Growth By Vaclav Smil Pdf Download

Prolific energy writer Vaclav Smil's "Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities" (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2019) is marketed as the most comprehensive study of the modalities of growth in Earth's life systems in their many natural, social, and technological forms. While the book reflects Smil's strength as a polymath, it also brings into focus his Malthusian outlook. Smil's Malthusianism is puzzling in light of much empirical evidence to the contrary and of his own detailed histories of human technological achievements, including his recent massive synthesis "Energy and Civilization: A History" (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2017). In keeping with Smil's historical emphasis, in this review essay, the Malthusian assumptions, assertions, and conclusions of these books are challenged through the Promethean insights of numerous writers whose output long predates the modern environmental movement and can thus avoid charges of "greenwashing". I make a case that, in the context of market economies (i.e., competition, price system, and private property rights), humans' unique propensity to trade physical goods and to (re)combine things in new ways have long delivered both improved standards of living and environmental remediation. I further suggest that it is not the volume of materials handled, but rather how they are handled that determines the impact of economic growth on the biosphere. While Professor Smil is fond of saying that "numbers don't lie", his work illustrates that they are sometimes made to tell an unduly pessimistic story through the intellectual filters created by an author's assumptions and value judgements.

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Perspective

The Paradoxical Malthusian. A Promethean

Perspective on Vaclav Smil's Growth:

From Microorganisms to Megacities (MIT Press, 2019)

and Energy and Civilization: A History

(MIT Press, 2017)

Pierre Desrochers

Department of Geography, Geomatics and the Environment, University of Toronto Mississauga,

3359 Mississauga Rd., Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada; pierre.desrochers@utoronto.ca

Received: 23 August 2020; Accepted: 9 October 2020; Published: 12 October 2020

Abstract:

Proliﬁc energy writer Vaclav Smil's "Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities"

(MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2019) is marketed as the most comprehensive study of the

modalities of growth in Earth's life systems in their many natural, social, and technological forms.

While the book reﬂects Smil's strength as a polymath, it also brings into focus his Malthusian outlook.

Smil's Malthusianism is puzzling in light of much empirical evidence to the contrary and of his

own detailed histories of human technological achievements, including his recent massive synthesis

"Energy and Civilization: A History" (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2017). In keeping with Smil's

historical emphasis, in this review essay, the Malthusian assumptions, assertions, and conclusions

of these books are challenged through the Promethean insights of numerous writers whose output

long predates the modern environmental movement and can thus avoid charges of "greenwashing".

I make a case that, in the context of market economies (i.e., competition, price system, and private

property rights), humans' unique propensity to trade physical goods and to (re)combine things in

new ways have long delivered both improved standards of living and environmental remediation.

I further suggest that it is not the volume of materials handled, but rather how they are handled

that determines the impact of economic growth on the biosphere. While Professor Smil is fond

of saying that "numbers don't lie", his work illustrates that they are sometimes made to tell an

unduly pessimistic story through the intellectual ﬁlters created by an author's assumptions and

value judgements.

Keywords:

Vaclav Smil; promethean; cornucopian; Malthusian; circular economy; decoupling; price

system; private property rights

Homines libenter quod volunt credunt

Men believe what they want

—Publius Terentius Afer (c. 195/185—c. 159? BC), as quoted by Vaclav Smil [1] (p. v)

1. Introduction

New books, academic articles, and popular essays on the population, resources, and environment

nexus are published every year. Most are intensely partisan, for there can be no middle ground between

the beliefs that valuable resources are ﬁnite and nature inherently fragile on the one hand, and that

human creativity can ﬁnd ways around scarcity and environmental damage on the other.

So-called "Prometheans" or "Cornucopians" typically argue that transforming the landscape and

developing new technologies provide a growing population with increasingly abundant resources and

Energies 2020, 13, 5306; doi:10.3390/ en13205306 www.mdpi.com/ journal/energies

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 2 of 21

improved standards of living. This perspective dominated Western thought from the Enlightenment to

the rise of the modern environmentalist movement two generations ago. Far from viewing nature

as inherently good, Prometheans of all political persuasions emphasized its shortcomings, dangers,

and resilience. While human actions could create negative consequences, these would be best addressed

through further innovations and economic growth [2,3].

By contrast, eco-pessimists have believed since at least antiquity that most non-renewable resources

are ﬁnite and that human activities are ultimately constrained by the limited carrying capacity of

ecosystems [

], although these ideas are now typically attributed to Thomas Robert Malthus [

]

and William Stanley Jevons [

]. Malthus is remembered (somewhat unfairly) for arguing that food

production would not keep up with rapid population growth. Jevons extended the limits reasoning

to coal and other valuable commodities. Another concept with deep historical roots that dominated

much of the ecological research and environmental policymaking over the twentieth century is

that nature is in a harmonious yet fragile balance that shouldn't be disturbed by human activities.

Reactionary thinking against industrialization and urbanization, coupled with a long-standing elitist

dislike of mass consumption, further shaped modern environmental thought and activism [8–10].

An especially ambitious contribution to this latter perspective was recently published

by the Czech-born Canadian environmental scientist and polymath Vaclav Smil. "Growth:

From Microorganisms to Megacities" (MIT Press, Cambridge, USA, 2019; henceforth Growth ) [

] is,

as the subtitle implies, an attempt to distil patterns from the study of growth of everything, from archaea

to civilizations. While in the hands of almost any other writer this project would reek of hubris,

Professor Smil is a throwback to the kind of erudite central European scholar exempliﬁed by eminent

social scientists such as Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and Ludwig von Mises whose enormous

output was once described in jest as based on the belief that "encyclopedias might very well just vanish

from the shelves" [

] (non-paginated, henceforth n.p.). As some readers may know, Professor Smil's

breadth and depth of technical knowledge on anything remotely related to energy is truly astonishing.

Idiosyncratic, he is a self-described "old-fashioned scientist" who prefers "hard engineering realities"

to "interminably vacuous and poorly informed policy 'debates'" [

] (n.p.). His basic outlook is that

our economy, societies, civilization, and ultimate survival all depend upon the availability of energy

sources, our ability to harness them, and the eﬃciency with which we are able to convert them into

useful things. Always aware of the complexity of human systems, inherent uncertainties, and the limits

of human knowledge and understanding, he has throughout his long career steered clear of detailed

predictions and policy recommendations. On the other hand, his relative lack of interest in public

policy intricacies, casual dismissal of basic economic insights, and often cursory discussions of the

impact of incentives and institutions on individual, corporate, and societal behavior have sometimes

been deemed problematic [14,15].

Be that as it may, Smil is a man of integrity who, when deriving inescapable conclusions from

undisputable facts, has never shied away from criticizing what he deems wishful thinking and

energy policy snake oil, along with their delusional or dishonest peddlers (e.g., peak oil, biofuels,

the hydrogen economy, Germany's Energiewende, Amory Lovins, and Elon Musk) [

]. Smil's thoughts

and assessments, however, occasionally display surprising paradoxes and contradictions. As a young

man trapped on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, he refused to join the Community Party and later

studied in detail the abysmal environmental outcomes delivered by central planning [

]. Yet, he has

long disparaged conspicuous consumption, unlimited free trade, and free-market economists [

]

while sometimes sounding as though he would relish the opportunity to redesign our economies

along less energy-intensive lines [

]. Intellectually closer to natural scientists who consider humans

ultimately no diﬀerent than other animal species, he described and illustrated in abundant detail

our uniqueness through various studies in the history of technology [

]. A proponent of reducing

humanity's resource footprint through smaller and more eﬃcient homes and cars, he is critical of

large-scale urbanization because it facilitates wealth creation and results in greater per capita energy

consumption [

]. A political refugee who made a good living in Canada and a long-time member

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 3 of 21

of the academic globe-trotting elite, he could never side with prominent American environmentalists

who called for immigration restrictions in the name of curbing economic growth [

], yet his policy

recommendations would ultimately deny the opportunities he has enjoyed to most of humanity [

To this Promethean writer, the most surprising paradox in Professor Smil's work is his persistent

Malthusianism, for it not only ﬂies in the face of much empirical data, but it also contradicts his own

earlier writings on limits to growth, Peak Oil and the history of technology as synthesized in his 2017

book "Energy and Civilization: A History" (henceforth Energy and Civilization) [

]. In the remainder

of this essay, I argue that Smil's ideological blinders, as expressed in Growth , Energy and Civilization and

elsewhere, prove too overwhelming to him. Like most of us, he ultimately can't resist the temptation

to torture the evidence until it confesses his pre-ordained pessimistic conclusions, thereby inviting this

more optimistic—and similarly one-sided—rebuttal.

