The Best of Times or the Brink of Collapse? Understanding the Cornucopian Worldview.
Introduction to Dieback and Collapse part iii
Given the present trajectories of critical markers of the human condition (for instance, arable land, available water, population, meat consumption, hunger, poverty, and inequality, biodiversity, military spending, carbon emissions and global warming), I have concluded that we are likely heading for massive global famines in the coming decades, probably beginning some time mid-century.[1]
Acute famines and severe hunger, I conjecture, will likely lead to mass refugee migrations and civil unrest in much of the world. The structures of civilization – presently characterized by nation-states, economic globalism (and patriarchy) – may be but a historical blip, not the long-term societal order we have come to accept as normal.
Some pundits see our prospects very differently. They agree, of course, that societies have come and gone, populations in specific places have boomed and busted, and yes, of course, humans have been a bit hard on the environment. But they consider my perspective pessimistic, needlessly disheartening, if not irresponsible. Indeed, with the same information, they have come to opposite conclusions. Where I see resource scarcity, they find abundance. Instead of a fragile food system, they point to it resilience. Things are getting better for humanity, they proclaim, and all indications are that they will keep getting better.
These pundits have been referred to as Cornucopians. The rest of this post will be devoted to presenting their perspective, for their arguments are valid within a limited framework. A clear picture of reality requires that we incorporate the evidence for their optimism and then (in later posts) contextualize this evidence within a larger perspective that includes socio-economic and planetary systems.
The famous Cornucopian economist Julian Simon in 1995 asserted:
“Our species is betteroff in just about every measurable material way... Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.”[2]
And Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician from the Netherlands who refers to himself as the skeptical environmentalist, says:
“The main reason why the infamous “Limits to Growth” reports got their dire predictions of an imminent world collapse so wrong was because they overlooked the fundamental dynamics of technological progress. Modern societies create a great deal of value without much environmental degradation, as economic welfare has come to rely more on how a material is processed and utilized than on the material itself.”[3]
Then there is Indur Goklany, a long-time analyst at the U.S. Interior Department and contributor to the libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, who framed the Cornucopian perspective in this way: “Instead of living in the worst of times, we’re actually living in the best of times, and carbon dioxide and fossils fuels are a good part of that.” Not surprisingly, Goks, as he’s known, has found a sympathetic ear in the second Trump administration.
The Cornucopians note that, despite the serious existential problems in the world, there have been no global-scale population crashes for hundreds of years, not since the Black Death in the 14th century. Rather, the number of people who call this planet home has been increasing ever since. Steadily, inexorably, even during the two world wars and the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1961, events that killed many tens of millions of people. And Civilization (which excludes only those few people living as foragers at the margins of the Earth) is arguably now global in extent, encompassing over eight billion people, and includes a complexity of niches and specializations second only to Mother Nature, herself.
So, even if one were to accept the premise that all that lives must one day die and that even the United States and the European Union cannot escape that logic of mortality, aren’t we now so robust, so powerful, complex and successful, that we will surely be around for many centuries to come?
The historian Carroll Quigley surmised that, like all our predecessors, our civilization too will “surely pass out of existence” – by say 2500. But a Cornucopian would note that, at worst, that gives us another five hundred years. After all, by the standards of civilizations, our globalized version has been around for only a very short time, and it has already become the most successful society by nearly every measurement imaginable.
We are growing more food than ever before. Wars and genocides are generally smaller in scale than in the previous century. There are no barbarians at the gates because there are no gates. We are global now, and we are assuring peaceful behavior between the powerful players through international trade agreements and negotiation. Worldwide, people are living longer, making more money, consuming more products. What a boon to humanity!
Poverty rates are going down, as are fertility rates—globally, they have halved since 1950, alone, so that, although the world population is still rising, the rate of population growth is decreasing for the first time in millennia. Far more people are literate than ever before. Technology accelerates in sophistication and possibility. There are more democracies than ever before. And at least a billion people are experiencing comfortable lives beyond measure.[4] Even the warnings of that bogeyman – global warming – predict a rise of only a few degrees Fahrenheit by this century’s end. Hardly the stuff of collapses.
