Early morning whirlwinds rising from the finely tilled, 'eroded' soil in Walla Walla County, Washington, 16 July 1937.

In 1948, ecologist William Vogt published his Road to Survival, which was to become the biggest-selling environmentalist book, until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Vogt argued that, with rare exceptions, man had ‘taken the bounty of the earth and made little or no return’. Where he had not lost water and soil, he had ‘overgrazed and overcropped, and by the removal of animals and plants, [had] carried away important soil minerals, broken down the all-important soil structure, and generally exhausted the environment’. Civilisations were at risk, because ‘hundreds of millions of acres of once rich land’ had become ‘as poor as or worse than – the city gardener’s sterile plot’. Population growth and wealth creation had in the end delivered ‘[d]espoiled forests, erosion, wildlife extermination, overgrazing, and the dropping of water tables’. That same year, Vogt’s close friend, the conservationist Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr, published his book Our Plundered Planet. There he warned that environmental destruction would soon prove even more deadly than the Second World War, for ‘man’s destructiveness has turned not only upon himself but upon his own good earth – the wellspring of life’. Osborn deemed American agricultural production one ‘great illusion’, because the ‘story of our nation in the last century as regards the use of forests, grasslands, wildlife and water sources is the most violent and the most destructive of any written in the long history of civilisation’. Man’s ‘avoidance of the day of atonement that is drawing nearer as each year passes’, Osborn continued, meant he had to learn ‘to work with nature in understanding rather than in conflict’. Failure to change threatened ‘man’s very survival’. Humanity had ‘now arrived at the day when the books should be balanced’. Another prominent eco-catastrophist voice at the time was the Indian academic, population-control activist and public servant Sripati Chandrasekhar, who commented in 1954 that the North American agricultural surpluses had been ‘obtained at the cost of the longevity and perhaps the very life of the land itself’. Throughout most of the world, ‘forests are not being used on a sustained-yield basis; they are being inexorably wiped out. Grasslands almost everywhere are being overgrazed. Water tables are falling; rivers are overflowing and changing their courses. Nature is losing her balance. Man’s ignorant and destructive hand has set the ball of disaster rolling.’ The optimists strike back Postwar eco-pessimists, such as Vogt, Osborn and Chandrasekhar, enjoyed much political support. They were nonetheless severely criticised by some of their contemporaries who, a few decades later, would turn out to have been right all along. Osborn and Vogt were attacked by an anonymous writer in Time magazine a few months after they published their books. (The writer was likely USDA soil scientist Charles Kellogg.) According to the reviewer, Vogt’s assertions about soil had by then been totally discredited by ‘real agricultural scientists’, who considered ‘every main article of the neo-Malthusian creed’ as ‘either false or distorted or unprovable’. Arguing that an acre of soil is limited in terms of its production capacity, or biotic potential, ignored the fact that humans were capable of improving it. Indeed, only individuals who had turned their back on progress could accept the notion that they would have to adapt to soil patterns for survival. The reviewer also refuted the notion that the productive capability of the world’s cultivated lands would continue to fall due to erosion and exhaustion.

As Philip Stott observed, ‘every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness’

While Vogt was correct to point out that humans did not maintain soils as diligently as perhaps they could have, he had ignored tremendous recent progress in terms of improving soil quality, in the process delivering increased production capabilities. There were only a few iota of truth in Osborn’s and Vogt’s ‘errors, prejudices, mysticism and reckless appeals to emotion’. Their ‘static’ philosophy, however, gave ‘great comfort’ to state planners, who believed that there were only so many resources available which had to be strictly controlled. The result, of course, was that ‘any group ruled by this static idea will turn its back on progress and become socially reactionary’. In another scathing review, agricultural economist Karl Brandt described Vogt’s take on soil erosion and overpopulation as ‘a forceful piece of propaganda for the no longer entirely new idea that soil-conservation practices by farmers are needed on many parts of the earth, and for Margaret Sanger’s idea that mankind must be saved by birth control’. Ignoring all contrary evidence, Vogt had produced a ‘truly amazing book, not for the knowledge or wisdom it offers the reader, but for its psychological appeal, the emotional reactions it generates, the laudatory reviews it gets from literary critics, and its phenomenal sales’. People knowledgeable about ‘farming, land utilisation, or the economics of resources’ who have ‘any critical faculty or plain common sense will be moved to anger by it and may want to throw it into a wastebasket’. Brandt also chastised Vogt for needlessly blaming ‘the old stand-bys of all left-wing radicals: the white man; the rugged individualist; the free-enterprise system; the capitalistic system; the lumberman who uses an axe; the railroads which contribute the Dust Bowl and the destruction of the forests to modern living’. To these, Vogt had also added ‘the farmers who use moldboard ploughs; the people who produce children and rear them; and the doctors, chemists, and biologists who reduce mortality and thus help families in overpopulating the world’. Brandt urged the writing of as many rebuttals as could be mustered because ‘the basically unsound main thesis of impending catastrophe as the result of universal abuse of land resources and of rapid overpopulation has profoundly impressed even men of otherwise good judgment’. The University of Delaware geographer Earl Parker Hanson was equally vociferous in his book, New Worlds Emerging, a self-described attack on the ‘Jeremiahs of geography, sociology and economics’, who disdained all past progress and called instead for conservation on a large scale. Denouncing the erosion ‘hysteria’ into which the modern world was ‘being stampeded’, Hanson called for ‘energetic economic development’, and argued that to ‘proclaim a numerical limit on the world’s arable lands, while decrying the technical advances with which that limit can be stretched by many millions of acres, is to turn one’s back on reality’. Another critical take on Vogt was penned by Merrill K Bennett, then executive director of Stanford University’s Food Research Institute. Looking back five decades, a time when ‘world population growth was enormous’, Bennett saw marked ‘evidence of improvement in per capita food supplies’, and argued that pessimism on the issue was ‘not compelled on the basis of historical fact or logic’. As for land management, despite some localised problems and the dramatic rhetoric of popular writers, demonstrable improvements were ‘widespread’. Indeed, he argued that a ‘large part of the arable soils of the world are made better by good farming than they were naturally’ – that is to say, they are made better through technological developments of all kinds that increased yields, conserved soils, reduced spoilage and delivered other benefits. Based on the available evidence he inferred that, ‘in all probability’, the ‘point of maximum productivity will be shifted upward as time passes because technological advances will be made, even if we cannot predict either the degree or the pace of advance’. To follow the pessimists’ advice to slow or halt economic and population growth, however, would ‘hamper invention, stifle capital accumulation, hinder investment domestically and internationally’, and thus ‘retard the general economic development, one aspect of which is improvement of national diets’. He also believed that ‘time may prove today’s pessimists to have been wrong, as with the pessimists of yesterday’.

