THE DOOMSDAY MEN

Part one of a series on Sc CYNICS have said that the flood of books on the environmental crisis is now reaching the proportions of a major pollution problem. In June, when the United Nations held its Stockholm conference on the question, the chorus of doomsday prophecy became deafening.

Earlier this year, a group of scientists in Britain issued a manifesto entitled 'A Blueprint for Survival'. It begins:

'The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of someone born today is inevitable-unless it continues to be sustained for a while longer by an entrenched minority the cost of imposing geat suffering on the rest of mankind.' These people declare that the rapid rise in population now taking place will soon outrun definite limits on the food supply. The rise in industrial production in the past few decades threatens to engulf mankind in a global sewer. There have even been predictions that changes in the atmosphere will lead to a rise in temperature, the melting of the polar ice-caps, and the drowning of civilization.

Opponents of these gloomy prognostications are also becoming more vocal. John Maddox, editor. of "Nature', has assembled what he claims to be massive scientific evidence to refute the more pessimistic and sensational environmentalists. The economist Beckerman, and the right-wing labourites Anthonv Crosland and Jeremy Bray, have supported him.

The arguments of this school of thought amount to a perfect faith in the ability of monopoly capital to cope with any problem that might arise. Men like Paul Ehrlich ('The battle to feed all humanity is over') declare that man's development must run into barriers that can never be overcome under any social or economic conditions. But Beckerman and his like have not the slightest doubt that capitalist economy can expand indefinitely.

At this point, perhaps, a question may occur to you: are we not now seeing capitalism in a deep crisis, its worst-ever recession? And if so, why is this never mentioned by either side in the debate about the crisis is itself part of the crisis.

Bernard Franks, in his articles on world population in together ample evidence to show how, while the debate goes on, capitalist crisis means that food is being destroyed or its production held back. The very fact that neither the environmentalists nor their more cheerful critics talk about the crisis is itself part cf the crisis.

A few years ago, the panic about over-population might have been dismissed as a middle-class fad, on a level with vegetarianism or homeopathy. But the trend today attracis the backing of some of the biggest international c mpanies.

This work is spearheaded by the so-called Club of Rome. This world-wide body has the ice and the Environment by the Environment support of firms like Volkswagen, Fiat and Olivetti. It has put many thousands of dollars into big-name scientific conferences and has financed the work of Forrester and Meadows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to carry out computer 'simulation' of the environmental process.

Some of the results of this work are to be found in the mass-produced book 'Limits to Growth'. • A film version was recently shown on television, with a great flurry of publicity.

This tendency for big capital to get involved in the environment game must be taken very seriously. It arises from the understanding in these circles that the post-war expansion of industry is finished, and that definite political and economic conclusions must be drawn from this.

Many people have noted the tendency in the statements of writers like Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin towards authoritarian and nationalist conceptions. Ehrlich has declared that the increase in population must be stopped, 'if necessary by compulsion'.

His recommended methods for defusing the population bomb' are inseparable from dictatorship. Top: the Stockholm conference of the United Nations on pollution and environment. Above: while conference was in progress preparations for the French H-bomb test in the pacific were being made atmosphere. Already, the biological systems of rivers and lakes are being wiped out and the oxygen content of oceans depleted, thus amplifying the effect of the dumping of masses of chemical wastes in the interests of the rate of profit.

Synthetic fertilizers and insecticides, the foundation of the new industrialized agriculture, are destroying the potential of the soil on a massive scale. Radioactive waste materials, both from industrial and military applications of atomic energy accumulate unmeasured hazards to future generations.

In the interests of profits, the basis for civilized life is being wiped out by the laws of capital. The hysteria of the environmentalists is thus the death agony of capitalism as it reflects itself in the minds of those who cannot imagine a world without capital.

We must not ignore what they have to say, for the ruling class will use it, along with all the other ideological effluvia of a rotting social order, in its efforts to cling to power.

CONTINUED