The natural limits of technological innovation

Technology In Society 20 (1998) 141–156

The natural limits of technological innovation M. Clow* St Thomas University, Department of Sociology, Fredericton, N.B., Canada E3B 5G3

Abstract Technological innovation does not create new human capabilities and production processes ex nihlio. It only finds new ways to tap into and harness existing natural processes and energy flows and directing them to human ends. Our ability to manipulate natural processes are doubly constrained: (1) by the attainable efficiencies of our devices with which we manipulate natural processes and (2) by the characteristics of the natural processes with which our appropriation of nature interferes. We have not understood the natural limits to technological innovation or accepted their consequences. Exponential economic growth has been possible only by greater and greater appropriations of the natural processes of the Earth’s biosphere. Increasing appropriation of the biosphere has caused increasing damage and disruption to the very natural systems upon whose continued operation we depend. We have not counted and have usually sought to deny, the rising negative feedback produced by technological innovation in service of economic expansion. The degradation of these natural systems signals we have already exceed the limits of sustainable levels of demand for resources and waste absorption capacity. That we have not taken appropriate action to curb increasing environmental degradation signals we have systematically overestimated our technological achievements, mystified how we have produced them, ignored their limitations, and failed to reckon their rising cost accurately.  1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The conventional wisdom in our society is that we are, or will be, masters of the natural world, a species limited only by its own intellect and scientific understanding. * Tel: + 1-506-452-0457; Fax: + 1-506-450-9615; E-mail: [email protected] 0160-791X/98/$19.00  1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 0 7 9 1 X ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 0 5 - 0

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Both the liberal and Marxist traditions are in agreement on this thesis,1 a rare consensus that forms the basis of popular belief in the sustainability of material progress in the face of increasing environmental problems. An oppositional current of thought, strongest among the “limits to growth” stream within environmentalism, rejects the expectation that our species will be able to achieve freedom (or is already free) from natural constraints. The key question in this debate is the ability or inability of technological innovation to provide the means of sustaining economic expansion while overcoming the deleterious effects of those economic activities on the natural environment. Another way of asking the question is: Are there natural limits to technological innovation? This paper deals with the debate by discussing the nature of the invention process we call technological innovation, and then assesses the limitations on human possibilities imposed by the nature of technological innovation itself.

2. Contending perspectives on technological innovation and society’s relationship to the natural environment Traditionally, nature has been perceived as a body of resources and natural forces which can be channeled and reshaped by science and technology to provide for what liberals label continuous and unlimited “economic growth”, and Marxists the “development of the forces of production”.2 Technology, it is asserted, gives humans an ability to overcome any apparent natural constraints on production, including those arising from environmental degradation. Neither widespread negative conse-

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Within modern liberalism the explanation of current social organization and social change are based on the notions of continual “modernization” and “development”. This process is understood as achieving a self-sustaining dynamic during the Industrial Revolution, when the right combination of expanding markets and technological innovation finally coincided, to allow us to escape the stagnation of the Middle Ages. Liberalism pictures our society as marked by the institutional capacity to overcome any technological, natural, or organizational limitation on economic expansion and increasing affluence. Our societal arrangements facilitate material progress; new ones will evolve to facilitate future progress. As fiercely critical as Marx was of capitalism and liberal socioeconomic thinking, he was in wholehearted agreement with liberal thinkers on the central importance of progress. Marx openly identified increasing abundance and power to appropriate nature as the natural goal of humanity and the key to continuing general human improvement (see Ref. [1]). Capitalist industrialization was a breakthrough in the social development of humanity because it created unprecedented expansion of the productive capacity of mankind and (allegedly) transformed our relationship with nature [2]. Under socialism and communism, Marx expected the elimination of class conflict to remove a brake on society’s efforts to create more rapid technological innovation and economic expansion, as well as spread their benefits to all of society. Marxist thought has seen the social organization of work and the state of technological development as the major factors limiting the production of wealth. Most Marxists believe the future holds, and will be shaped by, the expansion of the forces of production. (For a recent defense of this argument, see Ref. [3]). 2 The phrase “forces of production” refers to the available technology, the organizational abilities of society, the skills and discipline of the workforce, the wealth available for investment and the means of production. The “social relations of production” refer to the social relationships which tie producers to the work process, for example, slavery or employment for wages.