This essay is organized in two main parts. The ﬁrst sketches out some of Professor Smil's

broader contributions and his neo-Malthusian outlook. This is followed by a detailed presentation

of the Promethean perspective and a critical discussion of some of Smil's key assertions. In keeping

with his historical outlook, I rely mostly on Promethean contributions that long predate the modern

environmental movement—and can thus avoid charges of "greenwashing"—to argue that, in the right

institutional context (i.e., market economies characterized by competition, the price system, and private

property rights), humans' unique propensity to trade physical goods and to (re)combine existing

things in new ways ultimately deliver both wealth creation and reduced environmental harm. I also

challenge Professor Smil's casual dismissal of the "circular economy", at least to the extent the concept

suggests it is not the volume of materials handled, but rather how they are handled, that determines

the environmental impact of economic growth. Contra Smil, the way forward does not lie in a politics

of less, but rather in the embrace of what makes us humans.

2. The Neo-Malthusian Polymath

Smil's lengthier books are remarkable for their scope and sheer amount of detailed factual

information. Their narrative structures and editorial choices, however, often suﬀer from the fact that

their author rarely seems to have a speciﬁc audience in mind. Growth and Energy and Civilization,

each over 500 pages in length, are typical of his earlier output.

2.1. Summa Smilia

As historian of technology David E. Nye blurbed on the dust-jacket cover, Energy and Civilization

can be considered the "deﬁnitive work on this vital subject". The book is a revised and expanded

version of the earlier primer "Energy in World History" [

]. As highlighted in the preface, the new

text is 60% longer, has 40% more images, more than twice as many references, and builds upon the

work of hundreds of scientists, engineers, historians, and economists. Taken together, the addenda,

notes and bibliography are the size of a small book. Stylistically, the text consists mostly of short

detailed vignettes. Many of these describe a group of people or a speciﬁc inventor who contributed

the process or product X. X displayed features Y that, in turn, increased productivity by a factor of

Z. Smil also throws in a few calculations of his own on subjects such as the energy costs of Roman

roads, pre-industrial wind and energy power, the amount of energy required to sustain a female coal

bearer in an early nineteenth century Scottish mine, and the power densities of past urban energy

supply and use.

Along the way readers learn much beyond the history of technology narrowly construed.

Browsing randomly through the book, one comes across the historical use of pack camels in the

arid region between Afghanistan and Morocco, the game-changing nature of hydraulic fracturing on

the global supply of petroleum products, the nature and productivity of Pre-Columbian agriculture,

the technical details and devastation of the ﬁrebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, the 2015 revised

estimates of global energy subsidies compiled by the International Monetary Fund, and the murderous

character of Stalin's and Mao's regimes. Some of the more exotic references include an 1880 English

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 4 of 21

translation of "The Lusiads" (the 1572 epic Portuguese poem describing Vasco de Gama's discovery of

a sea route to India), the 1945 "United States Air Force Statistical Digest World War II", Robert Caro's

massive biography of American President Lyndon B. Johnson, and articles published in outlets such as

"É tudes françaises" and "Extreme Physiology & Medicine".

While rejecting the label of energy determinist, Smil's core message is nevertheless that

"[c]ivilization's advance can be seen as a quest for higher energy use required to produce increased

food harvests, to mobilize a greater output and variety of materials, to produce more, and more

diverse, goods, to enable higher mobility, and to create access to a virtually unlimited amount of

information" (pp. 417–418). The ultimate result has been "larger populations organized with greater

social complexity into nation-states and supranational collectives, and enjoying a higher quality of

life" (p. 385). Smil, however, expresses concern about "environmental externalities" and inequality

between those who consume too much ("high-energy countries") and those who have too little (p. 441).

Because of these, he calls for a "commitment to change" (p. 441). Unfortunately, nothing of substance

will happen in the short run because energy systems are too complex to be signiﬁcantly altered by

subsidies to technically inferior alternatives, be they wind power or liquid biofuels.

Growth covers some the same ground, but it is a diﬀerent animal in terms of its ambitions and

ultimate goals. Smil describes the book as the most comprehensive study on the modalities of growth in

Earth's life systems in their many "natural, social, and technical forms" [

] (p. xix), meaning biological

organisms, human artifacts (from simple tools to complex machines) and complex anthropogenic

systems (from population to economic growth) (Systems are deﬁned as "entities consisting of connected

and interdependent parts that make up speciﬁc structures and provide desired functions" (p. 303))

The ﬁrst chapter introduces readers to common growth patterns (e.g., linear, exponential, hyperbolic,

sigmoid) and outcomes (e.g., normal and power-law distributions). This is followed by a reworking and

repackaging of some the author's earlier writings on agriculture, technological change, human societies,

and other subjects. In the last chapter, Smil puts on his activist hat and worries about environmental

abuses and the fate of humanity.

As expected, Smil punctuates his core text with a few quirky calculations such as the number of

musical masterpieces Mozart could have produced had he lived beyond the age of thirty-ﬁve. He also

compiles yet another list of detailed studies written by knowledgeable experts who proved completely

clueless about (often short-term) future developments and outcomes. Failed predictions, Smil argues,

can often be explained by small variations or external interventions that disrupt the neat progression of

an expected growth trajectory in both simpler systems (e.g., weather events on a crop) and in human

societies. A striking case of the latter is the unexpected development of hydraulic fracturing that turned

the American petroleum production output curve from an asymmetrical bell shape into something of

an incomplete bimodal distribution. Readers are also warned never to infer simple and predictable

growth patterns on rapid initial take-oﬀs. Cases in point include the historical trajectories of British

coal extraction, the sudden halt of Japanese economic growth a generation ago, and a sharp decline in

electric car sales.

Although this is obviously not the author's intent, social scientists and historians already skeptical

of crude inferences from the methods and patterns of outcome observed in the domains of the natural

sciences to the realm of human actions will feel rather vindicated by Smil's evidence. After all, what can

growth patterns observed in geological processes or simpler life forms really tell us about creative

individuals willing to dissent from the status quo, consumers with evolving preferences, or market

economies characterized by an ever more complex and reﬁned division of labor? What is the analog to

rapid and sometimes drastic changes brought about by political actors, such as the displacement of

laissez faire and ﬁscal conservatism by new tax and spend policies, targeted "green" subsidies and

bans on conventional energy production and transport? Smil agrees to an extent, especially when

discussing the "role of the basic sociopolitical setting on economic growth and individual prosperity" by

"comparing outcomes in countries controlled for decades by Communist parties with the achievement

of neighboring nations" (e.g., North and South Korea, East and West Germany) (p. 417). In the end

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 5 of 21

though, he reverts to the default position of most environmental scientists that humans should be

treated like other living creatures and ecosystems because they are subjected to immutable natural laws.

2.2. "Numbers Don't Lie", but They Don't Tell the Right Story, Either

Smil's neo-Malthusian outlook permeates much of his work. His recent output is no exception.

In one of Growth's few paragraphs without numbers or references, he contends that Malthus' basic

assumption is "unassailable" for "the power of population growth is indeed much greater than the

capacity to produce adequate subsistence", at least when "population growth is unchecked" [

] (p. 317).

He does acknowledge, however, that Malthus was wrong to think that a food shortage would keep

populations in check. Smil further admits that economic growth proved to be the best contraceptive.

As he is often fond of stating, "numbers don't lie". Strangely though, the remarkable increases in

agricultural yields and total food production do not ultimately tell a tale of human achievement and

creativity, but rather of humanity having tapped into its ﬁnite store of natural resources and having

failed miserably to tackle environmental impacts. These are said to constitute "high direct and indirect

energy subsidies" [11] (p. 317).

Unlike most economists who have long viewed an ever expanding division of labor as the

necessary foundation of further growth and development, Smil, like many other sustainability theorists

before him, laments instead the "loss of such valuable, ﬂexible skills as the ability to grow one's own

food or to repair a range of small machines" [

] (p. 439). Readers, however, are not told how much

one should push back against the division of labor. Is a hobby gardener allowed to buy pre-packaged

seeds and plastic sheeting? Can a hobby mechanic plug his equipment in a functioning electrical outlet

and grid? Most importantly, how is growing one's own food a better use of one's limited time than

investing in the further development of specialized marketable skills and, in the process, better provide

for one's family? Indeed, how many pioneers who could build a log cabin and grow food without

external inputs wouldn't want to trade their situation with that of a relatively less skilled 21st century

delivery truck driver?

