The great fable of the Litany
We have been told for a long time the story of the Litany, that doomsday is nigh. Lester Brown and an entire army of environmental organizations, pundits and politicians have warned us of the impending debacle. This message has had enormous social and political impact. Former vice-president Al Gore's 'Earth in the Balance' is an excellent example of the mood: "Modern industrial civilization as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet's ecological system."
And this is not all, Gore insists. For sure, the deterioration of the world's rainforests, of fertile agricultural land, of the ozone layer and of the climate balance is terrible, but Gore actually informs us that these calamities are "only the first of a steady stream of progressively more serious ecological catastrophes that will be repeatedly proffered to us."
At the same time he insists that the loss is not only in the environment but also within ourselves. We have lost our natural contact with the Earth and become strangers to our own existence. "The pursuit of happiness and comfort is paramount," and we have ended up concentrating on "the consumption of an endless stream of shiny new products." We have constructed a "false world of plastic flowers and Astroturf, air-conditioning and fluorescent lights, windows that don't open and background music that never stops ... sleepy hearts jump-started with caffeine, alcohol, drugs and illusions." We have forgotten our "direct experience with real life." Our civilization has achieved not only the destruction of the world but ourselves. This is, indeed, "a dysfunctional civilization."
And consequently, Gore sees this civilization as the new antagonist, just as Nazi Germany and communist totalitarianism were for the previous generation. "It is not merely in the service of analogy that I have referred so often to the struggles against Nazi and communist totalitarianism, because I believe that the emerging effort to save the environment is a continuation of these struggles." And this is the reason why "we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization."
The real state of the world
But this vision and its political consequences are borne on the myth of the Litany. Gore's Litany about "a dysfunctional civilization" and the loss of "a direct experience with real life" reveals both a scary idealization of our past and an abysmal arrogance towards the developing countries of the world.
The fact is, as we have seen, that this civilization has over the last 400 years brought us fantastic and continued progress. Through most of the couple of million years we have been on the planet we had a life expectancy of about 20-30 years. During the course of the past century we more than doubled our life expectancy, to 67 years.
Infants no longer die like flies --- it is no longer every other child that dies, but one in twenty, and the mortality rate is still falling. We are no longer almost chronically ill, our breaths stinking of rotting teeth, with festering sores, eczema, scabs, and suppurating boils. We have far more food to eat --- despite the fact that the Earth is home to far more people: the average inhabitant of the Third World now has 38 percent more calories. The proportion of people starving has fallen dramatically from 35 percent to 18 percent, and by the year 2010 this share will probably have fallen further to 12 percent. By that time, we will feed more that 3 billion people more adequately.
We have experienced unprecedented growth in human prosperity. In the course of the last 40 years, everyone --- in the developed as well in the developing world --- has become more than three times richer. Seen in a longer perspective this growth has been quite overwhelming. Americans have become 36 times richer over the past 200 years.
We have gained access to far more amenities, from clean drinking water, to telephones, computers and cars. We are better educated; in the Third World, illiteracy has fallen from 75 percent to less than 20 percent, and the standard of education in the developing and the developed world has increased tremendously --- as regards university education in the developing countries by almost 400 percent in 30 years.
We have more leisure time, greater security and fewer accidents, more education, more amenities, higher incomes, fewer starving, more food, and a healthier and longer life. This is the fantastic story of mankind, and to call such a civilization "dysfunctional" is quite simply immoral. In the developing world there are still many who lack the basic necessities and for whom growth and development are not an inconsequential experience of plastic flowers, micro waved food, alcohol and drugs, but a chance to live a decent life with the possibilities of choices, reaching beyond the concerns of getting enough to eat.
For the industrialized world, growth and progress have given us a life that is so much better that we at last have enough time and resources to consider how we want to make the most of life. Ironically, Al Gore's dressing-down of our society is only possible because growth has liberated us (and him) sufficiently from our physical limitations to give us the possibility to choose --- even if this choice is to turn one's back on present-day society.
In so far as Gore simply wants us to consider whether we would not be happier shopping less and living more (leave the mall and visit friends, go for a hike in the wilderness, take up painting, etc.) his commentary is naturally sympathetic and serves as a reasonable reminder. But Gore goes much further and tells us that we live superficial and phony lives, that our civilization and our parents' generation have indoctrinated us into living this dysfunctional life and the we cannot see the prison walls that surround us. We are repressed without being aware of it. This kind of supercilious attitude is a challenge to our democratic freedom and contests our basic right to decide for ourselves how we lead our lives, so long as doing so does not bring us into collision with others.
But for both Al Gore and Lester Brown the argument goes much deeper. Because the actual justification of their criticism of civilization is not that we are doing better, but that we are doing better to an increasing extent at the cost of Earth's ecosystem. This is why in reality we should put a stop to the insane collision with Earth's limits.
Al Gore thus joins the long list of cultural pessimists who have experienced the modern world but have also seen the seeds of its destruction. From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, our technical ingenuity is seen as catastrophically exceeding our expectations, creating a world that has spun out of control.
Ironically, Al Gore believes that the way to escape this dysfunctionality is by means of "the harsh light of the truth." And as we have seen throughout this book, the light of the truth does have a harsh edge, especially on the core myths of the Litany.
Because our food production will continue to give more people more and cheaper food. We will not lose our forests; we will not run out of energy, raw materials or water. We have reduced atmospheric pollution in the cities of the developed world and have good reason to believe that this will also be achieved in the developing world. Our oceans have not been defiled, our rivers have become cleaner and support more life, and although the nutrient influx has increased in many coastal waters like the Gulf of Mexico, this does not constitute a major problem --- in fact, benefits generally outweigh costs. Nor is waste a particularly big problem. The total US waste throughout the twenty-first century could be deposited in single square landfill, less that 18 miles on the side, or 26 percent of Woodward County, Oklahoma.
