Though a long-term resident of this planet, I have yet to find The City of Grace. For others interested, this book offers an initial roadmap. Let us get underway.
As an environmental audit, the first chapter reviews the most fundamental driver on earth, population growth, citing projections for the twenty-first century. Ebullient demography should foster continued globalization in production and trade, spurring more countries to join the neoliberal open market. It continues a movement known as economic development which, since the Industrial Revolution, has been seen to provide gains in living standards and quality of life. Yet, consequential environmental problems are pressing, with writers suggesting that we would need four planet earths to sustain even existing inhabitants at the level of today’s advanced nations. All these elements, in addition to energy, climate and economic stressors (Homer-Dixon 2006, 11), constitute the systemic context into which The City of Grace must fit.
World Population Dynamics
Aggregate Analysis
Recent world population has demonstrated remarkable growth. In 1750, commencing the Industrial Revolution, it included an estimated 790 million people, first surpassing one billion in 1803. This milestone was overtaken by a second billion (i.e. a doubling) over the next 124 years (1927) and the third a mere 33 years thereafter (Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2018). Since 1960, that count again doubled such that, by mid-2019, the aggregate was estimated at 7.714 billion people, around 6 percent of all who have ever lived on earth (Worldodometer).
Components Analysis
Population of the world and regions for selected years in the twenty-first century (millions)
Region | 2019 | 2030 | 2050 | 2100 |
World | 7713 | 8548 | 9735 | 10,874 |
Africa | 1308 | 1688 | 2489 | 4280 |
Asia | 4601 | 4974 | 5290 | 4719 |
Europe | 747 | 741 | 710 | 630 |
Latin America and the Caribbean | 648 | 706 | 762 | 679 |
Northern America | 366 | 391 | 428 | 490 |
Oceania | 42 | 48 | 57 | 75 |
Apart from migration, population alters through births and deaths. The conventional, but also complacency-inducing, demographic transition model tracks the movement of countries from underdeveloped to advanced status (Daly and Cobb 1989, 243). The former, often with abundant fertility, exhibit high birth and death rates, while developed nations have transited to low death and birth rates, achieving demographic stability unless emigration or immigration interpose. In 1960, the world total fertility rate was 4.89 children per woman but, from 2016, it steadied at 2.51. Commensurately, global annual population grew by 1.82 percent in 1960, peaked in 1970 at 2.07 percent, and retreated to 1.09 percent in 2019 (Worldometers 2019).
Population Projection
Some years ago, the noted economist, Walter Rostow (1998, 26), asked ‘how close has the human race come to a more or less stationary global population?’ He continued, ‘the demographers’ answer is that after 2025 the rate of population increase will slow down rapidly and stabilize at about 10 billion. The demographers may be right, but history generally produced irregular outcomes.’ Correspondingly, Henry Teune (1988, 29) calls demography ‘an imprecise field of study.’
In 1972, in its Volume 2, Number 1, The Ecologist contemplated, under various assumptions, a global population of 15.5 billion by 2070 (Lee 1989, 147). Fortunately, we can downsize this estimate. World population currently increases by 227,400 people a day, the size of a small city. The United Nations (2019, 19) predicts that it will reach 8.55 billion by 2030, 9.77 billion by 2050 and 10.74 billion by 2100 (a count which Alexander and Gleeson (2019, 192) see as ‘utterly catastrophic from both a social and environmental perspective’). While at 0.1 percent per annum (Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2018), the growth rate in 2100 will fall short of that currently experienced, another three billion people will populate the earth, 39 percent more than at present. Table 1.1 shows the dramatic redistribution of aggregate population forecast by century’s end. Whereas in 2019, peopling of Asia was 3.52 times that of Africa, by 2100 it will be only 10 percent larger. Alternatively, in 2019, Africa’s share of world population was 17.1 compared with Asia’s 59.4 percent, shifting respectively to 39.3 and 43.4 percent by 2100. Europe in the same timespan will have dropped from 9.6 to 5.7 percent, this relative fall signifying an absolute loss of 117 million persons.
Gabor Zovanyi (2013, 10) disputes ideas that another billion or two would not make much difference, pointing out that ‘it would take only 11.5 days for a million individuals transported on a conveyor belt to pass by a fixed point at a rate of one each per second, whereas it would take 31.5 years for a billion to pass by at the same rate.’ In sum, not only will the world have to accommodate many more people, but current geographical relativities will be radically altered. The quest for urban grace will likely be more relevant than it now appears.
