Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XLVI:3 (Invierno, 2016), 421–433.
Simon Nicholson
The Birth of Free-Market Environmentalism
The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future.
By Paul Sabin (nuevo refugio, Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 2013) 320 páginas.
$28.50 cloth $18 paper
One day in October 1990, economist Julian Simon opened his
mailbox to find a check for $576.07. The check bore the signature of biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. It was accompanied by nothing more than a sheet of metal prices. The check had been sent to settle a public wager that the two men had made a decade prior. The story of that wager has taken on the status of legend within the environ- mental community, and its meaning and import continue to be debated and challenged to the present day. In The Bet, Sabin offers a particularly trenchant retelling. The book reads throughout as a personal history of Ehrlich and Simon, two larger-than-life figures, driven by deeply held beliefs, coupled with prickly personalities, to a kind of intellectual trench warfare. The narrative sets the stage for the wager by tracing both men’s formative childhood events, their personal and professional successes and failures, and finally the growing animosity between them and their camps. Sabin also uses the story of his two antagonists to illuminate important features of the social and political landscape in the United States from the 1970s through the present day. Throughout this period, the conversation about environmental well-being has assumed an increasingly charged and divisive character, such that positions on climate change, En particular, y protección del medio ambiente, in gen- eral, have become critical markers of political identity. As Nisbet has pointed out, there are now, En realidad, few stronger identifiers. Climate change is one of a handful of issues—taxation and gun control being Simon Nicholson is Assistant Professor, School of International Service, and Director of the Global Environmental Politics Program, American University. He is the editor of, with Sikina Jinnah, New Earth Politics: Essays from the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Masa., 2016); with Paul Wapner, Global Environmental Politics: From Person to Planet (Roca, 2015). © 2015 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Cª, doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00870 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / directo . mi t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e – pdlf / / / / 4 6 3 4 2 1 1 7 0 1 2 6 3 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 8 7 0 pd . f por invitado 0 8 septiembre 2 0 2 3 422 | S I M O N N I C H O L S O N two others—that can make it look as though there are “two Americas divided along ideological lines.”1 In The Bet, the lives of Ehrlich and Simon are examined against this backdrop of increasing political polarization. The present-day environmental movement is divided as well. The antagonistic positions regarding population, consumption, and technological development that Simon and Ehrlich occupied during the 1970s and 1980s still inform today’s academic and policy debates about appropriate actions for environmental protection. Sabin’s book shows the emergence, and gradual widening, of the gulf between Ehrlich’s brand of “neo-Malthusian” caution and Simon’s brand of “Promethean” expansionism, along with the related conflict between a predominantly ecological perspective on the world, as in Ehrlich’s case, and an economistic one, as in Simon’s. The basic details of the bet itself are straightforward. The loser had to pay the winner the change in the price of a $1,000 suite of
five widely used metals. Ehrlich contended that the collective
prices of those metals would rise in the decade beginning in
1980, whereas Simon predicted that the prices would fall. A pesar de
the exercise may sound trivial on its face, at the heart of the wager
was an ideological clash of critical importance. The bet was billed as
a way to illuminate and test the merits of fundamentally opposing
views about humanity’s collective impact on the planet and what it
ultimately meant (and means) for the human condition.
Por 1980, Ehrlich had become a celebrated public intellectual
and activist, on the back of his widely publicized view that rapidly
increasing human population numbers would prove disastrous for
el mundo. His position, spelled out in bestselling books like The
Population Bomb, was that an increase in population would inevi-
tably result in damage to the environment, reflected in part by
increasing resource scarcity—hence, his conviction about price
increases for important industrial metals during the 1980s.2
A diferencia de, Simon by 1980 had become a rising star in U.S.
conservative intellectual circles, known for his sharply voiced critiques
of environmental “alarmists” and “doomsayers,” such as Ehrlich
and his ilk. Simon’s position, which received its most comprehensive
1 Matthew Nisbet, “Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public
Compromiso,” Environment, LI (2009), 14.
2 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion? (Nueva York, 1968).
