IN AN ARTICLE I wrote recently on the hidden agendas and political origins of climate change, I argued that 1968 could rightly be considered to be the zeitgeist for elite-led arguments around ‘over-population’.
The Club of Rome for example, considered by John Coleman to be the driving force behind the UN/WEF drive around sustainability, came into being that year. Founded by known advocates of ‘population control’ Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King, the organisation was itself largely funded by that well-known champion of human rights, David Rockefeller. The appearance of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in the same year was not coincidental. Ehrlich’s book, which crossed over from academia to being a mainstream bestseller, was clearly a useful tool through which to amplify the politics of population growth for what was being planned.
Another notable contribution to sustainable development’s year zero was an article written by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, himself another disciple of the ‘there’s too many people on the planet’ club. The Tragedy of the Commons,arguably, provided not only the framework by which the economic rationale for sustainable development emerged blinking into the policy world, but also as a unique insight into the underlying motivations and hidden moral perspectives behind sustainable development. The concept in simple terms describes a (theoretical) situation where individuals, acting independently and rationally according to their self-interest, deplete a shared resource, even though it is detrimental to everyone involved.
If Hardin’s essay provides a fascinating look into the minds of the elites and their ambitions of the time, the implications of this mindset become positively chilling by the time we get to 2020.
The Tragedy of the Commons was written primarily as a philosophical treatise on what would happen if humans continued to have unrestricted, unfettered, and unlimited access to ‘the global commons’. According to Hardin, the global commons constitute the earth’s shared natural resources, the seas and oceans, the atmosphere and, perhaps more hypothetically, Antarctica and outer space. Hardin proposed that these all belong to us all as public properties or public goods, and that we all have a moral responsibility to be their good custodians. He argued, however, that the majority of people are more inclined to maximise their own utility than to assume altruistic or shared beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. People will always have a tendency towards overusing free resources, a trend that will eventually destroy their inherent value altogether. The premise of Hardin’s philosophical views is adapted from Aristotle who himself argued: ‘that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest, and only when he is himself concerned as an individual.’
Elaborating further on the implications of this for ‘stewardship of the planet’, Hardin suggested that it was a folly to simply trust people to self-regulate consumer habits or their impacts on the planet’s biosphere. Hardin warned that an innate tendency for over consumption would eventually incur a shared welfare loss and would eventually lead to an ever-spiralling degradation of the global commons – both as public goods and of themselves. Even if some individuals were able to demonstrate restraint, he reasoned, others would simply consume or take more.
To illustrate his argument, Hardin used the example of cattle herders sharing a common piece of land on which they were each entitled to graze their herd. Unregulated grazing, he argued, would always lead to competition, meaning everyone would seek to either feed their animals more than the fair allocation or add to their herd. According to Hardin, overgrazing would eventually lead to the degradation of this shared land, meaning that the whole group would share the cost of this ‘abuse of rights’. Hardin argued that the initial solution would be to privatise the land so that it could be regulated by a third party.
The technical points raised by Hardin’s article concerning a potential legal framework for ecology and the environment, based around private property and legal regulation, became the core of what later emerged as ‘sustainable development’. Certainly, ‘costing the environment’, quantifying pollution, and ringfencing areas of nature from the general public, have their origins in Hardin’s work. The article also implied the idea of market failure and began a discussion around how to conceptualise ‘environmental externalities’.
It is Hardin’s views on the consequences of over-population which provide particularly interesting insights into the predominant mindset behind this burgeoning movement. Hardin arguably took some of the ideas which were explored (but not openly expressed) by both the Club of Rome and by Ehrlich, and set these out in a more open and more unambiguous way. For Hardin, population growth was never a passive or neutral process, largely because he understood this as an unmitigated increase in the ‘units of selfishness’ that characterise the human condition. Thomas Hobbes had previously expressed a distrust and fear of man’s ‘state of nature’, which Hobbes had believed would inevitably bring about war and conflict without a strong, sovereign government to reign in man’s baser instincts. Sharing a similar pessimism, Hardin believed that man’s innate nature was one of selfishness, individual gratification, and moral vacuousness.
Government policy was a part of problem according to Hardin. The rise of the modern welfare state for example had, he argued, supported and enabled unrestricted family size. This had been informed by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where the idea of the family as the archetypal social unit, offered the choice of family size to citizens themselves. Coinciding with the postwar boom, Hardin argued that this had been an unfortunate coupling (excuse the pun), threatening planetary boundaries and ultimately mankind itself. It is perhaps ironic that birthrates in OECD countries declined by half since Hardin’s article – countries that have of course had the most developed welfare systems
Distrust of the masses amongst the elite, expressed by Hardin and other prominent figures, has been an open secret through the ages. Thomas Malthus was the first to openly state fears around growing population and diminishing resources. Others, such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, were never shy in offering their opinions on this subject either. Boris Johnson followed suit in 2007 with the dramatic statement: ‘whatever it may now be conventional to say, that single biggest challenge is not global warming. That is a secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself. Depending on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year.’
Sustainable development has been sold as a collective environmental ideal for mankind to strive for. Whether it was his intention or not, Hardin flagged up the real motivations of those pushing this now universally embedded agenda: population control. It is the belief that there are too many people on the planet, the majority of whom are selfish, individually motivated, and concerned with satisfying excessive wants and needs that ultimately endanger the planet. The irony of this is that it is the underlying philosophy of sustainable development that, interfering with natural checks and balances, is killing us.