Globalization
Lechner (2005, 331) regards globalization as ‘the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations across continents, organization of social life on a global scale, and the growth of a shared global consciousness.’ It has transdisciplinary1 status, spanning politics, governance, business, technology, sport, crime, terrorism, poverty, inequality, development and more. The estimable Peter Dicken, in seven editions of Global Shift, writes about structural changes in the make-up and geography of the world economy, which, by means of supply chains and logistics, including those of command régimes, increasingly integrate production, distribution and allocation (Hamilton 2003, 119). Globalization changes spatial relationships, usually centralizing economic and political control. Some argue that the process is new and will produce a borderless world, maybe with a single government. A traditional school suggests that the world economy has formerly been far more integrated than at present (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006, 14–28), despite today’s multinational and transnational corporations.2
Robertson (2001, 465) proposes a concept of ‘glocalization,’ which unites the global and the local, and creates unique outcomes around the world. It fosters heterogeneity to offset the encompassing homogeneity often assumed through multinational brands, customs, technologies and hegemonic practices. Some positive aspects of homogenization appear within modernization as, for example, in advances in transport and sanitation systems. Less prospectively, it impacts as placelessness found in urban function and form as cities embrace global efficiency. Abetted by forces that ‘flattened the world’ (Friedman 2005), such tendencies can produce feelings of individual and community dislocation, dehumanization and anomie in a ‘geography of nowhere’ (Kunstler 1993). They translate today as sharp and decisive political reactions by those protesting the status quo (Goodhart 2017).
The alternatives of heterogeneity and heterogenetization as found in glocalization ‘involve the interaction of many global and local cultural inputs to create a kind of pastiche, or a blend, leading to a variety of cultural hybrids’ (Ritzer 2003, 75). One outcome can challenge uniformity through the translocation of national food dishes or music. Another, the opposite of purification, is creolization, involving a combination of languages, customs or products, which were formerly unintelligible to one another (e.g. pidgin) (Ritzer 2003, 78–79). These forms hold interest as possible social innovations.
The Neoliberal Economy
Globalization also connotes a pervasive, neoliberal, free market ideology. In claiming to increase growth or living standards, it encourages far greater spatial mobility in populations and in the essential requirements for business. Among these production (‘factor’) inputs, land is immobile but can be owned or leased by foreign entities. Labor moves across national boundaries to take up prospective opportunities. Capital, in the form of physical or intellectual property, can be traded and transposed from country to country, while liquid (electronic) capital is hypermobile, chasing lucrative investment conditions. Entrepreneurship toward the development of new products or services is oriented globally, while its counterpart, management, is conducted by an international cadre of professionals.
‘Neoliberal’ harks back to the mercantile capitalism experienced in free trade during 1846–1880. This era stimulated early classical economists to develop models effectively unencumbered by public intervention. Indeed, Britain was busy privatizing transport routes and establishing commerce. Self-interest within Victorian society was constrained only by the need to provide essential services such as constabularies, civic buildings and public health facilities. Enthusiasm for laisser faire waned after 1880, as countries regulated market forces and erected protective barriers to shelter national economies (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006, 50). Such provisions were reinforced in the 1930s and 1940s when depression and war necessitated collectivist outlooks. For some nations, this consensus around monetary and fiscal intervention produced a 30-year postwar boom. It was also associated in western economies with the enlargement of social democracy and a welfare state.
From the mid-1970s, (radical) conservative theorists argued a return to economic liberalism, now cast as neoliberalism. A revolution in financing instruments and methods followed (Kaletsky 2010, 69). Small government was applauded in removing perceived excesses of the cradle-to-grave, ‘nanny state.’ Instead, the free market would orchestrate production, distribution and allocation to augment the social welfare of individuals by rewarding their own effort and enterprise. In Women’s Own in October 1987, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, suggested that people’s problems were a responsibility for individuals and families, not ‘society,’ of which there was ‘no such thing.’ Critics maintain that, at birth, people lack equal opportunity and face a kinked baseline. Unlikely to be as perfect as in economic theory, the market will concentrate industry and power alliances which can overwhelm individuals and establish unequal contests in information and agency.
This economistic, neoliberal stance not surprisingly supports the homogeneity argument regarding globalization. Gay (1991, 77–78) holds that individualization, and commodification of social institutions, has actually devalued our idea of ‘value.’ Given scale economies and sufficient consumers with disposable incomes, capitalism can continue to pursue productivity gains to enlarge profits. This quest underpins global expansion (cf. Mumford [1938] 1970, 272). The fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 eliminated most of the remaining barriers to capitalist development (aka hegemony). According to Ritzer (2003, 81), ‘we live in an era in which, truly for the first time, capitalism is unchained and free to roam the world in search of both cheap production facilities and labor as well as new markets for its products.’ He calls this process grobalization—‘gr’ as in ‘growth.’ It features sub-processes of McDonaldization (massive customer and retail chains) and Americanization, the propagation of American ideas, customs and industry. The enculturation involved has, until recently, come with the epithet of exceptionalism, and the military-political role of America as the world’s policing authority (pax Americana).
Apart from China, no nation has been positioned to impact the pre-2000 world order in the new millennium. Rather, via their marquee brands such as Sony, BMW, Nokia and Dyson, most advanced lands have fought for a place within it, conscious that falling behind will, perhaps quite soon, reduce per capita income and living standards. Encompassing growth dominates the global psyche (Hamilton 2003).3 Rather than any necessary gain in the gracility of the human condition, the consequence is environmental impact.
