Nature's Evil

It was not only about feeling . A Cambridge professor whose practical experience started with the administration of Indian finances, Keynes saw that his career aligned with this ‘English tradition’. He took part in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when the victorious states met to determine the fate of Europe after the First World War. In his book about the economic consequences of the Versailles Treaty, Keynes predicted a Malthusian crisis on a European scale. At the end of the nineteenth century, continental Europe had lost its self-sufficiency in food production in the same way that England had lost it about a century earlier. The population had grown, and Europe, like England, was able to buy increasing amounts of agricultural produce in exchange for its industrial goods. Every decade, a unit of labour invested in industry increased its purchasing power in relation to foodstuffs; here Keynes was reproducing Cantillon’s old idea, which had been recently recovered by Jevons (Prebisch and Singer would in turn reproduce these ideas of Keynes). His American counterparts Richard T. Ely and Thorstein Veblen were close to Keynes in their critical approach to land, resources and progress. But the peaceful end to the nineteenth century, which Keynes called an economic Eldorado, engendered a new, post-utilitarian generation. Nothing was more foreign to Keynes than their formalised optimism. It was the Yale economist Irving Fisher who started this neo-Panglossian canon by formulating still another ‘equilibrium theory’. On 16 October 1929, Fisher wrote in the New York Times that stock prices had ‘reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.’ The stock market collapsed on 24 October – the Great Depression had arrived.

European growth, explained Keynes, was possible only because both America and Russia supplied it with grain. But their own populations were growing even faster, with the result that the great powers to the West and the East of Europe could no longer feed the Old World. A brilliant prognostician, Keynes saw the new war in the making. But his Malthusian forecast for twentieth-century agriculture was wrong. Just as Malthus had failed to see the power of coal, so Keynes failed to see the full power of oil. Not long before the First World War, Fritz Haber, a Polish Jew and German patriot, succeeded in synthesising ammonia. Haber’s process gave rise to the first nitrogen fertilisers and new kinds of explosives. Working on munitions, he invented the first chemical weapons. Haber oversaw the chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915 and later invented the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B, which the Nazis used in the gas chambers. His wife and son both committed suicide, but half of humanity today is fed on products grown with the help of the Haber process. However, growing this food takes a great deal of energy: a kilogram of ammonium nitrate fertiliser consumes an equal amount of petroleum. The joint actions of a fertiliser, produced from air and natural gas, and machines that run on petroleum have liberated humanity from the threat of hunger. The inventions of Fritz Haber and Henry Ford carried the day over the fears of Malthus and Jevons.