Smil's key conclusion is straightforward: One should not be blinded by Moore's law

(i.e., the doubling approximately every two years of transistors and other components emplaced on

a silicon wafer) for all natural growth on Earth, including economic growth, must eventually end.

In a few paragraphs he tells his readers that economic growth is ultimately unsustainable because

it is based on "anthropogenic insults to ecosystems" [

] (p. 492). Dematerialization is a mirage

because "decoupling economic growth from energy and material inputs contradicts physical laws".

A circular economy is nonsensical for "modern economies are based on massive linear ﬂows". In the

end, the dominant model of economic progress is incompatible with the preservation of a habitable

biosphere and humanity must "put an end to material growth and forge a new society that would

survive without worshipping the impossible god of continuously increasing consumption" [

] (p. 497).

While Smil mentions or refers to a few sophisticated Promethean writers such as Merrill K. Bennett,

Julian Simon, Herman Kahn, and Joel Mokyr, like most sustainable development theorists he proves

incapable of engaging them seriously. Instead, he dismisses pro-growth policy analysts as being

disproportionately "economists, lawyers, and techno-optimists" who "rarely think about the biosphere's

indispensability for the survival of human societies" [

] (p. 510). To the extent he discusses the economic

way of thinking, Smil mostly limits himself to criticizing concepts or approaches that have long been

the favorite whipping boys of environmental studies scholars, e.g., GDP statistics, models that treat

innovation as an exogenous factor, and a failure to appreciate the fundamental role of energy in economic

activities. In short, his neo-Malthusianism is of the kind one encounters at most environmentalist

academic meetings, for not only is techno-optimism boiled down to a soulless straw human, but it

is also denied a competent defense and drowned under incantations of Kenneth Boulding's famous

mantras that "Anyone who believes in indeﬁnite growth in anything physical, on a physically ﬁnite

planet, is either mad or an economist" or else that society needs to move from a "cowboy economy" to

a "spaceman economy" [11] (pp. 492–493).

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 6 of 21

To a Promethean reader, Growth is more akin to a grandiose Malthusian legal brief than a balanced

assessment of an ancient and perennial debate. This will not surprise long-time readers of Smil, for

the book doesn't contain anything that he hasn't already stated in more detail before. For instance,

in his 2013 book Made in the USA Smil disparaged the "growth imperative of modern economies" as

"obviously unsustainable" because of the second law of thermodynamics [

] (p. 11). He even went as

far as rephrasing his conclusion by using the titles of then popular pessimistic books: Because "materials

matter

. . .

we should stop shoveling fuel for a runaway train of economic growth

. . .

embrace the

logic of suﬃciency

. . .

confront consumption

. . .

and make a break with the throwaway culture

. . .

reasserting self-control" [

] (pp. 11–12). Smil's thinking is also what one expects from the author of

another book titled "Harvesting the Biosphere. What we have taken from nature" [

]. As he further

re-stated in a recent interview: "This is a ﬁnite planet. There is a ﬁnite amount of energy. There is

ﬁnite eﬃciency of converting it by animals and crops. And there are certain sensitivities in terms of

biogeochemical cycles, which will tolerate only that much. I mean, that should be obvious to anybody

who's ever taken some kind of kindergarten biology" [19] (n.p.).

Yet, Professor Smil also knows that the core arguments put forward by neo-Malthusians over the

last two centuries have not withstood the test of time in market economies. As he documents in Growth

and many other writings [

], there is now so much food in most parts of the world that many poor

people suﬀer from obesity rather than calorie deﬁciencies. In Energy and Civilization , he speciﬁcally

dismisses concerns about "the rising use of fossil fuels [as] a cause for concern about their early

exhaustion" or "the early onset of unbearably rising real costs of recovering these resources" [

]

(pp. 424–425). Indeed, not only has there never a shortage of non-renewable commodities in functioning

market economies, but the inﬂation-adjusted price of most valuable commodities has often gone down

drastically, indicating greater availability in spite of rapidly rising consumption [26].

Faced with the facts that supply numbers don't lie, many neo-Malthusians have long pivoted

towards claims of present or future irreversible environmental degradation as a result of population

growth, overproduction, and overconsumption [

]. As perhaps best stated over ﬁve decades ago by

Resources for the Future staﬀer Henry Jarrett, the "underlying causes" of problems such as "lowered

environmental quality, smoggy atmosphere, polluted streams, noise [and] land skinned by strip mining"

have long been believed by many "to be seen in the same statistics that most of the time are hailed

as indicators of economic growth" [

] (pp. viii–ix). Smil shares this assumption and consequently

calls for learning to live within solar and biospheric limits, which would involve a "delinking of

social status from material consumption" [

] (p. 440). Yet, in a harsh review of Jared Diamond's

best-seller "Collapse", Smil also commented that the most frequently invoked historical examples of

environmental destruction as a result of population growth and alleged unsustainable societal practices

(e.g., Rapa Nui, Norse settlements in Greenland) failed to conform to the environmentalist narrative

and were at any rate of little if any relevance for more resilient advanced societies [

]. Smil's writings

on the Chinese environment also suggest that economic growth coupled with even partial institutional

reform can go a long way in addressing seemingly hopeless predicaments [30].

Like many present-day environmentalists, Smil's claims of massive environmental degradation

are ultimately based on rather extreme and controversial scenarios and analytical frameworks such

as the sixth mass extinction [

] or the Stockholm's Resilience Center's planetary boundaries [

Needless to say, such catastrophist claims have a long history. For example, over a century ago scientiﬁc

management guru Frederick Winslow Taylor summed up contemporary fears as follows: "We can

see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by ﬂoods into

the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight" [

] (p. 5). The President of the New York

Zoological Society and prominent eugenicist Henry Fairﬁeld Osborn similarly observed at the time

that, with the exception of conservation areas, nowhere was "nature being destroyed so rapidly as

in the United States" [

] (n.p.). Not only did "vulgar advertisements hide the landscape", but "air

and water are polluted, rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping grounds, forests are swept

away, and ﬁshes are driven from the streams. Many birds are becoming extinct, and certain mammals

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 7 of 21

are on the verge of extermination" [

] (n.p.). While there were indeed severe problems at the time,

they proved largely manageable in later decades. Indeed, environmental indicators such as air and

water quality and the extent of the forest cover suggest that the American environment is now in

a better (or at least less bad) state than it was a century ago despite a population that more than

tripled in size and is now considerably wealthier [

]. In the end, if not all environmental trends

are good everywhere, one can hardly deny that, with the exception of carbon dioxide emissions,

most environmental indicators in societies that have experienced signiﬁcant economic growth have

long shown (often major) improvement over time [35,36].

Smil also echoes another long-standing complaint of neo-Malthusians, i.e., the deleterious impact

of greater population numbers and increased material wealth on the need for the psychological

(or spiritual or aﬀective) ﬂourishing one experiences as a result of encountering natural beauty,

avoiding large crowds and enjoying other life forms ("biophilia"). In his case, this takes the form

of light pollution that interferes with his enjoyment of a "starry sky bisected by the Milky Way"

or East Asian tourists who ruin his contemplation of Vel

zquez's "Las Meninas" at the Museo del

Prado [

] (p. 499). In this, Smil echoes illustrious predecessors such as economist John Stuart Mill who

commented in 1848 that if there was indeed enough room for population growth "supposing the arts

of life to go on improving" and "capital to increase", it was nonetheless "not good for man to be kept

perforce at all times in the presence of his species" because a "world from which solitude is extirpated

is a very poor ideal" [

] (n.p.). Solitude, he argued, was essential to improve one's character, such as

when meditating in "the presence of natural beauty and grandeur".

A century later, best-selling eco-catastrophist author William Vogt wrote that contemplating

the "Peruvian Andes, high above the timberline, where the vast and ancient movement of the

earth's crust lies recorded before the eyes of any observer who will stop to look, are so majestic,

so awe-inspiring", that it created in him an experience similar to listening to Beethoven's Ninth

Symphony [

] (pp. 94–95). To people able to appreciate the perfection and richness of natural beauty,

Vogt added, environmental destruction arose the same kind of feelings that a Frenchman would

experience if someone slashed the Mona Lisa. In his 1957 presidential address to the Population

Association of America, prominent population economist Joseph Spengler stated that "an overworked

stork is the enemy of the beautiful" [

] (p. 61). His 1965 presidential address to the American Economic

Association similarly decried Americans "prepared to trade natural grandeur and 'spontaneous activity

of nature'" for "junkyards and carscapes" in a failed attempt to access "'God's great open spaces'" [

]

(p. 5). Indeed, Spengler observed, "some hold [economist] J. K. Galbraith had better label ours an

eﬄ uent society than an aﬄuent one" [39] (p. 10).

