Overshoot, p.1
Overshoot, page 1
OVERSHOOT
The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
William R. Catton, Jr.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana and Chicago
First Illinois paperback, 1982
© 1980 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Manufactured in the United States of America
P 14 13 12 11 10
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Catton, William Robert, 1926–
Overshoot, the ecological basis of revolutionary change.
Includes index.
1. Human ecology. 2. Social change. I. Title
GF41.C37 303.4 80-13443
ISBN 0-252-00988-6 / 978-0-252-00988-4
Previously available in a cloth edition,
ISBN 0-252-00818-9.
to the memory of my father
Preface
In a future that is as unavoidable as it will be unwelcome, survival and sanity may depend upon our ability to cherish rather than to disparage the concept of human dignity. My purpose in writing this book has been to enhance that ability by providing a clear understanding of the ecological context of human life.
It is axiomatic that we are in no way protected from the consequences of our actions by remaining confused about the ecological meaning of our humanness, ignorant of ecological processes, and unmindful of the ecological aspects of history. I have tried to show the real nature of humanity's predicament not because understanding its nature will enable us to escape it, but because if we do not understand it we shall continue to act and react in ways that make it worse.
End-of-chapter notes are provided to document or clarify points about which readers may feel reasonable skepticism. A list of selected references is also provided at the end of each chapter to satisfy appetites for further knowledge which I trust the chapter content may arouse.
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to my father, for his awareness of the moral significance of the web of life whetted my concern and steadied my thinking. He lived life with fascination from 1895 to 1972—a period of momentous change and splendid but tragic human achievement. I wish it had been possible to discuss the contents of these pages with him; he would have understood, I'm sure, my reasons for writing. This book arose from thoughts engendered by a time of national shame and global troubles, when many Americans sought to work their way back to basic values. I have written with the conviction that my own experience gave me some advantage in comprehending the ecological foundations of our difficulties; my work, my family, the parts of the world I lived in, were such that I did not have to become preoccupied with the special grievances of one group toward another group. Thus I was not prevented from recognizing the similarity between the frustrations felt by each group and those experienced by its supposed adversaries. Moreover, my own exposure to population pressure, a major indicator of the common source of our mounting frustrations, has been sufficiently marginal and intermittent to permit me to see it in relief. Constant exposure to it would have prevented me (as it has prevented so many others) from seeing its real nature. Complete insulation from it would have precluded awareness and concern. Even with my advantageous situation, it took me years to see what I was looking at.
As is always the case, my eventual attainment of insight was immensely assisted by many other minds (including some I have never met in person, as well as many friends). In addition to the authors cited at the ends of the chapters or quoted at the beginnings of the six parts, various influences by the persons mentioned below are gratefully acknowledged.
It was when I sat in on lectures by my former colleague, Fred Campbell, now chairman of the department of sociology at the University of Washington, and engaged him in many conversations, that I came to see the extreme sociological cogency of ecological principles to which I had first begun to be sensitized in a non-academic but most enlightening context—wilderness areas in national parks.
As the ideas I have set forth in this book were coming into focus, I had the benefit of some very stimulating discussions with various individuals in the fields of forest ecology and management of wildland reserves. I should particularly acknowledge C. Frank Brockman, professor emeritus of forestry, and David R. M. Scott, professor of forestry, University of Washington, and a number of national park administrators in New Zealand, especially Mr. P. H. C. Lucas, then Director of National Parks and Reserves, Mr. Gordon Nicholls, Supervisor of National Parks, and Mr. J. H. Taylor, Assistant Supervisor for Interpretation. None of these persons, of course, should be assumed to agree fully with the direction my thought has since taken, or with my conclusions.
The undergraduate and graduate students in my classes in human ecology at universities in New Zealand and in the United States have helped my thinking become clearer by their patient endurance of its maturation, and by their challenging questions and counter-arguments.
Development of my understanding of the ecological paradigm has been enormously aided by the opportunity for unusually congenial and mutually enlightening collaboration with Riley E. Dunlap, associate professor of sociology at Washington State University, in the writing of a series of papers pertaining to environmental sociology.
I am indebted to the following persons for offering suggestions or critical comments on various portions of various versions of the manuscript (and again, there is no implication that any of them wholly concurs with my views): Charles E. Bowerman, professor emeritus of sociology, Washington State University; Robert E. L. Faris, professor emeritus of sociology, University of Washington; Dr. J. A. Gibb, Director, Ecology Division, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Wellington, New Zealand; George A. Knox, professor of zoology, University of Canterbury; Peggy Koopman-Boyden, senior lecturer in sociology, University of Canterbury; William R. Lassey, professor of rural sociology, Washington State University; Gerhard Lenski, professor of sociology, University of North Carolina; Armand L. Mauss, associate professor of sociology, Washington State University; Peter J. McKelvey, professor of forestry, University of Canterbury; J. Milton Yinger, professor of sociology, Oberlin College.
