Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

significant nonrecurrent alterations is cumulative change, involving both endogenous and exogenous changes as complementary phases of a single process. While evolution implies a movement from simple to complex, proceeding through variation and natural selection, cumulative change refers to an increase in scale and complexity as a result of increases in population and territory. Whether the process leads to growth or evolution depends on the concurrent nature of the advances in scale and complexity.

Generalizing the process of cumulative change as a principle of expansion, Hawley (1979, 1986) applies this framework to account for growth phases that intervene between stages of development. When scale and complexity advance together, the normal conditions for growth or expansion arise from the colonization process itself. Expansion, driven by increases in population and in knowledge, involves the growth of a center of activity from which dominance is exercised. The evolution of the system takes place when its scale and complexity do not go hand in hand. Change is resumed as the system acquires new items of information, especially those that reduce the costs of movement away from its environment. Thus an imbalance between population and the carrying capacity of the environment may create external pressures for branching off into colonies and establishing niches in a new environment. Since efficiencies in transportation and communication determine the size of a population, the scope of territorial access, and the opportunity for participation in information flows, Hawley (1979) identifies the technology of movement as the most critical variable. In addition to governing accessibility and, therefore, the spread of settlements and the creation of interaction networks among them, it determines the changes in hierarchy and division of labor. In general, the above process can work on any scale and is limited only by the level of development of the technologies of communication and transportation.

Hawley (1986, pp. 104–106) points out how with the growth of a new regional and international division of labor, states now draw sustenance from a single biophysical environment and are converted to subsystems in a more inclusive world system by the expansive process. In this way, free trade and resocialization of cultures create a far more efficient and cost-effective global reach. The result is a global system thoroughly interlinked by

transportation and communication networks. The key positions in this international network are occupied by the technologically advanced nations with their monopoly of information and rich resource bases. However, as larger portions of system territories are brought under their jurisdiction, the management of scale becomes highly problematic. In the absence of a supranational polity, a multipolar international pecking order is then subject to increasing instability, challenge, and change. With mounting costs of administration, the system again tends to return to scale, resulting in some degree of decentralization and local autonomy, but new information and improvements in the technologies of movement put the system back into gear and start the growth process all over again. In the modern period of ‘‘ecological transition,’’ a large portion of the biophysical environment has progressively come under the control of the social system. Hawley, therefore, believes that the growth of social systems has now reached a point at which the evolutionary model has lost its usefulness in explaining cumulative change.

Hawley points out that while expansionism in the past relied on political domination, its modern variant aims at structural convergence along economic and cultural axes to obviate the need for direct rule by the center. The process of modernization and the activities of multinational corporations are a prime example of this type of system expansion, which undermines traditional modes of life and results in the loss of autonomy and sovereignty by individual states. Convergence of divergent patterns of urbanization is brought about by increased economic interdependence among nations and the development of compatible organizational forms and institutional arrangements. This approach, as Wilson (1984, p. 300) points out, is based on the assumption that convergence is mainly a result of market forces that allow countries to compete in the world on an equal basis. He cites evidence that shows how the subordinate status of non-Western nations has hindered their socioeconomic development, sharpened inequalities, increased rural-to-urban migration and rural– urban disparities, and led to the expansion of squatter settlements.

Human ecological theory accounts for the existence of an international hierarchy in terms of functional differences and the operation of its

universal principles of ecosystem domination and expansion. Quite understandably, underdevelopment is defined by Hawley simply in terms of inferiority in this network. Since not all can enjoy equal position on scales of size, resources, and centrality with respect to information flows, Hawley believes that the resulting ‘‘inequality among polities might well be an unavoidable condition of an international division of labor, whether built on private or state capitalist principles’’ (1986, pp. 106, 119).

As the process moves toward a world system, all the limiting conditions of cumulative change are reasserted at a higher level. On the one hand, a single world order with only a small tolerance for errors harbors the seeds of totalitarianism (Giddens 1990). On the other, there is also the grave danger that a fatal error may destroy the whole system. Human ecologists, however, rely on further expansion as the sure remedy for the problems created by expansion. To restore ecological balance, they put their faith in the creation of value consensus, rational planning, trickle-downs, market mechanisms, technological fixes and breakthroughs, native ‘‘know-how,’’ and sheer luck.

The real irony of this relentless global expansion elaborated by Hawley lies, however, in the coexistence of the extreme opulence and affluence of the few with the stark poverty and misery of the majority at home and abroad. The large metropolitan centers provide a very poor quality of life. The very scale of urban decay underscores the huge problems facing the city—congestion, polluted air, untreated sewage, high crime rates, dilapidated housing, domestic violence, and broken lives. One therefore needs to ask: What prospect does this scale and level of complexity hold for the future?

HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE

PROBLEMATICS OF ‘‘CHAOS’’

Chaos theory is the latest attempt to unravel the hidden structure in apparently random systems and to handle chaos within and between systems. In this view, order and disorder (chaos) are seen as two dimensions of the same process: Order generates chaos and chaos generates order (Baker 1993, p. 123). At the heart of both lies a dynamic element, an ‘‘attractor,’’ that creates the turbulence

as well as re-creates the order. In the human–social realm, Baker has identified center–periphery, or centriphery, as the attractor. Baker, however, uses the concepts of center and periphery more broadly to cover not only their application in the dependency approach (which views the exploitation and impoverishment of the non-Western peripheral societies as basic to the rise of the dominant Western capitalist center), but also to carry the connotation of humans as ‘‘world-constructors.’’ Centriphery is, then, the universal dynamic process that creates both order and disorder, as well as accounts for the pattern of human social evolution. The center has an entropic effect on the periphery, causing increasing randomness and denuding it of its resources. But as the entropic effects mount, they are fed back to the center. Beyond a certain point, the costs of controlling the periphery become prohibitive. Should the center fail to come up with new centering strategies, it may split off into subcenters or be absorbed by another more powerful center. Baker is thus led to conclude that ‘‘although the effect of feedback is unpredictable, the iteration of a pattern leads to turbulence. The mechanism for change and evolution are endemic to the centriphery process’’ (Baker 1993, p. 141).

Several things need to be noted about this approach. For one, since these eruptive episodes are random, ‘‘the emergence of repeated patterns

. . . must be seen as random . . . not as mechanically predictable occurrences. Among other things, the precise character of the emergent pattern cannot be predicted, even though we would no longer be surprised to find a new thing emerging’’ (Francis 1993, p. 239). For another, Baker’s centriphery theory is essentially Hawley’s human ecological theory recast in the language of chaos theory, with the important difference that a specific reference is now made both to the role of agency as ‘‘world-constructors’’ involved in ‘‘categorizing, controlling, dominating, manipulating, absorbing, transforming, and so on,’’ and to their devastating impact on the peripheralized ‘‘others,’’ the victims of progress, who suffer maximum entropy, exploitation, impoverishment, death, and devastation. Even so, Baker’s is the latest, though undoubtedly unintended, attempt to generalize and rationalize Western expansionism and its ‘‘chaotic (unpredictable) . . . devastating, and now increasingly well known, impact on native peoples’’ (Baker

1993, p. 137). As such, the centriphery process, said to explain both order (stability) and disorder (change), is presented not only as evolutionary and irreversible, but also as natural and universal: ‘‘Thus, the Western world became a center through the peripheralization of the non-Western world. And within the Western world, particularly in North America, the city, which peripheralized the rural hinterland, became the megapolis whose peripheralizing effects were simultaneously wider and greater.’’ (p. 136)]

Not only the recurrent iteration of this pattern but even its ‘‘unpredictable’’ outcomes (new strategies of control, splitting off into new subcenters, absorption into a larger center, etc.), are also prefigured in Hawley (1986). Its process is expansion, and its ‘‘attractor’’ is none other than the old master principle of sociology: domination or control (Gibbs 1989). While Friedmann and Wolff (1982) characterize world cities as the material manifestation of the control functions of transnational capital in its attempt to organize the world for the efficient extraction of surplus, Lechner (1985) leaves little doubt that Western ‘‘[materialism] and the emphasis on man’s relation to nature are not simply analytical or philosophical devices, but are logically part of an effort to restore world-mas- tery’’ (p. 182).

‘‘ECOLOGICAL DEMOGRAPHY’’?

Since the study of organizational dynamics as well as the structure and dynamics of population are at the core of sociology, Namboodiri (1988) claims that rather than being peripheral to sociology, human ecology and demography constitute its core. As a result, he contends that the hybrid ‘‘ecological demography’’ promises a more systematic and comprehensive handling of a common core of sociological problems—such as the analysis of power relations, conflict processes, social stratification, societal evolution, and the like— than any other competing sociological paradigm. However, although human ecologists recognize the possibility of other pairwise interactions in addition to competition, and even highlight the points of convergence between the human ecological and the Marxist point of view (Hawley 1984), human ecology as such does not directly focus on conflict in a central way. In this connection, Namboodiri (1988) points out how the very

expansionist imperative of human and social systems, identified as a central postulate by human ecologists, generates the possibility of conflict between the haves and the have-nots far more in a milieu of frustrated expectations, felt injustice, and a growing awareness of entitlements, which includes claims to their own resources by nations and to a higher standard of living by deprived populations. How these factors affect the development of and distribution of resources and the relationships among populations by sex, race, ethnicity, and other stratifiers should obviously be of concern to a socially responsible human ecology, one that moreover should be responsive to Borgatta’s call for a ‘‘proactive sociology’’ (1989, 1996).

