Population breeds pollution?
Dear Editors,
Thank you for publishing my letter on population and for your reply (July Socialist Standard). I do not understand why you so vehemently dismiss population growth as a contributor to serious environmental problems, and indulge in a compulsive denigration of Malthus: “Parson Malthus spouting his own brand of naturalistic determinism”, "apocalyptic vision had not an iota of scientific validity”, "completely arbitrary” (Socialist Standard, April 1991). Perhaps you are loyally echoing Marx’s similar invective when Malthus’s theory seemed to threaten his system?
In fact, Malthus regarded rapid population growth as highly desirable, provided adequate resources were available to support it. Nor was he a misanthrope, but a person of great charm and an advocate of progressive social measures, including much more equitable distribution of wealth. It is clear that he would have preferred his theory, arrived at in the pursuit of truth, not to have been valid, but could not escape from its conclusions. Which of these conclusions have stood the test of time?
The best known is that human fertility has the capacity to increase population exponentially ("geometrically") and, if unchecked, can overwhelm any conceivable supply of resources. (This is true; for example. if this country’s population of about 9 million in 1800 had grown at Kenya’s present rate of 4 percent per annum, we should now have more than three times the present world population of 5,500 million). What Malthus could not have known was that the revolution in agriculture was about to lead to a rapid increase in production, sufficient temporarily to relax the linkage between population and food supply that had, as Malthus realised, held in Europe for many centuries. The health of the people, and their numbers, now increased together, as Malthus. with characteristic honesty, acknowledged in the fifth edition of his Essay in 1817. Even so. the "misery" (Malthus's word) of anxiety about supporting a large family still operated strongly, and the average annual population growth of about 1.5 percent per annum during the 19th century fell a good deal short of the theoretical maximum, and indeed of present growth rates in Africa and South America.
Birth control
In the developed countries the anxiety about supporting a large family has now been much reduced by a deliberate choice of small family size, facilitated by contraception, something which Malthus ruled out on moral grounds, recommending instead “moral restraint” and voluntary choice of late marriage. (Practising what he preached, he married at 38 and only had three children). Your reply to my letter says that I “undermine the case for birth control by associating it with the ideas of Malthus”. Whatever this means, it does seem to be an association that Malthus himself would have rejected.
I said in my earlier letter that we should look at the actual world situation as it is now to see if some common ground for agreement can be found. In the developed world, rates of population growth are low and in some countries may become negative for a time. As some reduction in population size would have many beneficial effects. it is hard to sympathise with the near-hysterical reaction this prospect seems to produce in some quarters.
The Third World of poor countries is another matter. In Africa, food supply is now falling behind population, and the latter is expected to double in the next 25 years, unless serious attempts are made to reduce growth, or the checks of famine and disease detailed by Malthus are allowed to operate. Attempts to increase food production in Africa or (as you imply) in Western countries that might export food to stricken areas will involve soil erosion, deforestation, increased pollution by pesticides and fertilisers, and greater demand for energy. Clearly these measures can only provide temporary relief while population growth is dealt with. Any delay will only lead to further increases in the numbers at which population levels off.
Turning to environmental damage by human activities, your pamphlet Ecology and Socialism recognises the dangers of the “present mode of production” to the biosphere and acknowledges the "urgent need for humans to take action to change the way they relate to the rest of nature". So far so good, but the next sentence offers an explanation which is altogether too facile: "We in the Socialist Party agree that capitalism has devastating consequences for the environment”. Much more careful analysis is needed here than you offer in your reply to my earlier letter, in which you simply assert that the only cause of the ecological crisis is the capitalist system: "its cause is not the pressure of population nor industrialisation".
Several issues need to be disentangled: is it true that an industrial system can be run under any political regime without causing significant environmental damage, that damage being approximately proportional to the size of population? Will a socialist system at least minimise the damage? How long is it likely to be before a socialist system can be put into operation on a world scale? What are the implications of population growth in relation to these questions?
Ecological damage
It is certainly true that the capitalist system encourages economic growth as a consequence of its internal dynamics, and that this leads to rapid obsolescence, increased production rather than more efficient conservation, thoughtless depletion of resources dictated by market forces, short term planning through discounting the future. and so on. Additionally, the present state of international relations leads to wasted spending on armaments at a rate of £1,000,000 a minute (though this represents less than 5 percent of world GNP).
