When I was studying in college, I was exposed to a remarkable book called The Limits to Growth. I was fortunate to be taught by the professors who co-authored this book. They wrote, that under current patterns of resource use, the planet would run out of resources as well as become unfit to absorb our wastes. They called these the symptoms of a world in ‘overshoot,’ driving the world into unsustainability, and, eventually, collapse. The study went on to describe scenarios in which stabilizing the human population and industrial output could still create a sustainable world.
Later, I read the writings of Herman Daly, the proponent of the ‘steady-state economy.’ The steady-state economy is embedded in a finite natural environment of resources and ecosystems. As such, there are entropic limits on the growth of inputs of natural resources and outputs of waste and pollution, and at some point, the economy must stop growing. But even this steady-state economy would eventually come to end as minerals are exhausted.
The work of these pioneers has now been gaining grudging recognition even as the global economy has already exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity by many measures.
Moving from ecology, which has been a slow slide into the overshoot scenarios, I thought I would at least be able to revel in the preservation of liberal democracy. No such luck. I am now catching up on political readings I had long avoided reading (as if it would change their veracity) which all treat the apocalyptic theme of ‘democratic regression.’
I started with historian Anne Applebaum, who wrote a remarkable piece in The Atlantic in November 2021, entitled, ‘The Bad Guys are Winning.’ This is the latest in a lifetime of work on the fragility of democracies and how populism can easily turn on hatred and bring about the collapse of democracy. Applebaum writes, and it sounds trite till you realise how familiar the refrain is, “Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy.”
Applebaum’s piece in the Atlantic was chilling in its accuracy, drawing from the example of a Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Belarus, whose life story is summarised, “I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells.”
I went on to read of the ‘dictator’s learning curve,’ of the redundancy of mass arrests when an autocrat can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people – making the rest stay at home now apathetic to change. Something new was the Maduro model of capitalism from Venezuela, a far cry from its Davos equivalent. Autocrats who adopt it are willing to let their country fail, accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. What Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cost Russia fits this characterisation to a tee.
I read of how Turkey was persuaded to deport even fellow ethnic Uyghurs after it had bought into the standard, no-frills Chinese Communist Party’s package deal of autocracy: take China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights; buy Chinese surveillance equipment; and accept massive Chinese investment into crony companies. Then enjoy the glorious fruits of office, even as the Chinese investments provide insurance against international pressure.
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I thought this reading made a particularly bleak view till I stumbled onto a piece by Barton Gellman, again published in The Atlantic, ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.’ In this article, Gellman not only confirmed that the January 6 coup invasion of the US Capitol was pre-planned, but that this was a rehearsal for the stealing of the 2024 US presidential election.
Well, that did not help me find the inspiration for this brave new world, just released from COVID confinements. I then turned to Pratap Bhanu Mehta – unloved by left and right, our lonely constitutional scholar. His columns in The Indian Express make as compelling reading as materials in The Atlantic. What he writes on the state of democracy and institutions hits too close to discuss in polarised times. In a TV interview, he stated the trends give him nightmares. Right on.
Each of these complex and evolving challenges is a mirror to the pathology of our inter-linked times. Yet, it is when I saw them all as part of an inter-connected disease, that I understood this new global problematique. The overshoot of ecological limits is of a piece with the democratic regression. For example, only authoritarian China would for so long ignore the health effects of prolonged air and water pollution on its citizens. Authoritarians don’t make environmentalists, funny that!
Climate change is one way of looking at the myriad ways we are unsustainably consuming resources and producing wastes, both locally and globally. COVID is either a special case of laboratory research gone rogue from China or the latest in a long line of viruses hopping over from Chinese factory farms and wet markets. In either case, activities that are illogical, inhuman, perverse, and without a modicum of environmental regulation.
We should not be surprised that China did not share COVID information the way, for example, democratic South Africa did with the outbreak of Omicron. The authoritarianism of our time is not only a pushback to democracy but also a rejection of science and a negation of the long-term view, of environmental sustainability.
We would do well to understand the global and interrelated nature of the crises we face – climate change, COVID, authoritarianism, Chinese communism. China keeps the world addicted to cheap manufacturing exports arbitraging massive social and environmental costs, and I cannot say this is all China’s responsibility.
Far from China, clean energy leader Denmark has had to cull 17 million mink since 2020 over fears of COVID-like spread of infections to humans. Spurred by COVID, the Netherlands has only recently clamped down on this unhygienic, dangerous, and cruel business. Ignoring these new-found considerations, China remains the leading importer of factory-farmed mink.
Factory farming for meat production is now spreading from the US to China, whose appetite for wildlife products, even post-COVID, is still the source for much of the world’s illegal trade in endangered species, from elephants to pangolins. Factory farming has colossal environmental impacts from local water pollution to deforestation in the Amazon for producing soybean for animal feed. Not to mention the suspected link with pandemics such as COVID.
It is said that we need to simultaneously address issues for people and the planet – the dawn of environmental intersectionality. I finally turned to the words of that pioneer of intersectionality, bell hooks, to imagine a brighter future, ‘No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way. We go forward with the fresh insight that the past can no longer hurt us.’
It may just be that Bishop Tutu-type of old-fashioned love and truth-telling, not some new-fangled science, or some impossible political maturity, will help us on the path to democratic progress and, eventually, environmental sustainability.
Himraj Dang writes on environmental issues.