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quences from economic activity nor limits to economic growth and increasing control over nature were foreseen. But by the late 1960s it became clear that economic activity was causing damage to the Earth, damage that was affecting human health and economic activities. For economic growth to continue, we would have to curb the most damaging excesses of man’s degradation of the environment. The result was the emergence of a new version of conventional wisdom, “environmental management” [4], which assumed that reckless exploitation of renewable resources and “dirty” technology were responsible for the disruption of the global environment. This new wisdom argued that environmental measures were necessary but economic growth could be sustained indefinitely with proper management of renewable resources, pollution controls, and cleaner and more efficient production technologies [5]. Today this view is best known as the “sustainable development” formula presented by the United Nation’s 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future [5]. This report predicted that better management of the world’s environment would produce more renewable resources from the land and sea. It also predicted that technological innovation would improve efficiency in the use and reuse of energy and materials and reduce pollution. Reasoning that there would then be no resource shortages or pollution buildup, the report claimed that the way was clear for indefinite economic expansion if business, governments and the public cooperate to take the necessary measures to sustain development [6]. While sustainable development is viewed by some as a radical response to growing environmental disruption, it is actually an attempt to specify the technological and resource management measures necessary and sufficient to sustain economic growth, not an effort to challenge the core assumptions of the traditional “man over nature” perspective. Indeed, the radical response to environmental problems is the “limits to growth” perspective [7–11], which argues that there are ecological limits to the scale and kinds of economic activities in which humans can engage. It argues that mere commitments to minimize the environmental impact of particular development projects, or even of economic expansion in general, will not be enough to avoid a spiral of ecological degradation. Society must pull back within the natural limits to the amount of renewable resources that can be drawn out of the Earth, and to the kind and volume of wastes the environment can tolerate. Anything less will cause further degradation that will increasingly impair Earth’s ability to reproduce “renewable” resources and “naturally recycle” wastes. According to the “limits to growth” perspective, ecological constraints will inevitably limit the size of economic activity and the kinds of technologies we can employ.

3. Demystifying technological innovation To assess the assertion that our human capacity for technological innovation makes us so “special” we are no longer constrained by nature but have become (or at least are becoming) its master, we need to move beyond a magical view of technology. Faith in a technological ability to overcome natural limits does not make it so. We

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must first determine what technological innovation is, how it works, and how it has contributed to our productive abilities as a society. In traditional thinking, technology is not only artificial, the product of hand and brain, but something that enables us to exist outside the envelope of nature. But this is only superficially true. While technology is indeed invented, not discovered, technology does not create new human capacities and production processes ex nihlio. Technological innovation is but a process of finding ways to tap into and harness existing natural processes and energy flows and direct them for human ends.3 What was found in the first and subsequent industrial revolutions were ways to tap into and harness more natural processes and energy flows, often ones invisible to the unaided eye. But there is no transcending the natural world in any of this. On the contrary, the exponential expansion of production has only been possible by greater and greater intrusion into, and dependence on, the normal operations of nature, particularly the normal operations of the biosphere [12–14]. The biosphere is an unfathomably complex network of plant and animal communities, called habitats, and the non-living cycles of the air, water and land that connect and sustain them [12–14]. We depend on the biosphere not only to reproduce the conditions necessary for human life,4 but those necessary for economic activity. Economic activity is simply the process in which human work transforms “resources”

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Several familiar examples of technological innovations illustrate this fact. Radio, television, microwaves, and radar all represent results of the discovery of electromagnetism as a property of the physical world, and our invention of ways to modulate, transmit, and detect electromagnetic radiation. Computers use high-speed electronic switches to perform the binary logic operations worked out in Boolean algebra. The entire automotive industry is built on harnessing the energy in expanding gas produced by the combustion of volatile hydrocarbons to move pistons and turn wheels. Aircraft take advantage of Bernouli’s paradox: wings are shaped so that the air must move more quickly over the top of the wing than the underside, and as a result the pressure in the airflow below the wing is greater than that in the airflow above the wing. With enough wing and pressure differential, the whole machine will lift off the ground. Hydro-electricity converts the energy of falling water into another form by providing energy to spin a coil of wire in the field of a magnet. Pre-industrial technologies are in principal no different: the production of alcohol is the result of harnessing the ability of certain microorganisms to excrete alcohol; animal-drawn vehicles harnessed the muscle power of horses, oxen or dogs. In agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture increasingly sophisticated ways have been found to modify habitats and divert more of the biomass of living plants and animals into our production system. We have done the same to more and more of the materials and energy flows of Earth’s air, water, and soil cycles. We have found ways to harness more exotic physical, chemical and biological processes to produce such artificial materials as plastics, petrochemical based products, modified life-forms and electronic apparatus. We found ways to exploit exotic energy sources into fuel systems of production—fossil fuels, nuclear fission, solar electric. 4 It is the biosphere that creates the conditions for human life. Those conditions are air, water, food, livable climate and shelter. Breathable air, i.e. with sufficient oxygen and low quantities of carbon dioxide, is a creation of the biosphere’s green plants. Drinking water is the product of the biosphere’s complex hydrological cycle. Plants and animals are the only source of food for our bodies. Climate is the complex outcome of the operation of the biosphere’s atmosphere and oceanic systems. Shelter is heavily dependent on plant and animal products as well as materials from the outer layer of the Earth’s crust.

