Behaviour, Technology & Population: The Environmental Triad

In 1966, Harry Harrison wrote a novella entitled Make Room! Make Room!, which, in 1973, became the film Soylent Green. Both depict dystopian societies in which the failure to check population growth and ensure sustainable development has resulted in chronic overcrowding, desperate resource shortages, and collapsing infrastructure. But Soylent Green made one significant departure from Harrison’s novel: it introduced the notion of global warming. Indeed, the plot turns on the fact that Soylent Green, a plankton-based food substitute, is actually made using human bodies obtained from state-run euthanasia centres - because global warming has killed off the world’s plankton supplies.

Both Make Room! Make Room! and Soylent Green have been criticized as overly dependent on Malthusian notions of exponential population growth, and for failing to take account of the remedial effect of increasing technological efficiency. But these criticisms fail to acknowledge the essential truth in both the novel and film: that environmental degradation is largely a product of the First World’s profligacy; and that technology alone cannot solve the ecological dilemma by which humanity is confronted.

These truths are relevant to Australia in two key respects. The Howard Government has declined to endorse the Kyoto protocols on global warming on the grounds that they don’t do enough to limit Third World greenhouse emissions. But the question immediately arises: why should Kyoto place similar limits on the Third World when it is the First World that is largely responsible for the pollution that has destabilized the global environment? Australia is the world’s largest per capita polluter; the United States is the world’s largest net polluter. The onus is surely on both societies to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Secondly, the Federal Government is also making serious noises about building nuclear fission power stations as a "solution" to global warming, as well as indulging in speculation about the possibilities of geo-sequestration. This reflects a worrying obsession with the "quick fix" of technology instead of a preparedness to adopt the hard grind of behavioural change. The approach seems to be: let’s close our eyes and hope someone comes up with a clever invention that gets us out of this mess.

Moreover, population, for all its Malthusian overtones, remains an issue. Much hand-wringing occurs over the alleged failure by First World nations to sustain "replacement level" birth rates; the simple truth, however, is that there are too many people on this planet. Advanced industrial civilizations are mass consumers of resources, regardless of technological efficiency; therefore, mass population only exacerbates the negative effects of mass consumption. In other words, it is simply not possible – never mind sustainable - for the present global population to exist at First World levels of industrial capacity and material prosperity. And nothing we do to make technology more efficient, or our behaviour less wasteful, will change that fact in the longer term.

Thus, a long-term solution to environmental degradation will necessarily involve not just technological initiatives and changes to societal behaviour, but also a commitment to getting the global population levels down. And this is perhaps the most problematic aspect of the environmental dilemma, involving as it invariably must, difficult ethical issues. But the only way meaningful population decrease can be humanely achieved is through managed processes; that is, if we want to avoid the ghastly agencies of war, famine, and disease in the wake of environmental collapse – or the mechanical mass euthanasia depicted in Soylent Green.

The implications of Harrison’s novel and the film it spawned should be clear to most Australians. Aside from noticeable changes to weather patterns that have seen record dry winters and an unprecedented early start to the bushfire season in south-eastern Australia, there has been much media coverage of the Queensland Government’s decision to dam the Mary Valley, and of the dire warnings contained in the recently released Stern report. Australians are aware, as never before, of the consequences of environmental change – and of the long-term inability of technology alone to ward off the worst effects of global warming.

It now appears that at least some political fingers are starting to get twitchy on the panic button. The only question is whether this twitchiness is derived from a realization that we need to do something, or just reflects the politician’s instinct to bend in the immediate breeze of the vox populi.

Talk to you soon,

BB.

Quote for the Day: In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed. (Ralph Waldo Emmerson)