**Unnatural Resources: Innovation and the Environment** 4/28/2023 We often hear today of a world and climate in crisis, brought on by humanity’s negligence and greed. Some argue that our growing population strains the earth and depletes its resources, while others believe that more people means more ideas and innovation which can heal the earth while providing for all. My view is that by examining the relationship between humanity and natural resources, we can justify an optimistic outlook for both the planet and its inhabitants. An increasing population means we need more food, clean water, shelter, and jobs. Many see these needs in biological terms: people are part of the biosphere, not separate from it. Our needs seem to require more and more natural resources, while we pollute the atmosphere and consume energy, spoiling the forests, oceans, and deserts as we expand. From this perspective, resources are fixed and finite, and more people means less for everyone, or at greater and greater cost to person and planet. An extreme but nonetheless resonating take on this perspective should be familiar to moviegoers. In Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, super-antagonist Thanos believes overconsumption will lead life to implode on itself after depleting the universe’s finite resources. "I am inevitable," he proclaims, adopting the mantle of nature’s reactionary response to greedy growth, and rebalancing the universe by preventatively culling half of all life. But he comes up against Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, including Iron Man, whose technological brilliance and unwavering optimism save the day. Of course, the plot makes for great movies, but researcher Marian Tupy of the CATO Institute and economist Gale Pooley of Brigham Young University--Hawaii argue that Thanos's perspective is alive and well in the current environmental discourse (11-12), whether overtly quoted in graffiti tags and memes such as "Thanos was right", or more subtly, through his philosophical forebears. The Mad Titan shares much in common with a long intellectual tradition that originated with Thomas Malthus, an 18th century mathematics professor at Cambridge University. Like Thanos, the mathematician believed in the inevitably of natural law and is primarily remembered for believing societies would grow faster than their food supply could sustain (Tupy and Pooley 54). Populations would grow exponentially only until they ran into natural "checks" on growth, such as pestilence, poverty, famine, and war (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 54). To prevent these natural checks from inevitably wreaking havoc on our species, Malthus suggested "preventative" measures, which he hinted involved increasing "prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality, abortion, and birth control" (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 54). Lest we dismiss the idea of preventative checks only as inspiration for dystopian films and comics, the historical record provides clear examples of such ideas put into real societal practice. For nearly five decades, the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy resulted in the abortion, forced sterilization, abandonment, or outright killing of what might have been an additional “400 million people” (Tupy and Pooley 60-65). These actions were carried out after a 1972 report from the Club of Rome, which predicted that “if current trends are allowed to persist, the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet, possibly by the end of the century, certainly within the lifetimes of our children, are inevitable” (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 62, emphasis added). Interestingly, Thanos made his comic debut just a year later, in 1973 (“Thanos”). While the legacy of the kind of ideas Malthus considered indeed loom dark, Malthus's own growth rate predictions would prove drastically overstated even within his own lifetime. Marion Tupy and Gale Pooley point out that the population of England grew by 49.1 percent between 1700 and 1800, while the abundance of flour increased by 43.6 percent, and in subsequent years grew far faster than the population (54-55). Malthus overestimated the rate of growth of human populations while drastically mistaking the rate of growth in the food supply; indeed, even his own descendancy faded out completely (Tupy and Pooley 55). There is no reason to suppose that human populations grow at an exponential rate and food linearly; as I will show, the opposite has become the case. The Club of Rome and other contemporary writers expanded on Malthus’s fear of overpopulation and a limited food supply by emphasizing overconsumption on a fragile planet with scarce natural resources. This effectively adds an economic concern into the mix, as increasingly scarce resources would also be increasingly expensive. Paul Ehrlich, famous biologist and ecological writer, argues that an increase in population would eventually lead to the natural checks Malthus described, but in the near term would increase prices (Tupy and Pooley 80). The Club of Rome themselves warned that the “most probable” result of growth and consumption trends would be an extreme increase in the price of nonrenewable resources a century on (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 61). As more mouths to feed means more food must be produced, greater investment costs would need to accommodate