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into things society either needs or wants.5 The materials, energy sources, and life processes produced and reproduced by the biosphere in the course of its own normal operations are what we appropriate as “renewable resources”.6 And we rely on the biosphere to absorb our wastes: to recycle biodegradable wastes back into the elements of the biosphere, while harmlessly disposing of the non-biodegradable materials we drew out of the Earth’s crust or created in our factories. It is the biosphere as a whole that produces the plants, animals, air, water, and energy we use as renewable resources.7 While we may talk as if we depend on the regrowth of a particular species like spruce or haddock, or on “the river” or the “rainfall”, we depend not just on the pieces of the biosphere we need in the immediate instance of production, but on the normal operation of the whole global system that produces and reproduces the elements upon which we depend for particular economic processes.8 Environmental problems are not simply a long list of unrelated eyesores or threats to human health; they are human disruptions of the natural operations of the biosphere [15–18]. They occur when more wastes are created than the environment can naturally reprocess, when wastes are of a kind the environment cannot tolerate, when resources are extracted from the environment faster than they can be regrown, and when habitats such as marshes, estuaries, and forests are damaged or destroyed. The number and variety of ecological disruptions are a function of the manifold human appropriations of nature in our economic activities, and of the complexity and interconnectedness of the biosphere in which we are intruding. These disruptions imperil the very basis of human life and of economic activity. As habitats are poisoned by pollution, crippled by over-harvesting, or simply wiped out to accommodate urban and industrial expansion, the ability of habitats to reproduce renewable resources and process wastes is impaired or destroyed. Renewable resources are only renewed if the habitats of the planet operate; only if the ocean, atmosphere, and other physical and chemical cycles operate; and only if the wastes of our production do not poison habitats and are recycled back into the elements of the biosphere. Feedback effects of environmental degradation onto the economy are becoming increasingly marked.9 5 Service-sector economic activities need not be treated in a different fashion than goods production, for our purposes. While service-sector activities may be less energy- and materials-intensive and produce only information, medical attention, amusement or other “intangibles” as products, they also involve the throughput of material and energy into wastes. The energy and materials consumed in the production of services comes from the same three sources of resources, and the waste energy and waste matter produced similarly ends up in the biosphere. 6 The plants, animals, the air, water, and soil which are, or are what produces, renewable resources, are constituent elements of the biosphere which are renewed by the normal processes of the global ecosystem. 7 The only other source of renewable resources is solar energy, which also powers the biosphere. 8 It is the biosphere as a whole which produces the plants, animals, air, water, and energy we call “renewable resources”. The plants and animals of each community, or habitat, can survive only because the habitats are themselves connected and supported by the air, water, and soil cycles of the Earth. 9 Over-fishing and ocean pollution have combined to cause dramatic falls in catches. Over-harvesting of forests is impairing the ability of forest habitats to regrow, producing present and emerging wood shortages. The practice of high-intensity, single-crop agriculture leads to the destruction of soil productivity, falling food quality, and widespread pollution. Global warming, acid rain, and holes in the

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What the spiral of environmental problems and their negative feedback on the economy have shown is that the greater the scale and complexity of our economic activity, the greater our dependence on the productive capacity of the biosphere. This is an odd relationship to characterize as a “transcendence” of nature.

4. Technical requirements for sustaining economic expansion in the face of environmental disruption Both Brundtland’s notion of “sustainable development” and the “limits to growth” perspective agree that environmental problems arise from the disruption of the biosphere’s processes. They agree that only a healthy biosphere can supply the renewable resources and the waste absorption capacity necessary for continued large-scale economic activity. They both agree that as habitats are poisoned by pollution, crippled by over-harvesting, or simply wiped out to accommodate urban and industrial expansion, the ability of habitats to reproduce renewable resources and to process wastes is impaired or destroyed. The contest between these two perspectives can be boiled down to one fundamental disagreement: whether or not technological innovation and resource management can prevent the spiral toward ecological exhaustion [19] in a growing economy. Can efforts to “get more from less”, generate “cleaner technology” and create “wiser” resource management prevent further degradation of the biosphere as production rises? On this same point hangs the question of limits or constraints on the vaunted unlimited power of human technological innovation and creativity. The full measure of the efforts required to sustain economic expansion without wrecking what remains of the biosphere is seldom appreciated or explicitly theorized. I would propose that in order to sustain economic growth for a period of time without further ecological degradation, one must engage in a properly balanced combination of the following six sets of tasks, as outlined in Table 1. These measures to sustain economic growth through technological innovation are designed to do two basic things. On the one hand they are designed to increase efficiencies in the use of energy and materials in industrial processes: to produce more durable products with less waste, wastes that are recycled more efficiently or disposed of with less degradation to the environment. On the other hand, these measures are designed to stimulate both natural habitats and ocean, forest, and field “agricultures” to produce more of the plants and animals we want, without increasingly disrupting these natural and agricultural habitats. To continue economic growth indefinitely, this entire range of technological innovations has to continue on a coordinated and indefinite basis. If not, economic expansion will require more ecological demand [20] and more ecological disruption, and

ozone layer will have dramatic effects on agriculture, forests, and ocean life. Environmental degradation reduces the production of potentially renewable resources and shrinks the natural effluent reprocessing capacity of the biosphere.