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T H E BI R T H O F F R E E – M A R K E T E NV IR O N M E N T A L I S M | 423
treatment in his book The Ultimate Resource, was that any apparent limits
to economic expansion were illusory, easily overcome via human tech-
nological ingenuity and the workings of free and flexible markets.3
Sabin’s analysis is largely confined to the United States, but its
arc—from a focus on early government-led efforts to protect the
environment to the more recent embrace of technological and
free-market optimism—also speaks to changes in the international
arena. This review essay builds from The Bet to consider the past
and present state of international environmental politics, así como
the intellectual moves and government action (and inaction) en el
United States that has informed and shaped it. Simon may have
won the bet, but the discrepancy between the view of a planet
under siege and that of unchecked, ever-expanding human pros-
perity is far from resolved.
THE BIRTH OF A GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS The late
1960s and early 1970s were a formative period for the global envi-
ronmental movement. Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962,
with its warnings about the ecological effects of DDT, had given
impetus to a new understanding of the potential dangers of
unchecked industrialization.4 High-profile incidents and accidents,
including the massive oil spill from the SS Torrey Canyon in the
North Sea near Cornwall in 1967 and the Cuyahoga River in Ohio
catching fire (and the attention of Time magazine reporters) en
1969, started to galvanize public concern about rising levels of
environmental harm.
The first Earth Day in the United States, on April 22, 1970,
gave the burgeoning modern environmental movement both a
pronounced boost and a critical voice. An estimated 20 millón
Americans participated in Earth Day activities—a feat of organization
and mobilization that almost beggars belief today. Two years later,
the first major United Nations (UN)–sponsored meeting designed
to “evaluate and discuss the environment in systematic, comprehen-
sive terms” was held in Stockholm, Sweden.5 The UN Conference
Simón, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, 1981).
3
4 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Bostón, 1962).
See Ken Conca and Geoff Dabelko, "Introducción: From Stockholm to Sustainability?"
5
in idem (editores.), Green Planet Blues: Critical Perspectives on Global Environmental Politics (Roca,
2014; origen. pub. 1995), 17.
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| S I M O N N I C H O L S O N
on the Human Environment, as it was called, which birthed the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), ultimately be-
came the progenitor and model for a string of international attempts
to understand and respond to the changing global environmental
condición.
One important touchstone during this period was a report
titled The Limits to Growth, released just prior to the Stockholm
conference in 1972, by a group called the Club of Rome. El
report used a set of computer models to project the environmental
and societal effects of various converging trends, among them rapid
growth in human numbers and patterns of material consumption.
The book’s conclusions were stark and bleak: “If the present
growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution,
food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged,
the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within
the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a
rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and
industrial capacity.”6
En este momento, Ehrlich was emerging as a leading environmental
voice, harnessing and honing a vision of the world that was firmly
in keeping with the most pessimistic projections contained in The
Limits to Growth. Ehrlich, as Sabin relates, spent his early life train-
ing and then building a distinguished track record as a population
biologist, focusing most of his work on butterflies. He came to
embrace environmentalism as a kind of “secular religion” during
the 1960s, quickly building a public profile as an advocate of pop-
ulation control, reduced levels of consumption, and the abandonment
of high-risk technologies (21). Ehrlich’s public pronouncements
tended (and continue to tend) toward the apocalyptic. Soon after
publication of The Population Bomb, por ejemplo, he contributed an
article entitled “Eco-catastrophe” to a special Earth Day issue of the
journal Ramparts, in which he stated, “Most of the people who are
going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already
been born. . . . Por . . . [1975,] some experts feel that food shortages
will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation
into famines of unbelievable proportions.”7
6 Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on
the Predicament of Mankind (Nueva York, 1972), 23.
7 Ehrlich, “Eco-catastrophe,” Ramparts, 8 (1969), 24–28.
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T H E BI R T H O F F R E E – M A R K E T E NV IR O N M E N T A L I S M | 425
In the same article, Ehrlich predicted that the oceans would
be rendered lifeless by DDT poisoning by 1979, that life expectancy
in the United States would fall to forty-two years by 1980 as a
result of pesticide-induced cancers, and that the population of the
United States would crash to fewer than 23 million people by 1999.8
In the same year, Ehrlich suggested, “If I were a gambler, me gustaría
take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” (134).