The general neglect of cultural factors and the role of norms and agency in human and organizational interaction has also been a cause for concern to many sociologists. While some latitude is provided for incorporating social norms in specific analyses (e.g., in the relationship between group membership and fertility behavior), their macroorientation and focus on whole populations compels human ecologists and demographers to ignore the role of the subjective values and purposes of individual actors in ecological and demographic processes (Namboodiri 1988, pp. 625–627).

THE HUMAN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH:

AN EVALUATION

While the human ecological approach has strong theoretical underpinnings and proven heuristic value in describing Western expansionism and the colonizing process in supposedly objective terms, its central problem is one of ideology. Like structural functionalism, it is a theory of the status quo that supports existing institutions and arrangements by explaining them as the outcome of invariant principles: ‘‘Its concerns are the concerns of the dominant groups in society—it talks about maximizing efficiency but has nothing to say about increasing accountability, it talks of maintaining equilibrium through gradual change and readjustment and rules out even the possibility of fundamental restructuring’’ (Saunders 1986, pp. 80–81). Not surprisingly, human ecologists downplay the role of social class by subsuming it under the abstract concept of a ‘‘categoric unit.’’ They also fail to analyze the role of the state and of the interlocking power of the political, military, and

economic establishment, which are centrally involved in the process of expansion and colonization of peoples and cultures. These omissions account for their total lack of concern for the fate of the ‘‘excluded others’’ and the ‘‘dark side of expansionism’’: colonial exploitation, war, genocide, poverty, pollution, environmental degradation, and ecological destruction. Hutchinson (1993) blames the human ecologists for neglecting or downplaying the role of socioeconomic practices and government policies in creating rental, economic resource, and other differentials. He claims that their analyses tend to be descriptive because they take for granted the existence of phenomena such as socioeconomic or racial and ethnic segregation rather than looking at them in terms of spatial processes that result from the competition between capital and labor.

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE

NEW HUMAN ECOLOGY

The mounting public concern since the 1970s about fuel shortages, oil spills, nuclear power plant accidents, acid rain, dying lakes, urban smog, famine and death in the Sahel, rainforest destruction, and the like has made social scientists realize that overexploitation of the ecosystem may destroy the very basis of our planetary survival. Many environmentalists have blamed the voracious appetite of industrial societies and their obsession with growth for the destruction of the fragile balance among the components of the ecological complex.

Having encountered a seemingly unlimited frontier and an expanding economy, the West has come to believe that expansion is in the nature of things. A major reason for the neglect of the physical environment by American sociologists has, therefore, been the anti-ecological worldview of the dominant social paradigm that has been shaped by this belief. At the same time, the exaggerated emphasis by human ecologists on culture, science, and technology as ‘‘exceptional’’ human achievements has led to the illusion that humans are ‘‘exempt’’ from bioecological constraints to which all species are subject. This awareness has led Catton and Dunlap (1978) to develop the fields of new human ecology (Buttel 1987) and environmental sociology to deal with the reciprocal interaction between human activities and the physical

environment. They believe that the POET model, broadened to include the role of human agency and culture, provides a useful analytical framework for grounding environmental sociology in the ecological perspective.

In a comprehensive review of the new field, Buttel (1987) has pressed for shifting the focus of environmental sociology from the imbalance of population and resources, emphasized by Catton, to the reality of the unequal distribution of these resources. Allan Schnaiberg’s idea of the ‘‘treadmill of production’’ (1980), which emerges from a dialectical relationship between economic growth and ecological structures, points to the need to focus on production institutions as the primary determinants of economic expansion and to incorporate a conflict dimension in environmental analysis. Buttel’s own work in environmental sociology draws on the ‘‘political economy tradition’’ of the neo-Marxists and the neo-Weberians. Catton’s major contributions, on the other hand, are in the neo-Malthusian tradition. While the problem of order created by the harsh realities of industrial life and expansionism had earlier defined the central problematic of sociology and human ecology, the problem of survival now defines the central problematic of environmental sociology and the neo-Malthusian new human ecology: to the earlier question of how social order is possible is now added the more urgent concern with survival itself.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY APPROACH AND THE NEW URBAN SOCIOLOGY

The conservative nature of the classical and neoclassical human ecology paradigms has also come under attack from theorists who focus on the internal contradictions and the global reach of capitalism to understand urban phenomena.

