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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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27. Edward Goldsmith

Edward Goldsmith has been editor of the British Ecologist since its founding in 1970.
He was born in Paris in 1928. He studied political science and economics at Magdalen College at Oxford University. He coauthored the Blueprint for Survival, published in January, 1972,
a historic document signed by thirty-three foremost British scientists and men of knowledge.

The Blueprint for Survival1 appeared almost at the same time as Limits to Growth. Were they competing documents?

 

No, I think they are complementary. The Club of Rome study provides a very sophisticated analysis of the world situation and hints at the sort of changes required to stabilize our society. We provided a similar but far more rudimentary analysis, but on the other hand, accentuated the requisite program of change.

 

From your writing I concluded that a well-orchestrated change on numerous fronts is required. In what way do you feel Blueprint for Survival and Limits to Growth are contributing to that goal?

 

Change must occur on all fronts and must be orchestrated nationally and internationally. However, political action is unlikely to be taken unless the changes proposed are ‘politically feasible,’ which simply means that they can be implemented by politicians without their losing votes. In other words, it is public opinion that must first be changed. The changes required are so radical that they involve just about all the basic values that we in our industrial society cherish most dearly. Needless to say, this cannot be done overnight. Both the Limits to Growth and Blueprint for Survival have attracted a lot of attention. They have been translated into about fifteen languages. In many schools and universities they are already being used as standard texts. They have also been influential at the political level. Mr. Mansholt,2 for instance, told me that the Dutch government had been very much influenced by both of these reports. In New Zealand there is a new party called the Values Party, which has adopted a document called Blueprint for New Zealand, which is basically the Blueprint for Survival adapted for local requirements. I think they have made a contribution, but as I said before, one does not change a value system overnight.

 

Do you consider that present expansion in the developed countries is occurring at the expense of the Third World?

Undoubtedly. Economic growth is only possible in Western Europe and elsewhere if we can hoodwink the Third World to provide us with food and raw materials in exchange for on the whole useless manufactured goods. We in this country import every year 1.7 million tons of high-protein concentrate for our cattle from countries that badly need the protein for their own largely underfed populations. At the same time the Third World is being hoodwinked into believing that they can solve their problems by also indulging in economic growth.

 

But to build hospitals in India they need economic growth to be able to afford these expenses.

 

New hospitals are irrelevant to India's problems. India is not suffering from a lack of hospitals but from an ever-widening gap between population and food supply, as well as from countless social and material problems caused by the massive urbanization that is presently taking place as a direct result of the economic growth, however limited, that has already occurred.

 

The gap is only growing wider?

 

Indeed, it is. The population, which is already over 500 million, will have doubled by the end of the century unless it is brought to an end by famine, war or disease. What is certain is that it will not be halted by current birth-control programs. There is simply no evidence for supposing that technological devices such as the pill or the IUD have any significant effect on reducing population levels. In America there has been a reduction in the birth rate which appears to be largely the result of changing attitudes. As far as producing more food is concerned, industrialization of agriculture cannot conceivably do more than achieve this over a very short period and at considerable social and ecological costs. Even Norman Borlaug, who was given the Nobel Peace Prize for his key work on hybrid cereals and who is regarded as the father of the Green Revolution, admits that all he has succeeded in doing is putting off starvation for a decade or two. I am afraid that one has to face the unpleasant fact that man is not as ingenious as he thinks and that the basic problems of man cannot be solved by science, technology and industry.

 

Perhaps we aim too high?

No, it is not a question of aiming too high but of aiming in the wrong direction. Our industrial society is geared to achieving a materialist paradise in which all the ills we are supposed to have suffered from since the beginning of our tenancy of this planet, such as drudgery, unemployment, poverty, disease, famine, etc., would have been eliminated. The achievement of this paradise is known as progress, which consists basically of substituting man-made artifacts for the normal processes of nature, or what Max Nicholson3 calls the ‘technosphere’ for the ‘biosphere.’