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Table 1 Tasks for sustaining economic growth 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Somehow get more materials and energy from the biosphere, the sun, and the Earth’s crust without increasing the disruption of the biosphere in the course of these increased resource extraction activities Somehow get more useful work from a given flow of energy and similarly waste less materials in the production process Somehow produce more durable products (which need to be replaced less often) and make them easier to reuse, rebuild, and recycle Somehow produce products while generating less waste, with no waste that cannot be recycled or returned safely to the biosphere; those wastes being reclaimed must be easy to reuse or recycle Somehow reuse more waste energy, recycle more industrial waste, and recycle more thrownaway or junked products, without increasing energy and material use in the process Somehow dispose of wastes in the biosphere in forms, locations, and quantities that can be returned to the natural flow of such materials and energy without further disruption of the habitats and cycles of the biosphere

one quickly runs into limitations on production arising from the inability of the Earth to supply that rising demand for resources and waste absorption. 5. There is no perpetual motion Once put in this form, the problem with hoping to sustain economic growth indefinitely through technological innovation is relatively transparent. For unfortunately, technological innovation is not magic. Magic is what is required to accomplish what the six tasks require: to conjure up ever more product from the same amount of materials, ever more effort from the same quantity of energy, ever more renewable resources from the Earth, ever less wastes from industrial processes, and wastes ever more integrated into the natural flows of energy and materials in the biosphere. There is no such thing as perpetual motion. And there is no such thing as indefinite improvement in technological efficiency or indefinite ability to tailor ecosystems to deliver more resources or absorb and recycle more wastes. As we have already noted, technologies are simply the ways humans have found to tap into natural processes and flows of energy, and harness them to our work efforts. The efficiency of all our devices and processes are restricted, in the last analysis, by the laws of thermodynamics [21,22]. All technologies run out of possibilities for improvement. We cannot get more and more from less and less, or produce less and less waste as production increases.10 Nor can we plan on the suppo10 Tasks 2–5 represent efforts at “getting ever more from less” in all areas of production. Unfortunately, the efficiency of our devices and processes are not indefinitely improvable. The efficiency of all our devices and processes is restricted, in the last analysis, by the laws of thermodynamics [21,22]. These well-established principles tell us there is a limit to how much of a flow of energy can be tapped and turned into useful effort for our purposes. Similarly, there are limits to the efficiency of our use of materials. All technologies run out of possibilities for improvement. In practice our machines, devices and industrial processes seldom approach anything like their theoretical limits of efficiency because of

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sition that new forces of nature are awaiting discovery and exploitation to answer our problems. Even if new forces do exist, our means to harness them will also have limits, and the consequences of harnessing them will involve further ecological demand, whether for renewable resources or for the biosphere as a waste sink.11 It is also not reasonable to believe it is possible to increasingly reduce waste creation at higher and higher levels of production, or to make wastes more and more compatible in kind and quantity with natural flows of materials in the biosphere as we increase levels of production.12 Neither can technological innovation and the wise management of resources induce nature to indefinitely produce more and more renewable resources.13 Natural habitats collapse from over-harvesting (consider the case of the Atlantic cod stocks). Artificial “cultured habitats” (the artificial ecosystems of agriculture, aquaculture, or forest plantations), when pushed for greater yields, soon become dependent on larger and larger quantities of fertilizers, pesticides, and other inputs to produce lower and the exponentially increasing cost of developing and utilizing what are only marginally more efficient processes and machinery. 11 Even if new forces of nature are discovered, greater efforts made possible by new forces would eventually also be limited by the inherent inefficiencies of our means to harness them. Bear in mind that improvement in all six tasks have to be synchronized and coordinated to keep ecological demand within the envelope of the biosphere’s capacity to sustain. Big leaps forward in capacity in one area, energy production for instance, would be no help if matching gains were not made in the other areas of technological innovation. Indeed, “technological optimists” do not seem to have seriously considered the ecological consequences of trying to harness any as-yet-undiscovered natural forces. In the wake of our unhappy dalliance with nuclear fission, we must ask the ecological consequences of trying to harness natural process that may someday be found. Harnessing new and more fundamental forces of nature is likely to produce more, not less, intrusion into the processes of the biosphere and thus more problems, not solutions to existing ones. There is no technological deus ex machina to save us from the limits of ecological demand which only the biosphere of our planet can provide. 12 Task 6 represents the requirement that, if economic growth is to continue indefinitely, wastes from our economic activities must become increasingly compatible in volume, location, and composition with the natural flows of energy and materials to which they are added. Unfortunately, problems arise here as well. It will be a task of exponentially increasing difficulty to more and more closely match biodegradable wastes with the natural flows of materials in the biosphere. But more difficult still to solve is the basic problem that the wastes produced by many modern industries—notably nuclear power, the petrochemical industry, and the metal industries—are simply incompatible with the health of living things. Task 6 requires that industries with technologies which cannot be made compatible at any scale with the environment’s ability to handle their wastes be shed entirely from the inventory of society’s productive forces. In some cases it may be possible to operate some hazardous technologies on a small scale, by operating effective closed-cycle production systems, recycling, and toxic-waste destruction measures in combination, and if damage caused by inevitable releases will not bioaccumulate. But there is no way to operate hazardous processes in a way that would allow the ever-greater scale of their use. 13 The resource gathering activities of society are parasitic upon the natural processes of the biosphere. Plants and animals consumed by the economy, and all the materials and energy in the air, water and soil cycles appropriated by the economy, are being pulled out of their role in the normal operations of the biosphere. As in any parasitic behavior, too much appropriation from the host so interferes with its processes that it cannot maintain itself. There are limits to the renewable resources we can demand from Earth. In harvesting wild plants and animals from land and sea our activities, if they are to be sustained over the longer term, are constrained by the need to maintain the stability and diversity of the whole habitat which produces them.

