The Dynamic View

     A great many misconceptions of what’s possible and what’s inevitable arise from a static view of the conditions before us. Some have become quasi-immortal… ironically, because though incorrect, they support some doom-shouter’s favored Cause. If it becomes possible to laugh at them later on, that doesn’t undo whatever damage they may have caused in the meantime.

     Consider the famous case of Thomas Malthus. Here we have a highly intelligent man who thought long and hard about the subjects he addressed. Yet his view of Mankind and its environment was static, which gave rise to his Essay on the Principle of Population. Had he foreseen some of the developments that were breasting the technological and sociological horizon even as he wrote, he might have avoided his most famous error.

     Mind you, if we postulate Malthus’s static view of conditions, he was correct. What he failed to foresee was the alteration of attitudes toward childbearing due to the Industrial Revolution. (It would be unfair to gig him for not foreseeing the Green Revolution that made agriculture many times as productive as it was in his day.) Once children went from an economic asset to a luxury expense – an expense that was greatly amplified by urbanization – population growth tailed off sharply.

     Malthus heavily influenced the eco-warriors of the Twentieth Century. Theirs, too, was a static view of human existence. They uniformly saw the human resource and technological bases as fixed. Indeed, some of them opposed expansion of those bases. Have a particularly significant statement from Amory Lovins:

     If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. [Amory Lovins, Playboy interview, Nov/Dec 1977]

     In the above, Lovins expresses a very dark opinion of Mankind generally… and, of course, his own superior wisdom and morality: he would never misuse such a resource, but you just can’t trust those benighted humans. But it’s all justified, you see, by that fixed resource base. “We’re using up our planet! Once it’s ruined, there will be no more! If only you could see it as I have!”

     Barry Commoner captured that pessimism in his four laws of ecology:

• Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
• Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown.
• Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, "likely to be detrimental to that system"
• There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.

     All four of those statements are dubious in the practical sense, yet they constitute the Gospel of the Static System. Indeed, start from an enclosed system – say, a man trapped in his own home, unable to leave or open a window – and they become applicable. His best chance of survival is to use what resources are available to him in a miserly fashion. He must hope that he can survive until someone outside his enclosure manages to free him. Of course, if there is no such person… but that’s the question, isn’t it?

     The view of Earth and its resources as the absolute limits of Mankind’s expansion is very much like that of the man trapped in his house. But that view treats the rest of the Solar System as inaccessible. At the present time, that’s true: we can’t access the resources of the Solar System conveniently, much less put them to use. But need it be so for much longer?

     Some awfully smart people are trying to make it not so. There’s a significant chance that they’ll succeed before I die.

     Physical expansion has long been the sovereign remedy to resource depletion. It’s also the usual curative for restlessness, impatience with local constraints, and irritation from one’s neighbors. But it requires that we forge ahead scientifically and technologically. That means rejecting the radical ecologists’ prescription of stasis, under which the future is foreshortened to what Earth alone can supply, and adopting the dynamic view of existence.

     Of course, that would be a thumb in the eyes of Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy Rifkin, Amory Lovins, and their fellow-thinkers. It would reduce the Gospel of Stasis to a historical curiosity. A lot of intellectually and morally superior people’s egos would be bruised as their pet Cause diminishes… but what was that saying about eggs and omelets, again?