Smith (1995) has argued that a new urban sociology paradigm, which draws on neo-Marxist sociological theory, urban political economy, dependency theory, world-system analysis, and critical theory, has now become dominant and largely supplanted human ecology and the old urban sociology approach to the study of urban phenomena. The conflict between the two approaches is an aspect of the old conflict between the struc- tural-functional and the neo-Marxist (conflict) perspectives in the field of sociology generally. Whereas

human ecology’s main concern is with how technological change enables population aggregates to adapt to their environment through changes in social and spatial organization, the new perspective underplays the role of technological determinants or functional imperatives in shaping the urban landscape. It focuses instead on social inequality and conflict, and highlights the role of economic and political elites, states and other institutional actors, and powerful global forces in order to analyze the problematic ‘‘underside’’ of modern city life: urban poverty, housing segregation by race and social class, urban fiscal crises, deindustrialization, structured inequality in the built environment, and the massive level of human misery associated with the rapid growth of megacities in the Third World (Smith 1995, p. 432.) The new approach looks at urban growth within the context of the international division of labor engendered by the global reach of the expansionary logic of competitive capitalism. This process, which translates aspects of competitive capitalism into geographic space, involves ‘‘the creation and destruction of land and built environments we term ‘cities.’ [Moreover,] this leads to concentrations and locational shifts of human populations, infrastructure, and buildings within the urban landscape (resulting in suburbs, neighborhoods, slums, etc.)’’ (Feagin 1988, p. 23, quoted in Smith 1995, p. 438).

A ‘‘new urban paradigm’’ in the political economy tradition has been put forward by Gottdiener and Feagin (1988) as an alternative to the human ecological and the expansionist paradigms discussed earlier. Rather than treating societies as mere population aggregates or as unified biotic communities, the new urban paradigm treats them as specified by their mode of production. In this view, crisis tendencies and profit generation constitute the core of societal development, which is seen as dominated by the process of capital accumulation. Thus, to take one example, conventional human ecologists like to regard central-city restructuring as a consequence of adaptation to increasing population size and the growing complexity of social organization. They then relate these changes to the size of the metropolitan hinterland. The new urban paradigm, on the other hand, emphasizes the impact of the global economy, multinational corporations, the shift to functional specialization in world-system financial and

administrative activities, the constant subsidization by the state, the efforts of pro-growth coalitions, and changes in labor-force requirements leading to some renovation and central-city gentrification. It tends to focus on power and inequality, the production and reproduction of capital accumulation, crisis adjustment in sociospatial organizations, and such other processes. The following are some of the basic questions that the new urban sociology paradigm seeks to answer: What is the character of power and inequality? How do they relate to ‘‘ecological’’ patterns? How do production and reproduction processes of capital accumulation, as well as the processes of crisis adjustment, manifest themselves in sociospatial organization?

THE CRISIS OF THE NEW URBAN

SOCIOLOGY

However, having apparently supplanted human ecology, the new urban sociology itself appears to be in a state of deep crisis (Hutchinson 1993). Among other things, many of its practitioners are now claiming that the new urban sociology lacks a paradigm equivalent to that of human ecology; that its contribution is critical rather than substantive; that its viewpoint is far more ideological than empirical; and that it lacks a unifying focus, there being as many new urban sociologies as there are its practitioners (La Gory 1993, p. 113). At the same time, while asserting that ‘‘what is most salient about the new approach is . . . its direct challenge to the theory and method of ecology,’’ Gottdiener and Feagin (1988) deride the attempt ‘‘to pick and choose from some of the new literature . . . areas of compatibility, thereby turning the new approach into a mere footnote of the old’’ (p. 167). However, in view of the inadequacy of both approaches, La Gory (1993) suggests the use of network analysis as the preferred strategy for devising a revised urban paradigm that is informed by both the strengths and shortcomings of these two perspectives. And noting the considerable conceptual convergence between the two approaches, Smith (1995) argues for a synthesized urban theory that will require the fleshing out of Hawley’s theory of social organization, technology, and population distributions by incorporating the contributions of the new urban theory regarding the nature and content of the global competitive capitalist system. Thus, Smith claims that while the new

urban sociology can provide human ecology with a better understanding of power and dominance and how class interests play a central role in shaping urbanization, human ecology can help the new urban theory pay more attention to the demographic processes and variables in order to develop a theory of demographic change under global capitalism.

