Our quality of life peaked in 1974. It's all downhill now [Jackass alert]

With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.

The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.

This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.

Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.

The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.

Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land.

As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.

One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.

An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.

Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery.

Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilised to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."

There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasised.

It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.

Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.

We no longer have much of a frontier. In the past that's always meant big trouble.

Well, this is what I mean: I honestly can't think of an example where that's been the case. We pay our farmers to throw away their food as it is. If we really needed it, we could produce much, much more, and we could develop more land for farming as well. And we're just one country. If the third world ever gets out from under all the corruption, they could be producing just as much.

In the future, we could genetically develop vegetables that grow more quickly, so that we get two seasons of a plant instead of just one, and if people are squeamish we can still feed it to livestock, making them meatier and healthier.

Of course, there is a point where you run out of room, but I don't think we need to worry about that since populations are actually declining in many places. The baltics and Scandanavia are in decline, and pretty soon there won't be anyone left in countries like Italy and Spain. China's gender imbalance will lead to a big falling off in the long run.

This is just anecdotal, of course, but I think I've gone much further than I need to in order to debunk this guy's point. His main unstated premise, that we will always use the same technology and the same fuel and so eventually we will run out, is completely false.

In the last two days, I've read two interesting articles in the Wash Post about major paradigm shifts similar to the one I'm describing, although in different areas. First, the increase in population does not mean that we need more pay phones littering the landscape, because no one is using pay phones anymore. Their numbers are declining rapidly because they're not profitable anymore, since everyone uses cell phones.

The second shows one way in which technology is saving trees. People just aren't writing checks anymore. Because of a huge increase in credit and debit card transactions, ATMs and electronic transfers, the Fed is laying off most of the people who in the past dealt with paper checks (that's in today's paper I think). The number written each year is still in the tens of billions, but it declined by 20% last year and will fall by even more next year.

I see both of these changes in my own life--I haven't written a check in months! And I also have a cell phone, so I never look for a pay phone unless I'm in another region of the country. And I don't even have a ground line--I think that in ten years, with better cell technology, they'll be pulling down telephone polls all over the country and local service providers will be going out of business.

There are so many ways in which, over time, we do more and more at a lower cost to ourselves and the environment.

But our ability to improve both human life and the quality of the environment are imperiled, in the long run, by environmentalist wackos who want to halt economic progress now, while we are still doing more damage to the planet than we will in the future.

To cite an example at the opposite extreme, early explorers to lands that man had never before visited--let alone inhabited--were astonished to find that wild game was both abundant and totally unconcerned with the presence of men.

Those explorers found, for example, that they could wade right in among thousands of nesting birds and just grab dinner from the nests at their feet, either by clubbing a bird and/or by stealing its eggs.

Check your sources again. I bet you'll find that the hunter's paradise described by these explorers were in places that lacked in predators of all kinds. It wasn't that the Dodo Birds were not afraid of men, but that they weren't afraid of anything. The passenger pigeon only became vulnerable because of the technology to kill them in vast numbers wasn't available before the stone-age nomads were supplanted.

But you are thinking of hunting and gathering today, long after hunting pressures from overpopulation made harvesting directly from nature impracticable.

Hunting pressures derive from the total population of predators, not just the humans. If there is an abundant supply of game in a given area, the population of predators rise until there is no longer abundant game. Look up what is occuring in the Yellowstone area with the introduction of Canadian wolves. Deer, elk and moose populations are plummeting.

The hunter/gatherer lifestyle permits no more than a day-to-day existence, totally dependant on an insecure source of food. Vitamin deficiency diseases are rampant. Sanitation and medication are rudimentary, but cholera isn't deterred by that. Childbirth becomes a trauma that kills huge percents of the population. The eternal nomadic trek allows anything that might be a permanant achievement a waste of time.

But you are thinking of hunting and gathering today, long after hunting pressures from overpopulation made harvesting directly from nature impracticable.

First, the author adds the usual Guardian, Leftist, guilt-mongering spin which it makes it difficult to talk about a real problem.

Second, I agree with most of what you say. There's nothing inherently deterministic about our situation. We are not in immediate danger of running out of food, or oil, or energy, or water or even space. The technologies now exist which make a paradigm shift possible. It is also true that declining fertility increasingly renders a true overpopulation crisis much less likely.

Third, what is true is that we cannot keep urbanising - destroying the natural world - in the way we have been. There's only a limited amount of it and we are dependent on it in many unappreciated ways.

So humans alone among animals failed to evolve a competent means of survival until after thousands of years someone finally said, "I know, I know--we can plant seeds then everything will be OK. Phew, that was a close one, fellas--good thing I finally thought of that. Now we can stop all this hunting stuff and instead chop down this here forest and plough all these acres and kill grasshoppers."

That would only have looked like a good idea when population increased to the point that nature was no longer capable of supporting such numbers--only then would people have found farming easier than hunting.

Curiously enough, hunter-gathering was so successful a lifestyle that man increased in numbers until finally he was too numerous to live directly off nature.

Curiously enough, hunter-gathering was so successful a lifestyle that man increased in numbers until finally he was too numerous to live directly off nature.