I am also indebted to John M. Wardwell, associate professor of sociology, Washington State University, and to my sons Stephen and Philip, for reading the entire manuscript in semi-final form, commenting critically and extensively, and encouraging me to finish it and publish it.
I would like to thank Ann Lowry Weir for her expert editing and Stewart L. Udall for contributing the Foreword.
Above all, I am abundantly grateful to my wife, Nancy. She not only continued to make life personally rewarding, even with the world in conspicuous and disheartening disarray, but she also read and reread numerous drafts of chapter after chapter. She was enormously helpful to me by her continuing reluctance to accept ideas I could not put aside. She thereby kept me confronted with the tenaciously exuberant predispositions of citizens of a post-exuberant world—the audience I have sought to reach.
Foreword
by Stewart L. Udall
Limitless Expectations
We Americans came out of World War II infatuated with the miracles of science, firm in our faith that the same kinds of minds that had unlocked the secrets of the atom could solve any physical problem, and above all, convinced that the atomic age had solved once and for all any problem of future energy supplies.
A brief generation later, even after the Arab oil embargo had exposed our rapidly growing dependence on imported oil, we clung to the myth of the technological solution. It was called Project Independence—remember? Our scientists, we still fondly imagined, would develop the means to make America self-sufficient in energy (by 1980!).
From today's sober perspective, it may be hard to recall that the idea of unlimited resources, of “free” atomic energy that would eliminate resource shortages anywhere on earth by making it possible ultimately to synthesize whatever was needed, was universally and eagerly accepted by Americans at midcentury. Whatever was theoretically possible seemed technically feasible; just let the engineers get the bugs out. Whatever was technically feasible would ultimately also be economically affordable; because of cheap energy, unlimited economic expansion and global industrialization seemed to be rational goals. All this seemed to provide a conclusive rejoinder to the arguments of “Neo-Malthusian pessimists.”
Belief that the limits to human activity had been or would soon be removed inspired exuberant predictions. We came to expect a flow of goods and machines and technical innovations that would lift standards of living everywhere. The business community believed that if sufficient funds for research and development were forthcoming, there were no limits to what technology could do. The one sure way to have a healthy economy seemed to be through rapid economic growth geared to modes of production which consumed larger and larger amounts of energy.
The first “Atoms for Peace” conference was convened in Geneva as 1955 ended, and bullish experts from the atomic-club countries laid out their blueprints for the expansion of nuclear power.
The first book that sought to provide a road map for the age of super-technology was The Next Hundred Years, prepared in 1957 by the noted geochemist, Dr. Harrison Brown, and some of his Cal Tech colleagues. It was the outgrowth of a series of seminars with executives of thirty of the nation's largest corporations. Impelled by the promise of inexhaustible energy, the authors provided this vision of what they called an emerging “technical-industrial civilization”:< br />
If we are able in the decades ahead to avoid thermonuclear war, and If the present underdeveloped areas of the world are able to carry out successful industrialization programs, we shall approach the time when the world will be completely industrialized. And as we continue along this path we shall process ores of continually lower grade, until we finally sustain ourselves with materials obtained from the rocks of the earth's crust, the gases of the air, and the waters of the seas.
By that time the mining industry as such will long since have disappeared and will have been replaced by vast, integrated multipurpose chemical plants supplied by rock, air, and sea water, from which will flow a multiplicity of products, ranging from fresh water to electric power, liquid fuels and metals.
It was believed that the main obstacle to the attainment of this resource El Dorado was not a shortage of resources (nor the threat of overpopulation), but a lack of enough trained scientists and engineers to build and maintain the technical wonderworks needed by the developing countries.
A further expression of what someone later called “the golden optimism of the 1950s” was contained in the Rockefeller Panel reports published in 1959 and 1960. These studies were prepared with guidance from men like Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, and Arthur Burns, and were treated by the press as unofficial White Papers on the American future. The Rockefeller experts endorsed the super-technology hypothesis in these words: “New technologies, more efficient extraction processes, new uses may open up new worlds. Even now we can discern the outlines of a future in which, through the use of the split atom, our resources of both power and raw materials will be limitless….”
Policy of Aiming Too High
In 1962 a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences completed a report for President Kennedy containing recommendations for a new natural resources policy. This report, in sanguine tones, called for a basic reorientation of the U.S. approach to resources, and asserted that new breakthroughs in science had given mankind the potential to provide “dramatic increases” in energy and food. The breeder reactor was treated as something already accomplished. Mastery of controlled fusion was considered “probable” in a ten-to thirty-year period. The panel counselled the United States to shift away from a philosophy of conserving scarce resources (recommended a decade earlier by the Paley Commission to President Truman) to a policy described as “the wise management of plenty.”
