Danny Dorling’s book Population 10 Billion1 has been sitting in the in-tray of the Small Farm Future review department (along with a whole load of other books) for a couple of years now. I’ve been on their case about it, but until now I’ve had nothing from those slackers. Maybe I should introduce performance related pay… On which note, just a shout out for this blog’s seasonal appeal for funds, Wikipedia-style: “if every reader of Small Farm Future donated, er, about £1,000 annually, I could devote myself to it full-time and turn out the reviews a lot faster.” Or maybe I should make a pact with the devil and run ads. What d’ya think? Meantime, donate button is on the right.
Anyway, I have now read Dorling’s book and I want to share a few thoughts about it. They’re not in the form of a comprehensive warts-and-all review – rather, I want to highlight five themes of interest to me that anticipate some future posts, on which I think Dorling has thought-provoking things to say. And here they are:
1. Possibilism and the broken glass
Dorling defines himself as a ‘practical possibilist’ in his orientation to the future, arguing that we need more “stories that sit between those who say that all will be fine, and those who claim that we are doomed” (p.6).
It’s a good opening gambit, except that I think almost everyone occupies this ‘possibilist’ middle ground. Let’s call those who think ‘all will be fine’ in the future the optimists or utopians, and let’s call those who think that all of us are doomed no matter what we do from here the pessimists or dystopians. That leaves a very wide spectrum of opinion between those two poles. And yet we spend way too much time playing status games about our chosen positions on the continuum, castigating others for their excessive optimism or pessimism. I daresay I’ve been guilty of this myself at times. Enough of it. What really matters is debating the underlying models or visions, not sorting out the pecking order of who’s most appropriately optimistic or pessimistic.
For that reason, I’d like to suggest retiring the metaphor of the half empty or half full glass. Besides, why does it always have to be half empty or full? Suppose it was a quarter full, or three-quarters empty? Would we still be debating whether we were full or empty kind of people, or would we get busy trying to do something useful?
Another problem is that, for me at least, the human world seems a pretty dysfunctional place even in the absence of issues like climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss etc. Suppose someone waved a magic ecomodernist wand and vanquished all our environmental problems so that the world could settle into its existing social, political and economic arrangements for the long haul. For me, this would be a profoundly depressing prospect. All that misery, unfairness and anomie! So no, I don’t look at the potential salvation of contemporary civilisation as something to feel ‘optimistic’ about
—CRASH—
Did you just hear the sound of a glass breaking? Me too. But was it a half-full or a half-empty one? Let me tell you this. I – don’t – care.
2. Population growth
Anyway, forget all that. When it comes to population, Dorling says the glass is half-full. Despite all the fears of a spiralling human population swamping the planet, he points out that fertility is falling almost everywhere, often rapidly. Human numbers are still set to rise for some time because of the demographic lags involved, but possibly as early as 2075 (p.38) an absolute decline in human population may start on the basis of current demographic trends without the need to invoke future collapses and catastrophes – the four horsemen, Dorling says, may already have paid their visit.
What interests me most about Dorling’s line of argument here is not the human numbers involved or their likely impact, but the historical demographics of it. Human numbers began to surge around 1850, and stopped surging around 1970. This is the context in which all of us alive today have been formed, but it’s historically unprecedented and it doesn’t look set to continue in the future. Dorling cautions that we need to stop seeing our recent past as some kind of stable norm from which to predict the future. His discussion of why this recent anomaly occurred is interesting, if a bit vague – issues such as the long-term consequences of Europe’s conquest of the Americas, the fossil fuel dividend, the rise of capitalism and concomitantly rising inequality. His discussion of how it’s coming to an end is also frustratingly vague at times – and, dare I say it, over-optimistic – but also interesting in its focus on improving public health, improving social rights, particularly for women, and migration. Let’s just hold those thoughts for a moment…
3. Population and Consumption
Dorling is entertainingly severe on the school of thought that puts population levels and consumption levels jointly in the dock for our present environmental ills. My own illustrative example of his point comes from the following passage, where Herman Daly – rightly feted as a pioneer of ecological or steady-state economics – is taking another writer, Mark Sagoff, to task for asserting that pollution results not from our numbers, but from our lifestyles and rate of consumption:
“The false denial of cause a in order more forcefully to assert cause b is faulty as logic and tiresome as rhetoric. It becomes ludicrous when the effect is caused by multiplying a and b together”2
OK, but what are a and b here? If a x b is total resource use (or pollution) and b is total population, then a must be per capita resource use, which is the same as total resource use divided by total population. So another way of writing Daly’s ‘causal’ equation of a and b is:
Total Resource Use = (Total Resource Use / Population) x Population
So I think Dorling, and Sagoff, are right. Population cancels out. The problem is resource use.
But that’s not quite the end of the story. The conceptual problem surely arises because both rising population and rising resource use are joint determined consequences of a deeper underlying historical trend – which, for shorthand, I’d call capitalism. Call it commercialisation, globalisation or marketization if you prefer. Barring some unprecedented catastrophe, there are going to be a lot of us on the planet for generations to come, and the reason we got to be here is basically because of capitalism/commercialisation etc. But population and resource use are ultimately autonomous variables. So can we maintain our high (if soon to be decreasing) human populations under a different economic regimen with a lower total resource use?
Dorling thinks so and, to his credit, although he occasionally veers towards ecomodernist terrain he’s clear that the answer doesn’t lie in some high tech solutionism which would have 8-10 billion people in the future consuming at US levels without environmental cost. “We who consume most have to consume less”, he writes (p.20). He talks – over-optimistically, in my opinion – about how the ‘developed’ western countries have already reached ‘peak stuff’, but I find his general line of argument interesting. Global population is set to decline, the conditions that prompted its enormous recent surge are no longer operative, and people are tentatively moving into a phase of more dematerialised consumption.