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lower yields before they too break down.14 With regard to the supply of non-renewable resources from the Earth’s crust, the extraction of materials from the Earth often destroys overlying habitats and is associated with massive pollution of the biosphere in mining and refining. We therefore cannot reasonably expect to provide ourselves a growing supply of them either, without increasing environmental disruption. 14 Agriculture is a way of forcing nature to produce plants and animals we want as food and industrial raw materials in greater and more concentrated quantities, and often in other locations, than they naturally occur in the biosphere. There are six steps involved in even the most sophisticated modern agricultural systems:

1. selecting desired plants and animals from the biosphere. We choose to grow wheat, or raise cattle. Modern science allows us to cross-breed, hybridize, and genetically alter plants and animals, but we are still dependent on the raw materials provided by the biosphere’s gene pool; 2. destroying the original ecosystem where we wish to farm. We cut down the forest, drain the marsh, or plough up the grasslands that occur naturally. 3. creating our artificial agricultural ecosystem. We implant the plants and animals we have selected into what remains of the original ecosystem of the land, i.e. the soil, hydrology, insects and microorganisms that are needed to create the conditions necessary for the growth of our selected plants and animals; 4. artificially, and temporarily stimulating the fertility of the land. We enhance the agricultural ecosystem’s ability to support the growth of our chosen plants and animals through fertilization, irrigation, and other measures; 5. fighting an ongoing battle with nature’s tendency to replace our artificial ecosystem with a more diverse one. We (usually chemically) attack “weeds”, undesired insects, and other “pests” that either already existed on the agricultural site or that invade the farm from surrounding habitats. If unfettered, nature would return the farm to a more diverse state that would produce less crop; 6. harvesting. We kill and remove from the farm habitat the plants and animals we desire, removing much of the organic matter off-site, and disturbing the soil and the non-crop elements of our agricultural ecosystem. The higher the output one wishes from an agricultural activity the more intensively one must pursue some or all of these steps in the agricultural process: try to modify plant and animals to “improve” them for our purposes; destroy more of the world’s habitats for farmland; stimulate more growth with “better” fertilizers; and suppress competing plants and animals more vigorously. “Monocultures”, fields of a single crop (with their supporting worms, insects, microbes, etc.), drain the available supply of the nutrients the crop requires from the soil. High-intensity petrochemical fertilizers poison much of the necessary micro-ecosystem in the soil, while stimulating the growth not only of the crop but of the “weeds”. Monocultures are ideal breeding grounds for plants and animals that eat the crop, while the seeds of other plants find rapid growing conditions in the field. High doses of pesticides and herbicides cause damage off farm, and create “super pests” and “superweeds” immune to these poisons. They expose rural people to dangerous substances and contaminate food with residues. The soil and the crop varieties created by integrated multinational seed companies to match their fertilizers and biocides become increasingly dependent on larger and larger chemical inputs to survive and sustain production. Add in the abuse of heavy machinery and large-scale soil turnover on the land, and one creates ideal conditions for wind and water erosion. This kind of agriculture steadily reduces the productive capacity of the soil, the ecological basis of farming. Many similar problems have developed in attempts to expand output in animal husbandry. Large-scale animal husbandry consumes a huge amount of feed per pound of meat and is responsible for the destruction of rain forests for rangeland and the degradation of agricultural land where grain and corn fed to animals are grown. Raising large numbers of animals together create ideal conditions for diseases and pests. Concerns over the effects on human health of the use of growth hormones and antibiotics in meat animals has brought such problems into public view.