ECO-CATASTROPHE AND

ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE

Industrial and industrializing nations are now beset with more or less the same devastating problems of air, land, and water pollution and environmental destruction. Large numbers of lakes and rivers that were not naturally eutrophic have now become so as a result of pollution and chemical runoffs. In the United States, Love Canal and Times Beach, Missouri, made headlines in the 1980s as much as Chernobyl did in 1986 in the Soviet Union. Sulfur dioxide emissions from industrial and power plants cause acid rain that inflicts irreparable damage on buildings, monuments, marine life, trees, and plants. More than 60,000 synthetic chemicals are now on the market, of which a sizable number contaminate the environment and pose health hazards. Over half a million tons of toxic wastes are produced each year in the United States, while the five-year cost of cleaning nuclear waste, which remains dangerously radioactive for thousands of years, may well exceed $30 billion. The soil, lake water, and groundwater near nuclear power and weapons plants are heavily contaminated with such toxins as mercury, arsenic, and many types of solvents, as well as with deadly radioactive materials such as plutonium, tritium, and strontium-90. The contamination is so bad in eight states that huge tracts of land are said to be totally unfit for human habitation and pose serious health hazards for the surrounding communities. The siting of dump sites in minority communities and the international shipment of hazardous waste to non-Western nations raise serious issues of environmental justice. With an annual production of solid waste that doubled between 1960 and the late 1990s to nearly 225 million tons, the United States is producing more garbage than any other nation in the world and will soon be facing a huge problem of disposal as its 2,300 landfills run out of room and their leachates pose serious threats of toxicity.

The environmental destruction is far more serious and widespread in eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. These countries are the sites of some of the world’s worst pollution. Lakes and rivers are dead or dying. Water is so contaminated in some areas that it is undrinkable. Chemical runoff and sewage and wastewater dumping have created serious groundwater contamination. Lignite (brown coal), the major source of energy for industry and homes in some of these nations, is responsible for the heavy concentration of sulfur dioxide and dust in the air that has caused serious respiratory problems and additional health damage. The hazecovered cities are an environmental disaster. According to Worldwatch estimates, the former Soviet Union alone accounted for a fifth each of global carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions—the former are implicated in global warming; the latter are the principal ingredient of acid rain. These environmental problems thus not only span transboundaries, they also cut across ideological labels.

In non-Western nations, a million people suffer acute poisoning and 20,000 persons die every year from pesticides. Pesticides are a major source of environmental and health problems in the United States as well. But the United States alone exports more than half a billion pounds of pesticides that are restricted in or banned from domestic use. The ecology, natural environment, and resources of these non-Western nations are being destroyed and contaminated at a frightening rate. Irreversible damage is being done by large-scale destruction of rainforests and the intensive use of marginal lands, as well as by the imbalances that result from population pressures and the practices of multinational firms and national elites. Desertification now threatens a third of the earth’s land surface. Poverty, hunger, starvation, famine, and death are endemic throughout much of the world.

RELATION BETWEEN POPULATION AND

THE ENVIRONMENT

What lends urgency to the current population– resource crisis for the West is the fact that while human numbers are declining or standing still at most in industrial societies, they are increasing disproportionately in the rest of the world, a

world divided today not only economically and sociopolitically, but also demographically. The technological mastery of the world has resulted in a higher material standard of living in the West, but it has also spelled economic polarization, ecological ruin, and environmental disasters worldwide. At the same time, hunger, famine, poverty, and overpopulation in the rest of the world have raised critical issues of equity, justice, security, and human survival. While the close link among poverty, population growth, and environmental degradation is invariably highlighted by the neo-Malthusians and the media, the impact of unsustainable patterns of consumption and production on the environment does not receive equal emphasis. Much more disconcerting is the fact that the use of the population argument tends to divert attention away from the role of exploitative and oppressive social institutions and arrangements. Schnaiberg and Gould (1994) find the lack of control over industrial production systems rather than population growth to be the main factor contributing to the underdevelopment of Southern societies. Without minimizing the danger of overpopulation, they find clear historical evidence that the worldwide environmental disruption has been caused not by population growth but by the enormous expansion of production, profits, and surplus in the past century. And based on available evidence, Humphrey and Buttel (1982) have been led to conclude that ‘‘[one] of the most important findings to come from the study of the relationship between population size and the environment is the misplaced importance given to world population size as cause of natural resource scarcities and pollution . . . . [We do not] imply that world population growth should be . . . neglected as a cause of environmental problems, [but] a fixation on it as the major reason for pollution and energy crises would be sociologically misguided’’ (p. 60).