Unfortunately, the technosphere is very crude by nature's standards. It requires far more resources than the biosphere and hence generates far more waste products. Also, it is controlled by human manipulation rather than being self-regulating, which means that it is far more vulnerable or unstable. The artifacts we introduce, such as pesticides and fertilizers, are far simpler than the controls used by nature to achieve the same ends. This makes them more unstable as complexity ensures stability. Whereas the various parts of the biosphere tend towards overall stability, the technosphere is designed to satisfy petty short-term human requirements regardless of long-term consequences. For all these reasons the substitution which we call progress must and can only bring about a systematic deterioration of the world we live in.

 

Jan Tinbergen4 feels that the Blueprint for Survival was too utopian.

 

I presume he means by that that the changes proposed are unlikely to be implemented by today's politicians, they are not politically feasible. This is absolutely true; but I do not regard this as a defect except perhaps from the purely tactical point of view. The ecosphere is a vast organization. Like all organizations, it is hierarchically arranged, and at each echelon behavior is subjected to a new set of constraints. These constraints are cumulative. Thus, a biological organism must obey all sorts of biological constraints, but first of all be subjected to chemical and physical ones.

No society can survive which defies biological constraints. For instance, a society in which there is the death penalty for eating or drinking could not survive. This is the mistake made by the famous American religious sect, the Shakers. They were destined to become extinct because they banned sexual intercourse. Similarly, if our politicians impose upon us a society that openly defies biological, chemical and physical laws, it cannot conceivably survive for very long, no more than the Shakers

could. Yet this is precisely the situation we are in today. If what is ecologically necessary is not politically acceptable, then one has to change one's standards of political acceptability and not vice versa.

 

John R. Platt5 said actually we are at war, we need to recruit scientists like we did in the Second World War.

 

It is true that we are facing a far greater emergency than we faced in 1940. If we are to avoid the worst calamities, we must treat it as an emergency. However, this is not simply a question of recruiting scientists on an emergency basis. I do not think that scientific research is going to contribute all that much to solving the problem. We are not looking for new inventions; after all, if you were given a magic wand and told you could conjure up any new device you wanted, so long as its functioning did not defy basic laws such as the law of thermodynamics, what device would you ask for? There is no human artifact that would enable us to solve the problems.

It may be argued that scientists are required to monitor pollution levels, but this is pure fantasy. The task of monitoring the five hundred thousand pollutants in our environment and the three thousand new ones that appear every year and determining their effect in different combinations on the countless different forms of life that inhabit this planet is quite beyond our means. It is unlikely that the planet could support the weight of the white mice required to carry out the experiments. In any case, we do not need better documentation of the degradation of life on this planet but action to halt the process. As Robert Allen6 says, ‘If you jump out of an airplane, you are better off with a parachute than an altimeter.’

 

Barry Commoner7 called the Blueprint for Survival a step back to fascism because who will police the changes necessary?

 

I think that authoritarianism in a society must to a large extent increase with instability and tension. The Blueprint for Survival is designed to ensure a transition to a way of life some variant of which will be inevitable if man as a species survives the next century. Its object is to reduce instability and tension to the very minimum in this extremely difficult period through which we will be passing.

Barry Commoner is irresponsible. However, this is not surprising as he is generally irresponsible in many of the things he is saying at the

moment. His favorite themes, for instance, are that the world is not overpopulated and there is no justification for population-control measures. This is particularly grotesque at a moment when a large part of the population of Asia is threatened with starvation, not in ten years' time but right now. For example, 250,000 Indians reportedly starved to death two weeks ago as a result of the recent drought.

Barry Commoner also maintains that the only way to stop population from growing any further is to allow the nonindustrialized countries to develop so that they can achieve the Western standard of living. The principle being that in industrialized countries the growth rate of population has diminished. Barry Commoner knows perfectly well that the limited resources of our planet as well as its even more limited capacity to absorb further waste products makes it totally inconceivable that the whole world will ever be able to achieve the ‘Western standard of living.’ Even if it did, there is no guarantee that a drop in the birth rate would follow, since this is largely culturally determined, and nobody knows how Asian and African countries will be affected by industrialization.

