Thoughts on sustaining development

Matt Ridley: "When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds.Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled."

So what do we to know about the basic path of human progress towards environmental sustainability and economic development? First, poverty is the natural state of man. Poverty has been the primary if not exclusive state of being for 99% of the existence of humankind. For thousands of years, life has been, as “nasty, brutish and short.”[1] Second, for those same thousands of years, the environment has been a terrifying, mysterious, two-edged sword, the source of all natural wealth (generally fixed, limited or zero-sum) and a daily threat to human life as well as those same natural resources necessary for life. Third, it has only been the masteryof the environment, primarily through education and the application of technology, that has created the wealth and natural resources consumed on a daily basis by 7.5 billion people today.[2] To wit, sustainability has long been a given, development is a very recent advancement, and sustainable development is the ideal strategy for achieving that delicate balance between the continuation of the natural environment and the advancement of an ever-growing global population. As Matt Ridley has noted, humans are the only species that become more prosperous as they have become more numerous.

1. [1] Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan [2] There is no small irony that while some decry the disappearance of natural resources for consumption, world health is more negatively impacted by obesity and its related lifestyle-induced disease than it is impacted by a shortage of foodstuffs. Most hunger or starvation today is the product of the misallocation or mal-distribtuion of sufficient foodstuffs, not to any overall lack of same.