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The whole idea of “sustainable growth”15 is therefore a mere will-o’-the-wisp. Measures to reduce production’s ecological damage to the biosphere—such as pollution controls, improved energy efficiency, extensive recycling of resources, the production of durable goods, aggressive restoration of renewable resources, etc.— can reduce the degradation of the biosphere at a given level of production, but only to a certain degree. Or they can increase production for a time with fixed volumes of materials, energy, and waste disposal capacity. But there can be no sustaining of economic growth indefinitely into the future. We do face uncircumventable ecological constraints on human economic activity. As a consequence, the human creativity and inventiveness of technological innovation is also constrained by the very nature of how technology works in the material world. Technology’s manipulations of natural processes are, in fact, doubly constrained: (1) by the attainable efficiencies of the processes and devices with which we manipulate natural processes, and (2) by the characteristics of the natural processes with which our appropriations of nature interfere.

6. Where are the limits to sustainable economic activity located? If this analysis is accepted, the crucial question would appear to be “How close are we to exceeding Earth’s capacity to indefinitely supply our ecological demand?” What is usually meant by that question, given the overwhelming political imperative of sustaining economic growth, is “How much longer can we sustain economic growth?”, or “How much longer can economic growth continue without bringing ecological disaster on ourselves?” To make an assessment of where ecological limits lie, one must ask “What is the current state of the biosphere?” and “What is its rate of deterioration?” To ask when we have to stop or how long we can sustain economic growth are related questions, but not the same one. To answer them requires the answers to two other questions: “How do we expect the environment to behave when the economy’s demand for resources and natural waste recycling exceeds the ability of the environment to supply them?”, and “How will the economy be affected by a fall in the supply of natural resources and the ‘overflowing’ of nature’s waste sinks?” It is worth noting that these questions are usually posed at a high level of generality, that is, the level of the global economy and the global biosphere. Two modes of thought dominate thinking on these questions: on the one hand, what might be called the “catastrophic failure” mode, and on the other hand the “gradual deterioration” mode. Reflecting the long Western tradition of imagining change through an apocalyptic “end of the world” (at least as we know it), the most popular image of the overshooting of ecological limits to growth is that at some point environmental degradation will lead to a sudden collapse of one or more key ecosystems. If human life—

15 “Sustainable development”, in the vocabulary of the Brundtland Report and the round of state and business roundtables, means “sustainable economic growth”. See Ref. [5].

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or at least organized life for billions of humans—is not made unsustainable directly, this mode of thought envisages the collapse of key ecosystems triggering the failure of vital economic sectors—for example, food production or energy supply. The collapse of these vital areas of the economy would then throw society into chaos and/or cause megadeath on a continental or global scale. Social change would consist of picking up the pieces of a devastated world. In this mode of thought the overshoot of ecological limits would in many ways resemble the aftermath of nuclear war between the superpowers. Thinking along these lines leads to speculation on when global economic expansion will cripple key systems of the biosphere, and when that will trigger the failure of key economic sectors. One should not dismiss this perspective out of hand. The best evidence on the state of the biosphere is that key system-wide processes are in trouble, not simply specific ecosystems. Global warming, the holes in the ozone layer, and widespread damage to the oceans are not local problems; they reflect a breakdown in the basic cycles of the planet. Calculating the likely point of collapse depends on one’s assessment of the state of the biosphere and its rate of deterioration. Given that it takes some twenty years for the consequences of an insult to the environment to work its way through the biosphere and show its full effects, current spiraling levels of environmental disruption makes it seem wildly optimistic to expect that the biosphere can tolerate anything like a five-fold increase in ecological demand. How long would it take for us to reach that level of ecological demand? Since ecological demand rises in rough proportion to Gross Domestic Product without serious environmental measures, the doubling time of ecological demand under “business as usual”, at a 3% growth in Gross Domestic Product, is 24 years. At a 5% growth in Gross Domestic Product, it is 14 years. We might therefore expect that some kind of failure in key ecological systems or the exhaustion of key ecological resources should cripple key areas of the global economy by as early as 2050 or 2100. The alternative mode of thinking holds that one should not expect a catastrophic collapse of the biosphere, but rather a gradual and continuing degradation of affected ecosystems and physical cycles. As this occurs, certain economic activities become more and more difficult to maintain at peak levels of production, and production falls. Societies then scramble to accommodate themselves to these areas of falling production, and to any local collapses of particular ecosystems which do occur, amidst increasing social conflict over remaining resources and opportunities. If the apocalyptic mode of thinking expects ecological limits to take out modern industrial society with a bang, then the gradual deterioration mode expects modernity to go out with a prolonged whimper.16 Under this scenario, as Boucher argues, “…the quality of life on Earth gradually diminishes, with no abrupt disaster to interrupt this decline.” [24]. It is very difficult to resolve which mode of thinking is the more likely path of

16 I owe this language to D. H. Boucher, whose recent article in Science and Society on this topic is entitled “Not With a Bang But with a Whimper”. See Ref. [23].

