A Planet for Future Generations

How many people can there be on Earth, even if we deliver on the energy transition?

The “end is nigh” overpopulation controversy of the late 1960s feels, in retrospect, a bit dated. Today, when one revisits the dire predictions made by Paul R. Ehrlich and—most notably—the Club of Rome in their bestselling, headline-grabbing books, one can’t help but notice, by the sheer evidence that we are still walking and talking, that their apocalyptic predictions never materialized. The overpopulation debate did, however, raise some important points, worthy of reflection. Most notably these include the extent to which the utilitarian guiding principle of the Western civilization model, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” is worth pursuing, due to the multiple ecological contradictions it incurs and its spiritual shallowness.

At this point, there’s little doubt that the human species will somehow finagle its way out technologically or, God forbid, through the other more undesirable, automatic mechanisms identified by Thomas Malthus, of its recurrent overpopulation crises. The uneasy question bugging us today, as the dystopian narratives of “Black Mirror” highlight, is whether a life worth living can be lived in systems ruled by these technological mechanisms of social control.

Are innovation and technology the answer to sustainability on our planet?

There are some post-environmentalist movements in the US close to Silicon Valley, such as the Ecomodernists, that argue that by developing to the max with complex information technologies such as artificial intelligence, and with few or no political restrictions, we will, as a species, reach a point where we’ll be able to decouple our artificial, human-made systems from the natural world, and enter an artificial Garden of Eden of our own creation. There, we’ll be free to cultivate our own virtual gardens in perfect, digitalized and sustainable circular harmony.

However, this sort of technologically determinist vision of nature is polluted by a long list of forever-chemical ideals that have been building up in American culture since the Transcendentalists got away with their epic preservationist-nationalist-religious-theme park project for nature through Teddy Roosevelt’s national park system. “Wilderness”—a purer, natural, God-created universe existing apart from human beings—never existed, as William Cronon and others have shown. The Transcendentalists’ American wilderness was the Native Americans’ garden, minus the Native Americans, who were moved out to make space for an idealized vision of nature.

The artificial, technologically mediated decoupling from the natural world that the Ecomodernists desire is neither scientifically, nor even in the ecological sense, possible. Nor is it good for nature, as both ecological science and Jared Diamond’s collapsed civilizations tell us.

Will migration be a solution to our problems or a source of concern?

In a way, this question circles back to the overpopulation controversy of the 1960s pointed out in the first question. One of the unexpected indicators of the contradictions of Western civilizations’ teleological, epic narrative—as expressed in the overpopulation debate—has been the current inverse demographic pyramid resulting from the “greatest good for the greatest number” economic and political ideals embedded in the concept of the welfare state.

In the face of our technocratic elites’ growing perplexity about what ought to be done, if anything, about these graphs, the empty space is being filled in by massive illegal migration from some of the poorest regions of the world to the richest. This, in turn, has provoked a nativist backlash by what Hanspeter Kriesi and others have named “the losers of globalization.” It will be interesting to see how these contradictions are resolved by younger generations. I suspect that they will have fewer hang-ups than preceding generations in embracing their multicultural future.