The idea that “Nature is over” has been in general circulation since Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in 1989; it has now attained truly mainstream currency, as evidenced by its recent inclusion in Time Magazine’s “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life.” While the extreme right continues to dispute whether climate change is caused by human action, it is undeniable that we have never had a greater impact on our surroundings. Beyond the vagaries of weather, the majority of the planet is now directly affected by human habitation. How will we provide enough food, water and energy for a population that recently surged past seven billion? The obvious solution is to conserve resources. If we all drive hybrid cars, recycle aluminum and eat a more efficient vegetarian diet, our limited resources will go further.
But the obvious solution is not necessarily the best one. At the end of the nineteenth century, facing the similar question of how to make England’s coal resources last, a young economist named William Stanley Jevons suggested that conservation efforts are actually counterproductive. In his 1865 book The Coal Question, he wrote "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." So long as the demand for a good is elastic - if people use more when the price goes down - conservation paradoxically increases consumption.
Despite its importance, this concept lay dormant for a century before being effectively rediscovered in the 1970s by another English economist, Len Brookes. This time, it was a crisis in oil rather than coal that prompted the realization. Since then, the idea has resurfaced only occasionally in the mainstream press: a 2005 Wall Street Journal argument against conservationist energy policy; a MacLeans article on how energy efficient housing helped create McMansions. Some environmentalists have argued that the Jevons Paradox, also called the “rebound effect,” is small enough that efficiency gains matter; others have proposed that it could be diminished by adding a “green tax” to counteract its effects.
Regardless of the size of the rebound, the Jevons Paradox makes clear that not all “conservation” actually conserves. In many cases, conservation is still desirable from an ecological standpoint, even if it does not save energy overall. Recycling now saves energy (it previously did not), which may or may not lead to increased consumption of materials. But even if recycling does not reduce the need for new materials like aluminum and plastic, it at least prevents used ones from ending up in the dump, consuming space and polluting land and water. Energy-conserving buildings, vehicles and appliances are much less clear-cut wins for the planet. While more efficient cars, windows and air-conditioners conserve on a per-unit basis, they have almost certainly led to bigger engines, bigger houses, and nearly universal “climate control.” They are intimately linked to the growth of suburbs and exurbs at the expense of open space and longer, energy-consuming commutes. Here, “conservation” almost certainly cost more energy; it certainly did not conserve natural environments.
There is also widespread perception that meat and dairy consumption is less efficient than vegetarianism - PETA claims this in their publications, so does the United Nations. In a forthcoming paper in Ethics, Policy and the Environment, bioethicist S. Matthew Liao considers the possibility of engineering humans to be more climate-conscious through ideas like “pharmacologically induced meat intolerance” and genetic manipulation to make humans smaller. The central precept of these projects - from propaganda to bioengineering - is that meat is less efficient, as much as 90% less efficient. The idea that it takes ten pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat was first publicized in an essay by Shelly, the British poet who became a prominent vegetarian in 1813. Simon Fairlie, an English environmentalist and author of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, suggests that the ratio is around 7:1 on the worst American feedlots, and closer to 1.3:1 if cows are primarily pastured on grass. Fairlie and Michael Pollan have called into question other aspects of the dictum that eating beef is bad for the environment. They suggest that mono-crop systems - in the quest for “efficiency” - must substitute artificial fertilizer and pesticides for what animals provide naturally. Animals are also a powerful “micro-endowment” of capital; Heifer International has been quite successful helping farm families through gifts of animals.
Imperial China is a powerful demonstration of the hazards of promoting supposed efficiency at all costs. While Jevons’s England depended on extensive colonial landholdings and intensive use of coal to drive its economy, eighteenth and nineteenth century China featured the most land-efficient economy in the world. China fed a larger (and largely vegetarian) population on less land than was possible anywhere until the widespread use of petrolium-based fertilizer in the twentieth century. In fact, China (and neighboring Japan) pioneered the use of mono-cropping, complete with “artificial” fertilizer made from soybeans and fish, and pesticide made from whale oil. This left Chinese farmers subject to Jevons Paradox - with more food available due to efficient farming, the population simply increased. The efficiency in land use led to more demand for land, not less; it also made the system highly sensitive to change. The scholar Mike Davis has shown that shifts in the market and the climate led to widespread starvation; my own research shows that the famine was worst where people owned the fewest farm animals. This seems highly relevant in a world experiencing financial crisis and expecting climate change.
A coda: when chemical fertilizer did become available, the excess soybeans quickly found a market in “health” foods like margarine and meat replacements; these "health food" companies - generally the arms of major agribusiness corporations - have played a lead role in convincing the world their products are good for us and for the environment. This is ultimately a dangerous and unhealthy fallacy - bad for farmers, bad for consumers, and dangerous to the global climate.