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development that we face. The havoc being wrought on atmosphere and oceans seems precisely the kind of prelude to key systems failure. But as Boucher argues, the evidence that these will produce a catastrophic failure mode of environmental deterioration is uncertain: Global warming, destruction of the ozone layer, and similar atmospheric changes, epitomize this kind of environmental damage. The fluidity of the atmosphere makes them the most widespread occurrences possible, covering the entire planet. But the same fluidity dilutes their effects, making them gradual and insidious rather than sudden and explosive [25]. What seems certain is that if we do not encounter “catastrophic failure” scenarios, we will experience “gradual deterioration”. Indeed, we already are. The fact that we are causing ecological degradation to a particular ecosystem is evidence of local overshoot of ecological limits to sustainable economic activity.17 The fact that we are seeing widespread and general disruption of the biosphere is evidence we are overshooting not only many local ecosystems but the global physical cycles of the atmosphere and oceans. We have already exceeded the limits of sustainable levels of ecological demand globally. The meaning of this cannot be overemphasized. If we wanted to stop the growth of economic activity at the point where we were on the verge of exceeding ecological limits, we have already lost the opportunity. We are already well beyond the onset of the negative spiral of ecological overshoot and deterioration [26]. We should have stopped economic growth some time ago. As a result, we are already experiencing the phenomena one would associate with the “gradual deterioration” of the biosphere and “the gradual impoverishment of both the world’s peoples and its biological diversity.” [27]. So far, the social impact has only been felt locally. An excellent example of local overshoot and its socioeconomic consequences in the First World is the economic vacuum left in Newfoundland by the over-harvesting of codfish and the subsequent collapse of the cod stocks in the early 1990s. With the commercial cod stocks gone, fisheries-dependent communities in Newfoundland are muddling through on national unemployment insurance and federal government grants, while predictably intensifying the exploitation of the remaining fisheries resources. The overshoot of ecological limits, the accelerating deterioration of the material base of the economy, and the erosion of the economy it engenders are already underway in Newfoundland—as they are in many other places. Even if there is no sudden collapse, overshooting what the Earth can sustain initiates a negative spiral toward the exhaustion of the resource base. As long as the overload of ecological demand continues, it causes more degradation to the biosphere and steadily reduces the remaining productive capacity of Earth. If we act as if this 17 Remember that ecological limits are about the size of ecological demand that can be “drawn” from an ecosystem, not directly about the volume of product that the particular production process makes possible. A more efficient production process, or a less environmentally intrusive one, may get more product than an existing one at a given level of ecological demand.

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is not true, we will see many areas of production falter and collapse as ecosystems and air, water, and soil systems are further damaged and destroyed. The envelope of sustainable economic activity shrivels as we overshoot the imploding envelope of future ecological constraints. Boucher’s argument for taking action now to reduce ecological demand and restore as much stability to ecosystems as possible is compelling: The principal reason to stop pollution, deforestation, over-exploitation and the impoverishment of the biosphere is not the danger of future catastrophe, but the immense ongoing suffering they are causing, especially to the world’s poor, right now. The economic and spiritual costs of environmental destruction need to be confronted and stopped, precisely because no ecological collapse is likely to come along and halt them otherwise. Things will simply get worse little by little, with a diminishing quality of life for succeeding generations. The ultimate danger, ironically, is that no global catastrophe will ever come—that the health of both the planet and its human society will simply decay, world without end [28]. The proper question to be raised on discovery of the futility of hoping to sustain economic growth indefinitely is, therefore, “Why, a generation after we have discovered we are wrecking the biosphere, have we not taken rapid action to stop doing so?”. That question in turn raises a series of sociological questions,18 ones I have addressed elsewhere.19

7. How technological optimists have missed the mark Clearly, there are limits to the human capacity to innovate in order to overcome natural constraints on economic activity. Material progress, the notion that nature can be utterly reshaped and transformed [31] by human will and technological efforts to meet the objective of continuous development of the forces of production, is not the endless process which the “man over nature” tradition of the Enlightenment suggested. How is it that we have so misled ourselves? The simple answer is: wishful thinking. We have systematically overestimated our accomplishments, mystified how we have produced them, ignored their limitations, and failed to reckon their costs accurately. The initial plausibility of the idea of endless material progress, I presume, 18 These sociological questions would be the following: 쐌 Why does our society persists so singlemindedly in the pursuit of economic growth without serious regard to its increasing ecological consequences? 쐌 Why is our society not prudently reducing the scale and altering the character of our economic activities? 쐌 Who is responsible for this mess? 쐌 Who is resisting the reduction of our economic activities? 쐌 Who will be at the spearhead and who the foot soldiers of change? 쐌 What new sets of institutional arrangements are necessary to create an ecologically sustainable society? 19 To see my own faltering steps at answering these questions, see Refs [29,30].