The Natural Environment
In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson’s bellwether publication, Silent Spring, warned humanity about the effects of modernity (in the form of pesticides) upon the natural milieu. Awareness grew of the finiteness of the earth, prompted by the Cold War nuclear standoff, ecological disasters, public protests and advocacy, remedial legislation, and the formation of nongovernmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth in 1969 and Greenpeace in 1971. The following year, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) was founded and attention focused on The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), a cri de coeur of the Club of Rome formed in 1968.
Some 50 summers later, an erstwhile preoccupation with the environment has become an international obsession. As a leitmotiv, ‘pollution’ has ceded to a far more encompassing ‘climate change,’ to be wrestled with at a global level. Earlier concerns about chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) producing a hole in the earth’s ozone layer (Bennett 2001) have ceded to recurring worries about greenhouse gases (GHGs), most notably carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. They are, say the world’s leading scientists, responsible for warming and related effects such as ice melting and sea-level changes. Amid mention of a ‘large, unplanned geo-physical experiment,’ Gore (2013, 281, 311) writes of GHGs’ ‘trapping more extra heat each day in the lower atmosphere than would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.’
The scientific basis of warming was established in two papers of 1859 and 1896 (Gore 2013, 311–12). Some writers now recognize in the Industrial Revolution a new geological period, the Anthropocene, based on a carbon economy (Homer-Dixon 2006, 140; Heinberg 2011). Over the last 800,000 years, several Ice Age cycles have varied average world temperatures by up to five degrees Celsius. Yet, even at the highest point, atmospheric CO2 never reached 300 parts per million (ppm). Now, relative to the pre-industrial 280 ppm, it has topped 415 ppm (May 2019) for the first time in three million years4 and is increasing at about 2 ppm per year. Alternatively, for a one-in-two chance of holding average global temperature to no more than two degrees above pre-1750 levels, cumulative CO2 emissions to the far future must not exceed a trillion tonnes. We have contributed 550 billion tonnes already and are presently burning 10 billion tonnes of carbon per year (Goldie 2014, xxiii).
Though hubris, insouciance, inchoateness and sundry impediments, humanity appears sleepwalking toward disaster (Mazutis and Eckardt 2017). While Gore (2013, xiv) bewails the ‘rapid, unsustainable growth’ of relevant negative markers, Jared Diamond (2011) recalls the demise of past civilizations—local or regional, not global, as is the prospect today. In the ‘hyper-expansionist’ future, few want to contemplate any slow-down or radical change, even if the welfare of the planet is threatened (Gore 2013, 315). Robertson (1989, xi, 11) discusses loss aversion (pinpointed as one facet of irrationality by Brafman and Brafman 2008, 17) in these terms:
people with more power and wealth than others do not willingly give them up, and people who enjoy security and order do not willingly want to see them threatened. It would be foolish to underestimate potential resistance to the necessary economic transformation … [or] the ruthlessness with which this transformation might be suppressed even in law abiding countries…
Otherwise, Finnish theological scholar, Seppo Kjellberg (2000, 12) writes that ‘practical materialism, or mammonism, is a worldwide movement of a religious nature. But mammonism obviously defends common values that can be seen as the ultimate cause of the ecological problems of our time.’
One seminal means that might transform human thinking is the IPAT identity advanced by Ehrlich and Holdren in 1971. It asserts that environmental impact (I) is a multiplicative function of: population size (P); income per capita—affluence (A); and environmental impact per unit of income—technology (T) (Dietz and O’Neill 2013, 77). While this formulation could appear simplistic or sweeping, it is scalable from local to world levels and is sufficiently general to offer policy directions. Few plaudits will be forthcoming for reducing affluence, and nations are wedded to technology as indicating ‘progress’ and allegedly overcoming environmental constraints. Population thus emerges as the most straightforward, ‘first-order’ component to control but, as shown, its strong projected global growth to 2100 undergirds neoliberal capitalism. On the other hand, certain countries have found viable, though not necessarily popular, ways to check it, and demographic sanity appears latterly to have emerged in another set of advanced nations.5 The claim that ‘demography is destiny’ has never been more pointed—but how much of its relevance is now ironic rather than positive?
IPAT nevertheless provides the link among environmental outcomes, capitalism, neoliberalism and globalization—a Promethean ensemble with an Icarian underside. Particular risks characterize nonlinear systems, with chaos around the corner. A neoliberal ethos would have them addressed by individuals rather than collectively as heretofore. The risks introduce problems of coherence and cohesion in that they emerge from various sources and no one institution is capable of controlling them (Kamppinen and Wilenius 2001). Gorringe (2011, 285) captures the sense, asserting that:
all forms of technological progress since 1760 or so have been harnessed to a profit-oriented economic rationality, or irrationality, which has had the reproduction and accumulation of capital as its primary goal … What this means is that the ecological crisis is a crisis of a whole world-view and a whole world system, which we refer to these days as “globalization.” The triumphs of Western technology and of market economics have been exported to the whole inhabited earth but may cost the whole inhabited earth.
The question remaining is whether there could be any way to counter these apparently unsustainable trends of human development.