Embracing Limits: A Radical and Necessary Approach to the Environmental Crisis

By Keith Akers

RADICAL MEASURES ARE NECESSARY

If you've ever wondered where we're headed, and what a truly sustainable future might look like-this is the book for you.

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Today's civilization is like a kid with a credit card, thinking the party will never end. Politically speaking, there are no adults in the room. Perhaps th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earth Animal Trust
• Release date: Apr 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780945528036

Keith Akers

Keith Akers is a writer, speaker, and activist. He's also the author of Disciples (Apocryphile Press, 2013), The Lost Religion of Jesus (Lantern Books, 2000), and A Vegetarian Sourcebook (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1983), and numerous articles on the environment and plant-based diets. In his former life as a computer consultant, he worked on projects with the US Departments of State and Education, American Management Systems, Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile (now Verizon), and others. You can reach him at CompassionateSpirit.com.

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INTRODUCTION

Numerous environmental problems now threaten industrial civilization. Climate change is the best known, but more wait in the wings: peak oil, mass extinctions, water shortages, overgrazing by cattle, deforestation, soil erosion, and others. Yet even as these problems multiply, our society remains paralyzed. This paralysis stems from a conflict between our assumption that economic growth will continue and the environmental reality that we have already badly overshot any sustainable limits to growth.

Few people understand the reality of limits to growth on a finite planet. Even fewer understand the biological side of limits to growth: too many livestock, too many people, and the prospect of mass extinctions. Fewer still understand the social and economic implications of these limits; mainstream economists have completely dropped the ball.

If the economy has expanded beyond sustainable limits, then common sense suggests that we need a smaller economy. We must adopt three simple measures: (1) substantially reduce personal consumption, (2) substantially reduce human population, and (3) drastically reduce or eliminate livestock agriculture. This book explains why we need to do this and provides an overall guide how to do it.

First, a preliminary word of warning: while the measures I suggest are simple, implementing them is not. This book aspires to provide a radical and necessary approach to the environmental crisis. We understand quite a bit about what needs to happen and how it could be done, but we don’t yet have all the details. Providing such details will require extensive collaboration among people with a variety of different perspectives.

You should not mistake this caveat, however, as doubt as to our ultimate destination. We can anticipate a world with much less energy; even renewable energy is limited by material shortages, the difficulty of supporting heavy industry, and energy storage issues. We can anticipate a world largely without livestock; livestock are now two-thirds of the megafauna biomass of the planet and have wiped out almost all wilderness and biodiversity. We can anticipate a world with substantially fewer people, because a truly sustainable economy cannot support eight billion humans, even if they were all vegans.

With luck, this new civilization may preserve many of the desirable facets of our civilization that are not dependent on destroying the biosphere and its flora and fauna. Perhaps this will include modern medicine, washing machines, agriculture, democracy, science, and books.

With a handful of exceptions, neither political groups, nor social justice movements, nor even environmental organizations grasp the magnitude of the problem. Those of us who are aware are almost alone in this struggle. Where shall we begin?

PART 1

THE PROBLEM OF LIMITS

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1

IT’S NOT JUST CLIMATE CHANGE

The growing environmental crisis

Are there limits to the physical growth of the economy? Of course there are. We live on a finite planet with finite resources. These environmental limits, led by climate change, now threaten the basis of industrial civilization. At the same time, our society seems incapable of recognizing these challenges. These two realities—enormous problems and political paralysis—constitute what I call the problem of limits.

It is common sense that the physical size of the economy depends on natural resources. There is only so much soil on the planet. There is only so much water, metallic ore, and fossil fuel. Most importantly, there is only so much atmosphere into which we can dump our various greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxides, and all the rest. Since we live on a finite planet, the physical size of our economy must be limited as well.

With inventive technology and new discoveries, we can extend these limits considerably, but we cannot permanently avoid the issue of limits. We can improve the efficiency of our use of resources, but efficiency can never exceed 100 percent. We can make substitutions for minerals in short supply, but there are only ninety-two natural elements in the periodic table and sooner or later we are going to run through the ores we need. We can devise inventive technology, but sooner or later we are going to approach the limits of the possible, if we are not already there.

