Enough is Enough

I wish you wouldn't squeeze so,' said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. 'I can hardly breathe.'I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly: 'I'm growing.' 'You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse. 'Don't talk nonsense, said Alice more boldly: 'You know you're growing too.' 'Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,' said the Dormouse: 'not in that ridiculous fashion.'

"Enough is Enough" is the title of a prophetic book by John V Taylor, written in 1975, which I have been reading again lately. What is interesting is that - apart from predictions on population growth (expected to rise rapidly throughout the world including the West) - so much of what he is saying is now coming to pass. There are some signs of improvement - some of the pollution which he mentions has been brought more under control, and many rivers in England and Europe have been cleaned up. The case of pollution of water supplies by a Coca-Cola factory in India as recently as 2005 shows the problems are still here.

The most chilling comments come from his citation from "The Limits to Growth", where it is stated that "Man can still choose his limits and stop when he pleases . . . The alternative is to wait until the price of technology becomes more than society can pay, or until the side-effects of technology suppress growth themselves, or until problems arise that have no technical solutions." With the advent of peak oil, we seem horribly close to reaching those limits.

Back in 1975, when he was writing, being "green" used to be something of an eccentricity, after all, it was just past the days of the "white heat of the technological revolution". Now it is no longer an "optional extra".

John Taylor was a remarkable man, one time General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (when he wrote this book) and later Bishop of Winchester, he had a gift of "seeing outside the box", and while he was not always right in his ideas about the future, more often than not he was spot on. Along with E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful", his "Enough is Enough" was one of the seminal books of the 1970s. Each chapter starts with a marvelously apt quotation from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the first is the one I have placed at the top of this page. The book is still available second hand, but really deserves to be reprinted.

In this extract, he is commenting on the paper "The Limits to Growth", and on the legacy we want to leave out children.

---

Extract from "Enough is Enough":

Three years ago economists, ecologists and social scientists started a violent debate which has continued ever since. In January 1972 The Ecologist devoted a whole issue to "A Blue-Print for Survival."

It appeared over the name of thirty-three scholars, mostly scientists and obviously sincere. It was based largely on a book which the authors had seen, though it was not published until two months later: "The Limits to Growth". This had been written by Dennis L. Meadows and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the auspices of an informal international association of industrialists, scientists, economists and educators, calling itself the Club of Rome.

The Limits to Growth derives its arguments from an intricate world-model which shows the inter-play of such factors as the global growth of population, of industrial capital, of environmental pollution, and the exhaustion of the world's non-renewable resources of minerals, chemicals and fossil fuels, and the insuperable limit to food yields. The conclusions of the study were deeply pessimistic.

1. If the global figures for population and for industrial output continue to increase, as at present, in a geometrical progression - or, to use the jargon, exponentially - then natural resources which are non-renewable will become exhausted during the next century. Agriculture and industry will slow down more and more until food production becomes inadequate for the human race.

2. If that model is corrected by new discoveries of non-renewable resources and by recycling wherever possible, then a rising pollution of the environment will bring about a drastic decline in food production early in the next century.

3. If, besides solving the problem of natural resources, pollution is statutorily reduced, then industrial production can have a longer lease of life, but the population explosion will exhaust the food supplies.

4. Even if the population is leveled off and the research enables us to double our food yields, then the exhaustion of the land, the eventual depletion of resources and the slower but still inexorable accumulation of pollution must ensure the collapse of the human life-system by the end of the next century.

One is reminded of the words of a much earlier and greater prophet of doom: 'It will be as when a man runs from a lion, and a bear meets him, or turns into a house and leans his hand on the wall, and a snake bites him.' But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, like the prophet Amos, does not leave us entirely without hope. The conclusion of the argument, we are told, is that we must immediately plan - hopefully the date 1975 is proposed - to level off the upward curves of population growth, industrial output, pollution and, a little later, per capita food production in order to achieve a stabilized global equilibrium.

There is obviously no surer way of arousing the emotions of economists than to suggest that the highly developed countries of the West should deliberately stop the growth of capital investment, slow down industry's consumption of raw materials, and set about educating the citizens to expect a leveling-off of the standard of living. To say these things is to challenge the basic assumptions of the economic theory by which we have lived since the 1930S and, with rather less awareness, for far longer than that.

The authors of The Limits to Growth anticipated a widespread disagreement with their figures and an angry dismissal of the solution they proposed. So in the end they seemed to be ready for their opponents to drive a coach and horses through their datelines and statistics, if they could only be persuaded to accept the fact that this spaceship. Earth, is a home that is already becoming almost too small for us:

There may be much disagreement with the statement that population and capital growth must stop soon. But virtually no one will argue that material growth on this planet can go on forever. Man can still choose his limits and stop when he pleases . . . The alternative is to wait until the price of technology becomes more than society can pay, or until the side-effects of technology suppress growth themselves, or until problems arise that have no technical solutions. At any of those points the choice of limits will be gone. Growth will be stopped by pressures 'that . . . may be very much worse than those which society might choose for itself.'

It is even possible that their startling facts and figures were intended as shock tactics to dislodge Western man at least from the assumptions that have governed his outlook and his aims for many centuries:

A whole culture has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them. This culture has been reinforced by the apparent immensity of the earth and its resources and by the relative smallness of man and his activities. But the relationship between the earth's limits and man's activities is changing.

Whatever we may conclude about the nature of the limits that are inevitable, we have to recognize that all the curves on the graph are shooting up - expectation of consumer goods, consumption of energy and of raw materials, pollution and, of course, population. Our present situation of rapid material growth, which encourages every family to expect as of right an ever-expanding surplus, is, in the light of man's long history, so abnormal that one knows it has to cease. Sooner or later the curves have to flatten out. And if the quality of our children's life in this world is any concern of ours, then, in the industrialized countries at least, the sooner the better.