Just like all life. If your population outstrips your food supply, there is a die-back until an equilibrium is reached. As well say that wolves increase in number until they are too numerous. Your argument is circular.

How about some evidence of your assertation? I say that Man chose to cultivate crops and livestock to provide an easier and more secure food source. You claim Man was driven to agriculture by population pressure. So, how do you explain the American Indian, which had both agri and h/g societies side by side?

Nope. Humans alone among animals evolved a superior method of survival. Someone finally said, "Hey guys, why don't we just plant the corn where we know we can find it, instead of looking for it at random?" You're skipping a few steps to go from that to forest clearing. That came after they got the population increase that a more dependable food supply brought.

And in the meantime, what happens to your happy paradise of easy living? Not so easy to live off the land during a bad cycle.

But in a world not overpopulated, no problem: You just move somewhere else.

And the game will never recover to its former abundance while there are predators about.

Once the antelope grow longer legs, for example, the predators will be back to eating the sick and lame, and the stocks of antelope will return.

And in reality, such antelope-predator adaptations would likely be a gradual process--it would not happen in fits and starts.

And at all events, if there's enough game for predators, there's enough game for a small band of humans--not to mention that the predators can be trapped and eaten too.

Time to move on, follow the herd, leave the weak behind to die. Gramma can't make it? Too bad. No retirement plan in a hunter society

You're envisioning quite the castrophe. If the antelope become scarce, you can eat squirrels or field mice or insects or lizards or frogs or snail or birds or ground hogs or armadillos or wild strawberries, apples, fruits, seeds, nuts, vegitation of all kinds--this is a state of nature I'm talking about, which we humans are as well adapted to directly exploit as any beast its far narrower niche.

It wouldn't have been until mankind became too numerous to live directly from nature, that he was forced to live in a settled village and die of famine because you can't leave for greener pastures because all the land is occupied and defended.

And with farming and land ownership began the transition to continual ruthless warfare, as local shortages developed and people were forced to take land from others or die--hence plowshares to swords and PC's to guidance systems, and hence Cincinnatus).

Later came densely populated cities, which are breeding grounds for deadly plagues (look out, gramma);in a less densely populated world, any contagion based on a microbe that mutated to kill its host, would burn itself out before it could leap from one band of hunter gatherers to another, thereby isolating the infection from the vast majority of humans.

If the antelope become scarce, you can eat squirrels or field mice or insects or lizards or frogs or snail or birds or ground hogs or armadillos or wild strawberries, apples, fruits, seeds, nuts, vegitation of all kinds--this is a state of nature I'm talking about, which we humans are as well adapted to directly exploit as any beast its far narrower niche.

Tell you what; why don't you go and take a survival course, one where you actually have to do what you are proposing for a week or two. I have, and frankly, you don't seem to know what you are talking about in the least. Living off the land is backbreaking, calorie deficient work from sunrise to sunset, followed by shivering your ass off all night. Then you get to do it again.

If, after a week in the boonies, you still want to keep doing it for the rest of your life, be my guest. There's millions of acres of wilderness area in Idaho for you to lose yourself in. But, fair warning: it ain't Walden Pond.

Keep it.

Idaho is not a good place to live off the land. People only went there after being driven from more congenial lands and climates by overpopulation.

And Walden Pond was not a good idea--Henry planted beans (farming bad) and built a cabin to protect himself from the lousy climate.

But even were there a good place (and Thor Hyerdahl couldn't find one remaining good place back in the 1930s, so populated had the world become by then), a hunter-gatherer would sooner or later be kicked-off it when the hordes need the land, same as is happening to the few remaining primative tribes in Africa and South America.

My point is not that we should abandon technology--there are far too many people for that--my point is that we should recognize technology for what it is: a way to make more of less and nothing more.

Once again, you are thinking of depleted, left-over land in a hostile climate.

There is no place left on earth that remains undepleted by overpopulation and which has comfortable weather year round.

So of course living off the land will be miserable where there are freezing winters or boiling summers and the few remaining game animals have learned to evade poachers with firearms, let alone a guy in a loin cloth with a spear or bow.

But if living close to nature were as miserable as you described no matter what the place, then we alone among animals would have evolved to despise the very thing we did to survive for the vast majority of our species' time on earth.

Strange, don't you think?

Even a cat enjoys hunting so much that it plays at hunting--it can't get enough of it.

And properly so, because animals, including man, have developed the love of play because play is practice for the skills needed to survive in a state of nature.

Once again, you are thinking of depleted, left-over land in a hostile climate.
There is no place left on earth that remains undepleted by overpopulation and which has comfortable weather year round.

There never was such a happy hunting ground. Take the SE of N America, pre columbia. Moderate weather, low population, game competed for fiercely by predators. There are probably more deer in the southern US now than in 1400 AD.

Living off the land is miserable wherever you do it.

And we have. How many people today would volunteer to give up medicine, housing, plumbing, transportation and abundant food to go live in a skin tent and die of disease or starvation (the two most common causes in primitive cultures)?

While I can admire your romanticism in a weird way, I prefer to base my world in the reality of what is, not what Rousseau or Ned Ludd thought might have been.

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