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June reading
this year was like opening a time capsule.
It began with More
Lost Massey Lectures, Anansi 2008.
Economist Barbara Ward lectured in 1961
about development aid. Former German
Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1981 lectured
about his UN Commission. Near the end
of June I was shocked to read in Foreign
Affairs
July/August 2012 a critical
retrospective “Environmental Alarmism,
Then and Now ..” It was about the Club of
Rome’s 1968 report and book Limits
to Growth which seemed relevant to
my time capsule. The current Foreign
Affairs
critique was by
Bjorn Lomborg. He
showed population did not grow as the Club
predicted, commodity prices did not rise,
food production has not fallen, and there
has been no environmental collapse. He
notes the economists’ view that human
ingenuity needs to be taken into account.
The report allowed many to become
distracted by details of environmental
concerns such as pesticides and organic
farming. It allowed excessive population
control such as China’s one child law.
Lomborg notes poverty kills the most.
Economic growth removes poverty and
reduces population expansion. Contrary to
the title Limits
to Growth, Lomborg notes economic
growth is an answer. Taken with
the other parts of my June time capsule,
Lomborg’s take is far too simplistic. Ignoring
evident hazards by assuming something will
turn up may be good enough for economists,
but it is not good enough for those of us
who care about the human future. The stuff
of the More
Lost Massey Lectures was the stuff
of humans who took the learning of the
day, cared and thought and changed or
shaped it to give us where we are now. Limits
to
Growth is best seen as an important
part of that wider story of concern and
insight and mobilising action. The fact
that people changed things was the result
of the “alarmism” Lomborg crticizes. I knew some
names and recalled some of the work I
found in More Lost Massey Lectures
just I recalled reading Limits
to Growth. I also learned new
perspectives from my read about other
players in those years. The first Massey
Lecture was that by Barbara Ward. It was
titled “The Rich Nations and the Poor
Nations” – essentially about development
and economic growth. She reminded
listeners about the revolutionary times
and new motivating values such as equality
and sharing. Her economics of saving a
surplus to reach a critical mass for “lift
off” of a former colonial economy seemed a
long way from the debates around the
recent US banking failure. Yet her point
about a critical mass of infrastructure
and education so as to allow an economy to
take off – and mentioning India, Mexico
and Brazil as in principle ready to do so
in 1961 sounded prescient. The lack of
mention of Japan, Taiwan, China and South
Korea seems surprising now – but then she
spoke from the UK in the ending of the era
of European colonies. The
growth we now see has not been from the
economics of free market with an invisible
hand left to itself, but from large scale
international trading agreements based on
political needs and political competition
in a mist of the revolutionary post WWII
values Ward speaks of - like a quest for
equality. Frank
Underhill’s 1963 lecture “The Image of
Confederation” gave some fascinating
historical insights into the beginning and
evolution of the un-natural nation state –
Canada. Underhill himself contributed
through his work in establishing the CCF
political party, predecessor of the
current NDP opposition. George Grant’s
“Time as History” serves as a remarkable
philosophical backdrop for all the other
actors in the More
Lost Massey Lectures as well as for
Lomborg today. Grant sets our world as one
which conceives time as history. It is
heading somewhere in time, but no longer
waiting for the arrival of an end of time
and a kingdom of god. It is a world where
Grant suggests people want to make a
difference in building a future of justice
and peace in the here and now. Grant draws
from Nietzsche’s concepts of facing down
fate and meaninglessness and about humans
who do so and transcend a need for revenge
about their condition with a concern for
the world. Such people can re-vision the
future and re-set the horizons for the
human experiment. I note that the UN value
of freedom provides space for Nietzsche’s
individuals to emerge and do these things.
