Flat world -> Round world -> Finite world w 7 Billion people

Throughout history, we have come upon ideas that are difficult to integrate.  It’s normal.  Think of when we thought the earth was the center of the Universe.  It was a completely reasonable idea based on our immediate senses.  Or that the world was flat – also a reasonable hypothesis.  Or that the world ended at some edge of some ocean – just bottomed out like the edge of our bed!  Or that the earth was round, a very reasonable hypothesis.  Following this hypothesis, explorers from the flat world were rewarded with gigantic landmasses of unmined natural resources – ‘the new world’.  So while we don’t have to worry about sailing off the face of the earth at some unknown (but infinitely far) edge, we now have to worry about its finite surface area.  The possibilities implicit in finding the new world, also defined some basic physical limits.

And like our predecessors who tried to integrate sensory perception w abstract thought to conceptualize a round earth when for all intents and purposes it was flat, I recognize it is difficult to think about a finite earth when I can buy asparagus in NYC for $2/lb in October.

As a biologist, I often struggle w economic structure (asparagus in October for $2/lb, really?!); economists (generally) think of material resources as just subservient materials to the agency of humans rather than being the very intimate and mineral cycling of what we call humanity.  But Herman Daly is an economist I actually like.  In his “Beyond Growth”, he sees the disgruntled logic when an infinite economic growth paradigm is placed in the context of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  I’m going to quote at length from the first chapter of his book that set up the notion of a steady state economy:

“The growth advocates are left w one basic argument:  resource and environmental limits have not halted growth in the past and therefore will not do so in the future…

Earl Cook offered some insightful criticism of this faith in limitless ingenuity in one of his last articles (1982).  The appeal of the limitless ingenuity argument, he contended, lies not in the scientific grounding of its premises nor the cogency of its logic, but rather in the fact that:

‘the concepts of limits to growth threatens vested interests and power structures; even worse, it threatens value structures in which lives have been invested… Abandonment of belief in perpetual motion was a major step toward recognition of the the true human condition.  It is significant that “mainstream” economists never abandoned that belief and do not accept the relevance to the economic process of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; their position as high priest of the market economy would become untenable did they do so.’

Indeed it would.  Therefore, much ingenuity is devoted to ‘proving’ that ingenuity is unlimited.  Julian Simon, George Gilder, Herman Kahn, and Ronald Reagan trumpeted this theme above all others.  Every technical accomplishment, no matter how ultimately insignificant, is celebrated as one more victory in an infinite series of future victories of technology over nature.  The Greeks called this hubris. “

Daly ends this section by quoting from Cook again “without the enormous amount of work done by nature in concentrating flows of energy and stocks of resources, human ingenuity would be onanistic.  What does it matter that human ingenuity may be limitless, when matter and energy are governed by other rules than is information (Cook, 1982, p194).

So as we enter this magnificent period of the internet of ideas on a materially finite world, I am reminded of a book I read by Barbara Novak titled “Nature and Culture; American Landscape and Painting”.

America has become wealthy for many reasons.  In my mind, entering a pristine landscape and discovering oil catapulted the American dream for the various ex-patriots that arrived in ‘the new world’.  But that dream was predicated on growth by increased access to unspoiled resources.  America was rich in natural resources.  So incredible economic growth was totally possible (in that context).  What I like about Barbara Novak’s book, is that she notes the transition of styles of landscape paintings of the 1800s that I think reflect an important transition in thinking about nature.  There developed a tension between the pristine quality of the untouched land and the opportunity for mobilizing unexploited material wealth.  Artists went on dangerous expeditions to capture and record the virgin landscape and then they documented the transformation of that virgin landscape.  Landscape images ranged from untamed wilds of nature, to wilderness mysteries, to gardens of eden, to utilitarian topographic maps,  to pastoral narratives, to pre-industrial documentation.  What kind of landscape paintings do we have today?

In the 1800s, people on a crammed and overpopulated European continent, moved to an underpopulated and materially rich continent.  Growth! Unless we get to the moon and can grow our carrots there, there is no place to expand this growth paradigm as we currently understand it.  Given that I accept I live on a finite round earth, receiving a finite amount of sunlight daily, yet thriving on a trust fund of fossil energy, striving for a sustainable world is a real concept – an hypothesis that seems worthy of serious thought and meaningful exploration – not to be reduced to cynicism about how people appropriate the word ‘sustainable’.

We are not the center of the universe.  We do not live on a flat planet.  We live on a finite planet.  And on Halloween 2011,  world population is projected to hit 7 billion, each of us with varied demands on this finite surface, but 7 billion, none-the-less.  Trick or Treat.