by Chidem Kurdas
In an article titled “Can Our Species Escape Destruction?” John Terborgh argues that collective restraint is the one hope for stopping overgrown humanity’s devastation of the planet. This is a scientifically-imbued version of a common view. When the United Nations Population Fund announced that on Oct. 31st world population will reach seven billion, news stories referred to the event as a Halloween specter.
Malthus’ thesis that exponential population growth cannot be sustained by finite resources is a truism, though it is fashionable to dismiss Malthus, Mr. Terborgh says. In Malthus’ bleak early 19th century scenario, when population becomes excessive, overcrowding and competition for resources causes famines and wars. Those disasters act as a check on population.
We now know that population growth goes down in response to higher income and better education. In developed countries people have far fewer children than they did in the past. Poorer countries have high birth rates but in most places the growth rate of population is declining—in India, for instance. If these trends continue, world population will stabilize, albeit at a high level.
Of course, the ecological Armageddon argument is not just about the growing number of people but about the growth of each person’s carbon footprint. We in the developed world consume gargantuan amounts of resources compared to any past society and billions of people in developing countries are fast increasing their consumption.
Mr. Terborgh sets out the links in a seemingly impeccable chain of reasoning. “Humans compete for resources, living space, mates, social status, and almost everything else,” he points out. But “competition has a dark side, for a competitive system provides no rewards for restraint; to the contrary, lack of restraint is often rewarded.”
Given that “Without restraint there is nothing to prevent the exhaustion of resources and a global calamity of unprecedented proportions,” the conclusion follows: “The world needs to impose collective restraints on many fronts, but so far self-interest and competitiveness have trumped most efforts to respond to the needs of the collective whole.”
What entity is to impose worldwide restraints? Mr. Terborgh does not see national governments constraining competitive greed. On the contrary: “The human predicament of overpopulation and overexploitation of resources is fundamentally driven by the primordial impulses … In the contemporary world, these impulses form the self-interest of competitively driven entities, be they individuals, corporations, or nation-states.”
So nation-states can’t get beyond the primordial impulse to compete for more resources. This suggests a supra-national body. One could envision an amalgamation of the United Nations and the US Environmental Protection Agency writ large, but to possess the authority to impose constraints it would have to be backed by political power. A worldwide political entity, dictating and enforcing rules for the supposed “collective good” of humanity—that could be an international communist party with ecology as its protégé rather than the proletariat.
Truth is, replacing the invisible hand of competitive markets with a visible global boot would not necessarily protect the planet. On the contrary, past collectivist dictatorships caused great environmental havoc—recall the Soviet Union’s record, from heavily polluting industries to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, all centrally planned, no doubt justified by some notion of the “collective good”. Then there is the issue of what an environmentalist Stalin with global reach would do to our lives and liberties.
Scientists like Mr. Terborgh complain that humanity is not heeding their warnings about the impending ecological crisis. Given the political implications of collective action, you can see why many people prefer to take their chances with overpopulation and resource depletion.
But this issue merits serious discussion, especially as any attempt to use collectivist methods to prevent environmental catastrophe would strengthen authoritarian politics.