>I was thinking of various agricultural disasters like the
>Dust Bowl and the Irish potato famine, which followed
>particular agricultural practices and led to situations in
>which the inhabitants of formerly productive territories had
>to disperse (or, in the case of the Irish, die _en_masse_).
I think it is a step backwards from the sociological analysis of these events to reduce them to a singular 'exhaustion of important resources'. As Marx pointed out, Ireland post-famine produced a greater surplus for the landlords than it did before. His point was that there was nothing natural about the limitations that landlords set upon the Irish peasantry's consumption. Far from exhausting resources, Ireland continued to export livestock and grain throughout. Describing the famine as a 'potato famine' was the most pernicious mystification of the real causes of the hunger. The blight just tipped the scale that the English landlords had already set.
Similarly the description of the dustbowl as an exhaustion of natural resources does not fit. The AAA systematically impoverished American small farmers, reorganising agriculture in favour of bigger agri- business. It was only in conditions of extreme deprivation that farmers failed to irrigate the land. The scarcity was engineered. There was no absolute exhaustion of resources.
In both instances the ecological interpretation tends to shore up the capitalist prejudice that too many people were consuming too few resources. That fits the capitalist world view in that its own restricted monopoly over resources is asserted to be part of nature's law. Of course, that is in no way the case. To the capitalist the land is overpopulated, because he is concerned with profit, not basic needs. To fantastically reinterpret that as an 'exhaustion of resources' neatly sidesteps the fact that these limits are not absolute limitations, but simply the limits that capital sets on consumption.
>
>However, there are also some instances of non-humans
>exhausting environments. A few years ago I read about an
>island in, I think, the Great Lakes, with deer and wolves;
>the populations regularly go out of balance and crash
>because the island can't easily export and import deer or
>wolves.
You are projecting. You discover balances and crashes on your Great Lake island as if it were populated by Bulls and Bears not deer and wolves. Who is to say that balance is preferable to crash? Such values are human and simply do not exist in the animal world.
> My assertion is: if you keep doing bigger and bigger
>stuff, then when accidents happen and things go wrong they
>will be bigger and bigger accidents and wronger and wronger
>things.
Strangely on almost every scale you care to mention, human life on the average improves the more 'bigger and bigger' stuff you do (I mean life expectancy, infant mortality etc). That was where we started with the 1900 House. Your proposed law of bigger = worse, is I take it susceptible to empirical disproof. Last year accidents on Britain's roads fell once again. Less people die there today than they did in 1926. The law disproved.
Bigger and bigger stuff includes vaccinations for whooping cough, diphtheria and so on. Do these things lead to 'wronger and wronger things'. Increased food yields sustain some six billion people on the planet. Who is surplus to requirements among them?
> Yours, I take it, is that nothing serious can
>possibly go wrong.
On the contrary, it is you that puts the absurd demand that nothing should ever go wrong. My view is that the greater the resources at hand the greater the possibility of fixing things that do go wrong.
>
>The destruction of the environment is a way of maintaining
>scarcity. "They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree
>museum, then they charge you five dollars just to go and
>see'em."
Surreal. There are more trees planted in Europe and America than ever before. Thanks to increased yields, farmed land is being retired to forestation.
>no amount of purely technical progress will bring about an
>end to scarcity as long as the bourgeoisie or some similar
>ruling class remain in control of the economic system.
On its own, of course not. But as we saw with the Soviet Union, overthrowing the bourgeoisie without the technological basis for liberating humanity only led to a vicious police state, rationing inadequate resources.
-- James Heartfield
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