Reasons for Concern

Here’s a quick overview of some current environmental challenges, which we’ll explore in greater depth throughout the book:

1. Climate change. Each year brings disturbing news about the warming climate: melting Arctic ice and permafrost, a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, greater storm intensity, giant methane sinkholes in Siberia, new and more devastating wildfires, and record temperatures. Average temperatures have already increased about 1 degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and we’re approaching dangerous tipping points.

2. Mass extinctions. Species are going extinct at a faster rate than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago when an asteroid hit Earth. Today, we are the asteroid: more than 95 percent of all the land-based megafauna (large animal) biomass of vertebrate species is now humans, their livestock, and their pets. Large wild mammals, including all the elephants, giraffes, zebras, bison, deer, bears, and apes, comprise less than 5 percent. Humans and their livestock have overrun the earth; there simply isn’t that much space for wild animals. A sixth mass extinction, analogous to that which wiped out the dinosaurs, is already underway.

3. Peak oil. Numerous respected petroleum geologists have warned that there is only so much fossil carbon in the earth, and that we have used about half of all the economically recoverable oil. Conventional oil production peaked in the United States in 1970; it peaked worldwide around 2008. Oil production has increased since then, but not by much and only due to increases from expensive and environmentally damaging unconventional oil (oil from fracking, deepwater drilling, etc.; see chapter 10). The extraction of unconventional oil may have bought us about a decade or two before oil extracted by any means goes into inevitable decline, with potentially civilization-ending results.

4. Soil erosion. Soil, the basis of our human food supply, is eroding at a rate ten to twenty times faster than the natural rate of soil formation in the United States and Europe. Soil erosion is even worse in Africa and Asia. Our agriculture is destroying the land that supports the expanding human population in the first place. So far, food production has been able to keep up with population increases, but obviously this isn’t sustainable.

5. Deforestation. Forests have been progressively cleared for decades despite the protests of environmentalists. Cattle ranching is the main cause of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and recently political leaders have accelerated this destruction. Humans have destroyed about half of all the forest biomass in the world during the past ten thousand years. Besides being the home of countless millions of species, forests also contain the overwhelming majority of most of the earth’s sequestered plant carbon, an amount far greater than all the carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels.

6. Water shortages. Water is obviously indispensable for humans and all other species. There are no absolute shortages of water, but there is limited water availability in many agricultural areas. The Colorado River runs dry by the time it gets to the ocean, and this constitutes an absolute upper limit on water for the region without heroic and expensive water projects. Most groundwater-dependent agriculture, such as that in the Great Plains and California’s San Joaquin Valley, will eventually deplete that groundwater.

7. World hunger. With the depletion of agricultural resources, how long will we be able to feed even the current population of eight billion?¹ The Green Revolution—a set of new agricultural techniques utilizing high-yield crop varieties, irrigation, mechanization, and pesticides—has greatly increased the supply of food in the past fifty years. But the Green Revolution is also heavily resource intensive. It relies on inputs of depleting fossil carbon and declining water supplies.

8. Population. The exponential increase in human population in the past three centuries doesn’t yet pose a fundamental limit on the economy—but only if we don’t care about the environment or about human poverty. If the size of the economy could grow without limit, population wouldn’t be an issue.

9. Emerging infectious diseases. Humans travel everywhere on the globe, crowd both domesticated and wild animals in close confinement, and give antibiotics to livestock with wild abandon. As a result of all these activities, animal diseases are now developing antibiotic resistance, mutating, and spreading to humans. Previously unknown emerging infectious diseases such as AIDS, SARS, MERS, and most spectacularly COVID-19, have all had a chance to spread in human populations. These have the potential, and sometimes the reality, of creating pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish flu and the current COVID-19 crisis, which have caused havoc among human economies and populations.

10. Pollution. Plastics, acid rain, heavy metals, traffic, industrial production, radioactive waste, and nitrogen fertilizers have all contaminated soil, air, rivers, streams, and oceans. Pollution has degraded not only the natural habitat of wildlife, but our human habitat as well.

The complexity of dealing with limits to growth

The problem of environmental limits is a vast and sprawling topic, crossing many disciplines. These limits often interact with each other in complex and unexpected ways.

