About 15 years ago I met an economist with a bald head, a crooked smile, and some of the most outrageous ideas I’d ever heard. Our air and water are cleaner than they’ve been for decades, he said. There’s more food per capita in the world every year. Supposedly scarce energy and mineral resources have been getting cheaper over the decades, not more expensive. Population growth is good because it adds to the number of active, inquiring, innovative human minds–the ultimate resource of civilization.
Of course you can always shore up your belief that resources are limited as I did 15 years ago–concede that Simon is right about the past, but insist that our time is different. We’re in a new era, right? Besides, how could anyone hope to prove that the right kind of technological innovation will take place? Maybe nobody will figure out how to find more oil even if gas hits $10 a gallon. Maybe nobody will be smart enough to find a substitute.
U.S. wooded acreage has increased 20 percent in the last 20 years (Journal of Forestry, November 1990).
Tropical deforestation is at less than 1 percent per year of total tropical forest acreage (UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 1992), and there’s some evidence that the clearing of virgin forests and rain forests is an even smaller percentage.
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Nevertheless, many people now believe that the only way to preserve “nature” is an immediate total transformation of how human beings live, work, and breed. They aren’t winning all the legislative battles, but they are shaping the way we talk and think. Even people who’ve never heard of E.F. Schumacher or the Club of Rome perk up when you mention environmental-crisis buzzwords like “limits to growth,” “small is beautiful,” or “everything is connected to everything else.”
Simon didn’t convert me to his way of thinking. His opponents did. At that time, the end of the Carter era, I thought he mixed into his good points a lot of half-truths and special pleading. He didn’t appreciate nonsubstitutable resources like endangered species, and he seemed awfully complacent.
That could of course be true. But when a real scientist’s experiment goes awry, that scientist normally feels some obligation to figure out what went wrong. The shame doesn’t lie in making a mistake–it lies in not learning from it.
