Well,
I finished reading Merchants
of Despair a few days ago, shortly after completing A
Great Aridness; and I walked away from both feeling pretty
depressed, even though I had a good idea what to expect from them
when I started.
A
Great Aridness delivered on its close-up look at the likely
future of the American Southwest in the face of climate change, drawn
within the context of this region's relevant history. Bottom line:
it's going to be very hot and very dry, with opportunistic species
like bark beetles and mosquitoes making life very much worse. Tales
of skeptical professionals in a number of disciplines, including
climate science, who have been forced by overwhelming evidence to
both accept and help prepare for the effects of climate change are
particularly powerful in driving home the harsh reality we're facing.
This
stands in stark contrast to the glowing assessment of climate change
portrayed in Merchants of Despair, whose author expects
natural balance to ultimately be maintained, counter to the claims of
environmentalists who want to limit humanity's power out of a
mistaken belief that the resources we need are limited relative to
population. Indeed, the author portrays environmentalists as the
latest members of a worldwide conspiracy dating back to Thomas
Malthus that has justified depriving, killing, and forcefully
limiting the birth of people deemed by pseudoscientific reasoning to
be unfit to survive by themselves. Innovation, manifested as
technology, will save the day as it always has, he argues, and anyone
who holds it back is guilty of the greatest evil, intended or not.
I've
studied, thought, and written a lot about climate change, species
loss, and sustainability over several years, with a focus on
understanding the drivers of humanity's future. While there are
certainly some people with similar interests who hold a low opinion
of humanity's intrinsic value, even to the point of hoping for a
limited pandemic to "cull the herd," the vast majority are
searching and advocating, as I am, for solutions that maximizes
people's happiness with no casualties. Counter to the conspiracy
theory, the people profiting most by harming the poor are in favor of
curbing controls on environmental degradation, not getting more of
them.
One
of the main non-pseudoscientific principles guiding environmentalists
and sustainability advocates is an understanding that exponential
growth is fundamentally unsustainable; my own exploration of the
validity of this principle in large part converted me to my current
views. Malthus was indeed wrong: consumption has been able to keep
pace with population growth, thanks to human ingenuity and some
damned good luck – such as finding large sources of cheap energy,
and it too has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, as I found out
when I focused on both ecological impact and conversion of mass into
less useful forms ("waste," a crude form of entropy), this
has accelerated the extinction of species, many of which we depend on
for free services that keep the world habitable for creatures like
us. Merchants of Despair suggests that ingenuity can deal
with this too, through soon-to-be ultra-powerful manipulation of
matter and genes; but I would suggest that only a fool or a
megalomaniac destroys something he gets for free while trying to
develop the power to make it himself. The world seems to have an
unhealthy supply of both fools and megalomaniacs these days, which is
one of the reasons I get depressed when thinking of these things.
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