Climate change is perhaps the most important aspect of limits to growth. Yet our ability to cope with climate change is critically affected by other limits, as we will see later: limits such as the threat of peak oil, shortages of critical metals needed for energy-backup systems, and the destruction of forests. It’s not that we can’t deal with climate change. It’s that we are likely to discover that there’s much more to this task than building lots of wind turbines and solar panels. Fighting climate change will be messy and complex. We will need to make major sacrifices, which few are talking about and for which most of the world is totally unprepared.

A frequently overlooked aspect of limits to growth is the sheer mass of humans and their livestock, which overwhelmingly dominate all other large life forms on the planet. One hundred thousand years ago, humans were a small percentage of the land animals on the planet (Box 1-1, Mammal biomass 100,000 years ago). By 1900, humans were overwhelmingly the dominant species, and wild mammal biomass had declined precipitously (see Box 1-2, Mammal biomass in 1900). But just a century later, the biomass of humans and their livestock had increased explosively, while wild mammal biomass had declined even further (Box 1-3, Mammal biomass in 2000). Humans and their livestock today possess a carbon biomass thirty-five times more than all wild land mammals on the planet combined.

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And humans don’t comprise most of that biomass, livestock do! Other environmental complications go hand-in-hand with this near-total biological dominance: biodiversity collapse, extinctions, deforestation, soil erosion, and even climate change. Because this biological aspect of limits to growth is so consistently overlooked, and so obviously critical to our survival, I have made a special point of emphasizing it throughout this book.

Our crisis is much, much broader than any single issue, including climate change. These other environmental issues are just as serious as climate change, but still on the periphery of public consciousness. We don’t face a single environmental problem but a general problem: the problem of limits to economic growth.

Conclusions

The days of easy solutions are long past. The 1970s featured the first Earth Day celebration; passage of the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act signed by a Republican president; a Democratic president advising us to adjust our thermostats to save energy; a World Vegetarian Congress in Maine; and the popularity of books such as The Environmental Handbook, Diet for a Small Planet, The Population Bomb, and The Limits to Growth. These books, flawed as they may be, have value and were certainly headed in the right direction.

Perhaps we should have also paid attention to the warning on the back cover of The Environmental Handbook, prepared for the first Earth Day more than fifty years ago²: The crisis of the environment cannot wait another decade for answers. This sounded apocalyptic, and when succeeding decades produced no obvious apocalypse, we disregarded that advice.

And here we are. We are staring the collapse of industrial civilization right in the face. The subject of limits isn’t going to be a popular one. Elites will resist change that reduces their wealth. Ordinary citizens will view radical proposals with apprehension.

We need a completely new and different economic system, modeled on the ideas of ecological economics, but we also need cultural changes and a different understanding of what it means to be human. We need a sense of shared vision in our societies that will undergird and make possible these changes. This is a tall order for today’s fractured, polarized society, but as physical chemist and materials expert Ugo Bardi comments, It is not impossible: in emergency situations, such as in wars or natural disasters, people understand the need of personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good.³ In the coming chapters, I will show that radical measures are necessary.

2

UNDERSTANDING LIMITS

From empty world to full world

Our society is paralyzed from making any meaningful response to the environmental crisis. We struggle to reach a social consensus that climate change is even a real thing. We haven’t even begun to seriously ponder peak oil, soil erosion, or anything else.

What’s going on? Our difficulty is that we don’t have a framework for understanding the problem of natural limits. Or do we?

The basic concept

Most economists disregard or dismiss the question of limits to economic growth. But a small minority of dissident ecological economists do provide a framework for such questions: that we should view the economy as part of the larger environment. Ecological economists frame the problem of limits as the contrast between an empty world and a full world. If the economy is part of the larger environment, then we need to ask, How big can the economy get? The world today is relatively full of humans, their animals, and their products—all of which dominate the planet.

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The idea that the economy is part of the environment will strike most non-economists as undeniably true. Emphasizing that the human economy is part of a larger, physical world seems to belabor the obvious. But failure to understand this concept is a key reason why many mainstream economists and almost all political leaders haven’t really paid attention to the problem of limits.

Early on in their standard textbook on Ecological Economics,⁴ Herman Daly and Joshua Farley introduce the empty world and full world concepts (see Box 2-1, From empty world to full world). Ecological economists consider the size of the economy to be a physical concept, rather than a quantity measured by gross national product (GNP) or the money that trades hands.⁵ Roughly, we live either in an empty world or a full world. What the world is full of (or empty of) is human beings and human-created infrastructure such as cities, roads, houses, cropland, livestock, computers, cars, food, and pollution. It can accommodate only so many physical things, depending on how clever (or lucky) humans are and how many resources the world has.

