It was Malthusianism for a technocratic age; its vision of a post-industrial society, where change would proceed at a pace the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt would have been comfortable with. Reduced to its essentials, the logic of The Limits to Growth implied that human beings were the fundamental problem because humans consume resources.
The conclusions of The Limits to Growth were by no means extreme for the time, but fairly representative of intellectual opinion. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) set up a study group chaired by Harvey Brooks, a Harvard engineering professor. In a 1971 report, the group argued that developed societies were fast approaching a condition of near saturation. Even in higher education, people were suffering from information overload which risked stifling the production of new knowledge.[22]
The January 1972 edition of the Ecologist was devoted to ‘A Blueprint for Survival’. It was endorsed by thirty-seven eminent experts, including five Fellows of the Royal Society and sixteen holders of science chairs at British universities, two Nobel laureates and Sir Julian Huxley, who was a subscriber to virtually every environmental cause, from the Kibbo Kift in the 1920s, eugenics and population control in the 1930s, the first director-general of UNESCO in 1946, co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961, and writer of the preface to the British edition of A Silent Spring.
Environmental problems were not accidental malfunctions of modern society, the ‘Blueprint’ stated. They were ‘warning signs of a profound incompatibility between deeply rooted beliefs in continuous growth and the dawning recognition of earth as a space ship.’[23] Industrial society, with its ethos of expansion, was unsustainable. Then came an unambiguous, cast iron prediction: ‘Its termination within the lifetime of someone today is inevitable.’[24] A choice therefore had to be made between famine, epidemic and war (those three again) or initiating ‘a succession of thoughtful, humane and measured changes’ to spare our children the hardship and cruelty of the first option.[25] Even the most fervent proponents of global warming might be nervous of tying themselves to such a tight timetable for civilisation’s rendezvous with catastrophe.
As with global warming, scientists weren’t speaking from the fringes of the policy debate but given the role of defining what the problem was. In Britain, the Conservative government asked Sir Eric Ashby, a distinguished botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society, to chair a study ahead of the UN conference on the human environment in Stockholm. Its report, Pollution: Nuisance or Nemesis?, contains some of the most alarmist language presented to a British government in peacetime. Acknowledging that some members of the group considered that having less pollution and a better environment was a matter of political choice, like providing more hospitals, ‘others among us felt such an attitude is dangerously complacent, and are convinced that a fundamental and painful restructuring of our industrial society is necessary if mankind is to survive’.[26] Growth had to be halted in ‘a deliberate and controlled manner’. The sooner this happened, the better – ‘the longer the change is delayed, the more the productivity of the biosphere will be damaged, and the lower will be the eventual sustainable level for our descendants’.[27] There was no analysis or evidence to support this dire conclusion.
Most alarming to the alarmist was the lack of alarm in the general population. ‘The danger of entrusting the environment to the mandate of public opinion is that most people ascribe a higher priority to the present than the future,’ the report said. ‘Only in time of war do people willingly make such sacrifices.’[28] While some members of the working party believed that ‘the normal pace of politics’ was adequate to solve environmental problems, ‘others of us feel that there is no hope of action capable of grappling with the complex environmental crisis unless the issues are presented to the public in the same stark terms of national and even racial survival as maintained in war’.[29]
Wilfred Beckerman’s experience of serving on Ashby’s working group sharpened his criticisms of natural scientists’ approach to economic and social matters. Two years later, he wrote that scientists who might be world authorities on phenomena pertaining in the physical world ‘do not have a minimal understanding of the way that the world of human beings operates in general, or, in particular, the way that society reacts to problems such as pollution and demands for raw materials’.[30] Understanding those problems required knowledge of human beings in a social context. Some scientists might have decided to become scientists, Beckerman suggested, ‘precisely to shield themselves from these phenomena and to escape into a world where problems are not on a human scale, but microscopic or astronomic’.[31]
Beckerman argued against governments intervening to ensure the long-run supply of raw materials, as it would rest on the assumption that governments were better at forecasting future trends and developing new technology than private industry. ‘There is no reason to make such an assumption,’ Beckerman said. ‘This does not mean private industry always gets it right; it doesn’t, but it usually pays for its mistakes.’[32]
At that time, counter-arguments to environmentalism tended to come from the Left rather than the Right of political spectrum. Beckerman was an economic adviser to Tony Crosland, a senior Cabinet minister in the 1964–1970 Labour government and the Labour party’s foremost intellectual. Environmental policies had a distributional impact because they were inevitably skewed towards meeting the wants of the better off in society at the expense of the poor, Beckerman argued. There was a natural hierarchy of human wants. As societies became richer, improved quality of life became more important. Collective policies favouring improved quality of life therefore favoured the better off.[33] Crosland himself had a famous difference of opinion with the American economist J.K. Galbraith. In a brilliant put-down, he mocked Galbraith and then set out a point-by-point defence of economic growth.
