Along the same lines, other noteworthy examples include the manifestos produced by researchers who have demanded ‘the cessation of genetic manipulation’, and especially the views advocated by the Club of Rome in favour of putting an end to industrial growth, as expressed initially in The Limits of Growth and then in A Strategy for Tomorrow.
Hosted by Italian Aurelio Peccei, the president of the Ital-consult company, the Club of Rome was founded in 1968 in cooperation with various researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with the financial support of large international foundations. Most of its members are American nationals. They announce ‘the collapse of our global system’ by 2100 approximately, perhaps even earlier.
This prediction relies on the projection of five factors into the future: population, industrial and agricultural production, pollution and the availability of natural resources. The resulting computer-generated graphs prove that the exponential growth of all five factors leads to a catastrophic situation in the relatively near future.
The Exponential Aspect
Unfortunately, or fortunately, rather, in no way do these calculations correspond to reality. Independently from all underlying ideological biases, the figures are actually founded upon two mistakes that are characteristic of a purely analytical and mechanistic procedure: the exponential processing of all data that serves as the basis of such extrapolations, in addition to their heterogenous aspect. In other words, the Club mistakenly considers the development of all factors to be constant. On the other hand, it presents a global (planetary) analysis of a number of issues whose expressions not only vary from one region of the world to another but are sometimes even contradictory. Such initial pre-assumptions are thus wrong.
The exponential theory is already encountered with Marx and Engels, according to whom capitalistic production is bound to ‘simultaneously deplete the two sources from which all richness stems: the earth and the worker’. Indeed, says Karl Marx, ‘every agricultural progress is not only progress in the art of exploiting workers, but also in the art of despoiling the soil; every progress in the art of increasing the latter’s fertility for a given amount of time is a progress in the ruination of its lasting sources of fertility’ (Capital, Book I, volume two).
Just like Marx, the members of the Club of Rome fail to grasp that social factors abide by compensating laws of retroaction, as the effects impact the causes: the more pronounced the issues are, the greater the chances of formulating solutions that resolve them. It is no coincidence, for instance, that the control of procreation (through the generalisation of contraceptive methods) went hand in hand with a ‘demographic explosion’. Likewise, history proves that, in every era, the balance between population and environmental resources is re-established by means of autoregulation — with ‘overcoming’ acting as an alarm signal.
One of the most constantly observed laws in living systems is the one that regularly reinstates balance in every exponential growth whose consequences become destructive from the growth subject’s perspective.
In this regard, Mr Pierre Longone550 gives several examples: ‘In the US, urban proliferation has led to the asphyxiation of city centres, and thus to the cessation of growth and the diminishing of the population in major cities. The car invasion that has taken place in cities has triggered an autoregulation in the use and even acquisition of cars once a certain level of saturation is attained. Interest-bearing loans, which were morally condemned by Saint Thomas and are technically exponential in their effects, are thwarted by inflation and other factors’ (Population et sociétés,551 December 1972).
None have thus been able to demonstrate that any increase in the amounts mentioned by the Club of Rome is ever genuinely exponential, nor that, if this were indeed the case, it could ever be destined to remain so.
The Club’s evaluation of the ecosystem’s terrestrial resources is equally dubious. The theory centred around the rapid depletion of resources only takes into account currently known reserves. At no moment of history, however, have the ‘known reserves’ ever represented more than a few decades’ worth of ongoing consumption. There is thus nothing that could justify equating all existing reserves with detected ones. During the past forty years, our oil consumption has risen considerably; and yet, the number of ‘known reserves’ has not ceased to increase either.
According to Wilfrid Beckerman,552 ‘if we base our calculations on random samples of the earth’s metal contents, we can estimate potential reserves to be a million times greater in number than the currently known ones’ (In Defence of Economic Growth, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974). Similar conclusions have been reached by Anton Zischka in Die Welt bleibt Reich (Kümmerly und Frey, Bern, 1974).
