The Limited Use of History in the New World of Public Policy

The Limited Use of History in the New World of Public Policy
Richard D. Lamm
The Land Institute
June 4. 2004

I am honored to be invited to the conference. I hope I have something to contribute, but I must warn you that when I was in office, there was a men’s room right down from the Governor’s office and it had one of those machines where when you push a button, hot air is released to dry your hands. Someone, we never did discover who, kept putting a little card under the dryer saying: “Press here for a message from your Governor.”

Let me state up front my thesis. I believe that history has become of significantly reduced usefulness for human wisdom and for guidance in the management of the future. I believe that many of the great and wise sayings concerning the importance of history, like Santayana’s statement that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” or Harry Truman’s quote to the effect that the only surprises in the future are the history you don’t know --while perhaps still true for human events, do not give us guidance on our major environmental public policy challenges and can be downright dangerous as we face the next generation of public issues. In some ways history has become a trap because it prevents us from recognizing the full seriousness of the problems we are faced with. An old world is dying and a new world in which history is of limited use, is struggling to be born. Heretical words but let me make my case.

History does teach us much about human nature, about humanities, ambitions, cruelties, follies, about the seduction of power, the temptation of riches and lust. We enlarge our knowledge and enrich our soul by the study of history. History has been an important part of my life.

But history does not teach us about Mother Nature; it does not allow us to properly evaluate something like global warming, environmental degradation, or the growth of human numbers. It is likely that we are entering into a new era of Sustainability. A study of history would not have predicted the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution, and I don’t believe it is of much help in the search for the new world of Sustainability or what may exist on the backside of the Hubbard Curve.

The past gives little guidance to the next generation of problems because we are living on the upper shoulder of some unprecedented and dangerous geometric curves. We ignore Al Bartlett’s wise words that the greatest human failure is our inability to understand the exponential function. I believe the next sequences of geometric growth in human numbers and environmental impact are unsustainable, and are thus by definition without precedent. The relentless cascade of geometry is giving us a world beyond historical precedent. History teaches us of human limitations, but not of nature’s limits. History gives us little guide to a world that needs to turn from “growth” to “sustainability.” Some guidance, of course, but not where it really counts. We are sailing on uncharted waters.

I believe that we are surrounded with evidence that increasingly shows that something is fundamentally wrong with our historic ways of looking at the world. Yesterday’s solutions have become today’s problems, and these problems are of a different scale and coming at us with increasing velocity. The growth paradigm that allowed us to create wealth, reduce poverty, and increase living standards is becoming obsolete. Those human traits which allowed us to prevail over the ice, the tiger and the bear -- in a time of an empty earth continue to operate long after we are no longer an empty earth.

Reg Morrison in his book, The Spirit of the Gene, suggests that those genes that saved a species now are on course to destroy us. We are hard-wired by survival traits that now, unless controlled, will drive us into oblivion. Evolution moves too slowly to correct the dilemma that evolution put us in by its past slow progress.

Our globe is warming, our forests are shrinking, our water tables are falling, our icecaps are melting, our coral is dying, and our fisheries are collapsing. Our soils are eroding, our wetlands are disappearing, our deserts are encroaching, and our finite water more and more in demand. I suspect these to be the early warning signs of a world approaching its carrying capacity. We cannot call upon the lessons of history to help us evaluate the seriousness of these problems because it is an entirely new paradigm. Ecologically we are sailing on uncharted waters while moving at unprecedented speed. We have lost our anchor and our navigational instruments are out of date.

When I entered high school in 1950, there were 2.6 billion people on earth, and there were 50 million cars. Now there are over 6 billion people on earth, and our car population has increased ten-fold to 500 million; and within 25 years it is projected there will be 1 billion cars on the world’s roads. (Youngquist)

Nothing in our past prepares us for the environmental problems that we are faced with. We cannot grow our way out of these problems; we cannot use history to put them into perspective. The lessons we have learned living on an empty earth teach us the wrong lessons. We are still trying to “be fruitful, multiply, and subdue” an earth that now needs saving. Contemporary life is a rock rolling downhill, gathering speed. It presents us with a series of problems of nature, for which the lessons of history are not only useless, but teach us the wrong lessons.

Kenneth Boulding said that the modern human dilemma is that all our experience deals with the past, yet all our problems are challenges of the future. The lessons we have learned in the past do not help and in many ways are counter-productive in solving the problems of sustainability. Our economic models have become ecologically unsustainable.

Humans appear throughout history to be insatiable creatures. There appears at this time to be no reasonable limit on “more, “bigger,” or “faster” or “richer.” If we haven’t already hit carrying capacity, it is just a matter of time.

The well known Rio Declaration of Environment and Development in 1991 states unequivocally: “Human beings are at the center of concern for unsustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” These words speak to my heart but not to my head. It seems to me that in a limited ecological world we cannot entitle everyone to a healthy and productive life. Humans must fit within ecology. It seems too much to hope for that our aspirations and the aspirations of our children and grandchildren will somehow magically fit within ecological limits. I recognize that I might be wrong; we are all fragile human beings who confront the world from our own set of eyes. But here I have been essentially paraphrasing the United Nations, The National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, all of which have warned that increasing population and increasing consumption threaten to overshoot the earth’s ecological carrying capacity. Most of this historic ways that societies have grown and developed may be obsolete, and if they are, we are over-driving our headlights and heading for major traumas.

