The Principles of Sustainability

Simon Dresner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136552373
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

At a time of increasingly rapid environmental deterioration and climate change, sustainability is one of the most important issues facing the world. Can we create a sustainable society? What would that mean? How should we set about doing it? How can we bring about such a profound change in the way things are organized? This text tackles these questions directly. It covers: historical development of the concept of sustainability; contemporary debates about how to achieve it; and obstacles and the prospects for overcoming them.

This new fully revised edition covers the latest on the climate change front, particularly the advances in scientific understanding and political awareness of climate change. Other updates include more recent economic analyses, particularly the Stern Report, and the global shift away from faith in markets over the past five years.

Part One

PAST

1

Progress and its Discontents

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much … the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

– Douglas Adams

The Enlightenment

It was the development of Western science that allowed human beings to break free of the technological limits which had constrained earlier civilizations, leading to the emergence of belief in Progress.¹ The rediscovery of Greek science from the Arabs and information gleaned from the Arabs themselves launched European science at the end of the Middle Ages. The invention of the printing press enabled ideas to spread quickly. In the 17th century, European scientists began to make dramatic new breakthroughs. The invention of the telescope and Galileo’s discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter led to the overthrow of the old Earth-centred view of the universe. The discrediting of the authority of the Catholic Church’s teachings about astronomy precipitated the development of rationalism as an ideology for scientists. The power of reason was demonstrated by Isaac Newton when he developed his laws of motion to explain the movement of the heavenly bodies in mechanical terms.

Francis Bacon was a particularly important ideologist of science. In his Utopian novel The New Atlantis, published in 1627, he introduced the idea that science would enable the domination of nature.² It had previously been believed that man had permanently lost his dominion after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Bacon proposed that it could be regained through a scientific understanding of nature’s workings. His startling idea was that scientific men could gain powers that had been believed to belong to God. His imagery was striking and not at all politically correct: ‘I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.’³

Another important early ideologist was René Descartes. In A Discourse on Method, he put forward the idea that nature could be understood by the use of reason.⁴ He firmly separated ‘man’, who possessed rationality, from the rest of the natural world, which did not and could be regarded as a machine. Even animals, which appeared to be conscious, were in fact mere automata. There were no longer any ethical restraints on what could be done to other living things or the Earth. The first great success of Descartes’s vision of scientific progress through the analogy of Nature as a machine was Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion. It was followed in the late 17th and the 18th century by rapid advances in many fields of science.

The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason looked for the rationality that was being applied so successfully in science to be turned to other fields. In England, the philosopher John Locke outlined a political theory based on a deduction of the rights to life, liberty and property.⁵ Locke inspired Thomas Jefferson’s American Declaration of Independence. The idea of a rational political order took an even more powerful hold in the French Revolution, inspired by philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau.

In Britain, rationality was applied in the field of economics. Early capitalism began to break down the semi-feudal order and the factory system was created. Intellectual support for capitalism and the market came from the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, as exemplified in his description of the division of labour in a pin factory.⁶ He showed how a complex and difficult task had been rationally broken down into a series of tasks, which could be completed much more quickly when divided up in this way. Smith also reasoned counter-intuitively that efficient economic coordination could be achieved through competition in markets. If each individual acted to maximize their own economic self-interest, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market would bring about the most efficient distribution of resources.

Unlike Locke, Smith and the English tradition of liberalism, who based their theories on the idea that self-interest was natural, but could be harnessed for the general good, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that man was born good, but was corrupted by society.⁷ Adam Smith welcomed the creation of new desires that followed from economic development. Rousseau thought that human desires beyond the need for food and shelter contributed to unhappiness. Possessions are not essential for happiness, Rousseau wrote, and the desire for them arises out of comparison with others, and a sense of vanity, which Rousseau called amour propre. The result is that people are unhappy in civilized societies, not because they are unable to fulfil their basic needs, but because they cannot fulfil socially created desires. Economic development continually creates a gap between new wants and their fulfilment. Rousseau held that the route to happiness lay in abandoning society and returning to life as a natural being in a natural world. His ideas inspired the Romantic movement in the early 19th century, and are echoed today by the Green movement.