Today, it is known that metallic products (whose depletion within the next fifty years or so has been predicted by the Club of Rome, with the exception of chrome and iron) are recyclable to an 80 or 90% rate, which secures mankind’s future in this domain for several millennia to come.
The service sphere, the one where men create the highest number of new requirements, also happens to be the sector that consumes the lowest amounts of raw materials (Tourism, for instance, hardly leads to any increase in alimentary consumption or that of mineral raw materials).
Due their naive belief in the constancy of phenomena, not only do the members of the Club of Rome consider the events that have been affecting mankind’s history on a regular basis — including epidemics, wars, crises and various catastrophes — to be forever excluded and discarded (except for the disaster that is somehow bound to be triggered by the very absence of catastrophes, of course), but they also neglect the novelty factor in a most radical fashion; indeed, computer speculations cannot reflect human inventiveness.
‘In 1930, any careless futurologist would have taken the opportunity to predict the outbreak of a rubber crisis before the 1960s: rubber tree plantations, which were responsible for the entire production of rubber back then, were not indefinitely extensible. By the 1940s, however, synthetic rubber, a hydrocarbon derivative, had been introduced as a supplement to plant-based rubber, whose production has now been stabilised’ (in Science et vie,553 February 1974).
Prior to the invention of aeroplanes and the development of airfreight, one could have predicted with equal ease ‘the final congestion’ of road and railway transport.
Once the current energetic resources (of oil and gas) are depleted, nuclear fission will take over, with breeder reactors being next in line. By then, we will have undoubtedly succeeded in our controlled deuterium-deuterium fission efforts, whose study in laboratories has already reached an advanced stage (there shall be no fission products and virtually no artificial radioactivity).
Mr Longone writes: ‘Who is to say that mankind will not be able to extract almost unlimited energy not only from the power of hydrogen fusion, which is already being studied, but also from terrestrial magnetism or the various kinds of solar radiation, thus allowing us to take advantage of a small amount of universal energy?’ (Population et sociétés).
Neo-Malthusianism
Pollution, presented in the calculations of the Club of Rome as a series of curves with a regular vertical tendency, is neither a recent phenomenon nor, above all, an irreversible one.
The discovery of fire introduced the very first divide between man and ‘nature’. Palaeolithic hunters impoverished the vertebrate fauna that populated our planet’s various regions back then far more so than anyone has ever done in modern times. Later on, the Neolithic revolution resulted in the deforestation and aridification of immense territories. In 1976, researchers at the University of Columbus (Ohio) examined some ice blocks dating back to the last ice age (14,000 years ago) and originating from the Admiral Byrd station in Antarctica, in addition to Camp Century in Greenland. They noted that, in those days, the snow of Antarctica was a hundred times more polluted than it is now.
Mr René Dubois acknowledges the fact that ‘merely 30 years ago, the orga
nic contamination of water was far worse than nowadays, as was urban contamination by certain fumes, or microbial contamination’.
‘The authors of The Limits of Growth espoused the hypothesis of an exponential increase in pollution because, as they themselves stated, the few pollutants that had been measured seemed to be growing exponentially. In fact, however, the pollutants that have actually been measured reveal an absolute diminishment of pollution in Great Britain and a decrease in its growth rate within the United States: these two countries were the very first to enact antipollution laws’, remarks professor Henri Vander Eycken, from the free University of Brussels.
‘According to The Limits of Growth, the most optimistic hypothesis states that it would take a whole century to reduce the relation between production and pollution to a quarter of its current level. However, Great Britain has succeeded in reducing its own pollution much more than that in a period of 15 years. As for the US, it has set itself the goal of decreasing pollution to 1/10 of its current rate in the next 7 years. The least once can say, therefore, is that the “sweeping generalisations” encountered in The Limits of Growth are contradicted by the actual measurements’ (in La Libre Belgique,554 22nd–23rd February, 1975).