I doubt that on current trends these factors will be enough to stave off some major shocks. But I think they’re complementary in interesting ways to the neo-agrarian or neo-peasant agenda I promote on this blog. One of the main reasons people oppose a small farm or ‘peasant’ future is because the recent peasant past has been pretty grim. That’s partly because governments have deliberately made it so, but we’re emerging from a world of high rural fertility and high rural poverty into a new world of lower fertility based on more health and social rights, a degree of dematerialisation among the wealthiest but also a powerful need for the wealthiest to consume less. To my mind, this points to the need for a new kind of global peasantism based on relatively labour-intensive but relatively low fertility and socially entitled peasant households engaged in high nature value, reasonably remunerated (in cash to some extent, but more importantly in kind) local farming. I’m not saying that it’ll be easily achieved, but it does help identify some big social trends that peasant and agrarian activists can hitch their wagons to, and it puts some clear water between what a peasantism of the future might look like and what some of the peasantisms of the past looked like. Certainly, we can learn from the latter, but reading Dorling underlines for me a point I’ve tried to make before – a small farm future doesn’t necessarily have to look exactly like a small farm past.
However, in order to hang on to the benefits of a low fertility, steady state society we need to retain peace, order and social rights, particularly women’s rights. In other words, we need to retain the kind of liberal public sphere that – another point I’ve made before – various cheerleaders for a post-liberal politics within and without the environmental movement are enthusiastically trying to dismantle at the moment.
Bottom line: more or less whatever happens we’re set to have unprecedentedly high populations for a long time to come, a population level arising from a high consumption capitalist society. But it’s possible that in future there may be a lower consumption, non-capitalist, high population society. Let’s get on it.
4. Migration
I’m planning to write another post about migration soon, but to anticipate a few points by way of Dorling’s analysis, he points out that while much of our attention in the ‘developed’ countries on migration issues focuses on the international movement from poor countries to rich countries, the movement of poor people between poor rural hinterlands and their nearest large cities is and will be of vastly greater demographic importance.
Still, if we do just focus on international migration, Dorling suggests that poor migrants go to where wealth is concentrated, because wealth creates secondary employment markets to service it (note that this isn’t the same as saying that wealth ‘trickles down’ to the poor). Poor migrants from high fertility countries also tend to quickly assume the fertility patterns of the host society – so if global population reduction is a goal, then increased international migration from poor (and typically high fertility) countries to richer, lower fertility countries is a good way to achieve it. But if a rich society does want to reduce in-migration of people from poorer countries, a good way to achieve it is by reducing its inequalities in wealth.
Another issue is the bulging elderly population in many ‘developed’ societies as fertility crashes in the younger generations – an arguably one-off social problem which can be tackled by in-migration of young workers from poorer countries to balance temporary fertility/mortality disparities, which is often the way migration functions.
So some things to chew on there, which I’ll come back to in a later post. But where I’m generally going to go with this is probably fairly obvious – the best and most humane way of reducing in-migration in a ‘developed’ society isn’t by trying to ban it. “When migrants come,” Dorling writes, “times are generally good” (p.256). There are, perhaps, some additional complexities here, but Dorling has a point. After all, there seems to be no clamour in London to stop people migrating there from, say, Cumbria on the grounds that they’ll take jobs from Londoners. That’s not how the job market works. But if we turned to a society structured like neo-peasant Wessex, the migration picture would undoubtedly start to look different.
5. Cities
Dorling’s writing on cities seems a bit conflicted, but let me quote this:
“the worst of poverty is now found in cities, places where people can have literally nothing, not even a scrap of land. It is, perhaps, surprising we do not fear the city and our current demographic transition more” (p.202)
And also this, from Vaclav Smil’s recent book,
“another great uncertainty is the long-term viability of urban living….large parts of many of the world’s largest cities remain epitomes of violence, drug addiction, homelessness, child abandonment, prostitution and squalid living…Cities have been always renewed by migration from villages – but what will happen to the already mostly urban civilization once the villages virtually disappear while the social structure of cities continues to disintegrate?”3
Again, I hope to write more about this soon, and I’d want to question an over-simple ‘city vs. village’ dichotomy, but after spending years wading through endless, skin-deep eco-modernist paeans to the redeeming power of the slum, I find it refreshing to see some popular-academic writings telling a different story.
oOo
And that pretty much wraps up Small Farm Future for 2017. I haven’t made as much progress as I’d have liked in getting to the politics of an agrarian populist society, but I did at least get some groundwork done in outlining what such a society might look like productively and in getting a lot of global history off my chest as a kind of background to the politics. Thanks to those hardy souls who’ve ploughed through all that output. And thanks more generally to everyone who’s read and commented on this site – it’s appreciated. Hopefully, 2018 will provide opportunities to move things on. Though I do have a few side projects to attend to as well, such as building a house. Ah well, it’s good to keep busy. So happy festivities to everyone, whichever way you care to take them, and hopefully we’ll meet here again sometime in January.
Notes
- Dorling, D. 2013. Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It. Constable.
- Daly, H. 1998. ‘Reply to Mark Sagoff’s “Carrying capacity and ecological economics”’ in Crocker, D. and Linden, T. eds. Ethics of Consumption. Rowman & Littlefield, p.55.
- Smil, V. 2017. Energy and Civilization: A History. MIT Press, p.437.