It was Smith, rather than Rousseau, who captured the spirit of the future. At the end of the 18th century, the application of the steam engine, starting in England but soon spreading across Europe and America, led to a sudden explosion of manufacturing activity that Friedrich Engels later named the ‘Industrial Revolution’. Within two generations it had led to the most profound changes in the nature of people’s lives since the invention of agriculture several millennia earlier. The technology and social organization that flowed out of the Industrial Revolution gave human beings a degree of control over nature unparalleled in previous history.

Malthus on population

Just as the Industrial Revolution was starting to expand the limits of material progress, the English country parson Thomas Robert Malthus published his Essay on Population in 1798. He argued that the tendency of population towards geometric growth meant that it would always outstrip the growth in food supply. The population was controlled by ‘misery’ (rising mortality rates due to food shortages) and ‘vice’ (prostitution and contraception). The standard of living of the labouring classes always hovered around the minimum necessary for subsistence. This tendency towards population increase meant that any improvement in the conditions of the labouring classes could be only temporary and would soon be eaten up by population growth. The poor laws, which provided relief for unemployed labourers, only encouraged them to have more children than they could support. Those laws should be abolished. The ‘iron law of population’ would also prevent any permanent improvement in the lot of the masses, making futile any attempt at a more just and egalitarian society, as proposed by Godwin and Condorcet after the French Revolution. Malthus claimed to have come to this view reluctantly: ‘I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and society with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such improvements, but I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them.’⁸

William Godwin had proposed a Utopian anarchist society where property and self-interest had disappeared. People would instead act rationally in the interests of the whole. One of Malthus’s first critics was Godwin himself. In 1801, he responded to Malthus and pointed out that if the birth rate could be reduced through ‘moral restraint’ (delayed marriage) then ‘misery’ and ‘vice’ could be avoided.⁹ Godwin pointed out that such restraint must exist among the rich, or else they would have bred to the point of poverty themselves, so it could be acquired by the poor. Malthus accepted this point in the second edition of the essay, published in 1803. This marked something of a retreat from the position in the first edition that any improvement in the condition of the masses would automatically be eliminated by increases in population. He came to the view that the condition of the poor could be gradually improved by education about the benefits of delayed marriage. Combined with economic growth, it would slowly raise their living standards. But he continued to argue that redistribution of wealth could not work. It would only mean that the misery and poverty of the masses would be made general.

Unlike Godwin, Condorcet could not respond to Malthus – he had died in the Jacobin Terror of 1794. Condorcet had been a liberal Frenchman who believed in sexual freedom and advocated contraception as the means to curb population growth. Malthus, like nearly all his English contemporaries, considered contraception to be ‘vice’. Malthus argued that contraception discouraged prudence and took away the pressure to support a family that encouraged people to work. Malthus was not, as is often imagined, against population growth. He thought that it was a good thing. What he thought a bad thing was that the population grew faster than the means to support it. Malthus was not the extreme conservative he is often remembered as having been, either. He was a moderate Whig who supported civil rights for the lower classes, and even the eventual extension of the vote to them once they had become educated.

Not surprisingly, socialists in particular hated what Malthus said. There were very few in Britain at that time, but there were a number of socialist thinkers in France. They generally agreed that there was a danger of overpopulation, but they tended to see the solution in improved social and economic organization, more advanced technology and a consequent rise in the standard of living. They believed that as more varied pleasures became available, people would turn away from unbridled sexuality (some hope). They rarely saw value in contraception. The exception was Fourier, who regarded even abortion as legitimate in order for people to enjoy a good sex life.

