Cowboys, cornucopians and long-run sustainability

Abstract

In the 1970s there was a lively debate on the relationship between natural resource availability and long-run economic growth. One side has been characterized as “neo-Malthusian”. It emphasized the limited global “stockpile” of critical natural resources, from cobalt to petroleum, and the need to curb population and economic growth. The other side of the debate has been characterized as “cornucopian”. It emphasized the creative powers of technology and free markets to find substitutes for any and all scarce resources. This paper argues that the original dichotomy was false. It did not adequately represent either the real positions of most conservative business and political leaders today, nor did it reflect the currently emerging consensus among environmentalists. The former do not concern themselves with long-run issues at all, nor do they take a global view of the problems of mankind. Rather, they argue from the standpoint of short-run national (and corporate) interest. Environmentalists, on the other hand, do not fit the “neo-Malthusian” world view, which emphasizes the role of natural resources (and land) as factors of production, and points to the limited supply of renewable resources and the inevitable exhaustion of non-renewables. The most important scarcities, in the emergent environmentalist world view, are largely outside the market domain: soil fertility, clean fresh water, clean fresh air, unspoiled landscapes, climatic stability, biological diversity, biological nutrient recycling and environmental waste assimilative capacity. There are no plausible technological substitutes for these. The irreversible loss of species and ecosystems, and the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and of toxic metals and chemicals in the topsoil, groundwater and in the silt of lake-bottoms and estuaries, are not reversible by any plausible technology that could appear in the next few decades. Finally, the great nutrient cycles of the natural world — carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus — require that constant stocks in each environmental compartment and balanced inflows and outflows. These conditions have already been violated by large-scale and unsustainable human intervention.