While environmental regulations and public education campaigns undoubtedly played a role in

cleaning up the environment of ever wealthier societies, what Smil and other prominent neo-Malthusians

have long failed to grasp is that market-based economic development has always contained the seeds

of both improved standards of living and environmental remediation. I now turn to a discussion of

their key arguments.

3. Homo Prometheanus

In the last 70,000 years Homo sapiens' numbers grew from thousands of hunter-gatherers to nearly

eight billion individuals, a majority of whom are now city-dwellers. The outcomes of this process in

terms of life expectancy, health and many other indicators have been rather spectacular [

]. Needless to

say, progress would have been unthinkable if some of our ancestors had not challenged existing ways

of doing things and invented new things to do. As the economist Erich Zimmermann observed nearly

a century ago, before the emergence of humans "the earth was replete with fertile soil, with trees and

edible fruits, with rivers and waterfalls, with coal beds, oil pools, and mineral deposits; the forces of

gravitation, of electro-magnetism, of radio-activity were there; the sun set forth his life-bringing rays,

gathered the clouds, raised the winds" [

] (p. 3). However, he added, "there were no resources".

Resources, he later explained, were in reality "highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not,

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 8 of 21

they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature

sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is

made available for human use . . . knowledge is truly the mother of all resources" [41] (pp. 814–815).

Prometheans have long traced resource creation back to some unique human attributes. The ﬁrst is,

in Adam Smith's famous words, the "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another"

which has long been "common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals" [

] (n.p.)

Whether it caused or was a result of it, individuals came to specialize ever more narrowly in what they

did best and, trading with each other, produced far more, both in terms of quantity and quality, than if

each individual or larger social group had remained self-suﬃcient.

Another key characteristic is the capacity to solve problems of all kinds by constantly (re)combining

existing things in new ways. It was thus common a few decades ago to distinguish between the

'retardation school' of technological change, whose proponents believe that "the more that has been

invented the less there is left to be invented", and the 'acceleration school' according to which "the more

that is invented the easier it becomes to invent still more" because "every new invention furnishes a

new idea for potential combination with vast numbers of existing ideas" and the "number of possible

combinations increases geometrically with the number of elements at hand" [

] (p. 156). Nearly a

century ago, the radical American historian Charles Beard thus observed that there can never be

anything ﬁnal about technological advances for the "solution of one problem in technology nearly

always opens up new problems for exploration" and "[a]ctivities in one specialty produce issues for its

scientiﬁc neighbors" [

] (p. xxiv). Beard saw no end to this process because of the "passionate quest

of mankind for physical comfort, security, health, and well-being". He added that until "people prefer

hunger rather than plenty, disease rather than health, technology will continue to be dynamic" and

that "[c]uriosity would have to die out in human nature before technology could become stagnant,

stopping the progress of science and industry".

Writing from the perspective of the inventor and technician, the engineer and historian of

technology Henry Petroski argued that the "form of made things is always subject to change in response

to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all

invention, innovation, and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators, and engineers" [

]

(p. 22). Furthermore, "since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not

static, everything is subject to change over time. There can be no such thing as a 'perfected' artifact;

the future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing". In other words, successful market innovations

mandate the creation of smaller or less important problems than those that existed previously. As the

Canadian engineer and communist activist Herbert Dyson Carter observed over eight decades ago,

commercially successful inventions must either save time, lower costs, last longer, do more, work better

or sell more easily [

] (p. 143). While not all of these characteristics have environmental beneﬁts,

most do.

In what follows I ﬂesh out in more detail the Promethean perspective and challenge some of

Smil's assertions by calling upon authors whose writings long predate the modern environmental

movement. This will illustrate both how long-standing and vindicated Promethean arguments have

been over time.

3.1. Human Exceptionalism

In his "Treatise on Political Economy" ﬁrst published in 1803, French liberal economist Jean-Baptiste

Say was conﬁdent that humans' unique abilities to trade, barter, reason and use foresight would give

them the ability to oﬀset natural constraints, unlike other animals that were "incapable of providing for

future exigencies" [

] (n.p.). As such, people were "not more scantily supplied with the necessaries of

life, because their number is on the increase", nor more materially prosperous "because it is on the

decline". Rather, their "relative condition depends on the relative quantity of products they have at

their disposal; and it is easy to conceive these products to be considerable, though the population be

dense; and scanty, though the population be thinly spread". Indeed, he observed, famine was more

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 9 of 21

common in Europe during the less populated Middle Ages than in his days. In one of his "Letters to

Malthus", Say explicitly dismissed the belief that a reduction in population would "enable those which

are left to enjoy a greater quantity of those commodities of which they are in want" because it failed to

grasp that a reduction in manpower simultaneously destroyed the means of production [

] (n.p.).

After all, one did not see in thinly populated countries that "the wants of the inhabitants are more

easily satisﬁed". To the contrary, it was "abundance of productions, and not the scarcity of consumers,

which procures a plentiful supply of whatever our necessities require".

Anarchist theorist William Godwin similarly observed at the time that a human being is the

"only animal capable of persevering and premeditated industry" and the "only creature susceptible

of science and invention, and possessing the power of handing down his thoughts" [

] (n.p.). As a

result of past advances, most humans were "not living upon the wild fruits of the earth, or the wild

animals of the ﬁeld", but upon the products of human industry. Every person born into this world was

therefore "a new instrument for producing the means of subsistence" and every member added to

the numbers of the community, is a new instrument for increasing those means". The human species

was therefore "capable of improvement from age to age, by means of which capacity we have arrived

at those reﬁnements of mechanical production and science, which have been gradually called into

existence". By contrast, "all other animals remain what they were at ﬁrst, and the young of no species

becomes better or more powerful by the experience of those that went before him".

Building on Say's work, in the middle of the nineteenth century the French liberal economist

ric Bastiat granted Malthus his key premise for "all living species, except man" [

] (n.p.).

A human being, he wrote, "is perfectible; he seeks to improve his situation" and "[p]rogress is his

normal state". As a result, "the means of existence increase more rapidly than population" (italics in

original). Bastiat argued his case "not only [based on] the theory of perfectibility", but also on "facts,

since everywhere we ﬁnd the range of man's satisfactions widening" (italics in original). Karl Marx

later wrote that an "abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as

man has not interfered with them" [51] (n.p.).

In his 1879 best-selling "Progress and Poverty", American economist Henry George stated that

"everywhere the vice and misery attributed to over-population can be traced to the warfare, tyranny,

and oppression which prevent knowledge from being utilized and deny the security essential to

production" [

] (n.p.). This was because, of "all living things, man is the only one who can give play to

the reproductive forces, more powerful than his own, which supply him with food". Indeed, "while all

through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the limit of subsistence is independent of the thing

subsisted, with man the limit of subsistence is, within the ﬁnal limits of earth, air, water, and sunshine,

dependent upon man himself". As he put it, if "bears instead of men had been shipped from Europe

to the North American continent, there would now be no more bears than in the time of Columbus,

and possibly fewer, for bear food would not have been increased nor the conditions of bear life

extended, by the bear immigration, but probably the reverse". It was therefore "not the increase of

food that has caused [the North American] increase of men; but the increase of men that has brought

about the increase of food".

In a book ﬁrst published in 1957, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises observed that only

humanity had the power to escape from the struggles for survival, provided people engage in social

cooperation within the context of a market economy. As he saw things, an "eminently human common

interest, the preservation and intensiﬁcation of social bonds, is substituted for pitiless biological

competition, the signiﬁcant mark of animal and plant life" [

] (p. 56). As a result, humanity was

"no longer forced by the inevitable laws of nature to look upon all other specimens of his animal species

as deadly foes". It was thus "inappropriate to refer to animals and plants in dealing with the social

problems of man" because for "animals the generation of every new member of the species means the

appearance of a new rival in the struggle for life. For man

. . .

it means rather an improvement than a

deterioration in his quest for material well-being".

