This week in Environmental Studies, we examined several works of classic environmental literature—Limits to Growth, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and The Population Bomb—and later responses which have added nuance to the polemics of the sixties and early seventies. These classics all emphasized the potential horror of unbounded population growth and recommended that family planning steps be taken to dramatically reduce the world population. Their language is dire, and in addition to supporting the liberal solutions to overpopulation (e.g. sex education, establishment of abortion rights and increased contraceptives access) Hardin and Ehrich both advocate wide-reaching authoritarian measures to solve this problem, including governmental actions to end the “freedom to breed,” tax incentives to have fewer children in the United States, elimination of food aid to nations deemed unsustainable, and forced sterilization of Indian males with three or more children. These actions were seen as a lesser evil in the face of the global collapse resulting from a continued population crisis.
Commoner, Ostrom, and Smil all offered critiques of these environmental classics. Commoner, writing contemporaneously to Ehrich, examined specific pollutants, and found technology of production to be the largest contributing factor in almost each case. Ostrom added complexity to the issues of the commons, distinguishing the genuine commons from common pool resources, carefully detailing the successes and failures of various approaches to regulating common pool resources, and emphasizing the lack of cure-alls. Smil critiqued the simplicity of the World3 model in Limits to Growth, with its globally averaged pollution metric and lack of local distinctions, arguing that the computer model was just a thin cover for preaching.
Now, fifty years after the publishing of the classics, the idea of a global ecological collapse seems more possible than ever. However, the Malthusian collapse triggered by exponential population growth outstripping food production, and predicted by the classics, has not come to pass; since 1960, increased productivity, fertilizers, irrigation, further development of land, and modern crop varieties have enabled a growth in agricultural output outpacing population growth (World Development Report 2008, “Global Agricultural Performance: Past Trends and Future Prospects.”). Instead, anthropogenic climate change, triggered by out-of-control carbon dioxide emissions, stands as the most pressing global environmental threat. This problem was not even on the radar of the environmental classics, their environmental concerns being the interaction of growth and natural resources. In addition, the fertility rate has fallen dramatically since the publishing of The Population Bomb and “The Tragedy of the Commons” in 1968, from 4.85 births per woman to 2.48 in 2011 (World Development Indicators), largely without the kind of mandates recommended in those texts. No longer is it true that “there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero,” (Hardin 1968, 1244) as the United States, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, much of Latin America and Asia, and all of Europe has a fertility rate below the replacement rate, with population growth fueled by immigration and demographic momentum. However, continued exponential economic growth in these industrial nations, driven by fossil fueled production and consumption, has created a global ecological threat.