These were considered reasonable and even responsible statements
at the time. De hecho, they lent support to a widely held view in the
United States and other industrialized countries regarding the dire
and pressing deterioration of the environmental condition. El
extent to which Ehrlich’s pronouncements captured the prevailing
mood in the United States was apparent in the celebrity that he
acquired. Ehrlich became a staple guest on Johnny Carson’s The
Tonight Show, por ejemplo, ultimately appearing more than twenty
veces (3). According to Sabin, en 1970 solo, he gave “a hundred
public lectures and appeared on two hundred radio and television
shows” (12).
Ehrlich was espousing a view that also found favor at even the
highest reaches of power. A year after Ehrlich’s publishing The
Population Bomb, newly elected President Nixon claimed in a
speech that the growth in human population was a “world prob-
lem which no country can ignore” (45), and in his 1970 State of
the Union address, he called environmental restoration “a cause
beyond party and beyond factions” (46). President Nixon had
already, on January 1, 1969, signed the Environmental Policy
Acto. A year later, he oversaw creation of the Environmental Pro-
tection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Although President
Nixon was to be assailed later in his term for a perceived lack of
action on a variety of environmental issues, the legacy of environ-
mental rule making and institution building that he left behind is
undeniable. That legacy is, in large part, a testament to the passion,
prognostication, and agitating of Ehrlich and a host of others.
The ascension of Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1977
brought Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian understanding of the world
further resonance; “the Limits to Growth mentality [gained] a cham-
pion in the White House” (108). “‘More’ is not necessarily ‘better,’”
8
Ibídem.
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426
| S I M O N N I C H O L S O N
President Carter suggested during his inaugural address. “Even our
great Nation has its recognized limits” (108). By the time President
Carter took office, the oil embargo and subsequent energy shortages
and price spikes in 1973 had elicited real fears of resource scarcity and
an appetite for conservation in the United States. During the early
days of the new president’s term, a further source of energy stress,
a natural-gas shortage, gripped the country. President Carter struck
a moralizing tone, calling on the United States to scale back energy
demands in an era of shrinking resources, demanding “sacrifices”
even as he warned that Americans should not be “selfish or timid”
(112).
In hindsight, it might be easy to dismiss such clarion calls as
unduly negative, pessimistic, or romantic, given the extent to
which pleas for thrift and sacrifice have fallen from favor, pero ellos
are better read as a particular brand of hard-headed realism. Presidente
Carter’s calls for response came in the face of a deep and, by that
tiempo, widespread fear that the American way of life was funda-
mentally at odds with ecological realities. President Carter was able
to take some relatively swift and bold actions concerning energy and
environmental issues, as President Nixon had done before him,
because the environmental movement in the United States had
broad political and public support, and because those pushing for
environmental action could draw on a deep sense of urgency. El
prevailing view was well captured, de nuevo, by President Carter: “We
must even face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living.
This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned
and rational way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the
inexorable laws of nature” (103–104).
The same momentum and sense of purpose was evident else-
where in the world. Major agreements to tackle biodiversity loss,
hazardous wastes, stratospheric ozone depletion, and a variety of
other matters resulted from a number of international conferences
during the 1970s and 1980s.9 The ozone regime in particular dem-
onstrated that the world’s governments were able to find accord
when given clear evidence of harm from industrial activity. A
9 The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species ( Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA.,
1973), The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous
Wastes and Their Disposal (1989), The Vienna Convention to Protect the Ozone Layer
(1985), and The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987).
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shared sense of threat was a powerful motivator, aunque, unfortu-
nately, not one that could endure.
THE RISE OF FREE-MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM The drive for inter-
national cooperation on environmental matters reached giddy
heights with the United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development in 1992—the twentieth-anniversary follow-up to
the Stockholm conference—held in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, cual
came to be known popularly as the Earth Summit. The meeting
was attended by 118 heads of state (just two had been present in
Stockholm), along with many thousands of other participants rep-
resenting governments and organizations from civil society.