Acid rain did not kill of our forests, our species are not dying out as many have claimed, with half of them disappearing over the next 50 years --- the figure is likely to be about 0.7 percent. The problem of the ozone layer has been more or less solved. The current outlook on the development of global warming does not indicate a catastrophe --- rather there is good reason to believe that our energy consumption will change towards renewable energy sources way before the end of the century. Indeed, the catastrophe seems rather in spending our resources unwisely on curbing present carbon emissions at high costs instead of helping the developing countries and increasing non-fossil fuel research. And finally, our chemical worries and fear of pesticides are misplaced and counterproductive. First, phasing out pesticides will probably waste resources and actually cause more cancer. Second, the main causes of cancer are not chemicals but our own lifestyle.
The Litany is based on myths, although many of these myths may be propagated by well-meaning, compassionate people. And one can of course choose to believe that these myths may be represent "only the first of a steady stream of progressively more serious ecologic catastrophes." But is essential to point out that this is pure a matter of conviction. We know of no other substantial problems looming on the horizon.
It is difficult not to get the impression that the criticism leveled by Brown and Gore of a "dysfunctional civilization" is simply an expression of Calvinistic sense of guilt. We have done so well that some actually feel rather ashamed. We may really believe that we have deserved global warming.
But such a conclusion is quite unnecessary. We ought not to punish ourselves in shame. We ought to be pleased that we have thrown off so many of humanity's yokes and made possible fantastic progress in terms of prosperity. And we ought to face the facts --- that on the whole we have no reason to expect that this progress will not continue.
This is the real state of the world.
Continued progress
If we do not make considered, rational decisions but base our resolution on the Litany, that typical feeling that the world is in decline, we will make poor and counterproductive choices. In Peru, the authorities refrained from chlorinating the drinking water because they were afraid of the risk of cancer. Today, it is considered to have been one of the main reasons for the cholera epidemic that broke out again with such vehemence in 1991. Had they known how low the risk of using chlorine actually was, the epidemic probably never would have occurred.
In 1967 Paul Ehrlich predicted that the world was headed for massive starvation. In order to limit the extent of this, he believed --- reasonably enough given his point of view --- that aid should only be given to those countries that would have a chance to make it through. According to Ehrlich, India was not among them. We must “announce that we will no longer send emergency aid to countries such as India where sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population … Our inadequate aid ought to be reserved for those which can survive.” Ehrlich was basically saying that India should be left to paddle its own canoe. India, however, has today lived through a green revolution. In 1967, when Ehrlich wrote those words, the average Indian consumed 1,875 calories a day. Even though the population had almost doubled, in 1998 the average Indian got 2,466 calories a day. Had we paid more notice to Ehrlich and less to Borlaug and the incredible willpower and inspiration that surrounded the green revolution, things might have looked quite worse.
As far as the Western world is concerned, I hope that this book can lead to an appreciable change in attitude to environmental problems. We can forget about our fear of imminent breakdown. We can see that the world is basically headed in the right direction and that we can help to steer this development process by focusing on and insisting on reasonable priorization.
When we fear our environment, we seem easily to fall victim to a short-term feelgood solution which spends money on relatively trifling issues and thus holds back resources from far more important ones. We need to be rational and make well-considered decisions in our use of resources when it comes to the aquatic environment, pesticides and global warming. This does not mean that rational environmental management and environmental investment is not often a good idea --- only that we should compare the costs and benefits of such investments to similar investments in all the other important areas of human endeavor.
On the whole I believe it is important to emphasize that being overly optimistic is not without costs, but that being too pessimistic also carries a hefty price tag. If we do not believe in the future we will become more apathetic, indifferent and scared --- hiding within ourselves. And even if we choose to fight for the planet it will very probably be as part of a project that is born not of reasonable analysis but of increasing fear.
Of course we cannot simply choose to believe in the future. But the documentation and the arguments in this book can have a considerable effect because they can free us of our unproductive worries. They can give us new faith in the fact that we are involved in creating a better world by taking part in a society’s production of assets, tangible as well as intangible.
We encounter the same consideration when it is often pointed out that things have only gone as well as they have because we have worried. No, things have gone so well because we have worked hard to improve our situation. In some circumstances this has happened almost automatically, as in the continued growth of economic wealth. We have become richer and richer primarily because of our fundamental organization of a market economy and not because we have worried. Some of the most significant recent progress in the area of pollution has been achieved through regulation, but the regulation has been right to the extent that it represented a reasonable prioritization and not because it was founded on a general worry.
More food is available in the world not because we have worried but because visionary individuals and organizations created a Green Revolution. It is not because we have worried that we have more leisure time, greater safety, higher incomes and better education, but because we have tackled the problems.
We must take care of the problems, prioritize reasonably but not worry unduly.
We are actually leaving the world a better place than when we got it and this is really the fantastic point about the real state of the world: that mankind’s lot has vastly improved in every significant measurable field and that it is likely to continue to do so.
Think about it. When would you prefer to have been born? Many people are still stuck with the Litany and have a mental image of children growing up with a shortage of food and water, and with pollution, acid rain, and global warming. But the image is a mixture of our own prejudices and a lack of analysis.
Thus, this is the very message of this book: children born today --- in both the industrialized world and developing countries ---- will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities --- without the global environment being destroyed.
And that is a beautiful world.