In fact that is what the actors in More
Lost Massey Lectures sought to do
in their various ways. History called them
to participate in responding to its
direction and the needs of their times. To
my thinking, the religious traditions and
the revolutionary post WWII global values
(and rights) do resonate with recurring
human concerns and these provide some
guidance for Barbara Ward and the others
joining in making our common history. Claude
Levi-Strauss lectured about “Myth and
Meaning” drawing meaning from recurring
seemingly related myths in different
places amongst different peoples,
principally in the New World. It seems our
mythologies are interlinked and have some
common meanings. Summing up
the political action for the times falls
to Willy Brandt’s lecture at the end of
the book. He talked about Global Survival
in 1981 following the global survival
conference of the G7 in Cancun Mexico.
This title might sound a little alarmist,
but Brandt is hard to dismiss. As
Chancellor of West Germany Brandt’s
creative Ostpolitik initiative facilitated
a whole range of simple practical contacts
between West Germany and the surrounding
Eastern Block countries in an era confined
by Cold War thinking. His work shifted the
dynamics of east-west relations. His
initiatives likely paved the way for the
Helsinki Accords from 1975-89. These led
to the negotiated ending of the Cold War
in 1990. Brandt was a special person
acting to change the conceptual horizons
of his time.
Willy Brandt’s Independent
Commission on International Development
Issues called for widespread public
discussion about a common future. In so
doing it built on the major conceptual
horizon developed in the 20th
century by the builders of the United
Nations - the notion that we are all in
this together. Brandt called
on the richest nations gathered in Cancun
for a way “forward” in four areas, and I
quote: -
A global
food program to stimulate world food
production and overcome hunger -
A global
energy strategy to accommodate the need
for security among producers and consumers
alike -
Additional
financial flows to ensure the stability of
national economies strained by precarious
balance of payments and mounting debts -
Reforms to
bring about broader participation in
international financial institutions and
more balanced conditions for world trade. The list
looks remarkably relevant even now, some
thirty years later. In his lectures Brandt
also talked of the absurd levels of
funding going into an arms race which
carried with it the threat of nuclear war
and annihilation of the human world as we
know it. That too remains a current issue. So my
June time capsule provided insights
and issues which I once knew but had
forgotten and which continue.
Technically, Lomborg is right - Limits to
Growth got it
all wrong. Yet he himself seems to
know that Limits to
Growth is best
seen as a popularising tool for global
issues relating to that new concept –
our common future. The impact of
Limits to
Growth went
beyond people worrying about organic
farming. The reason
why Limits
to Growth got it wrong is in large
part because it impacted people like
Brandt who cared and who were special and
who were able to act. The answers to the
challenges of Limits
to Growth involved a recasting of
the horizons. As an NGO at the World
Population Conference in 1984 I can recall
pointing out, as Lomborg does in his 2012
article, that development is the best
solution to population growth. It was part
of the UN plan of action for population.
Birth control programs were also part of
the plan in part because they were tied to
advancing women’s equal rights, a
dimension of development and the kind of
education and preparation for economic
“lift off” to which Barbara Ward refers. Limits
to Growth got it wrong because
there were creative political responses to
the challenges it reported. There is now a
World Food Program. There is a World
Population Program. There is a UN
Development Program. There are widely
shared values being applied in all these
area of planning our common future like
fairness and equality. Thus
growth per se can at best be part of
the answer. Indeed, there may even be
“The End of Growth” as we have known
it, as the title of a recent 2012 book
has put it. That book shows current
economies depend on ever costlier oil
which is ever more hazardous to
extract. Lomborg did not discuss the
commodity oil. Perhaps it’s time for
another trip into the time capsule to
revisit the book Small is
Beautiful? Lomborg
notes critically that those who have
time to worry about details like
organic produce are people in rich
countries whose basic needs have been
met. Yet surely it is responsible for
people whose basic needs have been met
to reflect about growth for whom and
for what? If the basic needs of the
human family can be more or less be
met in our common future, we, the
people of the UN should hold a wider
discussion about Small is
Beautiful and
setting a limit to growth beyond human
needs!  |