Malthus' Revenge

I wrote this six years ago. Unfortunately, I think is still relevant. Where's the eneergy among the great majority of humans?

Malthus’ Revenge

Dr. D. Michael Shafer, Director, Warm Heart Foundation, A.Phrao, Chiang Mai

As a young man, Thomas Malthus was my model of the guy who “didn’t get it.” Malthus pre-figured the Club of Rome, the doomsayers who warned that world is running out of oil and else. For me, Malthus modeled the man who got past trends right but failed to account for our creative capacity to use technology to escape the fatal nooses that he and others like him imagined tightening about our necks.

I believed this until I realized that Malthus has been right all along and that climate change is his revenge.

A bit of history for those of you who need a refresher. Malthus was a late 18th century English gentleman minister who hobnobbed with the likes of David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau. He was also a great thinker and writer, best known today for his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, a work long discussed and until recently considered falsified by history.

Malthus’ principle of population was simple, powerful and grounded in data. He observed that historically the food supply on average grew only slowly but tended to grow substantially in periods of prolonged good weather and then shrink dramatically when rainfall or temperature declined. Human population, he noted, grew exponentially when provided with food and the new population then lived on past the end of the period of better than average food supply growth. The inevitable result, he argued, is a boom-and-bust cycle of population above and below the sustainable food production capacity – the carrying capacity of the land. Human population starts small, enjoys abundant food, grows fast, exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, suffers devastating starvation and disease, and dies back to less than the land can support, and so on.

Malthus’ argument, like that of his Scottish contemporary far to the north, Adam Smith, was moral, but pessimistic. Where Smith saw the invisible hand of the market converting the inherent greed of humans into a competition that drove innovation, optimal allocation of capital, minimum prices and maximum public consumption, Malthus saw ultimate disaster. For Malthus, humans’ inability to live within their means doomed them to over-reproduce to the point that only a population implosion would “save” life on earth. It is a fine irony of history that the dour Scot and the gentleman curate from Surrey should end up with such unexpectedly different worldviews.

Using historical population data, Malthus had a strong case – until the very time in which he wrote Principle. As Malthus published his book in 1798, in northern England we find the first evidence of sustained “positive” population growth beyond Malthusian constraints.

Neither the timing nor the location are coincidental; they mark the first sustained application of mechanical power to human economy. Here was the birth of King Coal, the Industrial Revolution, and modernity. Here apparently was the ultimate escape from the Malthusian bind that made possible today’s world of 7+ billion inhabitants – virtually all of them better off than the fewer than one billion people of Malthus’ day.

Like generations before me, I grew up believing that Malthus was just a quaint reminder of the days before tractors, fertilizer, railroads and refrigerated containers.

That is, until the day I woke up to realize that climate change was going to knock human population on earth back to a fraction of its current level, back to a new carrying capacity we cannot even guess at.

Then I realized that climate change is Malthus’ revenge.

Details aside, Malthus’ core insight is as relevant today as it was in 1798. All systems have their limits, their carrying capacities. Exceed these limits and the system changes fundamentally. Malthus focused specifically on the carrying capacity of the earth understood as how large a human population it could support given current technology and available land, which at the time were largely static. What interested him was the dynamic relationship between fixed system and variable human population. In this dynamic, he observed that once human population exceeded system limits, it crashed.

Observing the changes wrought by King Coal and its successors, Malthus might observe that there is a qualitative difference between expanding the “earth system” as technology has done, and rendering it infinite, which it has not.

If the Industrial Revolution and subsequent modernity merely expanded the system, then the impending climate change disaster should not surprise us any more than it would Malthus. We escaped the earthly bonds of hand-tilled soil to build an unimaginably big human population by tapping the deep carbon reserves of the earth. In doing so, we have exhausted a resource that in Malthus’ day we did not even know was a resource, the atmosphere. Today, we know that it is not only a resource, but that it is both finite and intimately bound to every other earthly resource: soil, water, and sea. The technology of modernity did not free us from the kind of resource constraint Malthus pointed to; rather, it increased to pool of resources to be tapped and so the carrying capacity of the earth. Through the interconnection of atmosphere and all our earthly resources, however, our system has now reached capacity. Indeed, many argue that we have exceeded system limits and our crash is imminent. Here we are facing the fact that Malthus was right all along: access to more resources simply means more people will need to die to bring the world back into balance.

Or perhaps, despite it all, you remain an optimist, one might say, a humanist. You may believe that while human ingenuity got us into this mess, human ingenuity can get us out again. You may believe that just as the carbon-spewing Industrial Revolution has permitted all the good stuff we enjoy and all that excess population; too, human ingenuity may find a way to live carbon neutral and suck all that accumulated carbon out of the atmosphere before Malthus extracts his revenge.

Most of the rest of you can only hope that the optimists are right, although I am afraid that the word “optimist” always puts me in mind of an old Soviet joke about the guy who says to his friend, “I can’t afford to be an optimist anymore. Optimists say, ‘things could always be worse’ – and they always are!”

Me? I’m almost 70. I’m not likely to be around, to paraphrase Robert Frost, “to watch your cities fill up with water.” You young folks, however, might want to kick it into gear.