Fourier believed that a socialist regime would result in a rapid increase of wealth to four times the level it was then. Nonetheless, he was worried about the physical limits of resources. He said the world was finite, and in two centuries would probably have a population of 5.5 billion. Even though the deserts might be reclaimed, the human species would become overcrowded and suffocate through excessive numbers. But he hoped that new conditions of life in a socialist society would humanely limit the population.¹⁰

What actually happened was that the population of Britain rose from around 10 million to around 50 million in the following 100 years. But thanks to the mechanization of agriculture and food imports from the outside world, particularly the Empire, food shortages grew less rather than more. A similar pattern was repeated in the rest of Europe. Even so, the population eventually grew to a point where locally available fertilizer was no longer sufficient and it had to be supplemented to maintain the rise in yields (first with guano from Chile, later with artificial fertilizer manufactured from fossil fuels). Britain remains a net importer of food today.

The 19th-century European population explosion was eased by the emigration of 60 million people from Europe to other parts of the world, especially the Americas. As living standards rose and urbanization continued, the size of European families gradually became smaller. Population growth levelled off in Europe in the 20th century. In the last couple of decades, the average fertility rate in most European and other industrialized countries has fallen well below two children per woman. However, population growth began to increase in the non-industrialized countries of the world as death rates began to fall in the middle of the 20th century. By 1992 the world had a population of 5.5 billion, rising by 1.7 per cent each year, and it reached 6 billion in 1999.

Marx’s critique of Malthus

Malthus had been dead for ten years before his fiercest and ultimately most influential critics began their attacks on his ideas. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not deny the phenomenon that Malthus was describing, of the wages of agricultural labourers falling to subsistence levels, but they explained it as a ‘reserve army of labour’ necessary for capitalist accumulation. The law referred to an excessive number of labourers relative to the means of employment, not subsistence.

Their argument had two parts; firstly, that Malthus’s ‘law’ of population was not universal or necessary, and, secondly, that relative surplus population was not an inevitable effect of the human condition, but of the dynamics of capital accumulation. Their intention was to show that the cause of the prevailing poverty and misery in society was not overpopulation, but oppressive economic and political structures. Marx and Engels’s view of Malthus was connected to their perceptions of the political consequences of his theories. Marx wrote in ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’:

But if this theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law even if I abolish wage labour a hundred times over, because the law then governs not only the system of wage labour but every social system. Basing themselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for fifty years and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!¹¹

Engels repeated many familiar arguments against Malthus. He gave Godwin’s point about the role of sexual restraint in response to Malthus’s warnings:

We derive from it the most powerful economic arguments for a social transformation. For even if Malthus were completely right this transformation would have to be undertaken straight away; for only this transformation, only the education of the masses which it provides, makes possible that moral restraint of the propagative instinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and easiest remedy for overpopulation.¹²

Engels went on to say that it was absurd to talk of overpopulation when only a third of the Earth’s land surface was cultivated and the application of agricultural improvements already known could raise the production of this third six-fold. Moreover, he added, the geometrical rise in population was matched by a geometrical increase in science and its application: ‘And what is impossible to science?’¹³ That phrase was a denial of any problem with natural limits – because human scientific ingenuity was such that essentially nothing is impossible. In reference to Malthus’s theory, Engels says: ‘our attention has been drawn to the productive power of the earth and mankind; and after overcoming this economic despair we have been made for ever secure against the fear of over-population.’¹⁴

The apparent limits to the fertility of land had led the early economists to conclude that there were limits to the growth of the economy. As science and technology began to make possible many things previously unimagined, and mechanization enormously increased agricultural productivity, the idea put forwards by Marx and Engels, that this kind of growth could continue for ever and that any apparent natural limits were not real, began to take hold. Their criticism of Malthusian natural limits was influential well beyond those who accepted their views generally, and today, paradoxically, is held at least as forcefully by mainstream economists as by the few surviving orthodox Marxists.

Ted Benton¹⁵ has analysed Marx and Engels’s rebuttal of Malthus’s natural limits conservatism. He argues that their ‘social constructivist’ response, that the limits are purely social, goes beyond what is necessary to rebut Malthus and, ironically, goes against the materialist spirit of their philosophy. He distinguishes between ‘Utopian’ and ‘realist’ emancipatory perspectives. ‘Utopian’ perspectives seek to deny the existence of limits to human emancipation. ‘Realist’ per...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Part I: Past
• Part Two: Present
• Part Three: Future
• References
• Bibliography
• Index