In a 1971 pamphlet, Crosland warned that parts of the environmental lobby were hostile to growth in principle and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people, reflecting manifest class bias and a set of middle and upper class value judgements:
Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them … We must make our own value judgment based on socialist objectives: and that objective must … be that growth is vital, and its benefits far outweigh its costs.[34]
The triumph of environmentalism during the West’s years of plenty was assured by the structural weakness of its opponents. Right-of-centre political parties represented class interests favouring environmental initiatives, but left-of-centre parties were divided between representing blue-collar workers (Crosland’s position) and members of the middle-class intelligentsia, such as Galbraith. There was one obstacle to environmentalism that could not be so easily overcome: obtaining Third World support needed for any global agreement on the environment.
In 1972, a representative of a leading member of the G77 challenged the fundamental basis of ecologism. Brazil’s Miguel Alvaro Osório de Almeida, who served as ambassador to the US and the UN and led Brazil’s preparations for the Stockholm conference, delivered an insight of great subtlety:
the problem to be solved in fact is not achieving an ‘ecological balance’, but, on the contrary, obtaining the most efficient forms of ‘long-term ecological imbalance’. The problem is not to exterminate mankind now, in the name of ecological equilibrium, but to prolong our ability to use natural resources for as long as possible.[35]
A year earlier, de Almeida had shocked western delegates at a preparatory meeting for the Stockholm conference. ‘To be many and to be poor is offensive to the sights and feelings of developed countries,’ he told them. ‘Most of their suggestions do not concern cooperation for increasing income, but cooperation to reduce numbers.’[36]
Without a formula to reconcile rich countries’ environmentalism and the developing world’s hu
nger for economic growth, the Stockholm conference, due to convene on 5th June 1972, was heading for disaster. In fact, the germ of that formula was to be found in Adlai Stevenson’s final speech, the passengers on the little spaceship, ‘half fortunate, half miserable’.
The person who planted it there would do more than anyone else to fashion it into a political doctrine to form the basis of a treaty of convenience between environmentalism and the Third World. Her contribution was to be decisive in ensuring that the Stockholm conference would be a starting point rather than a showdown – something that could not be avoided, only postponed.
* Insofar as human rather than climatic history was used as a source for argument, it was of pre-industrial societies that had suffered the effects of resource depletion and natural climate variation. Thus Al Gore in Earth in the Balance (1993) writes of the impact of volcanoes on the climate and the disappearance of the Minoan civilisation (p.58), on the lead up to the French Revolution (pp. 59–60); on the ending of warm periods and the fall of the Roman Empire (p. 64) and in triggering the Black Death and wiping out the Viking settlers on Greenland towards the end of the Middle Ages (p. 67); other climatic changes, such as changes in rainfall, leading to the disappearance of the Mycenaean civilisation in 1200 BC (p. 65) and the abandonment of Fatepur Sikri in India in the sixteenth century (p. 64); the onset of warmer periods, possibly causing the collapse of the Mayan civilisation around AD 950 and the Irish potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century (p. 69).
* The authors evidently realised their error, because the argument was shifted to a different issue from resource depletion to the system’s responsiveness to feedback loops. ‘Delays in the feedback loops of the world system would be no problem if the system were [sic] growing very slowly or not at all.’ Dennis L. Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Humanity (1972), p. 144. No evidence was offered for this to conflict with the common sense observation that dynamic societies are more adaptable than static ones.
[1] Dennis L. Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Humanity (1972), p. 197.
[2] http://www.earthday.net/node/77
[3] Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), p. 163.
[4] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2921
[5] Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), p. 163.
[6] Robert B. Semple Jr, New York Times, 23rd January 1970.
[7] Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), p. 238.
[8] Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (2003), p. 300.
[9] Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (2003), p. 313.
[10] Lisa H. Sideris, ‘The Ecological Body: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and Breast Cancer’ in Lisa H. Sideris & Kathleen Dean Moore (ed.), Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (2008), p. 137.
[11] Francis Sandbach, Environment, Ideology & Policy (1980), p. 19.
[12] Wilfred Beckerman, In Defence of Economic Growth (1976), p. 247.
[13] ‘Pollution: Nuisance or Nemesis? A Report on the Control of Pollution’ (1972), p. 7.
[14] Beckerman, In Defence of Economic Growth (1976), p. 14.
[15] Meadows et al, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Humanity (1972), pp. 9–10.
