Technology and the environment: the case for optimism

That is a point we can appreciate in this country. The very fact that we can have a vigorous debate about the future of the countryside is testament to the value of agricultural intensification. If food was still produced at low intensity by traditional methods, we would not have the luxury of choosing other uses of the land - hobby farming, say, or conservation. Commercial farming would outbid every other use as it did in the 1950s.

Using hydroponics, inorganic fertiliser, electric light and genetic modification we could in theory feed the entire world from a multi-storey farm the size of Wales. The rest could be returned to wildlife conservation. I don't think it will go that far. I think there will always be a market for local produce and for food produced in traditional ways. I hope there is, because I like that kind of food. But I have no illusions that my preference is good for the planet; it is the most selfish thing I could do. The people who deserve our accolades for saving the planet are not the hair-shirted ones wandering around saying 'Woe is us!', but the much maligned white-coated nerds of Monsanto who are steadily reducing the land we need for agriculture.

Private and public innovation

It is true that islands of nature do not do well in a sea of intensive exploitation. National parks, whether in Africa or Yellowstone, arouse resentment among local people who have to put up with the depredations of wildlife on their livelihoods. But a lot of this is a matter of ownership. National parks suffer from the same problems of neglect and under investment as anything that belongs to the state. Where entrepreneurs are encouraged to provide refuges for nature privately, a very different ethos prevails. I am arguing that we can soon afford to have islands of exploitation in a sea of nature, rather than the other way round.

I suggest that by far the most powerful influence on how we treat our environment is not how much we care, nor how much we pass laws, but what technology we invent. You only have to remember the fuel protests of last year [2000] to see how hard it is going to be either to tax people out of their cars or to shame them out of their cars. However, it would be a doddle to tempt them out of their cars if we had better transport running on clean fuel. The innovation does not have to be driven by a green motive. Indeed, when it is, we will be faced with nonsenses like wind power.

I cannot emphasise this point too strongly. The environmental movement is perpetually chastising us for our profligacy and urging us to be more ascetic and to return to older ways. Given what we know about human nature, and given the lessons of ascetic movements in the past, this will not succeed. We'll throw a party on the eve of Armageddon. My point is that it is the wrong sermon anyway. Six billion people going back to nature would simply destroy nature. But as we become more affluent, more technologically dependent and more isolated from nature, so we can afford to look after nature. We can afford to spare the money, the time, the landscape and the energy. Six billion people could feed and fuel themselves comfortably and return most of the planet to wildlife. It may seem a deeply paradoxical idea to today's greens but it deserves a fair hearing.

Writing the rules

Okay, you say, but innovation itself is driven by regulation. People invent clean technologies only when they must comply with legal limits on pollution. So what we need to do is to draw up strict rules for protecting the environment and force inventors to help us meet them. There is a limited truth in this but a legal pollution limit effectively acts as a free licence to pollute so long as the polluter keeps below the limit. He has no incentive to drive his emissions even lower. The US introduced tradeable emissions in its 1990 clean air act precisely to address this issue - to internalise the externalities as the jargon goes. Bad polluters would have to buy permits from better polluters who could thereby profit from driving down their emissions. As the Washington correspondent of The Economist at the time, I covered the debate. Environmentalists were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the scheme - only the Environmental Defence Fund was prepared to support it. The idea of polluters buying their way out of their obligations appalled them. It offended against the creed of asceticism. Yet in practice it worked well because the polluters were far more keen on being sellers than buyers of pollution permits. So emissions reduction went farther and faster and cheaper than anybody had predicted. In effect, where polluters had previously argued that emission control was too expensive, the new system called their bluff.

Inventions that seem to have nothing to do with the environment are often of the greatest significance. Consider silicon. Large chunks of the world economy now depend on manipulating electrons in silicon wafers. This invention has done much for communication, automation and computing. It is hard to think of a more benign trend from the environmental point of view. Silicon is superabundant; it is cheap; its products are light to transport: its production carries few and small pollution risks; its power demands are low. And it has freed many of us from work in heavy industry, where we generated worse environmental problems. In the north-east of England where I live, I now drive my children to school through the same suburbs as my parents drove me to school. When I was a boy, each morning we would pass the pit at Seaton Bum just as the night shift was coming above ground: men with soot-black faces with lamps on their helmets. Today we pass commuters heading for a call centre (and fewer people are unemployed). It may not be a great place to work but it beats digging coal 300 feet below ground.

