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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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13. Paul R. Ehrlich

Paul R. Ehrlich was born in 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He obtained his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Kansas. In 1966 he was appointed full professor of biological sciences at Stanford University in California.
From 1969 to 1970 he acted as president of Zero Population Growth. His book The Population Bomb went at the time into its twenty-second printing in its original edition. He followed this bestseller up with How to Be a Survivor, written with R.L. Harriman (1971). Together with his wife, Anne, he published Population, Resources, Environment (1970).

The data in Limits to Growth concerning population, were they sufficient to illustrate your position on population growth?

 

Well, they were highly aggregated, but they were perfectly sufficient for the purpose of the model as presented. In other words, I think a lot of the people who have reviewed the book have not bothered to look very carefully at other things the authors have said.

 

Skinner complained....1

 

Nobody really reads his book either. With the qualifications stated by the people who did the Limits to Growth work, it was utterly adequate. The conclusions drawn by the study were the same as those drawn by, I think, every competent scientist who has looked at the entire world situation.

 

Barry Commoner2 called Limits to Growth a step backwards.

 

Dr. Commoner seems not to have looked at the entire situation, I think, because his political beliefs will not permit him to accept the important role played by population growth in the environmental crisis. It is too

bad that he does not have an ecologist in his group to help him avoid such errors. Perhaps he meant that Limits to Growth was a ‘step backwards’ for the Commoner crusade to persuade people that population and affluence are unimportant. In that respect, I think he is correct.

 

Is the only way to alert mass public opinion the doomsday approach?

 

Well, I don't think one wants to take a doomsday or a nondoomsday approach. What you want to do is make the best possible diagnosis of what is going on. That's basically what the Meadows team3 has done, and what I am doing. It is making a prognosis, not a matter of optimism or pessimism or doomsday or not doomsday. You look at where the trends are going and then you say, in our best estimate if we don't change our course, the trends are going this way and the results are likely to be bad.

Most of the people who say the so-called doomsday people are too pessimistic are simply people who are utterly ignorant of the fundamentals of ecology. There are many people who have gained some understanding of the demographic situation, which is simple. We teach our undergraduate students all the demography that is necessary to understand the world demographic situation in two lectures. After that the question becomes one of understanding resources, understanding ecology and (what is much more difficult, of course) understanding social and political systems. We know in general where the solutions lie as far as the physics and biology and ecology go, but what we don't know really is how to change human institutions so that corrective action will be taken in time.

 

How much time you think we have?

 

Well, it depends. If you ask how long do we have until utter catastrophe overtakes the Western world, I feel that the MIT report is too optimistic. I think it will be some time within the next twenty years, probably sooner than later, but it is hard to judge. It depends on how things go. If you ask when we should have started, of course, we should have started down the right track in the 1930s, 1940s at the latest. For instance if there had been crash programs for population control in the underdeveloped countries in the '40s, then they would not be faced today with the hideous problems of unemployment, which political scientists and sociologists cannot see any way around. To prevent rising unemployment India, for instance, will have to provide more than a hundred

thousand jobs per week throughout this decade. We have enormous numbers of people coming into economies which are not able to create jobs for them, and impossible food problems and so on. We are well way past the time when we should have had crash programs to try and change our course. Another question now is if we start to change, will the built-in lag time within the system destroy us anyway. You know, we may have already gone on too far. I think that is the major question that concerns many ecologists.

 

And how about the gap between the rich and the poor cultures?

 

Well, it has been growing continuously. It's still growing and the run-of-the-mill economists' answer to this problem, both between nations and within nations, is to turn the same old crank faster. All we have to do is to keep the economy growing and growing.

 

That's the point of view McNamara espoused at the Stockholm Conference on Human Environment.

 

The idea is that economic growth will leave enough crumbs to improve the condition of the poor. But, of course, that's a game we have tried. It does not work. We have been doing that bit for the last twenty-five years or so, and we see quite clearly that the gap continues to grow. Therefore, although there is no absolute proof that it will never work, I think you will have to make the judgment that the ‘eternal growth’ approach will not work - especially since it leads to eco-catastrophe. What we need to do is to work very rapidly to get equilibrium economies - spacemen economies, as they are called - in the overdeveloped nations. Then we must face the problem of redistribution of wealth. That, of course, is one of the most difficult political and social problems.

