The author wrote the seminal work Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change in 1980. The following ass-kicking paper was written in October 1995 as an inquiry into public denial of ecological overshoot. It could have been written today, an unsettling fact that adds to the paper’s importance. Of great value is Catton’s demolition of cornucopianism.

ABSTRACT

Abundant evidence suggests industrial civilization must be “downsized” to curb damage to the ecosphere by the “technosphere.” Trends behind this prospect include prodigious population growth, urbanization, cultural dependence upon ravenous use of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, consequent air pollution, and global climate change. Despite prolonged Cold War distraction and entrenched faith that technology could always enlarge carrying capacity, these trends were well publicized. But there remain eminent writers who persist in denying that human carrying capacity (Earth’s maximum sustainable human load) has now been or ever will be exceeded. Denials of ecological limits resemble anosognosia (inability of stroke patients to recognize their paralysis). Some denial literature resembles their confabulations (elaborately unreal stories concocted as rationalizations). Denial by opponents of human ecology seems to be a way of coping with an insufferable contradiction between past convictions and present circumstances, a defense against intolerable anomalous information.

The passionate drive in the 104th U.S. Congress “to kill many environmental protection laws … in the name of less government” (Wager 1995, 3) stands in stark contrast to the ecological wisdom implicit in a two-centuries-old statement William Ophuls used as a tone-setting epigraph for his book on Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (see Ophuls and Boyan 1992, vi). Humans, said Edmund Burke,

… are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

That these aphoristic sentences imply an important ecological principle becomes sharply visible in light of some conceptualizations recently set forth by Barry Commoner (1990). People, he said, live in two worlds. We live not only in the natural world that evolved physically, chemically, and biologically over Earth’s five billion years, but also in a world humans have made. He insists we need to understand how these two worlds (Commoner calls them “the ecosphere” and “the technosphere”) interact, especially now that the technosphere has become so enormous and consequential, breaching the division between the two worlds. What we still euphemistically call “acts of God” are no longer uninfluenced by human societal activity. Collectively, we now significantly alter the natural processes of the ecosphere, “the thin global skin of air, water, and soil, and the plants and animals that live in it”

According to Commoner (1990, 15), “What we call the ‘environmental crisis’ – the array of critical unsolved problems ranging from local toxic dumps to the disruption of global climate” – results from a drastic mismatch between the ecosphere’s “cyclical, conservative, and self-consistent processes” and the technosphere’s “linear, innovative, but ecologically disharmonious processes.”

While Commoner’s statement carries real meaning to human ecologists, I am sure it is completely opaque to the person who happens to “represent” my Congressional district. It is probably meaningless to most of her House colleagues, and to most members of the Senate. It would probably find little resonance with most of the voters who put them in Congress. The aim of this paper is to try to shed some light on the apparent refusal of ostensibly educated individuals to realize the urgent need, as Commoner puts it, for ending the “suicidal war” between technosphere and ecosphere. Never have so many seemed so oblivious to so momentous a future-shaping condition.

THE BASIC CHANGES

Human ecologists could well be dismayed by the apparent preoccupation of society’s decision makers with matters of less basic importance to our global prospects than the following facts:

(1) Human numbers on this planet are much greater today (and still growing) than they were just half a century ago (Demeny 1986, 29-33; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990; Keyfitz, 1991).

(2) A greater fraction of the world’s people today live in cities, and many cities are faced with problems of serious air pollution (Demeny, 1986,55-58; Lowe, 1991).

(3) Industrialization has enabled and required mankind to use fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources at prodigious rates, with little regard for the finiteness of the Earth’s deposits of these substances (Young, 1992; Flavin and Lenssen, 1994,29-49; Inkeles, 1994; Szell, 1994).

(4) The combustion products we have been putting into the atmosphere may be causing climate change (Tangley, 1988;Abrahamson, 1989;Rathjens, 1991;Revkin, 1992; Ravin and Lenssen, 1994,50-70; Wigley, 1995).

(5) Other products of modem chemistry have been accumulating in the upper atmosphere and wreaking havoc with the protective ozone layer (Benedick, 1991; Litfin, 1994, 52-77).

Could mass media preoccupation with less crucially significant matters explain why there appear even now to be so many literate and educated people who remain unconcerned about these facts, or who deny their truth or at least their importance?

MEDIA TREATMENT

It is instructive to trace the entry of these topics into the print media to see just how long there has been information about them readily available to the reading public. For that purpose, it was a simple expedient to explore entries in the many volumes of the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, a standard resource in many libraries. Without parading details of this exploration, it suffices to say that all five facts have had appreciable public exposure in the print media.2 The treatments of the five topics attained clarity and explicitness at varying dates:

(1) exploding population was publicized from the 1950s;

(2) air pollution received explicit attention by the time of World War II;

(3) ravenous industrial dependence on exhaustible resources was explicitly depicted from 1973 onward;

(4) treatment of global warming by the greenhouse effect of C02 etc. in the atmosphere became fairly clear from the mid-1950s;

(5) depiction of the ozone layer got explicit coverage from 1985.

Thus, for a decade at minimum, and for several decades in some cases, these facts have been “available” to the general reader – and to politicians.