There is also nothing that could confirm the claim that the increase in pollution is rigorously proportional to demographic and industrial growth. There are actually many facts that tend to demonstrate the very opposite.
Paul R. Ehrlich purports that ‘all ecological poisoning relates to an excessive number of humans’, to which Mr Longone responds by stating: ‘Ecology suffers greater damage because of the technology being used than because of the rate of humans’. He adds that if we compare the Netherlands to the USA, and the Asian deltas to the lateralised regions of intertropical Africa, it quickly becomes apparent that the Earth has enjoyed greater respect in the areas where the human densities have been considerably higher; it is, in fact, an extraordinarily sparse population that has wrought utter destruction upon the greatest natural herd (buffalos), whereas the Dutch conquered 1/5 of their territory in the course of history’ (Population et sociétés, July 1972).
Basing his viewpoint on the most recent data, Mr Alfred Sauvy555 has, on his part, demonstrated that there is no correlation whatsoever (and especially no negative one) between demographic growth and an increase in the product per capita rate.
In fact, the demographic variable impacts the sequence of economic phenomena far more through structural modifications than through mere volume-related variations. In the past, the main variable that affected the structure was mortality: in cases of a sudden increase, it struck against all ages and, as a result, the age group pyramid remained more or less unaltered. Nowadays, the most significant demographic variable (at times of peace) is fecundity. The latter’s sudden modification might trigger a complete imbalance in the age pyramid and generate fearsome demographic ageing (in Sweden, the decrease in birth rates has already compelled the government to increase the age of retirement).
The Neo-Malthusian supporters556 of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) turn a blind eye to these facts. Furthermore, despite generally targeting institutions with ferocious criticism, they seem unable to discern that the logical consequence of a ZPG policy lies in the acknowledgement of the state’s authority over familial reproduction, as well as the right to limit the latter’s increase through forced sterilisation whenever necessary.
Paul R. Ehrlich, who rambles on about ‘freedom’ and ‘universal brotherhood’, does not hesitate to propose authoritarian and repressive measures that would prevent populations from procreating further.
Suspicious Guilt
In De l’histoire à la prospective557 (Laffont, 1975), Mr Pierre Chaunu558 defines the ZPG ideology as the spreading of individual death-obsession into the collective domain. In Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident, du Moyen-Age à nos jours559 (Seuil, 1975), Mr Philippe Ariès560 has demonstrated that, in modern times, this obsession with death originates from the USA and expresses both the aspirations and disillusionments of the American Dream, i.e. an apocalypticism in which disappointed over-optimism finds itself inverted.
‘The notion of Zero Population Growth, ever so popular in the US, betrays various and probably very complex forms of psychological panic, much more so than a rational examination of the situation. […] By concealing national situations behind universal data that lack any and all specific value, the anti-growth ideology conveys a suspicious sort of guilt. As the all-round champions of psychological naïveté and exponential calculation, the Americans have claimed the lion’s share in this respect’ (as written by Mr François Furet561 in Le Nouvel Observateur, 24th March, 1975).
Mr Longone notes: ‘We can only express our puzzlement at the fact that the world’s richest nation, with its mere 22 inhabitants per square kilometre, seems to have given in to such genuine obsession, not to mention panic, in the face of growth, while China, with a population of almost 800,000 inhabitants and a density of 77 people per square kilometre, loudly proclaims its faith in the future’ (Population et sociétés,562 July 1972).
The conference held in Bucharest in 1974 on the topic of population growth proved (as if it were even necessary) that in demographic matters, extrapolating one’s conclusions from one region of the planet to another is impossible.