[16] ibid., p. 23.
[17] ibid., p. 24.
[18] ibid., p. 154.
[19] ibid.
[20] ibid., p. 147.
[21] ibid., p. 155.
[22] Beckerman, In Defence of Economic Growth (1976), p. 258.
[23] Edward Goldsmith el al, A Blueprint for Survival (1972), p. 28.
[24] ibid., p. 14.
[25] ibid.
[26] ‘Pollution: Nuisance or Nemesis? A Report on the Control of Pollution’ (1972), p. 3.
[27] ibid., p. 9.
[28] ibid., p. 80.
[29] ibid.
[30] Beckerman, In Defence of Economic Growth (1976), p. 14.
[31] ibid.
[32] ibid., p. 35.
[33] ibid., p. 163.
[34] Anthony Crosland, A Social Democratic Britain (1971).
[35] Beckerman, In Defence of Economic Growth (1976), p. 110.
[36] http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/seminar/application/pdf/sem_pre_brazil.pdf
8
Stockholm
Its real leader, the source of its inspiration and the directions it set for the future of our planet, was Lady Jackson, whom the world knows best as Barbara Ward.
Maurice Strong[1]
Swedish scientists were finding an increase in the acidity of rain falling across Scandinavia. The Swedish government raised their concern at the UN. In 1968, the General Assembly passed a resolution to convene the world’s first intergovernmental conference on the environment.
For all its enthusiasm, hardly any preparations had been made for the conference, to be hosted by Sweden in 1972. Through a mutual friend, Sweden’s ambassador to the UN approached Maurice Strong to head the conference secretariat. Undersecretary of state Christian Herter for the Nixon administration lobbied Strong to take the assignment. A formal offer from U. Thant, the UN secretary-general, followed. Strong did not need much persuading. It was the opportunity he had been preparing for all his adult life.
Born in Canada in 1929, as a boy growing up in Depression-era Manitoba, Strong remembers asking his mother: ‘If nature could be so right, how could human society be so wrong?’[2] Inspired by Churchill and Roosevelt’s vision of a global organisation to ensure world peace, ‘I knew at once that I wanted to be part of that endeavour.’[3] Strong lived side by side with Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. At seventeen, he got his first job at the UN as a junior clerk in the passes office.
Reading Silent Spring deepened his concern about the environment, Carson’s ‘cry of alarm’ confirming what he already believed.[4] It also reinforced his belief in global governance. The environment is supranational and transcends the nation state – ‘one of the great underlying truths of environmental politics’, according to Strong.[5] The establishment of effective global governance and management was the single most important challenge of the next generation, Strong said in a lecture marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Stockholm conference. ‘I find it hard to conceive that civilisation could continue through the coming century if we fail to do this.’[6]
In a career straddling politics and business, Strong worked in the oil and mining industries before becoming head of the Canada’s international aid agency in 1966. Where some saw a contradiction between his environmentalism and digging minerals out of the ground, Strong saw ‘positive synergy’ between mankind’s economic and environmental needs.
It’s through our economic life that we affect our environment, and it’s only through changes in economic behaviour, particularly on the part of corporations, which are the primary actors in the economy, that we can protect and improve the environment.[7]
Strong’s sole foray into elective politics was not, he admitted, his finest hour. In 1977, Pierre Trudeau persuaded him to become a parliamentary candidate. Within weeks, Strong asked Trudeau if he could withdraw. It was the making of him. As an unelected politician, Strong could make a far greater impact on global affairs.
Strong’s lack of educational qualifications, he believed, barred him from a traditional ascent in international politics, so he pursued a business career to get noticed
and get on. Power is augmented by influence derived from extensive and diverse networks, he found.[8] Through them, Strong became powerful.
The list of his positions takes up four and a half pages of his autobiography. They include membership of the advisory boards of Toyota and Harvard’s Centre for International Development, UN undersecretary and adviser to the UN secretary-general, senior adviser to the president of the World Bank (he talent-spotted the bank’s president, Jim Wolfensohn, in the 1950s), Chairman of the Earth Council, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, a board member of the Davos World Economic Forum and of the regents of New York’s Episcopalian cathedral St John the Divine, as well as being a member of the Vatican’s Society for Development, Justice and Peace, Fellow of the Royal Society and member of the Club of Rome (The Limits to Growth was on the right lines but ahead of its time, he thought). He knew how to obtain political access and hedge his bets. In the 1988 American presidential election, Strong donated $100,000 to Mike Dukakis’s campaign, became a trustee of the Democratic National Committee and fundraised for the Republican National Committee at the same time.[9]
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 11