Depending on their consensus or conflict orientation, we find that the dominant perspectives on the population–resource dynamic place differential emphasis on the alternative modes of resolving competition over scarce resources. In this respect, the modern division of labor, highlighted by Durkheim, is but one of several modes of resolving competition over scarce resources. Schnore (1965, pp. 12–13) offers a number of alternative survival strategies, which may involve one or a combination of the following: (1) demographic

changes resulting in the elimination of excess numbers (increase in the death rate, decrease in the birthrate, and migration); (2) technological changes that allow for the expansion of the resource base (the exploitation of unused or existing resources, availability of new areas and new resources, resource substitutions, etc.); and (3) organizational changes that allow for the support of larger numbers (occupational and territorial differentiation, revolutionary changes that redistribute the surplus among the many, and reduction in the general level of living to support increased numbers).

For human ecology, the most salient aspect of the population–environment relationship is the way it affects human survival and the quality of human life. Under the impact of the interlocking crises of overpopulation, resource depletion, and environmental degradation, issues of sustainability and survival have come to occupy center stage. Corresponding to the main approaches in human ecology, three broad positions may be identified for discussion: the pro-growth (expansionist), the neo-Malthusian, and the political economy perspectives. Our discussion of these positions is followed by a consideration of the Brundtland Report, issued by the World Commission on Environment and Development, and of the traditionalGandhian view of the ecological crisis. Extended treatment of the issues involved may be found in Catton (1980), de la Court (1990), Humphrey and Buttel (1982), Mellos (1988), and Schnaiberg and Gould (1994).

The Pro-Growth (Expansionist) Perspective.

To explain the growth patterns of modern society, this approach builds on the foundations of ‘‘the new synthetic theory developed in the biological sciences in the last forty years, . . . mixing in elements of neo-Malthusian theory, Marx’s historical materialism, and modern systems theory’’ (Lenski 1979, p. 14). It seems quite likely, however, that the basic elements of expansionism, now presented as a natural universal process, were derived from the fundamental American experience of abundance and an open frontier conceived as a process. As Avery O. Craven (1937) put it more than sixty years ago, the basic idea was ‘‘that American history . . . presents a series of recurring social evolutions in diverse geographical areas as a people advance to colonize a continent. The chief characteristic is

expansion; the chief peculiarity of institutions, constant readjustment . . . . Into . . . raw and differing areas men and institutions and ideas poured from older basins, there to return to a more or less primitive state and then to climb slowly back toward complexity . . . . The process was similar in each case, with some common results but always with ‘essential differences’ due to time and place’’ (quoted in Potter 1954, p. 145–146.)

In expansionist thinking, scale, complexity, and acceleration—that is, the constant broadening of the limits of the maximum permitted by prevailing circumstances—mark the human–envi- ronment encounter. Hawley’s version of human ecology, with its focus on population growth and differentiation as significant processes of continuous change, provides a concise exposition of the pro-growth or expansionist view on the popula- tion–resource problematic. Hawley believes that industrial systems have no known upper limits on either the number of specializations or the size of the populations that can be supported. Similar pro-growth sentiments are expressed by other expansionist thinkers. Asserting that resource supplies are finite but unbounded, Hawley (1986, pp. 110–111) questions the neo-Malthusian assumption that overpopulation and overuse will soon exhaust a declining supply of fixed resources. While acknowledging the threat of overpopulation and pollution to the quality of the environment, he points to the inherently expansive nature of populations, technology, and organization that has resulted in a long history of resource expansion through more efficient extraction and use of new and existing resources, new resource development, and resource substitutions. With regard to global food-producing resources, he presents evidence to show that the size of arable land, its productivity, and its agricultural output can be increased beyond the rate of population growth. He blames poverty and the structural conditions that generate it for the chronic food shortages in parts of the world and points to the indispensability of further increments of growth and the creation of central organizations capable of tackling these and other environmental problems. Contrary to the view of the Malthusians, he holds that the expansive power of populations by itself does not cause war, resource depletion, or environmental degradation; it does so only under specific organizational circumstances. Hawley (1986, p. 26) views

these outcomes as the result of the maladaptation or malfunctioning of organization, with disequilibrium opening the possibility for evolutionary change through a movement to a higher level of complexity.

