a declining standard of living. Thus, markets and technology—'cleverness' to the authors—cannot be our savior.
The authors' solution is 'wisdom,' a rewiring of the system to eliminate the definition of 'human goals in terms of getting more rather than having enough.' This would be accomplished by the entire world adopting small average family sizes and settling on a modest level of wealth that would be assured to all, shared equally. In this case, with modest technological advancement, population growth, industrial output, and food supply level out while pollution gradually drops. Yet if this change were made just two decades later, the graphs would show the drop-offs of previous scenarios. Thus, the authors argue, the time for change is now.
As a cute trick, the authors have listed many of the criticisms of the original Limits to Growth. These are labeled 'biases and simplifications, verbal traps, and untruths' to preemptively disarm them.
These 'untruths,' though, are not entirely invalid, and any discussion of Beyond the Limits would be remiss not to address the last, that 'The World3 model...is right or wrong.' Even abandoning traditional notions of right and wrong, which the authors have done, leaves unanswered the question whether the model's output is at all meaningful.
Statistical analysis teaches us that numbers can be manipulated toward nearly any conclusion, deliberately or not.
While the creators of World3 shouldn't be accused of deliberate manipulation, their model needs to be examined closely. A computer program that can predict the future—in six-month increments for 100 years—begs question. Would a futurist in 1900, with access to great statistics and calculating power, have been able to predict today's economy or food production or industrial output? Could he even imagine today's technologies? As recently as forty years ago, visions of the future centered on flying cars and robot maids. Instead, we have computers and the Internet and skateboards with handles.
No one in 1900 could have predicted the Green Revolution, just as no one can predict the ramifications of today's biotech revolution, which some, including Green Revolution architect Norman Borlaug, believe will feed the world's growing population in coming years.
And the size of that population is not such a sure thing, either. Population growth has begun to decelerate; population may reach an equilibrium in the next century due to rising standards of living and birth control technology. But increased population also has one overlooked benefit: a greater capacity to generate new ideas and technology.
Further, a key component of the models, natural resource reserves, are little more than educated guesses. Nobody knows the extent of the world's fossil fuel reserve, except to say that it is finite. Reserves for many minerals are price-sensitive; expensive deep-sea exploration, for example, only begins when ground deposits become expensive.
Even though we don't know how much oil or platinum or granite we have to play around with, we shouldn't limit their use unnecessarily. Excepting necessities such as food and water, humanity takes minerals for use, not for their innate being. Oil without the technology to make energy or plastics is a mucky nuisance. In the future, when oil becomes scarce and prices begin to rise, sidelined technologies, perhaps solar and wind power or some new, unknown-as-yet process, will emerge as cost-effective alternatives. For other resources with fewer alternatives, recycling may play a key role.
But could any model account for all this? More pointedly, could any modeler attempt to make such predictions (excuse me, 'projections') with a straight face? When every aspect of a problem, from variables to the structure of the problem itself, is unknown, finding a solution will be difficult—especially when the existence of the problem itself is in doubt. Although certainly complex, World3's relationship with reality is unclear. Chaos theory, which explains our inability to predict future weather, calls into doubt the model's veracity.
For all these reasons, the creators of World3 had to rely on their assumptions and intuitions in the design of the model. Meadows et al. are not optimists; is it any surprise that World3 isn't either?
While environmental problems do linger and grow the world over, pollution, like population, has leveled off in the developed world as industrial production has multiplied. The reasons for this are myriad and include consumer demand, market responses, and, in some cases, government intervention. New technologies abound, efficiency grows unchecked, and, all the while, profits are being made in the process. Despite the constant drone of global warming alarmists, endocrine disrupter fear-mongers, and critical-path critics, we are not at any particular crossroads in the earth's environmental history.
Counter to their back-to-the-environment rhetoric, the authors' solution to their model's predicted global collapse is to move us further from our natural competitiveness into an age of 'sharing' and 'loving.' 'Before this society would decide on any specific proposal, it would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last,' etc. This is central planning and, though the authors stress that it need not be 'undemocratic, or boring, or unchallenging,' it would still be unworkable.
The authors are deliberate in not using the terminology of political economics. A society in which 'employment should not be a requirement for the ability to subsist' and in which resources are owned in common and divided equally has a name, socialism, which goes unmentioned in the book. This is the environmentalists' unspoken agenda, to erode our personal freedoms in the name of the greater good and a fair world, in the process ignoring evidence that such schemes are by far more repugnant and dangerous and subject to abuse than our current growth-centered world.
Beyond the Limits is a dangerous book because of its veneer of scientific credibility. It's fodder for troubling policy solutions that are likely worse than the problems they address. Under current, competitive, accumulation-based systems, the future cannot be assured with certainty, but, by providing market signals and incentives, we do our best to direct resources and assure positive outcomes as well as personal freedoms. After all, global catastrophe would mean decreased profits, and only the Malthusians, few in number, consider that a goal.