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 10 of 21

The American Trotskyist Joseph Hansen also noted three years later that he and his comrades

took "a decidedly diﬀerent view of humanity" than neo-Malthusians because they "note that man

has hands and a brain, the capacity to use tools and an inclination for teamwork. These have made

him, in distinction to all other animals, a food producer" [

] (p. 43). Hansen added that, in "today's

world, hunger is completely abnormal. Humanity can produce all it needs and many times over.

Moreover, man's capacity to increase his food supply expands with the increase in population and at

an ever-higher rate than population growth". A big population was therefore "an asset, not a liability.

Failure to see this rather obvious fact is the basic ﬂaw in the Malthusian argument".

3.2. Trade, Innovation, and Resource Creation

Prometheans have long argued that a larger population lays the foundation for greater resource

creation. As British political economist William Petty observed over a century before Malthus, it was

"more likely that one ingenious curious man may rather be found out amongst 4,000,000 than

400 persons" [

] (p. 49). The economist Edward Cannan objected a century ago to the notion that

agricultural productivity would have been greater in his days if population numbers had remained

small because its proponents failed to understand that fewer brains meant that fewer advances would

"have been discovered and introduced" [

] (n.p.). More recently, the physicist Robert Zubrin asked

who between Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison should not have been born in order to improve the lot

of humankind [57] (p. 24).

Needless to say, sheer numbers by themselves would mean little in the absence of an ever broader

and integrated division of labor and the technological advances it makes possible. In a personal reply

to and further face-to-face conversation with Malthus, the American diplomat Alexander Everett

suggested that an expanded division of labor not only made people more productive, but further laid

the foundation for "the invention of new machines, an improvement of methods in all the departments

of industry, and a rapid progress in the various branches of art and science" that resulted in a level

of labor productivity that far exceeded the proportional increase in population numbers [

] (p. 26).

A belief in decreasing returns, he argued, ultimately assumed that "labor becomes less eﬃcient and

productive in proportion to the degree of skill with which it is applied; that a man can raise more weight

by hand, than by the help of a lever, and see further with the naked eye than with the best telescope"

(p. 28). In 1844, Friedrich Engels stood Malthus on his head by observing that "science increases at

least as much as population. The latter increases in proportion to the size of the previous generation,

science advances in proportion to the knowledge bequeathed to it by the previous generation, and thus

under the most ordinary conditions also in a geometrical progression" [59] (n.p.).

Henry George noted three decades later that while one could see "many communities still

increasing in population", they were also "increasing their wealth still faster" [

] (n.p.) Indeed,

"among communities of similar people in a similar stage of civilization", the "most densely populated

community is also the richest" and the evidence was overwhelming that "wealth is greatest where

population is densest; that the production of wealth to a given amount of labor increases as

population increases. These things are apparent wherever we turn our eyes". In the end, the "richest

countries are not those where nature is most proliﬁc; but those where labor is most eﬃcient—not

Mexico, but Massachusetts; not Brazil, but England". Where nature provides modest resources,

George commented, "[t]wenty men working together will

. . .

produce more than twenty times the

wealth that one man can produce where nature is most bountiful". This was because the "denser the

population the more minute becomes the subdivision of labor, the greater the economies of production

and distribution, and, hence, the very reverse of the Malthusian doctrine is true; and, within the limits

in which we have reason to suppose increase would still go on, in any given state of civilization a

greater number of people can produce a larger proportionate amount of wealth, and more fully supply

their wants, than can a smaller number".

A concise overview of the anti-Malthusian stance was printed in 1889 in the Westminster Review:

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 11 of 21

The Malthusian theory does not accord with facts. As population grows, instead of production

being less per head, statistics clearly prove it to be greater. The intelligence which is fostered

in large communities; the advantages of the division of labour; the improved transit,

which increases in eﬃ ciency with an enterprising people in proportion as numbers become

large, and is impracticable until population has developed—are more than a match in the

competition of production for any advantage a thinly scattered community may in some

respects gain on a virgin soil. Malthus and his followers, while bringing prominently forward

the needs of an increasing population, keep out of view the increasing means of supply

which the additional labour of greater numbers will produce

. . .

. and so long as there are a

pair of hands to provide for every mouth, with intelligence and energy ample production is

assured, unless society erects artiﬁcial barriers by means of its laws regarding the distribution

of wealth. [60] (p. 287)

In his 1944 "The Theory of Economic Progress", economist Clarence Ayres emphasized the

importance of "the principle of combination" to human creativity and applied it in a variety of diﬀ erent

ways. The exponential growth or proliferation of technical devices could thus be explained because

"the more devices there are, the greater is the number of potential combinations" and because the

cross-fertilization of ideas was a key component of the discovery process [

] (n.p.). In this context,

the supply of natural resources could never be static:

The history of every material is the same. It is one of novel combination of existing devices

and materials in such fashion as to constitute a new device or a new material or both. This is

what it means to say that natural resources are deﬁned by the prevailing technology, a practice

which is now becoming quite general among economists to the further confusion of old ways

of thinking (since it involves a complete revision of the concept of "scarcity" which must

now be regarded as also deﬁned by technology and not by "nature". [61] (n.p.)

The result of these processes, as had been understood in embryonic form nearly three centuries

earlier by the German alchemist Johann Joachim Becher, was that with "increase of population come

increased facilities for subsistence, and through the latter comes inﬂux of people; this in its turn

causes further increase of population, and so on in an everlasting circle" [

] (p. 154). Writing in 1771,

the French economist Nicholas Baudeau similarly argued that the "productiveness of nature and the

industriousness of man are without known limits" because production "can increase indeﬁnitely" and

as a result "population numbers and well-being can go on advancing together" [63,64] (p. 98).

In the end, Prometheans, whatever their political leanings, typically shared four core beliefs:

(1) humans diﬀer suﬃciently from other animal species to invalidate analogies between growth in

human societies and growth in other social animals and ecosystems; (2) innovation is cumulative; (3) an

ever greater division of labor and a growing population lay the foundations for future growth and

wealth creation; (4) bad economic and environmental outcomes should be blamed on poor governance

rather than population growth. Prometheans, however, disagreed as to the practical policy implications

of this last belief based on their political aﬃnities.

3.3. Incentives, Institutions, and Green Innovations

While Professor Smil obviously understands the power of economic incentives, he frequently

expresses doubts about the outcome of free markets. In Growth he laments the cramped living

conditions of broilers (i.e., chickens raised for meat) and pigs, but understands that farmers cannot be

proﬁtable with lower densities [

] (p. 148). Another problem that seemingly rattles him a great deal

is that houses, appliances, personal vehicles, and many other devices keep getting more numerous,

bigger, and more complex over time [

] (pp. 8–9). In a recent interview, Smil discussed the small

super-insulated house he built in Winnipeg (Canada), an urban jurisdiction that has long had some of

the cheapest land, real estate, and energy costs (especially hydro-electricity rates) in the developed

world. As he admits, his creation made no sense economically and people don't want to pay a premium

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 12 of 21

for it "unless the price of energy goes up, up" [

] (n.p.). (Luckily for him, years of bad governance

at Manitoba Hydro will soon make higher energy prices a reality in his province [

].) If everybody

had such a house, he argues, humans would emit between ﬁve and eight billion fewer tons of carbon

dioxide every year, an outcome that proves the existence of "enormous slack in the system" [

Following this argument to its logical conclusion, however, one might as well consider children the

worst form of "slack" to be gotten rid of, a position now promoted by a seemingly growing number of

climate change activists [66].

To someone like Smil who views human societies through neo-Malthusian lenses, the price system

is obviously inadequate. To others, however, prices remain the best way to factor in innumerable

trade-oﬀ s in order to achieve a rational (i.e., economic) allocation of scarce resources out of an incredibly

large number of possible combinations. Market outcomes are therefore not determined by ruthless

displays of corporate power, but by a never-ending discovery process driven by consumer demand in

which existing and new technologies and materials are continuously pitted against each other. As will

now be argued, to work properly and deliver beneﬁcial environmental outcomes, the price system

must be embedded in private property rights.

3.3.1. Private Property Rights

To their supporters, secured private property rights have always incentivized forward thinking,

innovation, greater productivity, and careful stewardship of natural resources. As John Locke argued

in 1690, the "provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of inclosed and

cultivated land, are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those which are yielded

by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common" [

] (n.p.). A century later English

agricultural writer Arthur Young famously wrote that the "magic of property turns sand into gold"

and "Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine

years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert" [

] (n.p.). Despite Malthusian inclinations,

French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy observed at about the same time that Lombardy and

Belgium, although often ravaged by war, were "always ﬂourishing" because of well-established

private property rights. On the other hand, Poland had a small and stationary population "because

its inhabitants being serfs, and wretched, have in the midst of abundance very slender means of

existence" [

] (n.p.). However, he argued, "suppose for a moment the small number of men, to whom

these serfs belong, and who devour their substance, driven from the country, and the land become

the property of those who cultivate it, you would see them quickly become industrious, and multiply

rapidly" [69] (n.p.).