While Colin Clark directly links population numbers to power, Herman Kahn (1974) views population increase as a necessary stimulus to economic growth and believes the earth can easily support 15 billion people at $20,000 per capita for a millennium. In fact, he believes that the wider the gap between the rich and the poor, the more the riches will percolate downward. In any case, he is unconvinced that the rich would agree to part with their income to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. Roger Revelle (1974) believes the earth can actually support nearly thirty times the present population in terms of food supplies and that it would take almost 150 years to hit that mark. While economic development is necessary to provide people with the basis to control their fertility, Revelle is certain the world would drown in its own filth if most of the people in the world were to live at Western standards. Finally, the postindustrial sociologist Daniel Bell (1977) is convinced that economic growth is necessary to reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations. He has little doubt that the ‘‘super-pro- ductivity society,’’ with less than 4 percent of its labor force devoted to agriculture, could feed the whole population of the United States, and most of the world as well. In his opinion, pollution exists because the market principle has never been applied to the use of collective goods. Actually, Bell suggests that the government itself could utilize the market to demand a public accounting from all parties on issues of public interest, levy effluent charges for pollutants, and bring effective compliance through the price mechanism.

However, while corporations have shown greater sensitivity and self-regulation, there is evidence that attempts to enforce the ‘‘polluter-pays’’ principle are likely to be resisted or the costs passed on to the public. The negative impact of governmental policies that alleviate energy and resource scarcities is more likely to be felt at the lower socioeconomic levels (Morrison 1976). Dunlap (1979) presents evidence to show that the effects of pollution and the costs of cleaning the environment are borne disproportionately by the poor and may actually serve to reinforce class inequalities.

The Neo-Malthusian Perspective. Within the context of actual and perceived resource scarcities worldwide, neo-Malthusianism has gained ascendance since the 1970s over the earlier theories of demographic transition and neoclassical human ecology (expansionism), which were dominant through the 1960s. Based on the Malthusian notion that population invariably outruns food supply because of a lag between the simple arithmetical increases in resources and the exponential rates of population growth, the neo-Malthusians bring in the notion of carrying capacity to identify overpopulation as the main threat to human planetary survival. However, in spite of the fact that there is no exact or objective formula for determining the optimum population, the neo-Malthusians tie in the notion of carrying capacity—the optimum population that a given environmental resource base can support at a given time—with the idea of an acceptable quality of life that one insists on living. Sometimes the theory of demographic transition, discussed below, is also invoked to explain why Western societies have been able to avoid the Malthusian apocalypse by joining declining death rates and birthrates with increasing standards of living, while non-Western societies cannot, given the least likelihood of their ever achieving Western levels of industrial and economic development, and the sheer impossibility of the whole world living at U.S. standards within the constraints imposed by the finite nature of the earth’s resources (Daly 1979).

Compounding the environmental effects of the poverty-stricken and ‘‘food-hungry’’ populations of the world are the impacts of massive consumption and pollution by the ‘‘energy hungry’’ nations (Miller 1972, p. 117). The latter rise sharply with even a slight growth in the population of Western nations, where one-quarter of the world’s population is responsible for more than 85 percent of worldwide consumption of natural resources and the environmental sinks. Within the United States, a bare 6 percent of the world’s population consumes more than half of the world’s nonrenewable resources and more than a third of all the raw materials produced. G. Tyler Miller, Jr. (1972, p. 122) believes that the real threat to our life-support system, therefore, comes not from the poor but from the affluent megaconsumers and megapolluters who occupy more space, consume more natural resources, disturb the ecology more,

and directly and indirectly pollute the land, air, and water with ever-increasing amounts of thermal, chemical, and radioactive wastes. While the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972) and the other neo-Malthusians gave a grace period of thirty or so years, Catton (1980) believes we have already overshot the maximum carrying capacity and are now on a catastrophic downward crash course. In any case, he is convinced that our best bet would be to act as if a crash were imminent and to take advance measures to minimize its impact.

However, the basic premises of Malthusian theory have not stood the test of time. With each technological breakthrough, the Western nations have so far been able to raise their carrying capacity through extending their territorial and environmental reach, which now reaches to the ends of the globe. The social and economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution not only telescoped the doubling of human population within a shorter time span, they also brought about ever-rising material standards of living due to astronomical increases in the scale and speed of agricultural and industrial production in the advanced nations. While the Malthusian theory predicts the fall in growth rates of population as a result of rising death rates, this prediction failed to apply during the period of industrial growth. The theory of demographic transition was proposed to cover the anomalous results. The theory specifies declining fertility as a consequence of modernization and economic development. However, in the West itself, smaller families became a clear option only after the newly affluent had suffered a major setback in higher living standards during the Great Depression. On the other hand, the downward transition of fertility worldwide appears to be the result of a complex of factors, including the declining role of tradition and religion, rising levels of income, the increasing role of women’s education and outside employment, urban residence and industrialization, and the awareness and availability of fertility-control measures (Weinstein 1976, p. 85). Many of the generalizations based on the demographic-transition theory have thus proved to be culturally and historically specific.

