Wasted World: How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet by Rob Hengeveld (review)

Rob Hengeveld is a Dutch biogeographer and ecologist whose research has addressed topics across a wide range, from speculative work on the origins of life on earth to empirical work on invasive species. This book is a cri de coeur that draws on all of these, set in a literature that goes back at least to Malthus, represented in the modern era by The Population Bomb (1968), The Limits to Growth (1972), and the many works they inspired. That their warnings have gone unheeded and that global population has doubled since 1970 are its primary motivation. Aimed at a general audience, it is not a scientific treatise (a typical indication of quantity is “staggering,” e.g. 60, 126, 283) but an evocative warning with an apocalyptic message. “Through the unmitigated growth of our population and its supporting infrastructure,” Hengeveld writes, “we are maneuvering ourselves into a situation, the seriousness of which cannot easily be overestimated.…The problems facing us now are primarily those of whether or not we allow humanity and even life on Earth to continue.” (151)

In this account, consumption is not just something rich westerners do in their homes and cars and at the mall or supermarket. It is about the entire spectrum of resources that humanity consumes; the problems he foresees would not be resolved if only the affluent consumed less. Hengeveld takes a dark view of capitalism everywhere and of today’s “vast, treeless megacities,” where, he laments, “people don’t know each other anymore, don’t know the system they form.” (68) As that suggests, he sometimes seems nostalgic for a world in which most production and consumption were local and intimately interrelated, but he accepts that those times are gone. In fact, he welcomes many elements of modern living standards, such as medical knowledge and the institutions embodying it; the point of the book, he says, is to make it possible to retain a high quality of human life on earth.

Hengeveld rejects the focus on growth that characterizes modern political and economic discourse, and he is deeply distressed by its disregard for environmental costs. But although environmental change and global warming are among his concerns, his central argument is that rising populations, rising living standards in the developed world, and even more rapidly rising living standards in many parts of the developing world constitute mutually reinforcing, “self-accelerating” (140) exponential processes that are rapidly driving the use of resources, notably basic energy sources, fertilizers, and fresh water, far beyond the earth’s capacity to sustain humanity in the long term. New developments may have postponed the day when supplies of the fossil fuels that he believes have been the main force in modern growth, and of the potash and other fertilizers on which our food supply now depends, will actually begin to diminish, but supplies are not infinite. A crucial component of his argument is that exponential growth applies also to the complexity and interdependence of the systems on which the modern world depends. Hence they have grown beyond our capacity to control them, and we will not be able to manage challenges as resource limits are approached. Somewhere something – a war, a famine, a flood, a drought, a pandemic, social unrest and revolutionary ferment, a massive flow of refugees, a financial crash – will trigger a crisis that cannot be corrected, launching a self-perpetuating downward spiral and ultimately a catastrophic collapse of human life and social institutions.

Measures that could postpone this moment – such as increased recycling, reforestation, development of alternative sources of energy, and energy conservation – are well worth pursuing, but Hengeveld contends that they cannot generate a completely sustainable equilibrium. Some resources, once used, can never be recaptured. Nor is he much encouraged by the slowing of rates of population increase; not only is he skeptical of models that project that population will permanently stabilize somewhere after 2050, he believes that in the long term resources will not be sufficient to sustain human life at...