Less well understood is that a system of private property rights also submits owners to legal

sanctions based on constraints such as the common law (tort) doctrines of trespass (any entry on the

property of another) and nuisance (indirect or intangible invasions, such as odors and noises, or any

unreasonable interference with another's use or enjoyment of his property) or their equivalent in other

legal traditions (e.g., civil law systems). In this context, polluting someone else's property is no more

acceptable than vandalizing it. Such actions can result in damages being awarded or even an injunction

(i.e., an order requiring the cessation of an oﬀensive activity or specifying corrective action), although in

practice judges historically often granted a stay of injunction, i.e., a suspension of the injunction that

would allow the defendant time to work out the most convenient mode of compliance [70,71].

In practice, while such common law procedures sometimes bankrupted polluting businesses,

they also often triggered creative thoughts that culminated in the development of lucrative

by-

products [72,73]

. For instance, the journalist Peter Lund Simmonds observed a century and a

half ago that the stench resulting from the blood and oﬀal at a large pork-packing establishment "had

become such an oﬀense to the neighbourhood, that the proprietors were threatened with a perpetual

injunction" [

] (pp. 39–40). Shortly afterwards, however, they developed a method through which

they dried the entire refuse, including the blood. The parts containing suﬃcient fat to make the

operation economical were ﬁrst treated in a rendering tank where the clean fat was converted into lard

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 13 of 21

and the refuse into grease and grease oil. The scrap left in the process, consisting of the bones of the

head and feet and considerable meat, was then thoroughly mixed with the blood, dried, and converted

into a valuable output. The whole process resulted in a smell that was comparable with that of a pot

of boiled cabbage. Writing almost a century ago, Erich Zimmermann similarly observed that not all

businesses were "free to strive from the maximization of proﬁt without social interference" and that

"waste elimination may be enforced by law even if it does not pay in the economic sense" [

] (p. 768).

It sometimes happened, however, that "a corporation compelled by legal action to eliminate a waste at

great expense, and unable to pass the cost on to the consuming public, may succeed, with the aid of

scientiﬁc research, in converting the waste products into paying by-products—perhaps, even into a

product of major importance".

3.3.2. Market Prices

The short version of the case for the price system is as follows. Resources are always scarce,

while human needs and desires are not. The interaction of supply and demand results in prices that

reﬂect the relative scarcity of physical and intellectual resources. Proﬁts and losses are generated by

individuals' relative ability to combine scarce inputs in order to provide products and services that

consumers value more than the available alternatives. Over time, goods more valuable than the sums

of the inputs taken separately get produced, while goods worth less than the sum of their inputs are

not. The appropriate measure of a ﬁrm's success in creating value is therefore long-term proﬁtability.

Less appreciated is that market prices have long promoted both resource creation and greater

eﬃ ciency in resource use. When the price of a commodity increases, market actors look for more of it,

use it more eﬃciently and develop substitutes. As a result, resources for which there is a sustained

demand have become more abundant while their inﬂation-adjusted prices have decreased [

]. Even in

the context of stagnant or declining prices, farmers, manufacturers, and others have to keep up with

their competitors and become ever more creative and eﬃcient over time, an outcome documented by

Smil himself in several books.

3.3.3. Underground Resources

As Smil knows better than perhaps anybody else, much resource creation in the last two centuries

has resulted in the substitution of resources produced or harvested from biomass on the surface

of the planet by substances ultimately extracted from below the ground and transported over ever

longer distances. Carbon fuels, metals, sand, clay, silicon, potash, and phosphate, among others,

have thus allowed, through many transactions, much developmental work and constantly improved

manufacturing processes, to drastically reduce overall demand for wild fauna such as whales

(e.g., whale oil, baleen, perfume base), birds (e.g., feathers), elephants, polar bears, alligators and

countless other wild animals (e.g., ivory, fur, skin); trees and other plants (e.g., lumber, ﬁrewood,

charcoal, rubber, pulp, dyes, green manure); agricultural products (e.g., fats and ﬁbers from livestock

and crops, leather, dyes and pesticides from plants); work animals (e.g., horses, mules, oxen); and

human labor in various forms (e.g., lumbering, weeding). Smil is also aware that, in economies that

beneﬁtted from drastic productivity increases and wealth creation that owed much to underground

resources, much marginal agricultural land has been abandoned and allowed to spontaneously revert

back to a wild(er) state. Somehow though, he seems unable to conceive how vigorous economic growth

can spontaneously occur with a simultaneous greening of our planet.

What Smil apparently can't see has long been obvious to a few Promethean analysts. Writing in 1933,

Erich Zimmermann observed that as "science becomes bolder and more eﬃcient", the "movement

away from nature gains momentum and, in extreme cases, production rests only indirectly on

"land" and is freed from the limitations which a direct dependence on "land" involves" [

] (p. 762).

In the past, he wrote, "nature was the only reservoir from which man drew the raw materials of

production", but in his time industry had not only learned to tap into the waste heap and the junk

pile (e.g., scrap steel), but also to create "artiﬁcial substitutes, especially synthetic products". This had

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 14 of 21

come about "[w]henever the price of a natural product, essential to some industry, [rose] as the result

of the absolute limitation of the actual supply or of monopolistic control over the supply" As a result,

"chemists throughout the industrial world strain[ed] every eﬀort to imitate the product or to ﬁnd

usable substitutes. A high market price tends to stimulate research" (p. 764).

During the Second World War, the geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather noted approvingly that a

"hundred years ago, nearly 80 per cent of all the things men used were derived from the plant and

animal kingdoms, with only about 20 per cent from the mineral kingdom. Today only about 30 per

cent of the things used in industrialized countries come from things that grow; about 70 per cent have

their sources in mines and quarries" [75] (p. 55).

As the agricultural economist Karl Brandt also observed at the time:

During World War I and immediately after, the belief was common among scholars and

statesmen that Malthus' doctrine was still valid and that, owing to the progressive propagation

of man, scarcity of food was not only inevitable in the long run but characteristic also for

the second quarter of the twentieth century. A few years after the war the situation in

world market contradicted those assumptions. The war had fostered rapid progress in

farm technology. It brought the internal combustion engine into general use for agriculture,

ﬁrst in America and later elsewhere. The truck, tractor, and combine were some of the

machines in which it was applied. Millions of horses were replaced, and millions of feed

acres were released for food production. Enormous savings in manpower and in production

costs became possible. New varieties of plants made available for crop production many

areas that previously could be used only for scanty grazing. Research in animal nutrition

and genetics also led to much greater eﬃciency in converting feed into animal products.

The really revolutionary progress in food production technology revealed the economic

fallacy of the more than century-old secular "law of diminishing returns", as commonly

applied to food production. It became apparent that technological progress made increasing

economic returns and a lowering of the costs of food production possible within suﬃciently

wide boundaries. [76] (pp. 135–136)

Looking at a broader range of activities, the historical demographer and economic historian

Edward Anthony Wrigley later argued that the organic economy

escaped from the problem of the ﬁxed supply of land and of its organic products by using

mineral raw materials. Thus, the typical industries of the [Industrial Revolution] produced

iron, pottery, bricks, glass and inorganic chemicals, or secondary products made from

such materials, above all an immense profusion of machines, tools and consumer products

fashioned out of iron and steel. The expansion of such industries could continue to any scale

without causing signiﬁcant pressure on the land, whereas the major industries of an organic

economy, textiles, leather and construction, for example, could only grow if more wool,

hides or wood were produced which in turn implied the commitment of larger and larger

acreages to such ends, and entailed ﬁercer and ﬁercer competition for a factor of production

whose supply could not be increased. Meeting all basic human needs, for food, clothing,

housing, and fuel, inevitably meant mounting pressure on the same scarce resource. [

] (p. 5)

3.3.4. Decoupling

In sustainability parlance, relative decoupling refers to environmental impacts growing at a slower

rate than population or consumption. This is achieved through productivity gains, from increased

agricultural yields to lower energy inputs per unit of output. Absolute decoupling describes declining

overall impacts, independent of population and consumption trends. It is most commonly achieved

through resource substitution such as the reduction in the number of work horses and mules brought

about by the advent of the truck, tractor and the automobile; the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 15 of 21

that resulted from the substitution of coal by natural gas in electricity generation; or the replacement of

paper by electronic devices.