It was a landmark study, and its recommendations were unanimous. It cemented the consensus about technology and implied that if we ran out of petroleum or iron ore—or any other mineral—technology would soon come forth with a better, cheaper substitute. Such findings had a powerful influence on our national leaders and their perceptions. This influence was evident in the ebullient mood—and extravagant aims—of the period we later called the “Soaring ’60s.”
We aimed too high because we relied on the assurances of the technologists that we were living in an age in which there were “no problems, only solutions.” This belief in an omnipotent science shaped efforts and expectations, both in Washington and in the country as a whole.
My Interior Department mirrored the general optimism about technology. One of Interior's principal research efforts in the 1960s was water desalting; we were certain that sooner or later a technical breakthrough would make it feasible to turn the world's deserts into irrigated gardens. The programs of the Interior Department were, however, a mere sideshow. Everyone, it seemed, had an eye-catching act. The physicists and engineers at the Atomic Energy Commission spent hundreds of millions of dollars working on pet “Plowshare” schemes to use atomic explosions to dig harbors, to increase the output of natural gas fields, and to prepare for the excavation of a new Panama Canal. Aerospace engineers and Pentagon weapons managers offered to demonstrate how their systems analysis method could be used to solve the problems of the cities.
But the high-wire performance in the tent of big technology was the Apollo program. Each successful flight was watched by a vast audience, and each exploit seemed to certify that American technology was all-powerful. In restrospect, we can already see that these flights became more than brilliant exhibitions of engineering. They were voyages of the imagination, voyages which led us on a joy ride of extravagant expectations.
It is easy to fix the exact date when our euphoria reached a zenith. It was the July week in 1969 when the astronauts walked on the moon. We celebrated this triumph with a mixture of awe and self-congratulation. President Nixon proclaimed that it was “the greatest week since the creation of the earth.” A NASA official opined that the feat demonstrated we were “masters of the universe.” “This proves that we can do whatever we decide to do,” Americans concluded from this climax event.
But the 1970s were not so hospitable to big technology, or to the proponents of the mind-of-man doctrine. Indeed, they were a decade of disillusionment, of broken promises and unexpected developments. The Vietnam outcome was a setback to those who assumed that technical superiority in weapons would ensure victory over an agrarian nation. The reappearance of famines in Africa and Asia reminded us that science had not yet found ways to feed a fast-growing world. The oil embargo and the natural gas shortage shocked us into realizing that we still had no substitutes for our dwindling natural reserves. It was a symptom of the general disillusionment that the prideful, “We can do whatever we decide to do” of 1969 was replaced with the querulous lament, “But if we could put men on the moon, why can't we…?”
These developments suggest that a major reorientation is necessary if we are to cope with an energy predicament which threatens to cripple our country. If the atomic age now appears to have been an age of overestimation, then it is vital that we put technology in perspective and gain a better understanding of its strengths, and its limits. This will entail a reassessment of the contributions of technology—and of cheap petroleum—to postwar progress. Such an inquiry might challenge, for example, the claim that the Green Revolution is a monumental triumph of science and technology. How much of our farm productivity increase has been due to science, and how much to cheap oil, superior U.S. soils, and the beneficient weather of recent years?
It is undeniable that scientific advances in agronomy, in plant genetics, in weed and pest control, and in new insights about the applications of fertilizers and the mechanization of farming have added substantially to agricultural output. But petroleum that was deceptively cheap has played a major role in nurturing this illusion of perpetually expandable abundance. It has supplied fuel for water pumps and processing plants and field machines, and it has served as low-cost raw material for fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. Studies have already shown that the food and fiber industry is the single largest user of energy in this country, so we should abandon the pretense that our success in farming is solely an achievement of science and technology.
It is equally instructive to take a fresh look at transportation, another sector supposedly the scene of engineering's greatest achievements. Again, the available evidence suggests that the contributions of technology have been overstated, while the role of cheap oil has been understated. Beginning with Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, technical mastery has been part of the American achievement in transportation. There have been remarkable accomplishments in the design and manufacturing of autos, trucks, airplanes, and rockets. But how much of this would have been possible if the United States had not been an oil-rich country? Could we have created huge, sprawling cities and an auto-centered transportation system if we had not been lavishly endowed with low-cost fuel?
It was not just the advances in pipeline technology that made it possible for people in New York and New Jersey to burn Texas gas in their homes; it was a one-time abundance of natural gas. Nor was it just the skill of aerospace engineers which allowed our air transport to flourish; dirt-cheap petroleum made the whole thing “fly.”
Return from an Ego Trip
America has preened itself for three decades on the wizardry of its technologists. All the evidence suggests that we have consistently exaggerated the contributions of technological genius and underestimated the contributions of natural resources.