Among the outcomes of the Earth Summit were the final
texts of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, junto con
an ambitious multi-volume report titled Agenda 21, which was
billed as the blueprint for the transition to a sustainable society.
The warnings of environmental decline issued by Ehrlich and
other like-minded advocates had, it seemed, paid handsome divi-
dends. Far from gloomy, the tone of the Earth Summit was over-
whelmingly optimistic about the ability of humanity to address,
through coordinated intergovernmental action, the world’s press-
ing global environmental challenges.
Sin embargo, there were clear signs at the Earth Summit that the
“limits to growth” brand of environmentalism was reaching its own
limits. On the flight to Rio onboard Airforce 1 to attend a portion of
the conference, President George H. W.. Bush indicated to the press that
he supported the basic thrust of the conference, but he also proclaimed,
“The American way of life is not negotiable,” a line that has been
quoted many times since.10 It was a signal to the world that President
Carter’s brand of environmentalism, premised on conservation and
sacrifice, had already fallen out of favor, at least in the United States.
President Bush followed President Reagan in his vision of an
American future to be built on an ever-expanding economy and an
ever-rising material affluence. Governor Reagan began attacking the
prevailing notions of overpopulation and looming environmental
calamity as he began his run for the White House. Cuando el
President Bush quoted in Andrew Bacevitch, The Limits of American Power: The End of
10
American Exceptionalism (Nueva York, 2008), 53.
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| S I M O N N I C H O L S O N
announced his candidacy for the presidency in November 1979,
Reagan made a pointed jab at “unknown, unidentifiable experts,"
such as the authors of the Limits to Growth report, who made use
of computer models to foresee resource scarcities (141). A major issue
del 1980 election came to be competing visions of the present
and future of the United States’ economic fortunes. Reagan cast
Carter as a supporter of austerity and rigid governmental oversight
and himself as the champion of free enterprise, American individu-
alism, and expanding opportunity. When Reagan won the election
in a rout, a new understanding of the relationship between humanity
and the planet began to take hold.
Simon was one of the intellectual architects of the American
political conservative position on population and environmental
matters. According to Sabin, sin embargo, he started his academic life
with a deep concern about overpopulation. Por 1970, when he was
drafted as a stand-in speaker at a faculty forum in Urbana, Illinois,
he had done a complete volte-face. In a talk titled, “Science Does
Not Show There Is Over-Population,” Simon introduced the ideas
that were to become his hallmark: “I view the population explosion
not as a disaster, but as a triumph for mankind. Whether population
growth is too fast or too slow is a value judgment, not a scientific one”
(62).
At the heart of Simon’s claim was a belief in the ability of
humanity to overcome any and all apparent ecological limits
through investment and invention—a position that left him on a
collision course with Ehrlich. Simón, sin embargo, was not one to shy
away from confrontation. He began to pepper his talks and writings
with direct reference to Ehrlich’s positions, which he described as
“morally abhorrent.” Even though Ehrlich chose largely to ignore
Simon’s provocations, Simon continued to ratchet up the rhetoric;
in the June 1980 issue of Science, he saw fit to attack Ehrlich’s work
openly and earnestly.11 Simon’s article argued against the idea that
population increase was a leading cause of famine and that the
world might be entering a period of relative food scarcity. En cambio,
he pointed out that industrialized farming methods had increased
the global food supply by 25 percent during the prior twenty-five
años, and asserted that, thanks to the unfettered potential of human
Simón, “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News," Ciencia,
11
CCVIII ( Junio 27, 1980), 1431–1437.
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ingenuity, material constraints are illusory. “Because we find new
lodes, invent better production methods, and discover new sub-
stitutes,” wrote Simon, knowledge is the only real constraint on
“our capacity to enjoy unlimited raw materials at acceptable prices”
(132).