One can only make informed guesses as to how far the benefits of industrialism (which you welcome—see Socialist Standard, April 1991) can be provided with little or no environmental damage, but the measures you suggest in One Green World, although beneficial, would be very far from reducing the damage to zero. Recycling of materials requires energy and is inevitably incomplete in each cycle; “prudent" use of fossil fuels would still mean heavy use; control of pollution is only partial in most industrial processes; and so on. Transition to more economical practices takes time, and further population growth and the expansion of industry in the Third World are more than likely to outpace the improvements in technology.
In Ecology and Socialism (page 27) there is a complete misunderstanding of the effects of a “steady-state economy", which, although less menacing than an exponentially expanding one, is not sustainable if its consumption and production rates are high. For example, stabilising fossil fuel consumption at today’s levels would still lead to a progressive and rapid increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. (However, you do at least acknowledge that as part of a steady-state economy, population levels must also be stable—i.e., growth must cease! I low do you reconcile that with your dismissal of population growth as a cause of the ecological crisis?)
Even if the socialist system you envisage comes about by achievement of the necessary popular majorities in its support, this is bound to be well into the future. Would it not be wise in the meantime to reduce population growth as far as possible while the existing, more wasteful, economic system is in being? And can you be sure that, in practice, your system will be as effective as you claim in reducing ecological damage? I can think of few things more conducive to waste than being able to pick up as much as one likes of basic commodities for nothing.
I spent over 20 years in the late Conservation Society, most of the time as its chairman or director, and the relationship between politics and the environment was one of my main interests. I find many of your goals attractive, but reading your dogmatic assertions about how to achieve them prompts me to conclude with a paragraph from Malthus:
The speculative philosopher [i.e.. the advocate for the perfectibility of man. and of society] equally offends against the cause of truth. With eyes fixed on a happier state of society, the blessings of which he paints in the most captivating colours, he allows himself to indulge in the most bitter invectives against every present establishment, without applying his talents to consider the best and safest means of removing abuses and without seeming to be aware of the tremendous obstacles that threaten, even in theory, to oppose the progress of man towards perfection.
Shepperton, Middx
Reply: No, it doesn't—capitalism does
Socialists argue that the lot of the majority of world society can be vastly improved by replacing the present dominant world economic system—capitalism—with a system of common ownership and democratic control of the means of life. This system would allow the Earth's resources to be used to abolish world poverty and misery through the institution of production directly for use instead of for sale at a profit as now happens. Malthus and his followers deny that such an improvement can come about. According to them, increasing population will wipe out any gains, so it is better to do nothing. Not only is this wrong; it is heartless and deeply anti-human. It leads to a situation where a fall in the death rate (because, for instance, improved living conditions lead to babies and children living longer) is seen as a “catastrophe"
Thus Garrett Hardin, a Professor of Ecology at the University of California, can say:
I don't think anything can be done in the short term that won't make things worse in the long term. If there are too many people . . . saving lives ensures that more people will die in the end. . . . If a population is so malnourished that its physical ability to produce children is reduced, the first effect of improving a peoples nutrition is to increase that fertility. (The Christian theologian) Tcrtullian regarded famine as a blessing, to cut out excess population. It sounds hard . . . but it is so. (Science Digest, May 1986).
Apart from the fact that in the long run we are all dead, the thing to notice here is that the “excess" population are never well-off university professors but those unfortunate enough to have been born poor and without access to the means to overcome their poverty.
Is it really surprising that socialists attack these notions? Marx did so with a vigour which may have on occasion bordered on the intemperate but that is understandable in view of what was being said. He certainly did not do so because he feared “Malthus's theory seemed to threaten his system". Like us, he attacked the ideas and theories of Malthus because they were wrong and because they were used to defend the status quo.
Family size
Large families are not the cause of poverty. Many small families and people without dependants suffer the ill effects of poverty while the wealthy and privileged whatever the size of their families have always been able to escape from the misery and privations suffered by the poor. Nor would the attainment of “zero population growth" automatically lead to an improvement in the lot of the propertyless majority. The history of Ireland is proof of this. The population at the end of the 19th century was about half what it had been earlier in the century, yet the majority remained poor and the Irish economy relatively underdeveloped.
Socialists are all in favour of the widest possible dissemination of information about birth control and methods of limiting the size of families or the numbers of one's children. But one important point to notice (and it seems to have been missed by John Davoll) is that family size is not simply a question of biological drives. It also has a social aspect. Historical, economic and cultural factors play a very large (possibly major) part in determining family size:
reproduction, whether at high or low levels, is so important to the family and to society everywhere that its level is more or less controlled by cultural norms about family size . . . In each society the cultural norms about these vital matters arc consistent with the social institutions in which they are deeply embedded. Changes in fertility are unlikely without prior or, at least, simultaneous changes in those institutions. (R. Freedman quoted in David M. Heer, Readings on Population, 1968).
