Population Pressure, Resources, and The Environment Research Paper

(a) As in ‘the global environment’ or the ‘global ecosystem.’ Explanations at this high level of abstraction often are so general as to defy contradiction or verification.

(b) As a shorthand reference for all natural resources, especially all sources of raw materials, energy, and food. Less general than the first use, but still combines very different settings and industries under one rubric.

(c) To connote the purity of air and water, especially as affected by urbanization and industrialization and their impacts on rural or ‘natural’ landscapes.

(d) As an antonym of ‘heredity.’ This is a quite different and often confusing meaning in which ‘environmental’ effects are those determined by social rather than biological processes, along with interaction between the two.

The disputes, which go back at least two centuries, touch upon theories and evidence central to much of modern intellectual history. Moreover, the participants in the debates have included many of the giants of Western scholarly and political thought, from Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus, to Marx and Engels, to Keynes and the Myrdals.

2. Two Fundamental Phases Of Western Political Thought, 1750–1940

We can identify two fundamental phases of the developing debate on population, resources, and environment in the West. The first extends from 1750– 1880, the central period of industrialization in Western Europe and North America. The second covers the period 1880–1940, a period when industrial growth rates in Western Europe first peaked and then plateaued, Western imperial power peaked and then declined, and Western political instability and collective violence reached unprecedented levels. These two phases of ascending European political and economic power, followed by its slow decline, are reflected in the attendant debates about the balance among demographic growth, resources, and the environment.

During the expansionary phase, optimists from Godwin to Condorcet to Marx foresaw essentially unlimited expansion of material resources to support a growing population. What had to be changed was not the resource base, but rather the power of landowner and/or capitalist classes to place their demands above the needs of the majority. While Marx and his followers demanded revolutionary transformation of urban, industrial society, utopians sought to escape from its corruptions and create a new kind of society remote both physically and morally from the old. With the 20 20 vision of hindsight, we now can say that these utopian and Marxian views have not proven to be sustainable in the real world.

Meanwhile, pessimists of the period such as Malthus and his followers saw utopians as innocents unaware of the impossibility of human perfectibility. Malthus held that the human sexual instinct was a constant that would produce population growth ultimately leading to disaster. Idealistic efforts to reduce poverty (via ‘transfer payments’ in modern terminology) would prove self-defeating, he argued, because higher incomes would in turn lead to higher fertility and lower infant and child mortality. Hence, policies intended to relieve poverty would worsen the environment by putting additional pressure on the food supply through encouraging demographic increase. For Malthus, the only morally acceptable escape was by individuals exercising ‘prudential restraint’ of their fertility, by which he meant avoidance of marriage unless and until the couple had sufficient resources to support a family, accompanied by abstinence outside of marriage. Failing this, balance between population and resources would be imposed via the dreadful ‘positive checks’ of famine, plague, and war.

In similar hindsight we can say that Malthus’s forecasts were mistaken too. He underestimated how fast food production and economic activity would increase, and dismissed as infeasible the conscious control of fertility within marriage that later came to be the norm in urban industrial societies. His provocative arguments did, however, stimulate a passionate debate on population and the environment. In particular, his views were assaulted vigorously by Marx, thereby establishing a destructive ‘right–left’ dimension to more than a century of population resource environment debates that ensued.

Other conservative writers of the nineteenth century focused less on population issues and more on the ‘destruction’ of the ‘natural environment’ produced by capitalist industrial development and urbanization. In response to such claims, Marx and his followers acknowledged the validity of their criticisms, but argued that these developments were a function of capitalism, and hence transitional.

The second phase of the population environment debate began toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the use of ‘environmental’ as an antonym to ‘genetic’ emerged in discussions of human decadence and perfectibility. Such arguments derived from enthusiasm about Darwinian arguments, though many of their ‘eugenicist’ proponents were far from well informed of the scientific evidence involved.

In general, they argued that the human gene pool was deteriorating, with powerful detrimental impacts on society and its betterment. The urban environment was itself genetically damaging, producing a cycle of residents who bore large numbers of stunted offspring who in turn raised large families of equally unhealthy children. Meanwhile, social elites were controlling their own family size, resulting in a collective ‘enfeeblement.’ For these proponents, this posed profound dangers to state and empire by reducing military and international power, while the increasing fertility differentials between social classes foretold the prosperous being swamped by a flood of urban disability. What was essential, they argued, was intervention to reverse the rot.

While many eugenicists were politically conservative, others were liberals or socialists. Though relatively few were fascists, the eugenics movement ultimately was compromised fatally when its notions of biological decadence were co-opted by the Nazis.