At the same time, the ‘‘development’’ of poor nations has created a new set of claimants for the resources needed to maintain the high material standard of living of affluent nations. As the poor nations begin to assert control over their own

resources, try to set terms of their exchange, or resist outside pressures to transform them into ‘‘environmental preserves’’ or the ‘‘global commons,’’ the prospects of conflict, particularly over critical water, mineral, forest, and energy resources, are greatly magnified. Amartya Sen (1981) has looked at the famine situation as essentially a ‘‘crisis of entitlement,’’ not so much because there is lack of food but because many are denied any claims to it because of the very nature of the market economy. In the West, the entitlement revolution has entailed huge welfare expenditures, which could be financed either by economic growth or by direct redistribution of income (Bell 1976, p. 20). For Bell and the neo-Malthusians, the latter is out of the question.

To restore the population–resource balance— with global economic development, equitable distribution of resources, and the perfectibility of man and society now largely ruled out—the neoMalthusians rely on sophisticated computer models to predict the end to development and limits to economic and demographic growth for the nonWestern nations; others favor ‘‘sustained environment development’’. Still others despair of the effort to avert disaster through population control or the preventive checks of moral restraint proposed by Malthus. Instead, they invoke the operation of the Malthusian positive checks (wars, famines, pestilence, and natural disasters) and raise the specter of massive famines and die-offs to justify triage, war, secessionist movements, adding sterilants to drinking water, forced sterilization, violent and coercive contraceptive technologies for women, even genocide. In a piece published in 1969 in the Stanford Alumni Almanac, and appropriately titled ‘‘The Immorality of Being Softhearted,’’ Garrett Hardin is quite clear that food would be the worst thing to send to the poor. Nothing short of the final solution will do. ‘‘Atomic bombs would be kinder. For a few moments the misery would be acute, but it would soon come to an end for most of the people, leaving a very few survivors to suffer thereafter.’’ These solutions, which would bring about the decimation of entire populations, have been called ecofascist. Such sentiments are by no means uncommon among the neo-Malthusians.

To revert to the neo-Malthusian argument: The tragedy of numbers is compounded by the ‘‘free rider,’’ who derives personal benefits from

the collective efforts of others, and the more serious ‘‘tragedy of the commons’’ (Hardin 1966), where each herdsman will add cattle without limit, ignoring the costs imposed on the others and degrading the land held in common. The ‘‘tragedy of the commons’’ is really the tragedy of individualism run amuck, an individualism from which all constraints of private and common morality have been removed. However, others have been quick to point to the equal or far greater extent of environment pollution and ecological destruction in socialist countries as one more evidence of the inevitable convergence of capitalism and socialism!

Many environmental problems are clearly transideological and transnational. Acid rain, oil spills, the destruction of the ozone layer, the threat of global warming—all call for common responsibility and joint regulation. Ironically, it appears that the expressed concern about the destruction of the global commons through overpopulation or industrial pollution is seldom matched by a parallel commitment by powerful nations to preserve or clean up the environment or provide support for international population-control efforts. Instead, one witnesses a mad scramble to divide up the remaining oceanic and other planetary resources without regard to equity, ecology, or environment. As a result, the air and the oceans, as well as the forests and lands of other nations, are being overexploited or used as garbage and toxic dumps with impunity.

Of no small consequence globally is the environmental impact of waste, widespread corruption at all levels, hoarding and price-fixing, and poor storage, distribution, and transportation networks. Not surprisingly, ‘‘formidable mafias based on a triangular alliance between the corrupt bureaucrat, the corrupt politician and the corrupt businessman emerged in all [Indian] States and became a most powerful threat to the conservation of the country’s tree cover’’ (Vohra 1985, p. 50). When one adds to this list the role of political and economic elites and multinational corporations, and of huge debts, huge dams, and huge arms stockpiles, it becomes clear that poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and starvation may have far more to do with political, cultural, and socioeconomic components of food shortages than with sheer numbers alone. This is not to underestimate the immensity of the population problem or to minimize the difficulty of its solution.