The Absurdity of Sustainability

Two recent articles in the international press demonstrate the absurdity of the entire "sustainable development" theory. One is an article in the UK's Sunday Times suggesting the United Kingdom

"must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society."

The advocate in this case is a science advisor to Prime Minster Gordon Brown's administration who also thinks

“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

The second article, published in USA Today, notes

... birthrates (are) falling below the levels needed to avoid long-term, and in many instances, short-term, population loss ... Fertility remains high in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is falling there, too, even as infants and children die by the millions. In Sierra Leone, for example, the average woman bears more than five children, but nearly one in six die before reaching age 5 and fewer yet make it to reproductive age. Remaining increases in world population depend critically on reduced mortality in sub-Saharan Africa ... The U.N. projects that world population could begin declining as early 2040.

Those worried about global warming and other environmental threats might view this prospect as an unmitigated good. But lost in most discussions of the subject is the rapid population aging that accompanies declining birthrates ... Under what the U.N. considers the most likely scenario, more than half of all remaining growth comes from a 1.2 billion increase in the number of old people, while the worldwide supply of children will begin falling within 15 years. With fewer workers to support each elder, the world economy might have to run just that much faster, and consume that much more resources, or else living standards will fall. In the USA, where nearly one-fifth of Baby Boomers never had children, the hardship of vanishing retirement savings will be compounded by the strains on both formal and informal care-giving networks caused by the spread of childlessness ... China, with its one-family-one-child policy, is on a similar course, becoming a 4-2-1 society in which each child supports two parents and four grandparents

Where does it end? Demographers once believed that only as countries grew rich would their birthrates decline. And few imagined until recently that birthrates would ever remain below replacement levels indefinitely. To suppose the opposite is to presuppose extinction. Yet we see sub-replacement fertility remaining entrenched among rich countries for more than two generations and now spreading throughout the developing world as well ... As the number of women of reproductive age falls in country after country, world population is acquiring negative momentum and thus could decline even if birthrates eventually turn up. Societies around the globe need to ask why they are engaging in what biologists would surely recognize in any other species as maladaptive behavior leading either to extinction, or dramatic mutation.

Environmental extremists suggest the plants and animals should have dominion over man. They define sustainability as the ability of the Earth to survive, as opposed to man. They view man as the threat and suppose less development, less labor and less wealth would somehow make it all better. Like Malthus they live in a world of supposedly limited resources where fewer people means less sharing and, therefore, more for all. They operate from a profoundly myopic and selfish perspective where sustainability is merely a form of hoarding.

Malthus lived along enough to see the error of his ways but extreme environmentalists never get it. Still, as the USA Today article demonstrates, truth has a way of always outing itself. The reality of a world without growth and without children will slowly descend upon us all whether we accept it or not. There will be no one to work to pay the bills, no one to preserve the endangered species and no one to hear the cries of the old as they are abandoned by a shrinking younger stock unable to care for them all. There will, in short, be no one to sustain mankind, but the Earth, of course, will go on. That will be just fine by the extremists, who worship the physical and deny both the human and the spiritual.

For the rest of us, sustainability is a foolish concept. Man not only has enormous capabilities but has also enriched the Earth by his existence on it. His labor has transformed it and made it habitable. His labor has also created the wealth that is slowly but surely eliminating poverty. He has done so with the only true resource that exists - human labor. An iron rock is only a rock until a man comes along and makes it into steel that becomes a million different products. It is the same labor that learns how to grow more and more food from less and less land and finds cures for diseases. It is the same labor that is now able to reduce storm water flows (and, therefore, pollution) from development to levels below even nature. Man is the resource and his well-being must be the objective. Growth and the further division of labor is what makes everything good possible. Sustainability is a false choice. Man must advance and mankind must grow, not shrink, if we are to enjoy anything resembling the quality of life we now enjoy. Standing still is not an option.