Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of Natural Abundance by Donald Worster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Are there limits to growth – of economy, population, natural resource use, wealth – or will human ingenuity always concur the obstacles through capital and technology? Donald Worster, an environmental historian, tracks the ebb and flow of these contrasting ideas in North America and Europe since the discovery of the Americas half a millennium ago – the Second Earth, as he calls it. Worster’s history is an authoritative one, thoroughly researched, at times poetic, always insightful and thought-provoking. Worster builds a theory upon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. The mysterious green light that Jay Gatsby saw in the mist across the Long Island Sound enticed him but in reality was nothing more magical than a light bulb at the end of Daisy’s boat dock. The green light becomes a metaphor for the perceived natural abundance that Europeans discovered as they entered the Western Hemisphere – but would this green light also turn out to be a chimera, as the nature is conquered and overexploited, and the Earth shrinks?

Worster takes as his starting point the “discovery” of the Americas (along with Australia, Oceania and southern Africa), which he marks as the beginning of the modern period of human ecology that was global in scope and triggered profound changes in almost every society on earth (p. 7).

The book is divided into three parts, roughly according to three historic periods: the expansionist age after the discovery of the Second Earth, the sobering era in the late-19th and early-20th centuries when pollution and destruction of nature became apparent, and the latter part of the 1900s when the debate on the limits to growth fully emerged. Each of these parts ends with a record of a field trip that demonstrates the previous discussion in concrete terms.

The first part of the book, ‘Second Earth,’ describes the excitement that followed the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans and how Mercator’s map with its second sphere next to the old world map (literally the second earth) spurred the imagination of men in Europe. The old continent at that time was becoming crowded, its farmland and natural resources already stretched. When the new frontier opened, it became to be seen as a source of endless wealth in terms of land, forests, water, fish and wildlife. Imaginings of gold and other treasures added to the fables as Europeans started to flock to the new continent, which was also considered empty and free for anyone to come to. Worster also discusses the more theoretical thinking about abundance in the era’s intellectual climate. He notes that economics “still carried a residue of prediscovery attitudes – and awareness of natural limits that must eventually restrain the accumulation of wealth” (p. 42). Adam Smith, known for establishing the foundations free market economy in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (1776), as well as John Stuart Mill both recognized that nature’s limits must ultimately lead to a stable state. This, however, was not the dominant view.

The first field trip takes us to Nantucket off the New England coast. A group of British immigrants settled on the island in 1659, soon realizing that the place was not well-suited for agriculture. Instead, they turned to hunting and fishing. Nantucket became a center of whaling, but the Atlantic whale stocks were depleted in just over a century and the Nantucket whalers ended up taking longer and longer trips with less and less catch. Using historical records, statistics and literature (notably Melville’s Moby Dick). Worster paints a lively story of the whaling industry’s rise and fall, concluding: “The new fuels (that replaced blubber) did help remove pressure from the remaining populations of whales; they did not “save” the whales. Nor did capitalism or the supposedly benign and rational play of markets save them. Whales were saved only by the passage of laws and the exercise of moral constraint” (p. 69). This reflects a common theme in the book. Markets do not self-regulate when it comes to exploiting a common resource.

The second part of the book is entitled ‘After the Frontier.’ The first chapter in it is dedicated to George Perkins Marsh, perhaps the first influential environmental thinker in America. As Worster notes, “Marsh’s book (Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, 1864) represents an important intellectual moment in the transition from an age of plenty to an age of limits” (p. 81). Marsh saw warning signs from the European history where overuse had taken a toll on the land. Again, Marsh’s warnings fell mostly on deaf ears. This was the time when expansion of coal mining and the creation of steel mills it enabled brought prosperity to America – or at least to the owners of these facilities, such as Andrew Carnegie – while wreaking havoc on the environment and creating severe pollution in industrial towns and regions.

President Theodore Roosevelt and his advisors, Gifford Pinchot and WJ McGee get deservedly a full chapter. Teddy Roosevelt was an outdoors man and a big game hunter. He came to be known as a great conservationist, establishing the US system of national parks. “No president, before or after, did more than Roosevelt to protect and preserve land in the United States. No one did more to conserve wild nature for its own sake” ... “Roosevelt, however, never believed that conservation should merely mean preserving the natural environment. He also sought to exploit nature in new ways and places” (p. 111). The thinking of Roosevelt and his advisors led to a technocratic approach that emphasized re-engineering nature for the purpose of expanding productivity and wealth. The period’s most prominent environmentalist, John Muir, disagreed with his friend the President on this philosophy.

The field trip tells the story of California’s Imperial Valley, an arid desert near the Mexican border, which was started to be developed into agricultural land at the turn of the 20th century. The project would require enormous amounts of money and labor, but most importantly it meant dealing with the mighty Colorado river, controlling and re-channeling its waters to support agricultural production. While Imperial Valley survives as an agricultural area till today, its future remains uncertain as competition over water resources grows and demands from the cities of coastal California increases, while climate change bring further droughts.