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arose out of the actual success of the pursuit of economic growth: the exponentially increasing rates of production that became possible as first practical engineering and then organized application of scientific knowledge were harnessed by capitalists to increase the productivity of workers and drive down their labor costs.20 Pre-industrial societies understood their dependence on the biosphere. With widespread mechanization and steam power, amplified even more with the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century—i.e. with automotive technology, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, and electricity and electronics—the continued dependence on the biosphere was obscured, at least for a time. The appearance of being independent of the biosphere, if not the natural world as a whole, was strengthened once we had overcome many of the historic limitations on production and living. Unfortunately, the technological optimists who preach of our freedom from natural constraints have erred in extrapolating from our technological successes without understanding what we have in fact done in the last 250 years. They ignore, and have ignored, that the exponential expansion of production since wage labor was first combined with power-driven machinery in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century has only been made possible by greater and greater intrusion into the normal operation of the biosphere. Technological innovation has primarily focused on inventing new ways to divert and harness more and more of the processes and energy flows of Earth to the service of our economic activities without regard to, and with precious little awareness of, the effect on the global ecosystem that supplies

20

My own thoughts on the connection of technological innovation and the social purposes it serves are rooted in the Marxist tradition. For Marx, the enormous growth of wealth in Europe and continuing secular rate of growth had to be explained in terms of the propensity of the capitalist system to accumulate wealth in great quantities and continually revolutionize the means of production themselves. Marx argued that while merchants in many societies had long sought to accumulate wealth, the new class of industrial employers who spurred the Industrial Revolution had unique opportunities, incentives, and necessity to have their money make more money in a sustained way. These capitalists’ desires to turn money into investment to make more money become not only a goal, argued Marx, but also a goad, driving all of them to increased production, new technologies, and the frantic search for new markets and new investment opportunities. Marx argued that capitalists are in competition with each other: either directly in a single industry for market share, or indirectly for investment funds. Unable simply to continually squeeze more work for less pay from the free men who constituted their workforce, capitalists had to find other ways to lower their costs of production and undercut the prices of their competitors. Technological innovation, the development of machines that made each worker more productive and allowed greater production, and/or the shedding of workers, Marx argued, was the most reliable ways to do this. Surviving competitors responded in kind, renewing the cycle and forcing the search for new customers and new kinds of products to open new avenues of profit and effective competition. Only by this means could one keep ahead of one’s competitors, find the investment funds from profits or loans to innovate and expand one’s market, and so not be driven into bankruptcy as one’s competitors moved ahead in product design and lowered costs. The need not just to profit, but to increase the rate of profit of one’s firm over its competitors, becomes a whip cracking over one’s head. Even capitalists in different industries were forced to seek higher rates of profit as they competed for investment funds, skilled labor, and new investment opportunities. The search for new markets and customers, new technologies, new products, and new investment opportunities to keep ahead of the game becomes not simply the means to turn money into more money, but the means of sheer survival for all employers.

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these resources and must reprocess the wastes of production. We have not counted, and have often actively sought to deny, the rising negative feedback of our efforts on their material basis. It does not help when science fiction, both as a literary genre and popular consciousness, encourages reckless and groundless speculation of the potential of undiscovered natural forces, processes and energy sources, knowledge of which will materialize when needed, without self-limiting ecological consequences of their extraction and use, to free us from the limits to growth. Although I enjoy Gene Roddenberry’s great television fiction, when I read the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual [32], I am struck by how complete scientific nonsense can be so easily clothed in a superficially plausible simulacrum of authentic engineering language. Phasers, weather control systems, terraforming, subspace radio, anti-matter engines, warp drive, and transporters are indeed necessary technologies to produce the imaginary future free of Earth’s warm but isolated nurture. But these are purely imaginary technologies, many of which require violations of what we do know of the operations of the universe. Unfortunately, we have grown so used to believing that wishing will make it so that we can no longer easily distinguish between our real lives in the material world and our fantasies about what we would like to be able to do. Like Billy Liar we are in danger of ignoring our real opportunities and constraints in favor of dreaming our dreams—in spite of the fact the world is being made increasingly worse by the pursuit of those dreams.

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