The terms empty world and full world are relative and conceptual ideas. Several thousand years ago, we lived in a relatively empty world, with smaller populations in rural areas and low use of energy and materials. It wasn’t completely and literally empty; there were some humans and some resource consumption. But today, humans and their environments dominate the globe. Not only do humans dominate the world of animals (Box 1-3), but we have also filled up the atmosphere with our greenhouse gas emissions. We no longer need to worry whether wild animals will eat us—rather, whether they will vanish from the planet entirely.

Again, the atmosphere isn’t literally full; we could probably pump more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and manufacture more refrigerators. However, the economy’s physical size has now reached truly alarming proportions; the total mass of all human-manufactured artifacts (including trash, concrete, and everything else) is now greater than the mass of all living things.⁶

However, the economy can improve or develop without increasing in total size: for example, with development of a more efficient irrigation system or a faster computer. Thus, Ecological economics does not call for an end to economic development, merely to physical growth.⁷ In theory, it is possible for human welfare to increase while the physical size of the economy remains constant or even declines. This way of thinking is sometimes referred to as decoupling the economy from resource usage. So far, global GDP increases appear to correlate strongly with resource usage, and it’s unclear how decoupling would work in practice. One group of European economists concludes that there is no evidence such decoupling is currently happening and that the hypothesis that decoupling will allow economic growth to continue without a rise in environmental pressures appears highly compromised, if not clearly unrealistic.⁸

The essential nature of industrial civilization, as we use the term here, isn’t so much that it relies on factories or standardized mass production, but that it is expansionist. It relies on constant growth. Nothing about labor-saving devices or modern medicine, per se, requires continuing economic growth. But most of us can’t even imagine a civilization without economic growth.

Malthus, Darwin, and exponential growth

Malthus was one of the first modern thinkers to appreciate the problem of limits. He first published his celebrated work An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, when human population was nearly one billion, compared to eight billion today. Malthus considered the relationship between unchecked population growth and the growth of food supply. By his calculus, if food supply increases over time arithmetically (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …), but population increases geometrically (exponentially, e.g., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …), then population tends to outrun the food supply.⁹

Strictly speaking, Malthus wasn’t making a limits-to-growth argument as we understand it today, postulating an upper limit on human population at some figure such as nine billion or twelve billion. Malthus made no such calculations and foresaw that population could grow indefinitely, only with a limit on rate of growth: humans could increase in number, just not exponentially. But due to misery and vice, Malthus wrote, population growth is never unchecked. He was the first modern prophet of doom; without voluntary restraint, we would have war, famine, and disease to mitigate the excess population. Unfortunately, this worldview led Malthus to advocate cruel social policy. Better not to give charity to the poor, he argued: if you feed them, they’ll just make more babies!

Today Malthus’s conclusions are often held up for ridicule as exactly the reason we shouldn’t accept a limits-to-growth argument. Since the publication of his essay, we have seen both exponential growth in the population and exponential growth in the food supply. All we have known during the two centuries after Malthus has been what he seemed to think impossible.

But where did Malthus go wrong? While he is widely dismissed in terms of the human world, his basic scientific insight is accepted without question in terms of the animal and plant worlds. Charles Darwin saw that Malthus’s general proposition for humans also applies to plants and animals. (Malthus, in a casual aside, noted that animals also reproduce faster than they obtain food—and so applied his misery and vice scenario to the animal world as well.¹⁰) For Darwin, the exponential reproduction of plants and animals implied an inevitable struggle for existence among them. In his autobiography, he recounts reading Malthus and immediately seeing the application to his theory of evolution:

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population … it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species.¹¹

Malthus’s tenet drives Darwin’s theory of evolution. Both thinkers agree that all plants and all animals propagate themselves in excess of available food. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, A struggle for existence inevitably follows … It is the doctrine of Malthus, applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.¹² The maximum reproduction rate ensures that as many members as possible of a species will survive, but also that only the variations within a species most favorable for survival will be passed on.