In the Third World, due to the decrease in mortality that results from the spreading of European medical technology, the ‘demographic explosion’ that took place in the 1940s is already being absorbed, which is true of Latin America and, since 1972, India as well. A stabilisation of the situation is expected towards the end of the current century.563
Mr Pierre Chaunu affirms: ‘The estimations are currently exaggerated. All the censuses that shall be published in the coming years will prove, as they have been doing since 1963–68, that our estimations are tainted with increasing systematic errors. The surprises that surfaced between 1965 and 1974, as well as those that lie ahead (and are infinitely greater still), are embodied by symmetrical figures that represent the opposite of the 1945–63 period. We have proceeded to extrapolate on the basis of past situations, situations that are undergoing complete modification and, very often, a pure and simple reversal’ (op. cit.).
In Western countries, account taken of the current pace, it is not overpopulation that represents a threat, but a regular increase in the death excess compared to the birth rate. In La peste blanche,564 Mr Pierre Chaunu and Georges Suffert specify that in Europe, the general reproduction rate has dropped from 1 % to 0.8 %; which means that mere generational replacement is no longer guaranteed.
The white race, which represented 25 % of the global population back in 1972, will only total 12.8 % in 2075. The number of Europeans will thus have decreased by 50 % in the space of a single century (proportionately to the world’s overall population).
In 1975, only thirteen out of thirty-three industrialised countries had a fertility rate that exceeded population renewal. During that same period, more coffins were being produced in West and East Germany, Austria and Luxembourg than cradles. In 1976, Belgium and England had to be added to the list, followed by France and Switzerland around 1980. In Germany, the completed fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman has practically been attained by the 1950 generation. At this pace, the West German population will have decreased to fewer than forty million inhabitants by 2030 (see Jean Bourgeois-Pichat’s Baisse de la fécondité et descendance finale,565 in Population, November–December 1976).
In 1976, the French mortality figure exceeded the national birth rate in as many as thirty-four departments, including Côtes-du-Nord, Pyrénées-Atlantiques and Charente-Maritime, which has not prevented the ‘Friends of the Earth’ from advocating a decrease in the French population using arguments such as: ‘If one longs to escape urban concentrations, our 3100-kilometre coastline cannot provide a single person from our 52-million population with more than 62 millimetres of seashore’.
The Nuclear Power Plant Issue
In its Strategy for Tomorrow, the Club of Rome proposes an ‘organic growth’ model. What is meant here is that we are to decrease the growth experienced by rich countries so as to accelerate that of poor ones, and that the fewer goods are available to all, the fairer their repartition; which is utterly absurd.
What is responsible for leading people to believe that the underdevelopment of the Third World is actually due to the ‘overdevelopment’ of Western countries is deceitful propaganda. Those who wrote the preface to Paul R. Ehrlich’s book, namely Mr Pierre Samuel and Alexandre Grothendieck, claim that, demographically speaking, ‘each Frenchman born today weighs as much as 100 Asians’. Should our demographic presence be halved, the ‘weight’ represented by every Frenchman would thus total 200. One can hardly imagine how that could ever advantage Asia. In fact, the very size of the aid given to the Third World depends, among other factors, on the number of ‘aiders’. Under the current circumstances, a voluntary growth deceleration in rich countries would have the (marginal) effect of reducing development assistance, whose increase is, incidentally, demanded by the Club of Rome.
The same type of absurdities is encountered in the ongoing debate on nuclear energy.
To Mr Brice Lalonde,566 the head of ‘Friends of the Earth’ (an association that sponsored Mr René Dumont’s candidature during the presidential elections in 1974), the atom is ‘intrinsically fascistic’.
On 2nd December, 1974, in L’Express, Mrs Jacqueline Giraud567 declared that the leaking out of a single gram of plutonium into the atmosphere would suffice to cause the deaths of a million people. Since 1945, however, atomic explosions have actually released three to five tonnes of radioactive plutonium into our atmosphere. Here is Mr François Lebrette’s conclusion568 (Valeurs Actuelles, 10th February, 1975): ‘Either Mrs. Giraud’s calculations are inaccurate, or life actually vanished from our planet’s surface some 20 years ago, without us even realising it’.
Systems and Debates Page 29