 

And what about the rebuilding of the environment? Where do the behavioral architects come in?

 

Well, the whole question, of course, is how do you change human behavior into what I would call a more survival-oriented mode.

 

That's what Skinner calls the aim of life: survival.

 

In many ways I am a Skinnerian, although many of his specific solu-

tions are at the most impracticable. What I would take hope from is that as far as we can see, looking at other cultures, man is not necessarily an aggressive waster. The question to me is not now so much how do you change human nature - although that is an interesting question - but how do you change human institutions.

 

There have been suggestions for a World Population Institute.

 

Well, I have no objections to institutes and committees, but frankly none of these things turn me on. The institutes, commissions, academies and so on are the standard answers to establishment scientists and politicians who have been running the world for the last twenty-five years and sending it steadily on down the drain. They're the people who cannot find the way to disarm. They're the people who cannot find a way to keep the automobile from destroying the United States. They're the people who cannot figure out any way to stop a continuous exponential growth of energy use of between five and eight percent a year in the United States. In other words, when you look at the members of the American National Academy of Sciences, at the people in the American national government, the British national government, American state governments, and so on, these are the people who are unable to move off the course of oblivion. To expect to change the system by setting up more of their kind of institutions is just preposterous. We have a theory about them that is called ‘I am the proof.’ In other words, the fact that these people are at the top of the system to them is the proof that the system has to be perfect, otherwise they would not have risen to the top. They are the last people in the world whom we expect really to change it.

 

John R. Platt4 talks about mobilizing the scientists to tackle the job.

 

I agree with John that we've got to mobilize the scientists to meet this crisis, much as we did during the second world war. But first we must mobilize the people and then the politicians.

 

But we are in a war condition.

 

The point is until the politicians and the people realize it's war condition, you are not going to mobilize the scientists. First of all, scientists are among the most conservative people in the world. They are trained to stay in their laboratories, do what the politicians tell them to and keep

their mouths shut. There are rare exceptions, but with three hundred thousand or so scientists are at least two hundred and ninety-five thousand of them who have sold out completely to either industry or government.

 

The establishment.

 

Yes, of course. They are not going to mobilize anything, they have jobs. What they want to do is mobilize the space programs and try to get them moving again. You know in NASA5 they are working very hard to continue all sorts of nonsense. You cannot expect the leadership to come from the scientists.

 

What is the role of the media in this?

 

Well, in the United States the media are of course owned lock, stock and barrel by the same people who are interested in continuing the status quo. One of the problems we have is freeing the media from the control of General Motors and so on. This is a very big problem. It may be possible but again you keep coming right back to the same thing - if you've got to change the media, you've got to change the politics. The agency which controls the media is the Federal Communications Commission, which of course is largely controlled by the people who are supposed to be regulated. The foxes are guarding the henhouse. We keep coming back to politics. The ecology is relatively simple, the demography is simpleminded beyond belief. The politics, the sociology and so on tend to be very, very complicated and difficult.

 

I guess you don't expect too much from the World Population Conference of '74 either.

 

Something good could emerge from it. It was in a sense a miracle that we had the environmental conference in Stockholm four years after the first politicians learned the word ecology. Stockholm had a sort of propaganda value, but basically it had little immediate impact. The coverage in the United States of Bobby Fischer's chess games was considerably more substantial than the coverage of the media of the environmental conference, so -

 

But a population conference could be a step in the right direction.

 

It's a step in the right direction. But it's as if somebody is bailing

with a thimble while the boat is sinking. But you can say every thimbleful of water you throw overboard is a help. But if the water is coming in ten tons a minute and you are baling three, four thimblesful an hour, yes, it's a step in the right direction, but it's hard to get excited about how you are going to save yourself by doing that.


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