The Other Road to Serfdom and the Path to Sustainable Democracy

The Other Road to Serfdom

1 the other road to serfdom a hundred and fifty years ago, in a remarkable chapter in his Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill looked ahead to the sort of world we’d have if human population and economic activity continued growing at the rates he was seeing in 1848. He did this in order to argue against the idea that more is always better, but today his reductio ad absurdum, offered as justification for “the stationary state,” reads more like a dismally accurate prediction. There isn’t much to like, he said, in a world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; [with] every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, [with] every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated in the name of improved agriculture. Mills’s dystopian vision has, by and large, been achieved. Of course it’s not literally true to say that we have exterminated every animal we haven’t domesticated, or that “every rood of land” has been brought into cultivation; some land is desert or otherwise inhospitable to farming, and we’ve set aside some potentially arable land as wilderness and habitat for wild species. In most nations there’s a sturdy consensus that this is right and necessary and appropriate (though in some nations that consensus is under assault). Nevertheless, worldwide the human estate continues to expand, as forests are clear-cut to make way for cattle, as rocky slopes and other marginal lands are brought under the plow, as human population grows by about a quarter million souls a day. Growth in arable land has slowed in the past decade, and it now no longer outpaces 2 the other road to serfdom the rate at which it is lost to erosion and urbanization and soil degradation . As population continues to grow, arable land per person is declining even more rapidly; thirty-five years ago each human resident of the planet could draw sustenance from a third of a hectare, but by 1995 that figure had fallen to a quarter of a hectare—a decrease of 25 percent. One result: land that’s farmed has to be farmed hard—with intensive use of unsustainably sourced fossil fuel fertilizers and pesticides, and with techniques that amount to “soil mining,” an unsustainable drawdown of soil fertility that will further reduce the amount of arable land in the future. This degradation of agricultural land is nothing new: nearly onethird of all land that was used for agriculture forty years ago has become unusable for that purpose now. The biblical “land of milk and honey” is far from being lush and verdant today. But we shouldn’t be reassured by the thought that loss of arable land has a long history. The process has gone on so long only because the soils of the planet were so enormously fertile and productive to begin with. The nondomesticated species that continue to share our planet with us are here largely because we allow them to be—or because there’s a time lag between our acts (like dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere ) and the consequences of our acts (the disappearance of polar bear habitat, and hence polar bears, because of climate change); or because the extinction-producing processes currently under way (the cutting of rainforest, for instance) have not yet reached their full expression in the world. We who are alive today are living through the largest, fastest episode of species extinction the planet has seen since the meteor impact ended the Cretaceous era and wiped out the dinosaurs. Geologists have begun to refer to our era as the Anthropocene—the humanly shaped era. In many places, including the United States, the few remaining ecosystems that register as “wild” are not large enough to support the spontaneous operation of nature within their borders. We have to manage the wilderness in order to sustain it—and the oxymoron inherent in “wilderness management” has long since faded from view, as necessity has made routine what logical consistency would have forbidden. To those born into the fossil fuel era, it seems normal and ordinary that we should have vast energies available to us to effect our will...