Barry Commoner has a remarkable genius for coming to the diametrically wrong conclusions on the basis of the best possible information.

 

Jay W. Forrester8 is now completing a model of the United States. You are designing a computer model of Britain. Are you cooperating with MIT?

 

No. Our plan is to introduce social factors into the model, and as soon as you do this, you meet all sorts of objections. We now have a team of people who have worked together for three years, who see things in much the same way and who can achieve a high degree of cooperation on a project of this sort.

 

Ninety percent of the scientists that ever lived, live today. What is your opinion about the communication between scientists?

 

It is very poor. I have noticed this at all the scientific conferences I have attended. The basic reason is that they don't agree on general principles. Many of them have never considered general principles. Many of the terms they use have never even been defined. Some of them go so far as to say that a definition is not required. People talk gaily of economics, life, behavior, consciousness, mind, etc., without really

knowing what these terms mean. Until one gets one's general principles correct, no single terminology is possible and clearly a single terminology is required for the sciences. It is quite ridiculous that science should be divided into a host of watertight compartments. The world we are trying to understand is not divided in this manner at all. It developed as a single process and is made up of closely interrelated parts. It can only be described in a single terminology.

 

In other words, scientists don't understand each other because they don't know what people from other disciplines are saying?

 

They can't understand what is going on in other compartments - the subject matter of other disciplines - because they know nothing about these at all. But at the same time they don't understand what is going on in their own little compartment because this is constantly being influenced by what is going on in the other compartments.

 

In small self-regulating communities, observed by anthropologists, there is no assertion of individualism. Certain individual aspirations may have to be repressed or modified for the benefit of the community. How to turn back our super-consumer society to one or two children, one automobile, maybe no automobile, back to the bicycle, who knows? Will we first need a disaster?

 

You are really asking two questions: The first thing is the problem of individualism. You can see for yourself, if you live in a small village in Europe, that public opinion is much stronger than in a big town. Therefore, there are constraints on your behavior, which are imposed by public opinion, and to that extent individualism is reduced. Why should individualism be so important? I don't see it. Creative? What sort of things are we creating? You'll see that the art forms or music of primitive societies are very elegant. It may well be that primitive societies don't have Beethovens and Mozarts, but they don't have Hitlers and Mussolinis either. What you lose on the roundabouts, you gain on the swings.

One of the basic principles of industrial society is consumer sovereignty. People want something, therefore they must get it. This principle has to be completely rejected. People will simply never have all they think they want because things just won't be available. Do we need a disaster to make them realize this? To get really rapid change, you probably do need a disaster as there is a tremendous amount of inertia

built into our society at every level: government, industrialists, trade unions, individuals themselves. On the other hand, attitudes are changing fast, especially among youth in industrialized countries.

 

What in your view can the media do, what can journalism and television do to speed things up?

 

It is a question of priorities. Most newspapers are simply businesses. They publish things only if they are likely to increase their readership or their advertising revenue. Some newspapers are concerned with political issues first and foremost. In other words, they feel they have a mission. We could do with a lot of newspapers with this feeling of a mission. They must realize that the issues at present separating different political parties are totally irrelevant to the future of man on this planet. Our politicians are like children fighting over chocolates when there is a time bomb in the cellar. First they must remove the time bomb. They must take up the ecological issue, which is the only one that matters today.

 

What tactics can be used to persuade people?

 

Since people are interested in politics and politics has always been news, the ecological movement must become political. This way it will attract far more attention. This has already happened in New Zealand, as I have mentioned. At the present election in France there is an environmental candidate in Alsace. It will almost certainly happen in Britain very shortly. This I think is the direction in which our efforts should lie.


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