Fewer, Richer, Greener

21Prologue: Why Poor Is Brown and Rich Is Green

Giants in the Earth

It is almost an article of faith among educated readers that nature—the environment, the Earth—is in bad shape. According to this story, the past economic development I’ve described in the foregoing chapters has seriously degraded the natural world. And it’s widely believed that future growth on the scale I’m expecting might just finish it off, making the world uninhabitable or barely habitable for future generations.

This story reminds me of just about every religious text I’ve ever read. There was a Golden Age in the distant past—“there were giants in the earth in those days,” says the Old Testament¹ —and an apocalypse to come.

Maybe it’s an innate human characteristic to believe that. Dan Carlin, a broadcaster and lecturer on history, said, “It’s one of the oldest tropes in history that people look back and pine away for a golden age that they missed that never existed.”²

Myths usually carry some burden of truth, and it turns out that the story of environmental despoliation is half correct. Land unsettled by humans is pristine. Subsistence living, with its very high discount rates (described later), is the most environmentally destructive lifestyle ever known, but the population may be too small for the damage to be immediately obvious. Later, rapid industrialization can cause profound environmental problems. These are legitimate and serious concerns.

The Tipping Point

But then, when a certain level of ...