Crop spraying in a wheat field in Washington State, US, circa 1970.

In the English adaptation of his classic The Geography of Hunger (1952), Brazilian physician and geographer Josué de Castro denounced Vogt’s call for population control until the ‘born-to-starve disappear from the face of the earth’. The true road to survival, he argued, required ‘the effort to make everybody on the face of the Earth productive’. Like other anti-Malthusians before him, de Castro made the case for scientific advances and illustrated future possibilities by documenting how, among other achievements, poor Japanese immigrants, working ‘thankless soils’, had purchased ‘for nearly nothing’ degraded coffee-growing land in and around Sao Paulo, and developed a ‘magnificent green belt’ that was then contributing much to the produce supply of the Brazilian industrial heartland. The world, de Castro hoped, would not follow Vogt down the road to perdition. Vogt’s creed ‘preaches that the weak and the sick should be left to die, which would help the starving to die more quickly, and which even goes to the extreme of suggesting that medical and sanitary resources should not be made available to the more miserable populations’. Such policies, he wrote, only reflected ‘the mean and egotistical sentiments of people living well, terrified by the disquieting presence of those who are living badly’. In hindsight, of course, Brandt, Bennett, Hanson and de Castro’s optimism was vindicated. But the eco-pessimists still had an impact in the shape of coercive and often brutal population-control policies and programmes that diverted time and resources away from developing better ways of doing and producing things. Numerous alarmist academics, policymakers and interest groups revived the fear of soil erosion in later decades, in Canada, the US and elsewhere. They were again proven wrong. Needless to say, similar arguments, are still very much with us today, despite continuing improvements in agricultural yields. The persistence of eco-pessimism People react differently to the repeated failure of apocalyptic environmental predictions. Present-day conservatives and individuals who believe in material progress, especially if they have witnessed the failure of environmental predictions in the past, typically become more jaded over time. On the other hand, today’s left, and especially its youth wing, seemingly requires a constant supply of bad environmental news to vindicate its anti-capitalist worldview. Not that being on the left or right necessarily determines one’s attitude to environmental doom-mongering. Up to the late 20th century, environmentalism was largely pursued by aristocrats, the leisure class and reactionary and anti-liberal movements. Most of the traditional and radical left typically pursued material and social betterment. Be that as it may, several explanations have been put forward to explain the reluctance of environmental activists and sustainable-development theorists to change their minds when confronted with contradictory evidence. Without claiming any specific knowledge of, for instance, David Attenborough’s thought processes, his writings and speeches suggest that, like many biologists, he simply cannot acknowledge the fact that humanity has reached the top of this planet’s food chain by developing unique characteristics. These include everything from the ability to exchange physical goods (and the attendant division of labour) to the ability to innovate by combining existing things in new ways, which, among other things, has allowed humans to replace resources extracted from the surface of the planet (for instance, fuelwood or wool) with resources that ultimately originated from below (for instance, plastics and dyes). At the root of eco-pessimism, then, is always a deep-seated disillusionment with technological , economic and social progress. So faith-like is the disillusionment, so ingrained is the misanthropy, that no amount of good news can dispel them. In November 2018, Attenborough admitted he was worried that constantly ringing the environmentalist alarm bell was a bit of a ‘turn off’ for people. He was right. Not because, as Attenborough thinks, it is the wrong way to get the right message across. But because enviro-catastrophism, repeatedly refuted throughout human history, is the wrong message in the first place. Pierre Desrochers is an associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and the author of The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet. Joanna Szurmak is a doctoral student at York University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies. This essay draws in part on the authors’ book, Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change, published by GWPF books, 2018. Pictures by: Getty Images. (1) Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics, by Dennis Avery, Hudson Institute, 2000, p201

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