The third and final part, ‘Planet of Limits,’ focuses on the time after World War II to the present. The initial postwar decades were marked by optimism and a belief in the America Dream. There would be no bounds to growth and prosperity. Man’s inventiveness would overcome all limitations that the natural world would try to pose. The American economy was booming and consumerism was ripe. Cars, houses, consumer goods were produced in massive quantities. At the same time, human population growth peaked: almost 200,000 babies were added to the world population every day. The world population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 3.7 billion in 1970 (today there are 7.6 billion of us on the planet and, contrary to common beliefs, population growth continues at a rapid rate; projections expect our numbers to reach 9.8 billion by mid-century). Oil provided fuel for the massive expansion of economy but it didn’t add new resources to humankind. “Did cheap oil in the postwar era reopen a wholly new world of abundance to replace the one discovered by Christopher Columbus? Was it a Third Earth” asks Worster and answers: “Not all … But for a while its abundance could and did work a miraculous change” (p. 143).

Worster tracks the arguments between the believers in eternal growth and those in the emerging environmental movement. When President Harry Truman started worrying about impending resource scarcity, he appointed a Material Policy Commission. The commission recognized that it would in the future be harder to satisfy the demand for materials, but it still concluded that “the principle of Growth” through “free enterprise” was worth preserving (p. 146). This was a clear win of ideology over logic. While the economists, business people and politicians cheered on ever expanding capitalism, there was a new environmentalism rising with authors and thinkers such as Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) and Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb).

A chapter is dedicated to The Limits to Growth. Its main authors, Dennis and Donella Meadows, young American scientists whose eyes had been opened during a post-graduation trip to India, teamed up with the Italian visionary industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish science advisor to OECD Alexander King. The latter two established the Club of Rome, a think-tank to address what they called “world problematique.” This collaboration also involved an MIT statistician Jay Forrester and led to the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, a highly influential book (which also greatly influenced me in my youth). At that time, the team was mostly concerned with the depletion of nonrenewable resources. They questioned the idea that growth – in population, agricultural production, industrial output – could continue infinitely on a finite planet. Their position was not dogmatic and they did not prescribe solutions; still they were attacked viciously by most economists. Donella expressed her surprise at the “intensity of the reaction” to the book that simply cautioned that exponential growth was not possibly forever (p. 169). Limits to Growth suggested that limiting the number of children and consumption was necessary. This was unacceptable to the critics who would not accept any limits to individual freedom. At the same time, there was criticism from the left on the grounds that growth was needed to eliminate poverty in the world. These tensions are of course very much present in society today.

For a while it appeared that those advocating for unlimited growth – spurred on by human ingenuity that would always find substitutes when materials ran short – was winning. And it certainly took hold of politicians and economists many of whom till this day tend to think in these terms. Yet, ideas regarding ecological limits have constantly gained momentum and attention paid to environmental destruction caused by industrial and agricultural production has increased. The science community organized itself around global initiatives, such as the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and others in the 1990s and as the concern over climate change became prevalent bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have gathered irrefutable scientific evidence of the environmental havoc our economic system is causing (the IPCC released its latest report in the autumn of 2018 with a dire warning for us to mend our ways or to face peril). Systematic analysis of ‘planetary boundaries’ by the Stockholm Resilience Centre led by Johan Rockström has shown that we have already breached safe operating space for humanity in terms of species extinction, climate change and nitrogen pollution.

The final field trip is to Athabasca River in western Canada, one of the remaining wildernesses in North America – the final place where the green light beckons. The area is now threatened by massive extraction of shale oil from its bituminous sands, leaving the natural beauty of the forested watersheds badly tarnished. The excavation of the tar sands is egged on by reduced availability of oil from more conventional sources and the thawing of the northern areas due to climate change.

Donald Worster has written a majestic account of the rise and fall of natural abundance in North America and the world. His prose is beautifully crafted and engaging. The historical and scientific sources are supplemented by frequent and well-chosen references to literature. Still, Worster’s account is factual and he never preaches, leaving the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. In the epilogue, ‘Life on a Pale Blue Dot,’ Worster places Earth in a cosmic perspective and concludes that irrespective of scientific and technological advances, this planet is the only home we have or will have in any foreseeable future. At the end he ponders about the future of liberal and democracy in the face of natural limits. “Is individualism sustainable when the material horizons begin to shrink and ecological systems to unravel,” he asks. On an optimistic note, “our descendants … might choose to redefine democracy in less fragmented, individualistic terms – not as a political culture devoted to freeing the individual from all restraint, but instead as a culture that embraces restraint for all” (p. 224).



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