The Environmental Optimists and Pessimists
The Pessimists
essimism started out with a fear about the limited availability of food and natural resources. The concern that such limited availability will constrain the possibilities for economic and population growth dates back at least to Thomas Malthus in 1798. He was convinced that the limitedness of land put an absolute scarcity constraint on food consumption growth. While population rose at a geometric rate, the production of food could only be expanded at an arithmetic rate, Malthus thought. Hence, he believed that population could grow only until the minimum subsistence level of per capita food consumption was transgressed and had to decline sharply afterwards - only to grow and hit the absolute scarcity constraint afterwards again in an apparently endless vicious circle. Later on in 1865, Jevons warned against running out of coal as an energy resource and expressed concern about detrimental consequences of rising coal extraction costs on economic growth and the competitiveness of the British industry. The pessimism about the availability of natural resources was rather widely held by classical economists of the time, most notably, Mill in 1862 and Ricardo in 1817, who shared the belief that the economy had to stop growing sooner or later due to a resource constraint. In those days economics had a reputation as a 'dismal' science.
With the years passing by and both the economy and population growing tremendously, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, pessimism about the availability of natural resources receded and gave way to a rather optimistic outlook. Concern about natural resource availability emerged again with the publication of the Club of Rome's 'Limits to Growth' report. This concern became popular and widespread after the quadrupling of world oil prices, as OPEC first boycotted the US and the Netherlands for their support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and soon learned to exercise leverage over the OECD countries. Donella Meadows, the late leading environmentalist, prophesied that the exhaustion of essential mineral and energy resources would make economic growth infeasible some time in the next century. Therefore, a halt to economic growth and even an eventual economic contraction might be enforced through resource scarcity. Essentially the same message was echoed by the Global 2000 Report to the President of the US in 1980 and twenty years after their first report, Meadows et al. published an updated, but hardly revised restatement of their argument. At the end of the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich had already voiced a strong warning that the world would run out of food resources to feed a growing population. He wrote that 'the battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions - hundreds of millions of people will starve to death'.
For a long time environmental problems other than limited resource availability were rather regarded as temporary than enduring and were thus by most people not perceived as a fundamental problem of industrialisation and economic growth per se. This is true, for example, for the times when many people died due to air pollution (smog) in London at the beginning of this century. The public awakened to the detrimental side-effects of industrialisation and rapid economic growth in the early 1960s, when Rachel Carson, scientist and environmental activist expressed her fear about a 'silent spring' due to the death of birds being exposed to DDT, in her bestseller of the same name. Current environmental pessimism has more to do with concern about the destruction of nature and its pollution-absorptive capacity than with concern about limited resource availability. Indicative of this trend is that the second 'Club of Rome' report by Meadows et al. was much more concerned with environmental degradation than the first report.
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London Illustrated News
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London experienced considerable population growth and economic growth in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution. At the turn of the century many died from the ill-effects of smog and air pollution.
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Nevertheless, environmental pessimism consists of both concern about the limited availability of food and natural resources as well as concern about the detrimental impact of economic and population growth on the environment. Mankind is seen to be at a crossroad. It can either constrain both population and economic growth rapidly or live in a world of massive environmental destruction, eventually leading into catastrophe. This world would be one in which all the major forests are destroyed, deserts rapidly increase, drinking water and food is so scarce that it triggers violent conflict about its allocation, the vast majority of species have been rendered extinct, draughts, storms and other natural disasters have become customary due to massive climate change, millions of people are fleeing the environmental conditions in their home countries or are dying prematurely due to either starvation or the consequences of environmental pollution. It is not too late to stop this world occurring, but, according to environmental pessimism, if within the next one or two decades massive changes do not take place, then it will become both inevitable and irreversible.
The Optimists
Beckerman and Simon regard concern about natural resource availability as totally unwarranted. According to Beckerman resource pessimism represents a {A147}petty, defeatist view of human resourcefulness{A148} that ignores how the invisible hand of the market and technical progress can always overcome any apparent resource constraint. Simon and Wildavsky purport to demonstrate that the fear about major human-induced biodiversity loss is altogether based on flawed reasoning and contradicts best available scientific data. In their view, the biodiversity extinction crisis simply does not exist. Similarly, Beckerman, Simon and the authors in the relevant chapters of Simon all maintain that global warming is an unproven hypothesis and that there are good scientific reasons to presume that the greenhouse effect is non-existent. Any problems with sulphur emissions? {A147}The acid rain scare has now been exposed as one of the great false alarms of our time{A148}, says Simon. Desertification? Quite the opposite according to Simon: {A147}With respect to the world as a whole, the data for the last thirty years show less rather than more desertification, as measured by the only available measure - the amount of arable land in the world.{A148} Unsustainability of the high human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis? In the eyes of Beckerman the {A147}photosynthesis scare story{A148} is just a {A147}fairy tale{A148}. And so on for practically everything the environmental pessimists are worried about. As summarised in the words of Wildavsky: {A147}...the charges of the environmental pessimists, are false, mostly false, unproven, or negligible{A148}. Wildavsky{A146}s last point refers to the weak variant of this most basic argument of the environmental optimists: If there is indeed some environmental problem existent, then it is rather small and has been hugely exaggerated by the {A147}doomsayers{A148}, {A147}eco-doomsters{A148}, and {A147}alarmists{A148}.
Consequently, the problem can be fixed rather easily. Symptomatic for this view is Beckerman{A146}s assertion that {A147}environmental pollution is a simple matter of correcting a minor resource misallocation{A148}. It does not come as a great surprise then, that, according to the environmental optimists at least, the state of the environment is constantly improving over time. Indeed, this trend of environmental progression is seen as part of a more general long-term secular trend of improving material human welfare.
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Paul Ehrlich