NO MATTER HOW YOU SLICE IT, IT COMES UP HATRED OF YOUR FELLOW MAN:

Burying Malthus to save Malthusianism: The so-called ‘progressive greens’ challenging the idea that the planet is overpopulated are actually only interested in making Malthusian thinking more palatable and PC. (Brendan O’Neill, 3/26/10, spiked review of books)

Having hated and slated Malthus, Pearce moves on to explore how Malthus’s ideas had a devastating impact on later generations. He looks at how the Irish Famine of 1845-1852, in which one million people starved to death, was explained away by Malthus’s disciples as the inevitable product of overpopulation, of the fact that, in one Malthusian thinker’s words, ‘The careless, squalid, un-aspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits’. Once again, a social problem – the poverty and repression wrought by Ireland’s subordinate colonial relationship with Britain – was re-explained as a natural phenomenon. Pearce examines how Malthus’s thinking inspired the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of whose followers opposed the development of vaccines and other medical breakthroughs since they ‘stopped nature weeding out people vulnerable to its diseases’.

He traces Malthus’s ideas forward to William Vogt, the granddaddy of contemporary environmentalism whose green and Malthusian Road to Survival was published in 1948. Vogt also instinctively opposed medical breakthroughs and agricultural or industrial leaps forward, on the basis that they allowed people to carry on breeding. For example in India, said Vogt, ‘building irrigation works, providing means of food storage and importing food during periods of starvation [has only allowed Indians to continue in] their accustomed way, breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish’. Pearce takes us up to today’s Optimum Population Trust (OPT), an old-style Malthusian outfit, which says we must reduce the human population to three billion or face ‘nature’s brutal population policies… increasing the death rate by famines and disease’. The OPT sees the whole globe, but especially Africa and Asia, as a hotbed of potential chaos and slaughter. One of its former chairmen has argued that ‘for the whole planet to avoid the fate of Rwanda, Malthusian thinking needs rehabilitation’. Pearce points out that it simply isn’t true that Africa is overpopulated: ‘The continent contains 11 of the world’s 20 least densely populated nations and only one of the 20 most densely populated.’

Yet the driving motivation of Pearce’s demolition job on Malthus and his unreconstructed apostles is not to put the case for understanding humanity’s problems as social rather than natural and to challenge the backward idea that we live on a finite planet which will forever thwart ‘man’s unbounded yearning to multiply’. No, Pearce’s motivation is to rescue those backward ideas from their sullied association with misanthropic, racist, deeply reactionary movements of the past 200 years and from the inconvenient fact that they originated with a mad, harelipped reverend who hated the poor. Pearce wants to kill Malthus, but also preserve the very essence of Malthusian thinking.

Pearce seems to imagine that he is making a radical new contribution to the debate about people, the planet and resources when he argues that the decisive factor in humanity’s impact on its surroundings is consumption rather than population. In a chapter titled ‘Footprints on a finite planet’, which comes after 238 pages of Pearce’s attacks on old-fashioned Malthusians, Pearce finally confesses his own overpopulation concerns: ‘The quadrupling of global population during the twentieth century helped bring us to the edge of the abyss… Our sheer numbers have clearly been crucial to what has happened, but they are only part of the story.’

The main part of the story, he says, is not simply the fact of humans being born, but how much they then go on to consume. [...]

Pearce is explicitly updating and refashioning the arguments of Paul Ehrlich, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific neo-Malthusians, who (wrongly, of course) wrote in his 1971 book The Population Bomb that ‘hundreds of millions of people will starve to death’ as a result of overpopulation (4). Ehrlich himself updated traditional Malthusianism, arguing that humanity’s destructive impact is determined by three things: the number of individuals, the consumption of each individual, and the resources needed to satisfy that consumption. And now Pearce is updating Ehrlich, giving rise to what we might call ‘third-generation Malthusianism’, by arguing that ‘Ehrlich’s second factor in humanity’s impact on the planet [consumption] has come to the fore’. Population growth is actually slowing, says Pearce, so ignore the OPT and other unreconstructed Malthusians and focus instead on the main problem: the consumption habits of existing human beings rather than the projected number of future human beings.

Over the past 200 years, Malthusianism has continually reinvented itself. It has had to, since so many of its predictions have been contradicted by human experience, in particular the key claim of Malthus’s Essay: that it would be impossible for food production to keep up with population growth. Generations of Malthusians have dealt with this by arguing that some ‘unforeseen development’ has merely provided a ‘temporary respite’ from the fundamental Malthusian dilemma, and while Malthus may have been wrong on some of the facts he was right on the fundamentals. Pearce simply goes one step further, arguing not only that Malthus was wrong on some of facts but that he was a rotten piece of work with some very dodgy beliefs. Yet although he doesn’t say it out loud, Pearce, too, believes Malthus was right on the fundamentals.

Similarly, nativists always argue that while their predecessors were wrong (not least about their own wog ancestors) the current wave of immigration is TOTALLY DIFFERENT!

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 27, 2010 6:16 AM