Malthusians and Misanthropes

Figure 1. The End is Near

Saving the Planet

When I was a young man, I attended a high school in downtown Cincinnati. From time to time we'd encounter a pleasant old man, handing out flyers. From his shoulders front and back, hung cardboard signs proclaiming

The End is Nigh.
Revelation 22:12-21.

Now I am an old man and the cardboard placards say Save the Planet, referring to global warming caused by the CO2 that humans are pumping into the atmosphere.

Are we meant to take this literally? Do we really think that the man-made increase in atmospheric CO2 will destroy the planet? Figure 2 shows our best guess at CO2 concentrations for the last 600 million years. It turns out that current atmospheric CO2 levels are at the very low end of the planet's history. The planet is not threatened by 100 or 200 ppm increase from current concentrations.

Figure 2. CO2 concentrations, last 600 million years

In fact, atmospheric CO2 reached the lowest level in the entire 4.5 billion long history of the earth about 12,000 years ago at around 200 ppm. The minimum atmospheric CO2 needed to support photosynthesis in plants is 185 to 225 ppm. We were 15 ppm away from extinction. Way too close for comfort.

The planet does not need saving from man-made CO2. ``Save the planet" is a nonsensical bumper sticker.

The Gunnelwackers

So maybe Save the Planet really means something like Don't Disturb the Planet. Indeed the original conservation movement led by people like Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and Ansel Adams thought it extremely important to preserve portions of the wilderness, to benefit humanity.

The nation behaves well if it treats its natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. [Roosevelt, 1910-08-31]

What you can do is keep it [the Grand Canyon] for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you.[Roosevelt, 1903-06-06]

This Park [Yellowstone] was created and is now administered for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. [Roosevelt, 1903-05-24]

Figure 3. Roosevelt enjoying nature

But there was more than a bit of selfishness here. Roosevelt was both wealthy and an avid hunter. In large part, he was preserving these spaces for people like himself. His plan for the National Parks outlawed commercial hunting but not recreational. Both he and Muir had no compunction about pushing native Americans out of their newly created parks. And it was not long before the conservation movement developed an ugly misanthropic streak. People were the problem.

In the 1960's, the Sierra Club was a strong supporter of nuclear power. They figured nuclear was far less intrusive than dams on the wilderness, especially the wilderness streams they valued so highly. Atoms, not Dams was the motto. Here's how William Siri, the club president put it in 1966:

Nuclear power is one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation.
...
Cheap energy in unlimited quantities is one of the chief factors in allowing a large rapidly growing population to preserve wild lands, open space, and lands of high scenic value.
...
With energy we can afford the luxury of setting aside lands from productive uses."

Other members disagreed. They thought cheap energy in unlimited quantities would be a disaster for their wilderness because of all the people it would attract and support. One leader of this faction was Martin Litton. When he was asked if he worried about nuclear power accidents, he replied, ``No, I really didn't care because there are too many people anyway.''

Sometime ago I came up with the term gunnelwackers to describe this form of selfishness. The picture was people already in the lifeboat preventing more people from climbing in, by grabbing an oar and wacking at the hands that clung to the gunwale. I was rather proud of my metaphor.

Figure 4. Lifeboat Ethics. Crew of William Brown sacrificed passengers to save themselves.

Imagine my chagrin to find out that not only was my metaphor not original; but Garrett Hardin had used it in 1974 to applaud gunnelwacking as a laudable example of what he called lifeboat ethics.\cite{hardin-1974} Hardin's argument is the lifeboat is full. If you let more people in, the boat will swamp and everybody dies. Better to gunnelwack, and at least keep the people already in the boat alive.

Hardin's dubious ethics depended on two Malthusian tenets, which so far have proven false:

1) the lifeboat is full,

2) the lifeboat capacity is fixed.

But people like Litton went much farther. Their idea of an over-full lifeboat was somebody they did not know hiking on their trails in the Sierras. For these people, any disturbance of their privileged status quo was unacceptable. Somehow this has become enshrined in law. A favorite tactic for opposing any development is to find or define a sub-species that only inhabits the local area and claim that this species is threatened with extinction by the development. This misanthropic philosophy can only be maintained by humans that are wealthy beyond the imagination of 18th century kings, thanks to just such developments.

But the misanthropism has moved beyond Litton style selfishness. Don't Disturb the Planet has become a self-evident, moral imperative. Altering rain fall patterns is unacceptable simply because humans are responsible for the change.

Merely knowing that we'd begun to alter the climate meant that the water flowing in that creek had a different, lesser meaning. Instead of a world where rain had an independent and mysterious existence, the rain had become a subset of human activity. The rain bore a brand; it was steer, not a deer.[Bill McKibben, Earth Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Henry Holt, NY, 2010]

The next step is obvious. Maybe we should get rid of this planet infesting pest.

We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem or mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value to me than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.
...
Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.[David Graber, LA Times, 1989-10-22]

My guess is that most people who wave Save the Planet signs at demonstrations not only don't know their planetary history; but also don't know what the movement's leaders think of them. I don't think the demonstrators are hoping for a virus that will kill off humanity. But that's just a guess.