And if our civilization were in such peril, why have we seen no large famines in decades, no energy shortages, no unequivocal signals of collapse? It appears to us that globalization has actually provided Civilization an unprecedented resiliency, a capability of absorbing challenges that used to overwhelm societies.
Saudi Arabia, for instance, imports 80 percent of its food, yet its citizens experience relatively little hunger. To pay for the food and everything else the desert country cannot produce internally, the country exports oil, petroleum-based products, and machinery.
And when disaster strikes in poor countries – an earthquake in Haiti, a drought in Sudan, floods in Bangladesh – the rest of Civilization comes to the rescue.
Every year at least one major grain-growing area has a bad year, but others have good years, and so in total, Civilization has enough to feed everyone.
No, we don’t actually feed everyone. There are plenty of people who go hungry [700 million to more than a billion each year, depending on how one defines “hungry”], but it is not because we can’t. We grow enough for everyone on the planet. The problem is not one of insufficient food, but of poverty and maldistribution. In Africa, for example, the infrastructure is so poor that the necessary food often cannot reach those who are in gravest need.
However, globalization is solving these problems as quickly as problems have ever been solved. For instance, in the past fifteen years, alone, 1.3 billion people have been connected to the electrical grid. Africa has become more democratic, and now the power of capitalism and technology is raising living standards in many countries.
As societies become more democratic, they become more responsive to the needs of their citizens. This is of extreme importance, for as the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen famously noted, “…famine does not occur in democratic countries.” In India before independence and in Bangladesh before its parliamentary democracy, but not since.[5] There were several major famines in the Soviet Union, but not in Russia since 1991.[6] And the famines in Sudan (1983, 1998, and 2023-25) and in Somalia (1992 and 2011) occurred in regions of military rule, civil war, or failed states.
To summarize the Cornucopian position, our worldwide civilization is becoming ever more tightly connected by economics, transportation, and communication. We have our problems – all societies do – but global civilization shows no signs of crashing. Quite the opposite, actually. People are living longer than ever before. More countries are democracies than ever before. There are fewer wars and proportionally fewer people dying of diseases. Grain production has kept up with the exponential rise of population. Indeed, more people are eating well than ever before. There are proportionally fewer people in poverty than ever before. If anything, global civilization is – although not perfect – the best running organization humans have ever created. The glass is definitely half-full.
ENDNOTES
[1] My work is an update of the Schade, C. and Pimentel, D. (2010) Population Crash: Prospects for Famine in the 21st Century. Environment, Development and Sustainability; 12: 245-62.
[2] Simon (1995). This may true in the United States since 1961 (as Simon qualifies), however it has not been the experience of most of the world. Weigel (2004) says “that water and air in the developed world are cleaner than in five hundred years.” Certainly, he must not be including the United States, Canada, Argentina, Russia and Australia in the club of developed countries here.
[4] The word democracy is being used in the same loose sense found in common usage, so that the United States, Hungary, and Russia are all called democracies, albeit “flawed” not “full” democracies. Also, slavery has dropped dramatically both in absolute and relative terms if one compares today’s 27 million (Encyclopedia Britannica) to the 18th century and if one includes Russian serfs as slaves. Otherwise, the comparisons become more complicated. However, if one considers the brilliant arguments made in favor of slavery by the American statesmen John Calhoun, one might regard all who labor in the harsh conditions for little pay around the earth as no better than slaves, and then the numbers become questionable, indeed (See Hofstadter, 1948).
[5] Bangladesh experienced a famine in 1973 and 1974, directly following its first attempt at parliamentary democracy after independence from Pakistan. However, given the immediately preceding circumstances—namely the Bangladesh Liberation War, a devastating cyclone, and political instability—this famine cannot be considered a fair test of Sen’s hypothesis.
[6] Golkin (1987).
REFERENCES
Golkin, A.T. (1987) Famine: A Heritage of Hunger. Regina Books, Claremont, California.
Hofstadter, R. (1948) The American Political Tradition. Vintage, New York.
Simon, J. (1995) The State of Humanity. Blackwell Pub., Malden, MA.