3. Complex Phenomena, Simpler Analyses

Any intersection among three forces as multifaceted as population, resources, and the environment—each of which is itself a subject of convoluted debate—is bound to be one of challenging complexity, required balanced and nuanced analyses. Yet, unhappily, there is an enduring tendency for arguments that anoint one of the three forces as dominant. Proponents on all sides tend toward single-cause explanations of complex social processes. Some emphasize the biological, others the economic, still others the ecological. Each group embraces one unifying theme to the exclusion of insights from other perspectives, and produce pronounced polemics of denunciation and retort.

Malthus’s celebrated essay on the principle of population was itself such a response to earlier arguments from utopians (including his father). It in turn provoked passionate denunciations by utopian socialists and Marxists, some of whom argued that there were no natural limits on population growth. Similarly, eugenicists of the early twentieth century exaggerated the importance of biological and genetic elements for social issues such as fertility, poverty, and illiteracy, and such arguments in turn led social scientists to exclude biological elements entirely from their discussion of the ‘demographic transition.’

In short, there has been a mentality of the adversary underlying much of the discussion about population, resources, and the environment, redolent of the style of political, religious, and legal advocates who ignore the similarities of their approaches to those they condemn.

Another source of dissonance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the tendency to search for or assert ‘scientific laws’ of population, resources, and/or environment. Marx and Engels claimed the mantle of science for their analyses of capitalism while attacking utopians seeing the world not as it was but as they wished it to be. Malthus too criticized utopians such as Godwin and Condorcet in the same way. The fact that Marx’s arguments did not explain social conditions within his own lifetime, and that Malthus’s distinction between geometric and arithmetic progressions of population and food was contradicted by trends underway as he wrote, failed to dissuade either from his claims of scientific validity.

Similarly, the near-appropriation of Darwinian theory by political proponents of social Darwinism, and later of then-modern genetics by those promoting eugenics as social policies, illustrates the deep mystique of science in political arguments of this period. Invoking ‘scientific’ evidence of biological limits to human progress, eugenicists derided moderate and revolutionary reformers’ assurances that environmental or political change could ameliorate the lot of the poor. Such excessive arguments from eugenics then led social scientists from the 1930s onward to formulate a theory of the demographic transition that excluded biology.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union Lysenko and his associates developed a Soviet ‘scientific’ response to eugenics that asserted that environmental factors trumped genetic forces, and more specifically that hereditary characteristics could be acquired rapidly from the environment and subsequently transmitted reliably to later generations. This ‘scientific’ perspective offered Soviet officials the opportunity to use ‘environmental’ (i.e., social, economic, political) policies to manipulate the gene pool—an opportunity that produced devastating famines as a consequence.

4. Economists And Demographers

Economists and demographers of the twentieth century also tended to unduly limit the horizons of their analyses and data. Neo-classical economics flowered at a time when economic growth was so rapid that it was easy to ignore resource and environmental issues. Natural resources must have appeared unlimited to those at the center of expanding global empires, while the bulk transport allowed by steam power, railroads, and refrigeration rendered moot early concerns about limited agricultural land.

The emerging field of demography had multidisciplinary roots in economics, biology, mathematics, statistics, and epidemiology. Yet leaders of the nascent field were offended by the excesses of some biologists and others who sought to explain Western fertility declines in exclusively biological terms, and by the conservative political views that increasingly were associated with such explanations. The emergence of fascism exacerbated their concerns, leading them to relocate their 1936 scientific meeting from Rome to London and to boycott another meeting in Berlin.

At this moment in the intellectual history of demography a social and economic explanation of Western fertility coalesced into the ‘theory of the demographic transition.’ Though not really a theory in the sense of offering testable predictive hypotheses, the demographic transition provided a grand historical generalization that fertility declines could be wholly attributed to economic and social forces of the industrial revolution. In so doing, it ignored biological explanations then in vogue of the same phenomenon, as well as elements of culture, language, and religion unless these were driven by socioeconomic change (e.g., the effect of urban and industrial development in weakening the hold of the extended family on fertility behavior.)

The thinking of both economists and demographers was affected deeply by the Great Depression of the 1930s. To some degree they interpreted it as a consequence of ‘underutilization,’ both of capital and human resources in the economy and of the ability to bear children. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in Sweden and Enid Charles in England produced gloomy, sometimes apocalyptic writings anticipating the terrible consequences of continuing low fertility. The Myrdals’ prescription for dealing with ‘the population crisis’ was social legislation that evolved into the Swedish welfare state.

World War II focused concerns in different directions, but the war was followed by a long period of buoyant economic growth accompanied by much higher fertility levels. Expectations of unlimited economic growth replaced the gloom of the 1930s. Fertility trends ranged from powerful and sustained baby booms in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to smaller and shorter-term ‘boomlets’ in most of Western Europe.

