The two men helped erase words that had epitomized the human struggle, "too little," replacing them with "too much." It's important to note, though, that only in a restricted intellectual sphere did this new assessment of the human condition take hold. The growth of economies and therefore of the physical effects of people is still very much dominant. The environmental/ecological minority emerged because the situation became fraught; it's indication of how bad things had become, but not much of an opposing force. When there were still frontiers, with their illusions of inexhaustibility, of course we didn't hear any prophetic warnings. And aren't warnings now falling on deaf ears, as far as any actions are concerned? Those who say they take the warnings seriously go about their normal business anyway, as if unable to do otherwise. Mea culpa.Robert Tulip wrote:Chapter Two ends with a fascinating philosophical discussion about two books that started the modern environmental movement in 1948: The Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborn and Vogt’s Road to Survival. Both were widely read, controversial and influential for their shared argument that consumption driven by capitalism and population growth is causing an ecological crisis that can only be solved by a reversal of growth in human numbers and wealth.
The way of thinking behind protecting the integrity of an ecosystem establishes a system of moral values that see the stability and beauty of life as intrinsically good. This change in the idea of the environment moved the ethical compass from how nature affects us to how we affect nature, paving the path of the Anthropocene, as our new global totality.
The Anthropocene is the most telling arrival of all. It means that ecosystems have become irrelevant in practice, if valued in abstraction.
Carrying capacity shouldn't be equated to some limit beyond which the planet can't cope. Carrying capacity should be restricted to the limits of a species' population, determined by the species' fitness in the environment. Does the environment have what is necessary for humans to grow their numbers? Obviously, yes. As long as we can feed enough people to make births outweigh deaths, we're not exceeding capacity. As long as medical science can combat serious epidemics and prolong lifespans, we're not going to exceed capacity. I'm saying that carrying capacity is an ineffective warning; it puts no meaningful restraints on most things we're inclined to do. How can concerns about carrying capacity stop us from, for example, mining the ocean floor, probably obliterating hundreds of species now unknown (See Atlantic, Feb. 2020)?The key idea of carrying capacity provided the warming signal of looming catastrophe, due to unsustainable production. But Vogt was unsure if carrying capacity could change, increased by technology. Later ecologists quantified this problem with analysis of planetary boundaries, which could produce non linear abrupt system change if transgressed.
I don't know of instances of living lightly on the earth save for peoples who lived, or live, in very harsh conditions, such as African Bushmen. Mann's previous 1491 happens to offer perspective on that stereotypical concept of native peoples' environmental ethic. By and large, the people who inhabited the Americas before Columbus arrived were very adept at effecting large scale changes to the environment. Thomas Jefferson's vision of a plantation economy doesn't strike one as particularly light on the earth. Sustainable? Maybe, though slave labor made it run.The panoply of ideas about living lightly upon the planet originate in these themes, with the vision of humble local simple community life as a human ideal, a Jeffersonian agrarian self sufficiency.
Against this rural ideal, the Hamiltonian urban view saw productivity and industrial prosperity as the basis for protecting nature through wealth, producing the fundamental dispute between Wizard and Prophet.
By my reading, nobody was concerned around 1800 with protecting nature. Maybe some Romantics in England, but not in the U.S.
I appreciate that you don't pretend, as some do, that we don't have to choose between protecting terra firma and growing as big as we want. You choose moving offshore. But wouldn't that happen only subsequent to some catastrophe that makes the land totally unlivable? Otherwise, people just won't go out there. The proposal doesn't strike me as a first line option for any of our environment problems.Robert Tulip wrote:My view is that by shifting the main place of human life to the world ocean, living on vast floating island cities, we will be able to manage the continents and the oceans to maximise both biodiversity and human wealth, in ways that will come to value educated simplicity. The underlying problem is to use technology to increase biomass. The immense quantities of unused nutrients in the world ocean can be mined to create a sustainable circular high carbon economy, potentially with as much energy as we want. I am currently setting out my ideas on this for a journal article.DWill wrote: However, Robert, though we may indeed be able to engineer a planet supporting 25 billion people in relative wealth (even though we are not supporting very well a goodly percentage our current 7.5 billion), we cannot do that while giving space and life to the millions of other species who live here. Wizardry has no answer for that problem, and I'm not aware that wizards have claimed any ability to achieve an ecological feat such as that. Incredulity in this case is highly justified.