Nature's Evil

This is Latour’s myth, and I think there is some truth in it, and some falsehood as well. Gaia is real but not entire. She is as multitudinous as humanity, as pluralist as society. The natural history of evil has been endlessly various. Resources are all different because each and every one of them involved a particular interaction between people and nature. Each natural resource has its own political characteristics. Along with people who extract, process and trade it, each resource is a social institution which works according to the rules set by nature. To unite people and nature would entail granting rights of citizenship to natural phenomena and integrating their tales along with human voices in a comprehensive plebiscite. This is a distant utopia, but we will get there, if we survive. In the meantime we are travelling in the opposite direction, down a blind alley.

In 1974 William Nordhaus predicted the transition from a ‘cowboy economy’ to a ‘spaceship economy’. Cowboys consume as much as they like, regardless of the waste produced, because they see nature as obedient and infinite. Astronauts focus on the limited resources available to support their life, and they recycle what they have consumed. An epoch later, in 2018, Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for this work, but his prediction hasn’t come true. Humankind is behaving more like cowboys who find themselves in a spaceship than like astronauts who have landed on the prairie. Multiplying and fruitful, humankind is approaching the year that Nordhaus predicted for climate catastrophe – 2030. The glaciers are melting, and temperatures fluctuate widely. The summers are intolerably hot. Fires are destroying those forests that survived the axe. Fertile lands are turning into desert. Permafrost looks like marshland, and strange bubbles burst under the surface. The frontier between culture and nature is still moving, nature’s territory is shrinking, and viruses are coming out of left field. 5

During the twentieth century, the total consumption of material resources, calculated in tons, increased by a factor of eight. The world population also grew, but the extraction of material resources per head doubled in the course of the century. In 2008 the total consumption of natural resources (excluding water) consisted of 62 billion metric tonnes of raw material; in 2020 this reached 100 billion. If water is included in these calculations, the result is tripled by weight: the world uses about 100 billion tonnes of fresh water per year, most of it in agriculture. The richer the country, the more matter its citizens consume. In 2011 in India, per capita consumption of natural resources was 4 tonnes, in Canada more than 25 tonnes; an American uses thirty times as much energy as an Indian. The difference in the consumption of resources depends on the population density. Countries with sparse populations consume more raw materials and energy per capita. Towns require fewer raw materials and less energy than agricultural areas. Urbanisation saves energy and frees up land for growing forests which absorb carbon dioxide. But towns need jobs; any service – information, finances, transportation, entertainment – requires significant amounts of energy; and most energy in this world comes from fossil fuel. Modern goods undergo ‘dematerialisation’: computers are ever smaller; one smartphone now does the jobs of several bigger devices. But the total volume of raw materials consumed by humanity increases every year, both in absolute figures and as a per capita figure. Unfortunately, the saving on material is achieved because of a greater expenditure of energy.

Emissions reliably track economic growth. Between 2014 and 2020, worldwide gross product – the total of all goods and bads produced, bought and sold in the world – was growing annually by 3 to 4 per cent, and global emissions of carbon were growing by 2 to 3 per cent. Discussed by economists and promised by bureaucrats, the decoupling of these two processes has not happened. In the series of international conferences, culminating in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015, governments signed up to good intentions. However, not a single developed country has met the obligations it undertook as part of the Paris Agreement. The agreed goal was to limit the increase in average global temperature to 1.5 degrees above the temperature of the planet in 1880. In fact, a rise of 2, or even 3, degrees is predicted by 2050.