Classical and neo-Malthusianism both stem from a concern for quality of life, built on the basic premise that the more people there are, the less stuff there is to go around. The limits of food production, or any other resource, would only become a problem if they began to impinge upon the health and well-being of people. While resource shortages would first affect the poor and the vulnerable, the logical conclusion of the Malthusian problem was that it would eventually extend to all people, with misery stemming not only from the shortage of resources themselves, but from the conflict that inevitably accompanies such scarcity. With the emergence of environmental Malthusianism, the finitude of resources continued to pose a threat to quality of life, but now with the added dimension that it was not only material and spatial limits, but also ecological limits—and the concomitant changes in environmental conditions—that would foster human misery.
Within this discourse on quality of life there is a diversity of opinion about who should be blamed and what should be done. The initial problematisation was founded on
the eugenic principle of biological elitism, the result being that the chief goal of any intervention should be to sustain a high quality of life for people of a particular genetic heritage or with particular genetic characteristics. Anyone who fell outside the eugenic purview was a burden, and would only serve to reduce quality of life for those deemed deserving. The eugenic view was contested on the principle of biological universalism. In a general sense, this meant that all races and creeds shared equal rights—and equal blame—regardless of their genetic characteristics, and so interventions should be sought to bring a greater quality of life to all. In the specific case of environmental Malthusianism, however, biological universalism led to a statement of differentiated responsibility in the opposite direction: the rich and profligate members of the middle classes in the developed world—hitherto the darlings of eugenic discourse—were responsible for a disproportionately heavy impact on the environment, and were thus the rightful targets of any intervention. Unsurprisingly this discursive dart did not fly unhindered. Even now, with the discourse of biological elitism having long since fallen into disrepute, the contention over how much responsibility should be borne by the beneficiaries of historical environmental damage endures. As an imminent threat to the wealth and power of the industrialised world, this is one debate that can hobble along perfectly well without the crutch of biological elitism.
Throughout the rise and fall of each biological ‘ism’, the quality of life discourse has continuously oscillated between the dyad of ‘maintaining wealth’ and ‘distributing wealth’. For Malthusians of every hue, the root of the problem was that wealth was finite and its distribution spread too thinly; to maintain wealth required a reduction in population, so as to mitigate the deleterious effects of distribution. When ground through the mill of biological elitism, wealth was a product of good genetic stock, and its uneven distribution a natural outcome of inherited capability. In contrast, biological universalism breaks the link between an individual’s genetic heritage and their value to the species; it shifts the parameters of the debate away from one’s value as an economic agent, to an inherent, unquantifiable value, wherein one human being is equal to another regardless of their capabilities. Biological universalism is, of course, a double-edged sword: equal stature means equal responsibility, and even if biology is rejected as the basis on which wealth should be distributed, there are many more ways for inequality to perpetuate. But regardless of what counts as wealth, where it comes from, how much there is, and how or with whom it should be shared, the one constant that survives the discourse on quality of
life is the dyad of maintenance and distribution of wealth, which environmental Malthusianism has at the heart of its problematisation6.
5.1.3 Environmental Limits
Prior to the emergence of environmental Malthusianism, environmental limits had been conceptualised as limits of physical space and productive capacity—which is to say, there was only enough arable land, only enough clean water, only enough industrial material to support a certain number of people at any given time. The consequence of bumping up against these limits was to be pushed back, to be enclosed and constrained by natural ‘checks’ to population growth. Environmental Malthusianism is itself the product of a new discourse on environmental limits. Not just physical space and productive capacity, but an ecological system with inputs, outputs, and variables; not the sort of limits that one could bump up against and be pushed back by, but limits in the form of systemic resilience, a system upon which a population puts ‘pressure’. The consequence of putting too much pressure on the system—of having too high a population—is systemic failure. Not simply population collapse within a fixed environment, but ecological collapse, resulting in population collapse, and an environment forever changed.
In the ecological permutation of Malthusian discourse, population was already too high, so that if quality of life were to be increased for everyone the environment would quickly become ruined, and if the environment were ruined it would ultimately reduce quality of life for everyone. This mirrored classical Malthusianism in the sense that, even though the effects of overpopulation may begin locally with specific populations, they would eventually affect everyone globally, but now the vector of the problem was systemic and ecological, rather than linear and spatial. To environmental Malthusianism, environmental limits had already been transgressed, it was only the systemic nature of the problem that created a delay between cause and effect. Unlike the earlier Malthusian ‘checks’, which would begin to bite as soon as the food ran out, environmental Malthusianism rested on abstract reasoning, which required faith in scientific knowledge about the workings of the planet. The threat could not be ‘seen’ with the naked eye, only with instruments, calculations and theories—a drawback that would beleaguer
6 This point is of great importance in relation to the genealogy of sustainability as a whole, more so than would
appear from this context. See the narrative political impossibility, in chapter 2 (§ 2.1.3), for details of the conflict it provoked and its legacy in sustainable development.
environmental knowledge of every sort from then on. This was a new kind of problematisation, to which uncertainty and doubt were intrinsic.
As a new generation of environmental Malthusians took control of the discourse, the eugenic undertones of environmentalism were all but expunged. This new environmentalism espoused biological universalism—just as likely to place the blame on rich as on poor, on white as on black, on men as on women. Stripped of the baggage of biological elitism, the discourse of environmental Malthusianism became a species-wide, bio-political equation, based not on the class of the individual, but on the category of ‘human’ and the impacts of the human species as a singular entity; shared rights, shared responsibilities, and shared consequences. The problematisation at the heart of this next- generation environmental Malthusianism was balanced between the Malthusian first principle that the more people there are, the less stuff there is to go around; and an ecological understanding of the environment in which people exert ‘pressure’ on an already over-stretched planet. This is the dominant discourse into which environmental Malthusianism would settle.