The famous bet came the following year. Simón, writing for
Social Science Quarterly, asked of Ehrlich, “How often does a
prophet have to be wrong before we no longer believe that he
or she is a true prophet?" (134), and then he proposed the bet
on raw-materials prices.12 Ehrlich leaped at the prospect. Ehrlich
worked with fellow scientists John Holdren and John Harte to
choose the portfolio of five metals that lay at the heart of the
wager. The market price for each chosen metal had risen sharply
during the 1970s, giving Ehrlich and his camp plenty of reason to
believe that they would be on the winning side. The Chronicle of
Higher Education billed it as “the scholarly wager of the decade”
(137).
By the time Ehrlich was forced to concede in 1990 that he
had lost the bet, his ideas about overpopulation and resource
scarcity had already fallen out of favor in the United States. El
Reagan era rejected environmental limits in favor of unbridled
capitalism and a repudiation of government-led action. Simón
became a media figure in his own right via his work with the
conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1980s, preaching a new
gospel of abundance.
The tide was also turning in the international arena. As Bernstein
charted, although the Earth Summit of 1992 was the high point for
international environmental cooperation, it was also the moment
when the “compromise of liberal environmentalism,” which had
been percolating since the birth of the Reagan–Thatcher era, began
to crystalize.13 The new liberal environmentalism, in contrast to the
cooperative internationalism that preceded it, privileged free trade
and loosely regulated, if not completely unregulated, market
responses to environmental matters; gave precedence to economic
development over environmental protection; and upheld state
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Simón, “Environmental Disruption or Environmental Improvement?” Social Science
Steven Bernstein, “Liberal Environmentalism and Global Environmental Governance,"
12
Quarterly, LXII (1981), 31–43.
13
Global Environmental Politics, III (2002), 1-dieciséis.
430
| S I M O N N I C H O L S O N
sovereignty in matters of resource extraction and use.14 The issues of
environmental management and human interest came to be con-
flated; en otras palabras, “sustainable development” rather than a strict
focus on “environmental protection” became the order of the day.
These changes have grown clearer and more pronounced
through time. The World Summit on Sustainable Development
held in Johannesburg, South Africa, en 2002, marking the ten-year
anniversary of the Earth Summit, showed little progress in state-
to-state cooperation and agreement making, but made a point of
privileging public–private partnerships. El 2012 United Nations
Conference on Sustainable Development, held once again in Rio
de Janeiro, focused on building a “green economy” and “the in-
stitutional framework for sustainable development,” thus revealing
the change in tenor from times past. Although the 1970s and 1980s
saw a strong international consensus about limiting the dangers of
runaway population growth and industrialization, the 1990s
through the present day have been marked by a belief that the
answer to environmental concerns lies in economic growth. En
the international level, just as in the political and social context
of the United States, Ehrlich’s views have largely given way to
Simon’s.
THE FUTURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION Sabin argues convinc-
ingly that the bet between Ehrlich and Simon was ultimately
meaningless, in the sense that it revealed next to nothing about
the dynamics that it was meant to test. International metal prices
are subject to the complexities and vagaries of global market con-
ditions, which are related only tentatively and tangentially to pop-
ulation growth. “And yet,” notes Sabin, rightly, “the symbolism of
the bet itself proved simple” (189). Political conservatives seized
Simon’s victory to lend support for a rolling back of environ-
mental regulations and for the free-market triumphalism that
characterized the Reagan era. As a new economically liberal
understanding of environmental action took hold, support for
international state-led initiatives has foundered. Nowhere is this
development as evident as in the area of climate change. Enterrar-
national efforts to keep pace with it, under the umbrella of the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
14
Ibídem., 5–6.
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T H E BI R T H O F F R E E – M A R K E T E NV IR O N M E N T A L I S M | 431
which opened for signature at the Earth Summit in 1992, tener
limped forward at best. Bickering between the industrialized
world, led by the United States, and the rapidly industrializing
emerging powers, led by China, India, and Brazil, has occurred
against a backdrop of belief not just in the sustainable development
but also in the sustainable growth of the world economy. Techno-
logical optimism and belief in free markets are in ascendance, incluso
as climate forecasts worsen.