Why the precautionary principle is wrong

Or consider pesticides. In the 1940s, the commonest insecticide was a compound of arsenic, lethal to humans and birds as well as insects. It was replaced by DDT, harmless to people, but because of its persistence in the environment it had knock-on effects for otters and hawks. DDT was replaced in turn by synthetic pyrethroids, which persist in the environment for only a short time and kill only target species. So otters and hawks have returned. Pyrethroids are being replaced by genetically modified plants that produce a natural pesticide from inside the plant, cutting out the need for sprays and reducing the collateral impact on non-target species to almost nil. Only, of course, Greenpeace does not want this improvement, so the rest of us may not be allowed to have it either.

However, it is much easier to see how technological innovation has reduced our impact on the landscape and the environment. That is what is so painfully wrong with the precautionary principle. Now, you say, he has surely gone too far. What can be wrong with taking a precautionary approach to the future? Better safe than sorry. What is wrong with it is simply this: it ignores the risk of doing nothing. Had we not improved agriculture we would have faced a stark choice between famine and the cultivation of all wild land. Had we not drilled for oil in the 1860s, we would have wiped out the whales. Standing still is not a risk-free option. It is precisely because today's technology is too dirty and dangerous that we must encourage inventors to improve on it. And that has been true ever since technology consisted of a stone-tipped spear capable of felling a mammoth.

If the world is getting better all the time for nature, why are species still going extinct? Why are habitats under threat? Why is pollution getting worse in some places? Not because we are using more technology, but because there are more of us. Population growth, especially in the third world, brings pressure to bear on the environment and on resources. As somebody who loves wild places, I will not deny that the world would be a nicer place with fewer people, but I am not volunteering for euthanasia and nor, I notice, are most environmentalists. The misanthropy that many of them nonetheless express, verges on the criminal. Garrett Hardin, a much admired eco-guru, has said, 'Freedom to breed is intolerable'.

Remarks like that are intolerable but that is not the worst of them. They are also unnecessarily pessimistic. By a miracle the graph of world population is gradually flattening out. I say a miracle because as a zoologist I find it immensely surprising that any species could be capable of voluntarily limiting its fecundity. Yet the facts are undeniable. There is no need for coercion to achieve population control. In every nation on earth, when prosperity and freedom reach a certain level, the 'demographic transition' occurs and birth rates fall rapidly. It happened here about a century ago. It is happening in Bangladesh and Kenya now. As a result, estimates of peak world population in the mid-21st century have been falling steadily for 40 years. Where once we thought there would be 15 billion and rising, we now expect only nine billion and falling. All you have to do to make this happen is reduce infant mortality, improve living standards, encourage female education and allow access to family planning - was there ever an easier policy to adopt?

Of course nine billion is still a great deal but there is absolutely no evidence that it is unsustainable, that it is beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Quite the reverse: all the evidence suggests that we can feed and fuel that number with ease and still increase the land devoted to conservation.

The language of fatalism

Well, you may say, he can only afford his optimism because of the good work the environment movement has done over the years to raise public consciousness and to generate concern for the environment. To some extent I am prepared to concede this point. Especially on the subject of species in danger of extinction, consciousness-raising is important. But I fear that the environment movement has too often promulgated a counsel of despair. It has spoken of an, uncontrolled population explosion; of an 'inevitable' famine; of an 'irreversible loss of rain forest'; of a permanent climatic catastrophe, of a total exhaustion of natural resources. This is the language of fatalism. It has all too often given the impression that because of ecological limits, we must now prevent the poor using exactly the tools that enriched the rich - technology and free trade. Steeped in false nostalgia for a supposedly better past, it has told us to retreat, not to press ahead. This is not just flying in the face of facts. It is also disgracefully complacent. It ignores the cost of standing still.

Joseph Schumpeter once pointed out that in the early 19th century, those economic giants Malthus, Mill and Ricardo were all agreed that economic stagnation was imminent and that the law of diminishing returns was about to cramp economic progress forever. Yet they stood on the threshold of a wave of progress that has generated 10 times the population, twice the life expectancy and 100 times the wealth, yet with pollution getting better not worse. Do we have to repeat their complacent mistake?

So there you have the heresy. I think it possible to be in favour of saving the planet without being a pessimist or an enemy of new technology. I predict that in 2050 the nine billion people in the world will have a far better living standard than today; large parts of Scotland and Brazil will be managed wilderness devoted to wildlife and recreation; the air in Bangkok will be cleaner than today; most cars will run silently on hydrogen fuel cells; fossil fuels will be barely needed; GM crops will grow in butterfly-rich fields. Oh yes, and we will have dismantled every last wind turbine in Wales.