A study of the failure of a large-scale multi-million dollar birth control campaign in India (the Khanna Study) pointed directly to the fact that a large family was a necessity for the overwhelming majority of the agricultural population studied. For them the practice of birth control was seen as economically ruinous and a threat to their well-being, particularly in later life in a society lacking state-provided welfare services. (Mahmood Manvidani, The Myth of Population Control, 1973).
It is obvious that the numbers of human beings cannot go on rising for ever. But to think that population control can be successful without the introduction of the economic security that socialism would bring is mistaken. Engels put the matter well in a letter he wrote to Karl Kautsky in February 1881:
There is of course the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage Communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings . . . it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. (Marx and Engels on Malthus, 1953. p. 97).
Contrast this with the contradictory forces operating within capitalist society. Fears about the "dangers" of overpopulation alternate with concerns regarding population decline seen as a loss both of potential markets and of recruits for the armed forces to fight for the interests of the ruling class in the wars capitalism causes.
Thus present-day child benefit payments to parents in Britain have their roots in a 1944 White Paper advocating family allowances as a means of arresting the decline in the birth rate. A recent report by the Family Policy Studies Centre into a similar situation in the Common Market over the past few years suggests that pressure will be put on the European Commission in Brussels to support "pro-natalist" policies (Independent, 29 July 1991).
John Davoll expresses an understandable concern about conditions in some parts of Africa. The situation there is, again, the outcome of the workings of the world capitalist economy. Investment of capital in profit-making enterprises such as logging lays waste vast areas of forest at a far greater rate than local subsistence farming. Investment in large-scale agriculture drives the peasant who cannot afford to compete on to fragile marginal land which rapidly degenerates into desert:
Drained, fertile floodplains and complex irrigation systems favour the most "economically profitable" land use systems which invariably amounts to the large-scale cultivation of cash crops destined for the export market. As a result of the small farmer's weak financial position he cannot compete for the fertile lands, and is relegated therefore to lands of marginal fertility for food production. (Saidou S. Jallow of Gambia College in S. H. Arnold and A. Nitecki Culture and Development in Africa. 1990. p. 72).
Africa cannot be seen in isolation from the rest of the W'orld. A world-wide socialist system would give all access to food and the means of producing it. Local shortages could easily be made good from the common world pool of resources.
Capitalism and pollution
Because under capitalism profit-seeking firms are producing commodities to be sold on the market in competition with other profit-seekers, they are under pressure to produce as cheaply as possible so as to undercut competitors. Anything which adds to their costs of production (as pollution control measures do) hampers this profit-seeking and is resisted on the grounds that some competitors may not have to bear the same cost.
When pollution control first became a big political issue in the 1960s the then President of the Chemical Industry Society, Professor G. H. Beeley, pointed out that chemical wastes were not re-used because "it is cheaper to throw them away" than to concentrate them for re-use:
Neither the chemical industry nor the users of its products lightly accept. . . the cost of disposing their waste. The cost can mean the difference between profit and loss".(Soil Association press release. 28 July 1969.)
This is why under present conditions the elimination of 98 percent of emissions from smoke stacks takes place only where the value of precious metals recovered is greater than the cost of filtration. Socialism, because it will produce for use only and not for profit, will have no such constraints on the implementation of know n measures to eliminate pollution.
We are a little surprised that John Davoll appears to chide us for advocating re-cycling as a means to a sustainable “steady-state economy”. He himself has gone on record as stating that “industrialism" does not have to cause the environmental damage it does today "if goods were made more durable . . . and were also designed to be capable of being re-cycled, re-used and repaired" (John Davoll. "A Sustainable Society", Conservation Times No 86. July-October 1983).
Humankind has now developed the technology to provide everyone on Earth with a decent existence while at the same time minimising environmental depletion and destruction. How soon? As soon as a majority understand the need for the change and take the necessary democratic political action to gain control of the state and use it as a means to free us from the danger we are now in. Many hands will speed the plough.
Gwynn Thomas
Blogger's Note:
John Davoll's mention of 'One Green World' may be in reference to this special issue of the Socialist Standard that dates from August 1987.
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