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By Karl North | July 20, 2010

Ever since Malthus, the question of population overshooting carrying capacity has been cast as the specter of unwashed ever-breeding hordes who will overrun the society of “developed” nations and bring an end to “progress”. That this way of thinking became an historical pattern arises from a capitalist culture that justifies its economic system and excuses its failures like inequality and overpopulation as “facts of nature”. In contrast, political economy reveals these institutional embarrassments to be social constructs, which means that they are amenable to change. No wonder the study of political economy suffers under a heavy taboo in capitalist society. How are population dynamics a social construct, and what alternate social structures could address the problem of overshoot?

A useful approach to these questions might start with a dissection of one of the oft-cited essays on the question of population, Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”. Few fault Hardin’s ecology, but like many others, I find his social science quaint, if not pathetically elitist. The first tip-off is his uncritical acceptance of Malthus ‘law’ of population growth: that barring coercion, human populations will grow at an exponential rate. If Malthus had spent more time understanding the longstanding zero population growth of his own British aristocracy, and less in ideological servitude to its interests (in this case abolition of the institution of the poor house), he might not have made such foolish statements about ‘inevitable’ growth rates in population and agriculture. As is now understood, if not widely, economic security arrests population growth as it has in numerous ruling classes, and education and economic security for women arrests population growth even in relatively low income populations, as it has in Cuba and even in the state of Kerala in India. The best one can do for Hardin on this point is to excuse him for not being a social scientist. The trouble is, as with Malthus, that Hardin keeps being cited as if he were one.

Hardin’s other problem, which again many have exposed, is his elitist solution to the tragedy of a resource free-for-all: privatization. Hardin: “The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it”. Indeed, the enclosures he consistently favors, that occurred first in Britain and then increasingly around the world, put property in the hands of private owners, mostly or increasingly of the more privileged classes.

Hardin has little liking for political remedies; he dismisses administrative law, “which is rightly feared for an ancient reason–Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who shall watch the watchers themselves?”. Then, perhaps realizing that without administrative law nothing will control the private owners, he invokes a supposed biological superiority of elites: “legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance–that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” Recognizing that this is only a lesser evil – elites sometimes beget offspring less fit than themselves – he still embraces it because for him there is no alternative

The ideologists of privatization regularly use Hardin to reject any notion that a commons can be successfully democratically managed in the public interest as a public resource. They do this by conflating his characterization of the commons – a resource free-for-all – with all public administration of resources. This really needs to stop. The real tragedy is mismanagement, be it public or private. And the tragedy of late stage capitalism is its license to private interests to squander resources as they please. Is Hardin’s biological elitism really still worth rereading?

Research exists that applies the perspective of political economy, or even more fitting, that of political ecology, to the question of population. Carolyn Merchant in Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England contrasts a growing colonial population in the New World with European populations that had stabilized by the 18th century. Population pressure on the land and its handmaidens, soil deterioration, war and plagues, had gone far toward achieving zero population in Europe. However, social structural changes eventually appeared that mitigated those harsher methods. Unlike colonial New England where land was plentiful, European society imposed restrictions on both land inheritance and marriage age, which in turn slowed population growth.

Mazoyer and Roudart also take a systems view that focuses on the interaction of population, land and other natural resources, and technology in agricultural history. They describe an agricultural revolution in the 18th century that, if it did not permanently solve the population problem, at least put an end to recurrent famines in Europe. But no major policy changes of the type that occurred in Kerala or Cuba came until working class mobilization in reaction to the ravages of the industrial revolution. By mid-20th century, organized labor had forced most of capitalist Europe to adopt a combination of social policies that provided the degree of economic and gender equality required to maintain population growth close to zero.

European history in recent centuries appears therefore to demonstrate that societies can address the population problem by altering social customs and even, under democratic pressure from below, by public policy, a tool that Hardin, ever the elitist, had dismissed as unworkable.

Today, it is unlikely that any policy framework can sustain the global population levels that a temporary era of cheap energy has generated. But the historical examples discussed above provide a ray of hope that local communities, especially ones at rural population levels, can use public policy to stabilize their population levels within the carrying capacity of the land base that they control.

Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization | No Comments »

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