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Scarcity and Sustainability in Utopia

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Scarcity and Sustainability in Utopia Institute of Advanced Insights Study ScarcityScarcity andand SustainabilitySustainability inin UtopiaUtopia Jonathon Porritt Volume 4 2011 Number 4 ISSN 1756-2074 Institute of Advanced Study Insights About Insights Insights captures the ideas and work-in-progress of the Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Up to twenty distinguished and ‘fast-track’ Fellows reside at the IAS in any academic year. They are world-class scholars who come to Durham to participate in a variety of events around a core inter-disciplinary theme, which changes from year to year. Each theme inspires a new series of Insights, and these are listed in the inside back cover of each issue. These short papers take the form of thought experiments, summaries of research findings, theoretical statements, original reviews, and occasionally more fully worked treatises. Every fellow who visits the IAS is asked to write for this series. The Directors of the IAS – Ash Amin, Colin Bain, Michael O’Neill and Tony Wilkinson – also invite submissions from others involved in the themes, events and activities of the IAS. Insights is edited for the IAS by Michael O’Neill. About the Institute of Advanced Study The Institute of Advanced Study, launched in October 2006 to commemorate Durham University’s 175th Anniversary, is a flagship project reaffirming the value of ideas and the public role of universities. The Institute aims to cultivate new thinking on ideas that might change the world, through unconstrained dialogue between the disciplines as well as interaction between scholars, intellectuals and public figures of world standing from a variety of backgrounds and countries. The Durham IAS is one of only a handful of comparable institutions in the world that incorporates the Sciences, Social Sciences, the Arts and the Humanities. The focal point of the IAS is a programme of work associated with, but not exclusive to, an annual research theme. At the core of this work lies a prestigious Fellowship programme. This programme gathers together scholars, intellectuals and public figures of world standing or world-promise to address topics of major academic or public interest. Their mission is to anticipate the new and re-interpret the old, communicating across and working between disciplinary boundaries. Every year, the Institute invites as many as twenty highly creative individuals to spend up to three months in Durham. They are located in Cosin’s Hall, a magnificent and spacious 18th century mansion which, together with Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle, forms part of Palace Green, dominating the World Heritage Site of Durham Peninsula. During their stay, Fellows engage with departments and colleges, deliver public lectures and seminars, and, above all, join an international community of researchers to address the theme selected for that year. Further details of the IAS and its Fellowship programme can be found at www.durham.ac.uk/ias/fellows Copyright The design and contents of Insights are subject to copyright. Copyright and Reproduction Rights in all submitted contributions remain with the authors, as described in the Author’s Copyright Agreement. Copyright and Reproduction Rights of all other material remain with Insights. Except under the terms of Fair Dealing (UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), the user may not modify, copy, reproduce, retransmit or otherwise distribute the site and its contents (whether text, graphics or original research concepts), without express permission in writing from the Institute. Where the above content is directly or indirectly reproduced in an academic context under the terms of Fair Dealing, this must be acknowledged with the appropriate bibliographical citation. The opinions stated in the Insights papers are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, or the staff and students thereof. Institute of Advanced Study Insights SCARCITY AND SUSTAINABILITY IN UTOPIA For 40 years, environmentalists have strained every sinew to persuade society ‘to change its ways’ to avoid the potentially fearsome consequences of accelerating climate change, resource depletion and pollution. ‘Scarcity’ has been one of the recurring themes of this critique of orthodox models of progress and economic growth: if we go on growing both the number of people and the overall size of the economy, it has been argued throughout that time that the natural systems on which we depend will simply not be able to cope. Whilst hard to argue with from a scientific point of view, the cumulative impact of this alternative world view over forty years has been limited. ‘Business as Usual,’ with a few relative painless environmental trimmings, remains the order of the day. So is it time for environmentalists to try a different tack: to seek to seduce society into ‘changing its ways’ rather than hectoring and dragooning it? Might we perhaps learn from the rich heritage of utopian writing, from Thomas More’s original ‘Utopia’ to Ernest Callenbach’s ‘Ecotopia,’ to develop a very different discourse based on aspiration, quality of life and a fairer, more efficient economy? The lessons are there to be learnt, but does utopian thinking have any part to play in the modern Green Movement? The majority of environmentalists remain suspicious of utopian ‘visioning,’ partly on account of their interpretation of the malign influence of utopian thinking on the events of the twentieth century, and partly (it is suggested) because of a natural predisposition on their part to dystopian mindsets and long-held scepticism about the role of technology in sorting out problems that are perceived to go a lot deeper than ‘the next convenient techno-fix’ would be able to reach. But what is there to lose? With more and more entrepreneurs and wealth- creators aligning their own interests with prospects for a cleantech, sustainable economy, it is argued that the conditions for a fundamentally different approach to environmental advocacy are better now than any time over the last 40 years. obody denies that there is an upper limit to the number of human beings that Planet Earth Nwill be capable of supporting in the future. It might be nine billion, it might be 20 billion, it might be 100 billion. But it is not an infinite number. (It might also be one billion, by the way, or even less.) So you might therefore imagine that encouraging debate about some kind of general principle of ‘an upper limit’ on the number of human beings would be self-evidently sensible and uncontroversial. Not a bit of it. From the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968, we have had 43 years of sustained controversy about the degree to which ‘a limits thesis’ 2 Institute of Advanced Study Insights (as I shall refer to it from now on) is either intellectually robust or useful in terms of influencing the way policy is made and the way people choose to lead their lives. Four years after The Population Bomb, The Club of Rome (a self-appointed group of illustrious environmentalists) commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to carry out some basic modelling looking at human numbers, resource availability and environmental pollution. The resulting ‘Limits to Growth’ report generated a huge controversy throughout the seventies and early eighties. It was instrumental in influencing a large number of people (including myself) to start thinking rather more seriously about the state of the physical environment. There are strong grounds for hypothesising that much of this controversy around the limits thesis can be traced back to the importance of the concept of scarcity in the field of economics – pre-dating more modernist concerns about ecological scarcity. Back in 1932, Lionel Robbins defined economics as ‘the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between given ends and scarce means’ (Robbins, 1932). This established the idea of market-based (or relative) scarcity as the essential tenet of economic thinking, with scarcity (from the French word ‘escarceté’) seen primarily in terms of an insufficiency of supply arising in proportion to the need or demand. As Simon Zadek says: In modern economies, scarcity is presented as ubiquitous, all-encompassing. There are no circumstances, it is argued, where it is possible to free oneself of the condition of scarcity. Scarcity is essentially Reality, and any perception that appears to transcend scarcity is essentially Fiction, the world of the impossible, of Nowhere, of Utopia (Zadek, 1993). From Thomas More onwards (as we will see later), Utopias have indeed set out to articulate a variety of worlds beyond scarcity, where the hopes and dreams of Western civilisations are manifested in people’s more or less contented lives: ‘The majority of utopias presuppose the elimination of the major premise of classical economics, namely scarcity’ (More, 2004). And for most latter-day utopianists (including Saint-Simon, Fourier, Gorz and Marcuse), the relative abundance of such idealised models of social equilibrium would, it was assumed, be generated by socialist models of industrialisation. As we now know, it is predominantly capitalist models of industrialisation that have seen off scarcity for very large numbers of people and, in the process, brought us hard up against some of the biophysical limits that cause contemporary ecologists such deep concern. This process is seen by many to have commenced in the nineteenth century (in an explosion of what has been called emulative consumption), but reached a completely different level of intensity in those ‘never had it so good’ decades after the Second World War. Overcoming scarcity (in proportion to need or demand) became a particularly powerful driver of economic growth in the USA in the 1950s: Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.
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