Sustainability, Part I: On the Edge of an Oxymoron

• Lindsey Grant
• March 1, 1997
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

As the connection between growth and environmental damage became apparent, the conflict became intense.  The proponents of growth recognized that the new awareness threatened their fundamental mindset.  Conventional Keynesian economists, practicing a discipline that contains no conceptual process for studying limits, regularly attempt to avoid the philosophical issue of growth by assuring us that pollution is declining and that no resource scarcities stand in the way of continued growth because of “the infinite substitutability of resources”.  This is dogma rather than a proven proposition.  They have yet to name good substitutes for food and water to name two critical resources.  A former President of the Royal Society of Canada stated their problem briefly and elegantly:

The economists largely ignore population growth and consumption because they ignore the ecosystem.  They think in terms of an infinite world. Because of population growth, however, most inhabited regions tend to be overpopulated in terms of stress on local ecosystems, and far beyond sustainability.  Standard economic theory depends on a closed system with a circular flow of exchange values, to which the environment and the reservoir of resources are externalities.  The future looks bright because no heed is paid to uncosted materials such as water, air, forests, animals, plants and soils, without which the ecosystem would cease to exist and so inevitably would we.  Economics as a science must become concerned about the ecosystem because we are part of it, cannot manage it, and cannot live outside it.³

Nevertheless, economists are heeded, in a world that worships GNP growth, and thus growth is accepted as the solution to our problems.

The argument is regularly made that growth is acceptable “up to a point.”  In most respects, we are already beyond that point.  I hardly need remind Forum readers that the country far from being in a sustainable state is on a course that will be catastrophic if long continued.  Farmlands are losing soil at a net rate of about 12 tons per hectare annually and the best ones have lost half or more of their topsoil in little more than a century.  We are losing better farmland to urbanization and industrialization than we can recover from wasteland.  Agricultural yields are stagnating while the demand for food grows.

Our per capita timber resources are declining, and old growth forests and their genetic resources are being destroyed.  The forests are under attack by a man-made combination of “ozone, acidic deposition, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides.”  These in turn affect “plant physiological processes that provide resistance to insects, pathogens and climatic stress.”⁴  We know that there is a complex synergy leading to forest decline, but we do not yet understand it or its potential consequences.

We are still losing wetlands, and pollution accelerates the collapse of fisheries.  We are drawing down groundwater tables where the water is most needed.  We are altering biological systems and playing a sort of Russian roulette with the natural systems that support us.  We cannot stop the growth in our emissions of carbon dioxide, and we are thereby affecting global climate.  I could go on.

It is sometimes argued that economic growth is needed to make environmental reforms affordable.  This is the ultimate squirrel cage.  The growth of population and consumption generates problems that must be solved by further growth.  Even economic activity directed toward benign ends is itself polluting.  Building an interceptor sewer may cost billions of dollars; it will relieve some of the water pollution though it will not eliminate the nitrates and phosphates that are a byproduct of population growth but in the process it contributes to air pollution, carbon dioxide releases and climate change.

There are other environmental problems that cannot be solved by investment, no matter how intense.  Preservation of our farmlands is a case in point; it needs reversion to good conservation practices even if they yield less food more than it needs massive investment.

Briefly, this sums up the case.  Economic growth is the problem, not the solution, and population policy is a central element of environmental sustainability.

In Europe, population growth is on the verge of turning around, unless immigration stops the trend.  Those who know of the European experience may argue that population growth is a fading issue in the industrial world, and hardly a matter for concern.

Were it not for immigration, one could perhaps make that case for the United States.  At present fertility levels, we would peak at something over 300 million if natural increase alone were the driver.  The problem, of course, is that immigration drives population growth in this country.  Some 43% of growth in this century has been post-1900 immigrants and their descendants.  The comparable projection for the next century when we are headed for a half billion Americans is about 91%.  (This estimate is conservative.  It assumes a lower level of immigration than we are now experiencing, and it assumes that immigrants’ fertility will move down, whereas in fact it is driving the average fertility upward.)  Starkly put, this means that the issue of growth is the immigration issue in the United States right now.  What does this mean?  Immigration policy becomes population policy, which becomes environmental policy.  Many environmentalists don’t want to hear that.  Somehow, we must bring them around.