Human resourcefulness and technological innovation may just help save the environment, argues Jesse Ausubel (Image: Marc Asnin/Redux)

Throughout history, technological innovation has saved us from being overwhelmed by overpopulation, and Jesse Ausubel tells Alison George why he is convinced that human resourcefulness can pull the fat out of the fire even now

You’re known as a techno-optimist. Why have you got such faith in technology’s power to save the environment?

I regard myself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist. But I do think that humanity is ingenious and enterprising. Throughout the ages people have doubted that their descendants could exist, with improving health and longevity, in the numbers and densities we do now. In the 19th century it was common to reason that horse manure or chimney smoke would bury or choke cities. Yet air quality in New York City and water quality in New York harbour are better than when I or my mother was a child. Over time people find, invent and spread solutions for many environmental problems.

So do environmental doomsayers fail to factor in our technical ingenuity?

Malthus certainly underestimated technical change. And numerous people considered experts in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s thought that humanity would not make it to 2009 without big collapses in population, at least regionally. It didn’t happen. As a student in the early 1970s, I shared the tremendous interest in Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Science article “The tragedy of the commons”, which described how herdsmen selfishly add cows to the common pasture until the resource fails for all. In the tragic instances, individual rationality does destroy the collectivity.

Surely our …