By the early 1960s, concerns about the negative environmental consequences of economic growth began, accompanied by worries about accelerating demographic increase both due to the Western baby booms and to rapid mortality declines with sustained high fertility rates in formerly colonial developing countries. Both concerns contributed to growing awareness and activism about environmental problems, enhanced further during the 1970s by the oil crisis, the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and the appearance of economic ‘stagflation’ that had no explanation in the canon of Keynesian economics. These events suggested there might, after all, be limits to natural resources, technological advance, and economic prosperity. In the United States and Western Europe, a new kind of political environmentalism emerged, including a direct electoral form in the German ‘Green’ party.

During the 1980s, and partially in reaction to environmental politics, there emerged in the United States an odd amalgam of earlier utopian, Marxian, and laissez-faire thought, deploying apparently scientific data and economic analysis, in what came to be called libertarianism or ‘cornucopianism.’ In its most enthusiastic variants, cornucopians argue that there are no natural limits to economic and population growth, and that the availability of natural resources is rising rather than declining. Some asserted that the ‘ultimate resource’ is human intellectual power to innovate technologically and create new resources, and hence the more humans on earth, the more resources there would be, ad infinitum.

Many of those who embraced such arguments did not seem to appreciate their intellectual origins, especially their Marxian pedigree. They were promoted strongly by opinion organs of American new right groups (the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal ).

5. Environmental And Ecological Approaches

While many biologists, economists, demographers, and politicians have tended toward simple arguments about population, resource, and environmental issues, environmental scientists have emphasized the place of the human species in a complex ecological web of biological systems in constant interaction with the physical environment. In so doing, they have pointed appropriately to its vulnerability to the external insults of human technologies. However, there has also been a tendency to minimize or ignore the potentially positive environmental impacts that can also be produced by human technologies.

Consider for example the ‘epidemiological transition.’ The triumph of human knowledge over food shortages and many endemic infectious diseases has produced dramatic improvement in human mortality since the eighteenth century. This was, of course, the primary reason for the acceleration of rapid human demographic growth since 1750, but it may also be seen as a fundamental technological transformation of the ecological systems involving humans, their food supply, and their ‘predators.’ Though environmental writers generally do not describe these particular technological achievements in negative terms, some prominent writers have expressed skeptical views of their long-term implications for the global ecosystem.

In general, environmental and ecological writers frequently have emphasized the negative effects of other elements of science and technology, such as those surrounding energy consumption and production and modern agriculture, and paid rather less attention to the potential of new technologies for expanding natural resources or ameliorating environmental damage from other human activities. Of course sophisticated ecologists take such potentials fully into account, but there remains among some elements of the environmental movement a tendency to de-emphasize the potential environmental positives of technological innovation—in some sense a polar extreme from the technological enthusiasms of some economists. To many ecologists, the technological optimism of much modern economics, and of both Marxists and the new right, ignores the laws and complexities of nature.

To some degree we have come full circle. When environmentalists denounce the rape of the rain forest or the despoliation of freshwater streams and lakes, they echo older and eloquent laments such as those of D. H. Lawrence at the ruination of the English countryside or Dickens’s portrayal of the industrial wasteland in Hard Times. Concerns about the environment, like those about population and resources, have deep intellectual roots in Western intellectual traditions.

6. Conclusion

Given this rich but often contentious intellectual history, what might be expected of future discussions of population, resources, and environment? During the nineteenth century, most of the major political thinkers were forced by the powerful changes all around them to analyze population change and its interaction with resources and the environment. Typically they sought single (or at least simple) explanations of the complex transformations they could see, leading inevitably to an intensely ideological debate. Instead of building upon the work of earlier writers, they sought to refute their adversaries’ errors. First the utopians, Malthus, Marx, and their allies clashed over the potential for demographic and economic growth with prosperity. Later biologists, eugenicists, and social scientists contested about the biological vs. environmental causes of declining fertility rates and increasingly ‘enfeebled’ urban populations.

These classical debates about population resources/environment are a polemicists’ dream: sweeping generalizations, exaggerated rhetoric, and emotional accusations. Those in the Marxian, socialist, and liberal-Christian traditions were certain that when the majority took power from the reactionary elite, they would build a more humane environment unconstrained by demographic issues. Those following Malthus, and later the eugenicists, argued to the contrary that human progress is constrained by the laws of biology and demography.

The political and economic crises following World War I tended to mute these earlier debates about population growth, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation. After World War II, it was relief at the end of global war and the reappearance of prosperity that further eclipsed environmental and demographic questions. Only since the 1960s have these issues re-emerged, after decades of inattention.

There is good reason to fear that future debates may echo those of the past: ideological blinders, harsh rhetoric, narrow analytic perspectives. But there are also signs of hope. Resource economists have shown that it is possible to combine the power of economic theory and analysis with those of ecology and environmental perspectives. Demographers too have broadened their dependency upon purely socioeconomic analyses to embrace insights from biology, ecology, political science, and other relevant disciplines. The hope is that these more ecumenical trends will persist and flower, so that our collective understanding of population, resources, and the environment may someday be as subtle and complex as the phenomena themselves.

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