Smil, however, has no time for the most optimistic scenarios, for "[d]ecoupling economic growth

from energy and material inputs contradicts physical laws: basic needs for food, shelter, education,

and employment for the additional billions of people to be added by 2100 will alone demand substantial

energy ﬂows and material inputs" [

] (p. 492). Yes, he admits, inputs will exhibit "lower relative

intensities (energy/mass, mass/mass) than today's average rates", but absolute material use will either

rise with continued population and economic growth, or else "will moderate but remain substantial".

Why this is inherently a bad thing, however, is left unsaid. As Smil knows very well because of his

intimate familiarity with and more formal studies of the disastrous environmental outcomes created

by communist central planning [

], there is simply no correlation between overall material use

and environmental degradation. In other words, material poverty is not inherently environmentally

virtuous, nor his greater material use necessarily bad for the environment.

As argued three decades ago by economist and demographer Mikhael Bernstam (who relied

in part on Smil's [

] work), throughout the second half of the twentieth century market economies

became wealthier and cleaner while centrally planned ones stagnated or even regressed while becoming

increasingly polluted. Bernstam considered this outcome the "most important reversal in economic

and environmental history since the Industrial Revolution" [

] (p. 334). A short version of his

analysis is that this result can be attributed to the cost minimization paradigm of market economies

as opposed to the input maximization of centrally planned ones. His most relevant insight for this

essay, however, is that discharges into the environment declined in market economies for reasons

ranging from spontaneous energy transitions (e.g., the substitution of coal and fuel oil by natural

gas and hydro-electricity) to the development and adoption of better pollution control and disposal

technologies made possible by increased wealth (e.g., from sewage treatment and landﬁlling to

waste incineration and (deep) underground injection of hazardous wastes). The elimination or proper

handling of waste (i.e., uselessly processed resources and economically useless production—scrap,

spills, slag, discards, refuses and other processing losses; destroyed primary resources; losses of

intermediary and ﬁnal output in transportation and storage), rather than greater material use as a result

of increased production and consumption, thus ultimately determined the impact of economic growth

on the environment. Bernstam, however, didn't discuss the spontaneous and widespread creation of

valuable by-products out of polluting production residuals, a widespread and market-driven outcome

that long predates recent discussions of the creation of a "circular economy".

3.3.5. Loop Closing

Smil considers any suggestion of imminent implementation of the circular economy as "seriously

misleading" as modern economies are based on "massive linear ﬂows of energy, fertilizers,

other agrochemicals, and water" [

] (p. 492). Readers, however, are not told why these ﬂows

are or will always prove inherently problematic, especially if institutional reforms (e.g., an end to

subsidies that promote wasteful behavior; more stringent enforcement of private property rights) and

more innovative ways to handle them are developed and implemented.

A misconception that Smil and proponents of the circular economy seem to share, however,

is that the concept marks a break with past industrial practices in market economies. Yet, in the

1875 catalogue he wrote for his exhibition on the creation of valuable by-products out of production

residuals, Peter Lund Simmonds commented that the "manufacturer, of course, only considers as

Waste the residues of the used raw and subsidiary substances which remain on his hands after he has

obtained the principal and secondary products, and these have often in his eyes little or no comparative

value. Many useful bye-products and valuable industries, however, sprung out of the proﬁtable

utilization of these" [

] (p. 2). In 1886 an encyclopedia entry described how "in the earlier days" of

many manufacturing branches "certain portions of the materials used have been cast aside as 'waste,'"

but over time "ﬁrst in one branch and then in another, this 'waste' material has been experimented

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 16 of 21

upon with a view to ﬁnding some proﬁtable use for it; and in most instances the experiments have

had a more or less satisfactory results" [

] (p. 464). A scientiﬁc retrospective published the following

year highlighted "the utilization of waste materials and by-products" as a "leading feature of the

Victorian epoch" [

] (p. 299). Writing in 1904, the American industrial chemist Leebert Lloyd Lamborn

observed: "If there is one aspect more than any other that characterizes modern commercial and

industrial development

. . .

it is the utilization of substances which in a primitive stage of development

of any industry were looked upon as worthless" [82] (p. 16).

While legal constraints sometimes triggered creative solutions, competitive pressures were

typically deemed more signiﬁcant. For instance, the Scottish chemist and politician Lyon Playfair

argued that "as competition becomes keen, these waste products may become the largest source of

proﬁt" [

] (p. 269). Peter Lund Simmonds similarly wrote that "one of the characteristic and salient

points of modern enterprise [is] not only to allow nothing to be wasted, but to recover and utilise with

proﬁt the residues from former working" [

] (p. 4). Perhaps his most candid passage on this topic is

the following:

As competition becomes sharper, manufacturers have to look more closely to those items

which may make the slight diﬀerence between proﬁt and loss, and convert useless products

into those possessed of commercial value, which is the most apt illustration of Franklin's

motto that "a penny saved is twopence earned". [79] (p. 4)

In 1927 Rudolf Alexander Clemen, then the leading economic analyst of the American meatpacking

industry, viewed "the development of by-products in industry [as] one of the most outstanding

phenomena in our economic life" [

] (p. vii). He credited the fear of being overwhelmed by competitors

in the same or other industrial sectors as the driving force in this respect. Modern conditions, he argued,

made it "almost impossible materially to cut production and distribution of expense for the majority

of commodities". In this context, "one of the most important opportunities for gaining competitive

advantage, or even for enabling an industry or individual business to maintain its position in this

new competition", was to reduce manufacturing expenses "by creating new credits for products

previously unmarketable".

Contrary to Professor Smil's environmentalist dislike of large cities, many past authors alluded

to the importance of agglomeration economies for successful industrial resource recovery [

Simmonds summarized the British experience by observing that larger factories were at an advantage

"in consequence of the larger quantity of residues at their command, and which necessitate special

machinery for working up or utilizing", but he also pointed out that "in great industrial centres, too,

the waste products of a large number of works may be easily collected" [

] (p. 4). At the turn of the

twentieth century the political economist Charles Devas explained the concentration of industries by,

among other factors, the "greater growth of subsidiary industries, such namely as supply materials and

utilize refuse, to do which for a single factory would not be worthwhile" [

] (p. 98). The journalist

and author Frederick Talbot wrote in 1920 that, in order to be successful, "co-operative and individual

methods [of resource recovery] can only be conducted upon the requisite scale in the very largest

cities where the volume of material to be handled is relatively heavy" [

] (p. 303). This was because

"waste must be forthcoming in a steady stream of uniform volume to justify its exploitation, and the

fashioning and maintenance of these streams is the supreme diﬃculty".

Interestingly, something akin to the creation of a circular economy was attempted in some centrally

planned economies in the post-World War II era. These initiatives revolved around an elaborate

hierarchical input and output quota system of waste registration, collection, distribution, and reuse and

a number of mobilization campaigns. As with everything else in such an economic system, however,

the experiment failed as it suﬀered from a number of shortcomings, mainly: (1) the lack of incentives

by individuals to invest time and eﬀort into creating and producing goods that other people are willing

to pay for; (2) the diﬃ culty of allocating resources rationally in the absence of a price mechanism or

when prices have been distorted by government policies; (3) the inability of a centrally planned system

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 17 of 21

to take advantage of the unique tacit knowledge and information that individuals possess about their

immediate surroundings and particular line of work [89].

4. Conclusions

In his recent intellectual history of left-wing Prometheanism, geographer William B. Meyer

observed that "exponents of green thought have been studied much more carefully (and sympathetically)

than have prophets of human mastery over the earth" [

] (p. 15). This is arguably even truer in the

case of free-market Prometheans. Be that as it may, to many environmental scientists and sustainable

development theorists, Prometheanism, whichever side of the political spectrum it might come from,

implies an unacceptable belief in "human supremacy" [

]. True, humans are perhaps less unique

than what was once believed to have been the case. After all, we now appreciate better than our

ancestors did that many other life forms use sophisticated means of communication, transmit tacit

knowledge to their oﬀspring, use opportunity tools (e.g., sticks, stones, sponges, thorns) and can

modify long-standing practices to take advantage of new opportunities [

]. We also know that some

insects (e.g., leafcutter ants, some species of termites, ambrosia beetles) developed agricultural practices

tens of millions of years ago [92].

