Are we headed for a Malthusian catastrophe, or a utopia of plenty?
Polling several of my colleagues from various backgrounds such as climate change, ecological management, sustainable development and environmental modelling; and a corresponding poll of some contacts in physics, finance and programming, I posed variations on the following question:
Will advanced human society be contained by environmental barriers, such as climate change and habitat destruction, causing it to stagnate or shrink? Or will economic growth continue, and with it new ideas and technology that enable society to overcome them?
Reasonable cases can be made both ways; you don't have to be a green anarchist to note that past societies collapsed often wholly or in part due to environmental factors; nor a techno-utopian to see that population and world GDP have been growing for the past 1M years and per capita GDP for the past 1k years (Delong 1998). Putting aside very long-term considerations such as energetic limits to economic growth (Brown et al. 2011), I asked respondants to consider a 50 - 200 year timeframe.
(I endeavoured to give my own views after hearing respondants', but for completeness' sake I lean towards the side of plenty, although only for certain classes and cities, I fear. There is a real chance of extermination for everyone else.)
The environmental scientists often had strong middle-opinions compared to the physicists. Common responses were "Some areas will develop, whilst others at a much slower pace due to environmental problems" and, among the utopians, "Many people will die and/or suffer, but environmental constraints aren't tough enough to cause the most developed countries to significantly relapse". Environmental malthusians had a wide range of views, although none went so far as to predict human extinction.
Physicists and financiers were more sanguine, talking about artificial intelligence and smart electronic grids, although the only mention of peak oil/resource extraction was by the malthusian. Programmers were the most utopian, with financiers and physicists more mixed.