Misery and vice, for Malthus, are the natural checks which arise when population exceeds resources: things like hunger, disease, and fighting. If there were always plenty of resources, no matter how rapidly species reproduced, there would be no reward for favorable variations, no destruction of unfavorable variations, and no struggle for existence. Species would never evolve but, we presume, just proliferate until they filled the whole universe. Therefore, it is these natural checks which arise when there is a shortage of resources—misery and vice in Malthus’s language—which drives Darwin’s theory.

Exponential growth in the twentieth century

Was Malthus wrong, or just ahead of his time?

The most obvious feature of the economy of the past five hundred years, compared to any previous period of human history and culminating in the twentieth century, has been its rapid and exponential growth, including population growth. Yet appreciating the enormous scale of growth in just the twentieth century is key to understanding limits to growth. Human population more than tripled in this period, but other indicators of physical growth increased even more. Water use increased nearly ninefold (Box 2-3), and energy use increased more than sixteenfold (Box 2-2). In the same time frame, we’ve also seen obvious advances in science and technology. But we are doing more than just using better tools. We are using and burning through resources at an unprecedented rate.

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When political leaders and economists from both major political parties say they want to continue economic growth (or act as if this were inevitable anyway), we need to ask: Really? Do they believe that by the end of the twenty-first century, the economy will be ten times again larger than it was in the year 2000? Will this economic growth come from burning ten times the amount of coal, oil, and gas that we burned in the entire twentieth century? Or are we going to see a veritable orgy of wind turbine and solar panel construction, nuclear power, or what? And unless we start desalinating seawater, how will we expand water use another ninefold over the current already gargantuan use? Based on the accelerating destruction of the natural world for economic ends, we ought to give a different answer to these political leaders and economists: this isn’t going to happen. The rate of growth will slow, and at some point, it will stop. The question is, when and how?

The problem of market failures

Ecological economists would likely agree with conventional economists on a vast array of issues including basic questions of supply and demand, which address the allocation of scarce resources. But there are two other aspects of economic policy that can’t be reduced to questions of supply and demand. These are the questions of scale, or how big the economy can get, and distribution, or how we should distribute the economy’s wealth. Scale is another way of talking about limits to growth or economy size, and distribution is another way of talking about inequality and social justice issues.

Economists often refer to the idea of a free market, that is, economic exchange and trade in an unregulated (or relatively unregulated) trade environment. Buyers and sellers adjust what they buy and produce, and what they pay for these goods and services, based on their own economic self-interest. Celebrated eighteenth-century thinker Adam Smith argued that if everyone acts in their own self-interests, the aggregate result for the community is positive: sellers producing things that buyers want at a fair price, with competitive free trade determining what a fair price is and what buyers really want.

The free market works well for allocating resources in many cases, but does the free market address social justice issues or limits-to-growth issues? Consider a few notable examples of instances in which the free market was less than helpful:

1. In the nineteenth century, slavery was a quite profitable institution, at least for many slave owners. Could the free market have ended slavery? In principle, it eventually might have,¹³ although this process evidently didn’t work fast enough to prevent the American Civil War.

2. Today, someone might propose killing all the remaining elephants in the world, rendering them extinct, to sell the ivory. This could be a money-making proposition! Would a free-market system be able to prevent the extinction of the elephants? Again, in principle, the free market might eventually do this, because a human economy that allowed elephants to flourish might work better than an economy that wipes them out for their ivory or for their habitat. But so far, elephant populations are crashing, and the economy has seemed to reward anyone killing elephants or seizing their habitat.

3. What about climate change? James Hansen and other scientists have suggested that the threshold amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, to avoid climate catastrophe, is no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). Yet today—with a vigorous free market—CO2 levels are over 400 ppm and rising steadily. The economy seems to reward greenhouse gas emissions, which continue and are intensifying.

In all these cases, if we trust a free-market approach, we might get lucky. It is possible that slavery in the American South would have disappeared anyway with the introduction of modern agricultural machinery, without the need for a civil war. It is possible that consumer boycotts or ecotourism would make it more profitable to keep elephants from going extinct. It is possible that solar and wind will become so cheap, they will entirely replace fossil fuels.

But the broader point is that we shouldn’t care whether slavery, killing the elephants, or colossal greenhouse gas emissions is the best financial investment. Such choices are barbaric and stupid at the outset, no matter how much money can be made. Values are inherent in any discussion of sustainability or social justice—values that can’t easily be reduced to market values. Doing nothing and