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 the planet’s ability to absorb our waste. They called these the symptoms of a world in ‘overshoot,’ moving beyond these limits into unsustainable territory and, eventually, from overshoot to 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 reluctant recognition even as the global economy has already exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity by many measures. Various scientific studies that have demonstrated the warming of the planet have confirmed this in great detail.
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 ascent of liberal democracy. No such luck. I am now catching up on political readings I had avoided reading late last year (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 Dec. 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 realize 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 summarized, ‘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 and apathetic to change. I learnt of the network of kleptocratic state-owned firms behind the global network of ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ Something new was the Maduro model of governance 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.
I read of how Turkey was persuaded to deport even fellow ethnic Uyguyrs 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. Accept massive Chinese investment into crony companies. Then enjoy the glorious fruits of office, even as the Chinese investments provide insurance against international pressure.
Finally, I was to learn that so many Western corporations and politicians were ‘caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies.’
I was stunned on reading all this, chilled more than by this current extended winter. But I should not have been, these are everyday occurrences, most of this material is public information, and all the author did was to join the dots. Applebaum concludes if autocracy is not confronted worldwide it will come home, as indeed it has in so many parts of the democratic world.
I thought this a particularly bleak view till I stumbled onto a December piece by Barton Gellman, published in The Atlantic, ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.’ In this article, Gellman makes not only a compelling case the Jan. 6 coup invasion of the US Capital was pre-planned (we know that), but that this was only a rehearsal for the stealing of the 2024 Presidential election.
Gellman writes, ‘Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified, president-elect.’ If you don’t believe this, note that electoral officers of recent integrity in key states have already been changed and some state laws passed that make it possible for the legislature to change such officers and take charge of the count during an election.
Well, that did not help me find the inspiration to understand and accept this world we live in. 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 polarized times. In a TV interview in December, he says 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 an authoritarian state in China would 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 animal factory farms and markets. In either case, activities that are illogical, inhuman, perverse, and without a modicum of environmental regulation.
We should not be surprised the country producing the largest amount of greenhouse gases today did not share 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 democratic processes but also a rejection of science.
While the Chinese regime is only the extreme case of this authoritarianism, these tendencies are universal. When democracies cannot discuss science objectively what can we expect from authoritarian states? When capitalist economies, backed by science, publicly discussed, cannot address long term climate issues, which are demonstrably affecting businesses as diverse as coal mining and insurance, what can we expect from the authoritarian states?
A case in point is the factory farming of animals for meat production, which is expanding from the US to China and other countries. This is not only inhuman and unhealthy, but has colossal environmental impacts from water pollution to deforestation of the Amazon for producing soybean as animal feed. And, potentially, Covid.
India, like many other countries, had the strictest lockdown worldwide, with attendant human suffering, and there has not been any assessment of what worked and what did not. It took a scientist from South Africa, Dr Angelique Coetzee, to remind us night curfews are useless and have no scientific logic. Even now we are struggling to re-open schools when scientific debate would have kept them open.
Covid management reminds us of the many mistakes we made, the lack of public debate, the rejection of science. If only we can learn from this to tackle climate change. But so many countries operate in an authoritarian manner when it comes to debating carbon budgets and what goes into them.
We would do well to understand the global and interrelated nature of the crises we face – climate change, Covid, authoritarianism, Chinese communism (non-market China has addicted the world to cheap manufacturing exports arbitraging massive social and environmental costs, and I cannot say this is all China’s responsibility). Since complicity is also near-universal, pillorying one country or another is not the answer (I make an exception of authoritarian China which seems to be impervious to local and global responsibilities). We must keep searching for better examples, and that has been hard to do for these crises.
The worse examples are also still being exposed and they are coming from all over. For example, clean energy leader Denmark has had to cull 17 million mink since 2020 over fears of Covid -like spread of infections to humans. We know mink farming is utterly unhygienic and cruel, but these considerations are not relevant for the largest importer, China. Only recently, spurred by Covid, have some countries like the Netherlands started clamping down on this dangerous and soulless business. It has hard to distinguish these businesses from their counterparts in 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.
It is said that we need to simultaneously address issues for people and for the planet – the dawn of environmental intersectionality. This is such a tall task, and science and reason have spectacularly failed to influence public policy, so 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 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.