Yet sensible, coordinated actions in the face of pressing envi-
ronmental challenges remain as important today as ever. What is to
be taken from the Ehrlich–Simon wager, as we look to the future
of environmental action? Is the growing cadre of activist climate
scientists and ecologists who advocate urgent and far-reaching
action to combat the drivers of climate change and species extinc-
tion just another group of “doomsayers”? Will human ingenuity
guided by the free market be enough to save the day?
The struggle to determine what constitutes “sensible envi-
ronmental action” continues in the academy and in policy circles.
A new “ecomodernist manifesto,” with clear echoes of Simon’s
posición, has been making the rounds. It still clings to the notion
that “[a] the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries
to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be function-
ally irrelevant,” proposing the easing of environmental concerns
through a technology-driven “decoupling” of human activity from
reliance on natural processes.15 For its part, the neo-Malthusian
position of Ehrlich finds current, though less bombastic, expresión
in the writings and activism of figures like McKibben, hamilton,
and Klein, among others.16 Ehrlich himself continues to fulfill the
“eco-prophet” role that Sabin ascribes to him, arguing regularly
and loudly that his pronouncements from the 1970s need only a
little more time to materialize.
The two sides in this debate—technological optimists/market
liberals versus the proponents of technological and capitalist control—
continue to delight in fierce intellectual exchange. Yet even though
See John Asafu-Adjaye et al., “An Eco-modernist Manifesto” (Abril 2015), available at
15
http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto/.
16
Ver, por ejemplo, Bill McKibben, Maybe One: The Case for Smaller Families (Nueva York,
1998); Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change
(Londres, 2010); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Nueva York,
2014).
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432
| S I M O N N I C H O L S O N
Prometheus and Cassandra enjoy locking horns with each other, el
old debate has grown stale. Too much is at stake to take comfort in
blind adherence to well-worn arguments, particularly now that
environmental questions have become the stuff of political ideology
in the United States, not just scientific investigation, and both sides
of this debate can claim a share of the truth.
Sabin’s plea for moderation, and an appreciation for both
Ehrlich’s and Simon’s positions, seems a sensible starting point for
a new era of environmental action, though in the context of the
embittered political landscape in the United States, moderation is
difficult to imagine, let alone generate. Fights over environmental
matters remain fierce and deeply partisan. Environmental action
no longer has the widespread support that led 20 million Americans
to participate in the first Earth Day activities. This lack of shared
environmental sentiment seems only to encourage further polari-
zación. Those opposed to any serious action on climate change
pounce even on the measured and carefully parsed projections of
groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
using any possible loophole, expressed in probabilities and degrees
of certainty, to suggest that the scientific community lacks credi-
habilidad. Any shades of grey are subject to the machinations of those
attempting to gain the upper hand by painting complex situations
black or white.
But the positions of Ehrlich and Simon permit a middle ground.
Simon was absolutely right to claim that technological development
has worked miracles for the human condition as well as for the
environment during the latter half of the twentieth century. Él
undersold, sin embargo, the extent to which such advances were the
resultado, at least in part, of governmental regulations and institutions
that Ehrlich and his supporters proposed. Asimismo, Ehrlich was
clearly justified in warning about the ecological dangers inherent
in an unchecked and unthinking expansion of industry. His stark
pronouncements of impending doom, sin embargo, obstructed re-
sponsible dialogue about the environment; those seeking to oppose
environmental action had only to point to his failed prognostications.
Simon was a useful foil for Ehrlich’s incorrigibly apocalyptic vision,
celebrating the human capacity for innovation in the face of great
challenges.
Mainstream scientific assessments of climate change, ocean
acidification, species extinction, disruption of the nitrogen cycle,
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T H E BI R T H O F F R E E – M A R K E T E NV IR O N M E N T A L I S M | 433
and a variety of other global environmental dangers suggest that
humanity’s road ahead will be a rocky one. The many proponents
of Simon’s work who continue to deny the need for serious and
committed action in response to these dangers are performing a
disservice to the scientific tradition upon which his positions were
based. De la misma manera, none of us can afford to dismiss Simon’s
untiring industriousness, nor his optimism about the ability of
humankind to develop creative responses in the face of over-
whelming challenges, as we search for ways to channel the best
of ourselves into the work to come.
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