We cannot be growth maximizers and ecological realists at the same time. The Rio Declaration was beautifully written and I hope that it is possible. But it seems to me that you cannot maximize all the variables in any equation and thus it seems improbable that we can realistically ensure that humanity meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

We cannot solve growth-related problems with more growth; we must move to sustainability. It took a billion years or more for nature to create the limited stocks of petroleum and mineral wealth which modern technology and human ingenuity have recently learned to exploit. But we are squandering our one time inheritance of cheap energy and handy resources. The models so painstakingly developed over 300 years to create more jobs and more goods and services must be dramatically modified

What to do? At a minimum we should move to stabilize the population of the United States and the World. I can’t believe that the Bush Administration is going around the world discouraging condom use and teaching “natural family planning.”

I believe that we should have a $2 gallon tax on gasoline, the proceeds of which would not be available for new governmental spending, but to help us retire the baby boomers, which is another great challenge facing America.

I believe we should abolish most of the income tax, except on the higher incomes, and move more to consumption taxes. We must re-use, re-cycle, restore. We shouldn’t build a car in America that doesn’t get 40 miles per gallon. Alternative energy sources are available and easily developed with the right public policy. Amory Lovins says that alternative energy is not only a free lunch, but also one that we get paid to eat. We must reduce immigration from the current levels of mass immigration (1.3million a year), to numbers closer to our historical averages (270,000). We must stress community, and use religion and spirituality to become less materialistic. Is this enough? No, of course not, but you get the idea. It is not exactly a politically popular agenda, but a necessary one.

But first of all, we must better practice humility, appreciate better what we don’t know (ignorance) and develop a culture of limits. We in the West and at the Land Institute can help give birth to the new world that will be required on the downslide of Hubbard’s curve. The West has had its own clash of cultures that track the knowledge/ignorance dilemma: the culture of the infinite and living with the finite.

Civilization has triumphed in the West because it has refused to accept limits and has overcome a myriad of obstacles. Our ancestors found a desert and made it into a garden. The culture of the infinite teaches that knowledge, ingenuity and imagination can prevail over any obstacles and that there are no limits -- only lack of creativity.

This is the West of irrigation canals, trans-mountain diversions, pivot sprinklers and other adaptations that allow us not only to live in a semi-desert, but also to enjoy green lawns and prosperity. The culture of the infinite suggests the future is a logical extension of the past, that all problems have achievable solutions: “Go forth and multiply and subdue the earth” and “Go West, young man.”

It is the optimism of “Not to worry: God gave man two hands and only one stomach.” It reflects a devout belief in limitless economic development, progress and the perfectibility of the human condition. It is the world of the green revolution that has given us the potential to eliminate hunger, and of technology that some say has repealed the law of supply and demand and discovered endless and unlimited wealth. This is the world built around unlimited people -- unsatiated consumers.

The supporters of the infinite are either the modern prophets or the modern alchemists -- but to date they say they have been stunningly successful in solving the problem of population and poverty. And in their minds their approach will continue to be successful. Knowledge trumps all! Aridity can be solved by desalinating oceans, and wealth (computer chips) can be created out of sand.

The second culture is the culture of the finite. The West also teaches that we must adapt to nature, and be acutely aware of nature’s fickleness and limitations. It teaches us humility and caution, that there is such a thing as “carrying capacity” and we must respect the fragility of the land and environment. It argues that nature teaches us that we never can or should rely on knowledge or the status quo, that climate is harsh and variable, and that the price of survival is to humbly anticipate and prepare, and recognize that we can never anticipate all the surprises that nature has in store for us. It questions the proposition that growth, population or economic, can go on forever. This is the world of conservation, national parks, wilderness legislation, crop rotation, Planned Parenthood, Malthus, and Exxon Valdez. It is the vision of Thomas Berry: “The earth and the human community are bound in a single journey” and it listens to Isaiah: “Woe unto them that lay field upon field and house upon house that there be no place to be left alone in the world.”

Our industrial civilization is built upon the assumptions that there are no limits, that technology will forever solve our problems, and that we will not reach any sort of carrying capacity. It assumes infinite resources, where scarcity is caused by want of knowledge and imagination. Civilization in most of the world supports this assumption of the infinite.

The finite culture, with fewer adherents, but equally passionate, contends that the first culture is making “empty earth” assumptions that cannot be sustained. They point out that the more we know, the more we don’t know and that technological hubris is dangerous to our future. They want to move now to stabilize U.S. population, reduce our energy use, and help the rest of the world do likewise.

Ultimately, finite-culture adherents feel that we cannot and should not have an America of 500 million living our consumptive lifestyles. They contend that we live in a hinge of history where society must rewrite the entire script. If they are correct, then our basic assumptions about life, our great religious traditions, and our economy are conceptually obsolete. So far, those who sing this song are failed prophets.

But what if -- just what if -- the culture of the infinite was only a temporary victor? What if nature bats last? What if the real lesson we should have learned in a place with 13 inches of rain was the need to appreciate that limits could be pushed and extended but never eliminated? What if the rain forests, the dying coral, the rising temperatures are trying to tell us something?

The lessons I have learned from my love affair with the West support this second culture. I believe we need to transform society from an earth-consuming technological civilization to a sustainable and more benign civilization. I’m impressed with Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” which teaches that human fate depends on our ability to change the basic values, beliefs and aspirations of the total society. I believe that the fate of the world depends on our ability to know when to abandon the infinite culture, and shift to the finite culture. Wait too long and we are doomed. Some will say if we shift too soon, we’ll give up a lot of fun and exhilaration. I’d rather we shift too soon. We won’t get a chance to shift too late. Let me end by quoting Howard Nemerov, a former Poet Laureate:
“Praise without end for the go-ahead zeal of whoever it was invented the wheel; but never a word for the poor soul's sake that thought ahead, and invented the brake.”