Letters to the Editor

• They're right, kind of. Sort of. Not really.

  [Read the article: Stop your sobbing]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Yes, nature is a messy, almost ad hoc arrangement where organisms have to contend with both each other and their environment in order to survive. It's also true that a few species lose that contest every so often, and that occasionally whole swaths of earthly life are wiped out by this or that catastrophe. I'm also willing to grant M.M. Nordhaus and Shellenberger that every creature's goal is to 'control' its environment and thereby improve its chances of survival. That, however, is about all they've gotten right.

  What they've managed to ignore is that there are limits to our ability to control our environment. As has been pointed out, this planet has only finite resources and however ingenious we are at stretching their potential, eventually we are going to reach earth's absolute carrying capacity and no amount of innovation is going to get us over that last hurdle. N&S's argument seems to be that as long as we haven't crossed the boundary between a sustainable existence and an unsustainable one (a threshold that I'm not sure we haven't already crossed), we should just keep pushing and, with luck, everything will turn out fine.

  But life at the edge of sustainability is precarious, which brings us to climate change and the contention that there is no 'preferred' climate and that we should just accept the fact that global temperatures are going to change. Within a certain framework, this is a valid point, but one which ignores the fact that we've built our societies to exist in the context of this climate. If that climate changes rapidly, then there is going to be an adjustment of some kind, and it's likely going to be extremely painful. This is where N&S would have benefited from a more careful reading of Diamond's work (particularly the parts about the Greenland Norse). If we're going to live at the limit of what our planet can support given X set of environmental constants, then it only takes a slight negative (by which I mean less human-friendly) deviation from those norms to tip us toward some sort of societal collapse. We wouldn't go extinct, I'm sure, but it would certainly be a setback for all that social and scientific progress that they seem to value so highly.

  That is why it's in our best interest to slow, or less probably, halt global warming: the faster it happens, the less time we'll have to adapt to our new environmental reality, especially if we refuse to moderate or abandon counter-productive ideas about how to manage our relationship with our planet. And the same goes for population management and resource distribution, by the way. And that's really what we need to do: manage our environment, not 'dominate' it or live in 'harmony' with it. It's in our best interest as a species to use our environment in a manner that most benefits us, but without taxing our resources to the limit; we'd do much better to exist somewhere under the sustainability threshold rather than on it. Or, to put it another way, in a world where we no longer have any meaningful natural checks to keep our population from flying hopeless out of balance, we have to be our own checks: if we don't do it consciously, we'll do it as a consequence of our actions, and the latter option is much messier than the former.

  But then again, living within our means is just proof that we haven't fulfilled the biblical injunction to rule over all the earth (as long as we're accusing one another of basing our ideologies on quasi-religious narratives). And let's be honest: if you prevent a disaster from happening, who will know? We haven't much interest in dealing with 'maybes', especially if it means such inconveniences as increased fuel economy standards. As is the case with most critters, we're mainly reactive—rather than try to head off a catastrophe, we'd rather test our evolutionary luck and gamble on our ability to adapt.

  Oh, and part of the reason the developed world seems to take better care of its environment than the developing world is because we're paying all those poor people to destroy their environments in lieu of our own. Right. Diatribe over.

  Permalink Monday, October 8, 2007 11:40 PM