Yet, one can hardly deny that modern humans have developed unique abilities such as their

capacity to trade physical goods over long distances and to expand and improve upon their stock of

knowledge and capital by transmitting and (re)combining ideas. The beneﬁcial outcomes created by

these traits were arguably better understood and more widely celebrated in the past [

]. For instance,

writing two centuries ago, William Godwin observed that before the publication of Thomas Robert

Malthus' "Essay on the Principle of Population", most people believed that an increase in population

would deliver better days. Godwin saw "something exhilarating and cheerful" in this earlier spirit

when humanity believed it could summon "the unlimited power we possess to remedy our evils,

and better our condition" [

] (n.p.) Humans, he observed, felt they "belonged to a world worth

living in".

Fortunately, a belief in progress dominated much of the second half of the nineteenth century [

a time period (1867–1914) Professor Smil deems the most signiﬁcant watershed in human history since

the emergence of settled agriculture [

]. To give but one illustration, the anonymous writer of a review

essay published in The Economist in 1854 argued that Malthusians beliefs were often held with a

"fervour quite religious" by some of the "leading minds of society" [

] (p. 1269). Natural constraints,

these people believed, ultimately mandated "no remedy [other than] starving out the people, horrible as

it is". Humanity therefore had to turn its back on "great discoveries and improvements, which render

humanity more productive", for they would only make things worse down the road. Fortunately,

The Economist contributor wrote, Malthusian notions that the barrier to progress was "becoming

more formidable" and that "progress is always in a diminishing ratio" were "ﬂatly and emphatically

contradicted by the history of society all over the world". Indeed, "as men have been multiplied

[so much faster than formerly]", industry had "become productive in the compound ratio of their

numbers and their skill" and in every civilized society an increasingly smaller portion of the population

was then suﬃcient to feed everyone (pp. 1269–1270). As he put it, the Malthusian doctrine was by

then so discredited that "nobody, except a few mere writers, now troubles himself about Malthus on

Population", although these errors may yet "linger in the Universities, the appropriate depositories of

what is obsolete and practically unimportant" (p. 1270).

Sadly, many later university professors and social activists—including some early twentieth

century eugenicists discussed without context in Growth—proved very apt at promoting the Malthusian

perspective and creating a constant stream of new catastrophist scenarios [

]. When their teachings

prevailed, human suﬀering followed, from forced sterilizations to wars of aggression. Although one is

reluctant to bring this up, Professor Smil, who was born under Nazi occupation, shouldn't need to be

reminded that Hitler justiﬁed his policy of territorial expansion on Malthusian grounds [

]. Yet, as the

reviewer of popular 1948 neo-Malthusian tracts observed in Time magazine, how could anyone who

Energies 2020, 13, 5306 18 of 21

bought into the belief that national governments had too few resources to keep their populations

passably well fed argue against the notion that they should ultimately conquer and clear other lands

of their populations? What especially saddened the reviewer was that Germany, a country that had

managed to "stretch" the sandy acres of the Prussian plain through innovative farming practices

and highly skilled industry, had by then already gone to war twice because of the prevalence of the

"slice-of-cake [that can't be grown] philosophy" among its people and political leadership [96].

Needless to say, Professor Smil's ire never translates into anything remotely resembling

old-fashioned Geopolitik. His targets are rather Angry Birds and "other inane apps" [

] (p. xiv),

"unneeded junk" (p. xvi); "poorly built, odd looking, and esthetically oﬀensive" McMansions (p. 251);

desires to "out-American America in ostentatious consumption" (p. 501); and failure to appreciate

natural beauty. Yet, one can easily imagine how Smil's thinking, like that of many other Malthusians

before him, might motivate less sophisticated minds to oppose lifting people out of poverty and

promote coercive population control.

Fortunately, basic numbers don't lie and what they convey is that, in the context of market

economies, past Promethean writers proved much more right than their opponents. This is not to say

that environmental challenges are non-existent, but that the root causes of most current problems are

arguably more ideological and institutional than physical. Like nearly all prominent neo-Malthusians

before him, however, in Growth Professor Smil elected not to directly engage with the key insights of

his more optimistic opponents. Knowing his work ethic, then, would it be too much to ask him to

consider devoting one of his future book projects to a more systematic debunking of the ideas of people

whose predecessors proved much more correct than those on his side of the sustainable development

divide? Most important of all, Professor Smil could back up his case with hard numbers rather than

having to rely on scenarios and models based on historically debunked premises.

Funding: This research received not external funding.

Conﬂicts of Interest: The author declares no conﬂict of interest.

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A re we running out of resources? That's been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, in contrast, argued that humans would innovate their way out of resource shortages. He believed that people were the "ultimate resource" that would make other resources more plentiful. In this paper, we revisit the main points of contention in the debate regarding availability of resources and their relationship with population growth. Using the latest price data for 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals, we propose a new way of measuring resource availability based on four concepts. First, the time-price of commodities allows us to measure the cost of resources in terms of human labor. We find that, in terms of global average hourly income, commodity prices fell by 64.7 percent between 1980 and 2017. Second, the price elasticity of population (PEP) allows us to measure sensitivity of resource availability to population growth. We find that the time-price of commodities declined by 0.934 percent for every 1 percent increase in the world's population over the same time period. Third, we develop the Simon Abundance Framework, which uses the PEP values to distinguish between different degrees of resource abundance, from decreasing abundance at one end to superabundance at the other end. Considering that the time-price of commodities decreased at a faster proportional rate than population increased, we find that humanity is experiencing superabundance. Fourth, we create the Simon Abundance Index, which uses the time-price of commodities and change in global population to estimate overall resource abundance. We find that the planet's resources became 379.6 percent more abundant between 1980 and 2017. On the basis of our analysis of the relationship between resource availability and population growth, we forecast that the time-price of commodities could fall by a further 29 percent over the next 37 years. Much will depend on policies and institutions that nations pursue. For the time-price of commodities to decline and resource abundance to increase, it is necessary for market incentives and the price mechanism to endure. When prices of commodities temporarily increase, people have an incentive to use resources more efficiently, increase their supply, and develop cheaper substitutes.

In recent decades, researchers have increasingly documented the impact of anthropogenic activities on wild animals, particularly in relation to changes in behaviour. However, whether human-induced behavioural changes in wildlife may be considered evidence of cultural evolution remains an open question. We explored whether behavioural responses to different types of human activities in species already known to display behaviour transmitted through social learning, particularly non-human primates (NHPs), are suggestive of cultural evolution in the wild. Results indicate that human influence on NHP cultural repertoires includes the modification and disappearance of existing cultural traits, as well as the invention of novel traditions with the potential to become cultural. These examples are found mostly in the domain of food acquisition, where animals modify their diet to include new resources, and adopt novel foraging strategies to avoid humans. In summary, this paper suggests that human activities can act as a catalyst for cultural change in animals, both in terms of threatening existing traditions and fostering new ones. The current situation may echo environmental changes thought to have triggered major behavioural adaptations in our own evolutionary history and thus be useful for research on human cultural evolution. As wildlife is increasingly exposed to humans and their activities, understanding how animal behaviour patterns and cultures are impacted and change in response to anthropogenic factors is of growing conservation importance.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis dates back in decades and is still topical presently due to its importance in environmental policy formulation. There are several systematic reviews of the EKC hypothesis using traditional review method. However, this review employs bibliometric and meta-analysis to track historical trends on the theme using the VOSviewer software and meta-analytic methods. The review translates the network analysis into visualized forms based on authors' contribution, the impact of the research by countries, citations count, and text corpus modeling using a network data extracted from Web of Science. The meta-analysis reveals that the collection of studies that validate the inversed-U shaped relationship has an average of US$8910 as the turning point of annual income level. Low income and middle-income countries are found below the thresholds of annual income level while high-income countries are above. Heterogeneity is confirmed among turning point in studies on EKC hypothesis due to differences in the period of study and econometric methods used in model estimation. The empirical findings reveal that most of the studies on EKC hypothesis are based on atmospheric indicators, while literature is sporadic and limited on EKC hypothesis which employs land indicators, oceans, seas, coasts and biodiversity indicators, and freshwater indicators.

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Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346225136_The_Paradoxical_Malthusian_A_Promethean_Perspective_on_Vaclav_Smil's_Growth_From_Microorganisms_to_Megacities_MIT_Press_2019_and_Energy_and_Civilization_A_History_MIT_Press_2017

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