FLAWED ACCOUNTING, WISHFUL THINKING

Until the end of the 1980s, public views of nearly everything were colored by the dangerous rivalry between two nuclear-armed superpowers, each defining the other ideologically as evil. When the Cold War ended at last, it became possible for a writer desiring to educate people to ecological facts of life to suggest that the visible failure of communism was accompanied by an as yet unrecognized failure of Western capitalism (Orr, 1992, ix). “Our failures,” he said, “are still being concealed by bad bookkeeping (both fiscal and ecological), dishonest rhetoric, and wishful thinking.” But he insisted “the day of reckoning” was coming soon, for “the world … is not without limits” recognizable by an ecologically literate person.

Most people are not yet ecologically literate, even this many years after the well-publicized 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment that met in Stockholm. So “the health of the planet” continued to deteriorate (Brown et al., 1991, 20-21). As many people as existed altogether in 1900 were added to the Earth’s load between 1972 and 1991, while the world lost nearly 200 million hectares of trees, an area the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. Deserts have expanded by 120 million hectares, claiming more land than is planted to crops in China and Nigeria combined. The world’s farmers lost about 480 billion tons of topsoil, roughly equal to that which covers the agricultural land of India and France. And thousands of plant and animal species with which we shared the planet in 1972 no longer exist. So it may have been a display of exaggerated faith in popular wisdom when a pair of demographers (Tsui and Bogue, 1978, 3) wrote that “No social problem, other than war, has attracted greater and more sustained public concern during the decades since World War II than the ‘population explosion’.”

MYOPIA AND OVERSHOOT

Not only were there Cold War blinders restricting people’s perceptions of the world for so many years; there was also a consummate faith that continuing technological innovations will enable Earth’s human carrying capacity to be expanded “to almost any required size” (Ehrlich et al., 1971, 41). This exuberant worldview has been expressed in professional scientific journals, not just in more popular media. Examples have appeared in Scientific American (e.g. Hopper, 1976; Revelle, 1976), BioScience (e.g. Weinberg, 1973), and The Sciences (e.g. Ausubel, 1993), as well as in Science, official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which published the following assertion (Simon, 1980):

Incredible as it may seem at first, the term ‘finite’ is not only inappropriate but is downright misleading in the context of natural resources….Even the total weight of the earth is not a theoretical limit to the amount of copper that might be available to earthlings in the future. Only the total weight of the universe – if that term has a useful meaning here – would be such a theoretical limit. In summary, because we find new lodes, invent better production methods, and discover new substitutes, the ultimate constraint upon our capacity to enjoy unlimited raw materials at acceptable prices is knowledge. And the source of knowledge is the human mind. Ultimately, then, the key constraint is human imagination and the exercise of human skills. Hence an increase of human beings constitutes an addition to the crucial stock of resources, along with causing additional consumption of resources (1435-1436).

The idea in that final sentence recurred in the context of some analysis of carrying capacity estimates; ex-President Bush was quoted insisting that every human possesses not just a consuming mouth but also productive hands (Cohen, 1995a). Here, and again in a subsequent book, Cohen (1995b) implied that “the historical record of faster-than- exponential population growth” might well continue to be “accompanied by an immense improvement in average well-being.” While human population had increased fourfold between 1860 and 1991, human use of inanimate energy increased 93-fold in the same period.3 Human influence upon the planet had thus grown enormously faster than mere human biomass. Is this fact a basis for optimistic amazement, or should it be arousing deep anxiety?

The point of the statement from George Bush (echoing Friedrich Engels) was to suggest that human carrying capacity may be not just burdened by more people but could actually be raised by them.4 But no such faith can eliminate mathematical limits (see Cohen, 1995b: Appendix 6). Anyway, carrying capacity is not simply “Earth’s maximum supportable human population” (Cohen, 1995a, 342); the concept should denote Earth’s maximum sustainable load. The concept of human carrying capacity is not qualified sufficiently by noting that the load depends on level of living as well as number of people. What the carrying capacity concept must spotlight is the issue of system durability; how long can an ecosystem support a given load? It is true that the load varies with level of living. It is no less essential to recognize the idea (which should be so simple) that overuse of an environment reduces its load-supporting capacity for future generations of users.

As Ehrlich et al. (1971,41) suggested a generation ago, it already “seems clear that a population size smaller than that of 1970 will be necessary, if all human beings are to have a high material standard of living, and if a comfortable margin for error is to be maintained against ecocatastrophes.” More recently a writer for Worldwatch Institute has stated flatly that “we have surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity” (Postel, 1994,4), saying what makes this evident is the extent of depletion and damage to natural capital. “The earth’s environmental assets are now insufficient to sustain both our present patterns of economic activity and the life-support systems we depend on”.5

As if to remove all doubt as to what is meant by asserting the human load already exceeds Earth’s carrying capacity, the head of the Worldwatch Institute insists “Time is not on our side. The world has waited too long to stabilize population…. If we care about the future, we have no other choice but to launch a worldwide effort to stabilize our life-support systems – soils, fisheries, aquifers, and forests – and the climate system” (Brown, 1995, 141; cf.Catton, 1980). And as he pointed out, this would take a massive mobilization of financial and political resources comparable to organizing to fight World War II. Absent that, “we will leave our children a world without hope.”