the growth; whether by increasing farm land or extracting more yields through technological improvements in fertilizer, tractors, pesticides, or potentially vertical farming. Regardless, such investment requires money, and therefore increases the cost of producing food, economically and environmentally. Surely challenges arise from more mouths to feed. Certainly, we should not ignore the many horrible events that contributed to our current standard of living. The story that brought the destitute up to the level of wealth enjoyed today is soaked in blood and controversy. Industrialization wreaked havoc on the environment of the first nations who underwent the transformation, pillaging and polluting natural resources in air-smogged factory-cities across Europe. There were radical changes in the social world as well. As best-selling history and finance author William Bernstein notes, economic growth contains tricky "trade-offs", as it breeds both wealth and inequality, which can lead to decreased societal stability, happiness, and increased violence (333-335). Our own miraculous time excluded, these trade-offs have stunted the progress of most economic hotspots throughout history, as "the same mechanisms that create great wealth also give rise to great inequalities in its distribution" (335). However, the poverty and social issues of today are far and away preferable to the lots our ancestors shared. Humanity has been desperately poor for almost all of history (Bailey and Tupy 7). Actual wealth has drastically increased for everyone, even the poorest in the poorest nations (Bernstein 333-335). The average daily income in the Roman Empire averaged $2, and remained the same in England hundreds of years later in 1066 CE. By 1800, global average income was $2.80 a day (Tupy and Pooley 286). Today’s incomes are well over 3,000 percent higher, despite the global population growing by 680 percent in just 220 years (Tupy and Pooley 283-284). Mankind's painstaking exertion on the natural world throughout the ages has "accumulated a store of knowledge that has allowed us to reach escape velocity from scarcity to abundance", a feat that took "millennia of trial and error", but occurred "somewhere toward the end of the 18th century" (Tupy and Pooley 3), coinciding with the beginning of widespread industrialization. Despite the social issues and historical grievances that may plague us today, we must see our issues in the context of the wider historical record. In almost any measurable way, our modern life far surpasses anything they experienced: mortality rates, malnutrition, deadly disease, child labor, and the danger of everyday life plummeted during this period, while life expectancy, education, safety, democracy, individual rights, hygiene, and free time saw drastic increases (Tupy and Pooley ch. 8; see also Tupy and Bailey). The Industrial Revolution, while environmentally disastrous, paid the start-up costs to today’s global wealth, and with the discipline wrought by two hundred years of both hard and human capital growth and innovation, individuals in wealthy nations are increasingly acting as benevolent stewards of the environment. Using international GDP per capita data from the World Bank and scores from the Environmental Performance Index at Yale, I matched each nation’s 2021 or nearest available per capita income with their 2022 EPI scores, which measures 40 different factors relating to a nation’s climate change preparation, health of their environment, and the vitality of their ecosystems (“2022 Environmental Performance Index”). I grouped the nations by EPI scores in increments of 10: **** From this analysis, we see that nations with higher GDP per capita rank higher on their Environmental Performance Index Scores (Brown). The analysis reveals that nations with wealthier individuals (Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg), take better care of the natural world, while the nations with poorer individuals (India, Sudan, Iraq) rank amongst the worst environmental stewards (Brown). This should not surprise us, as the poor are rightly concerned with the immediate needs of the present, while wealth can liberate individuals from chronic stress and free up their time and attention for more creative pursuits and environmental enjoyment. Surely the process of industrialization harmed the environment in the short term, but as Tupy and Pooley point out, it also “spurred the creation of an enlightened populace with a historically unprecedented concern over the environment and a willingness to pay for its stewardship through somewhat higher taxation” (315). Today, even the once heavily polluted rivers of former industrial epicenters like New York and London are now so clean that we hear of dolphins, seals, and other diverse sealife returning in abundance (Tupy and Pooley 315; Serna). This is wonderful news– economic development and environmental care need not be at odds with one another, and in reality, effective environmental stewardship appears to depend on wealth (Brown). Another of these voices is Vaclav Smil: scientist, policy analyst, and bestselling author. Like Ehrlich, Smil is concerned with overconsumption, and warns that current advances in technology do not guarantee future successes in thwarting the hard limits posed by the natural world (Smil; see Desrochers). Smil comments on Moore’s Law, defined by the rate at which silicon wafers have shrunk in order to double the speed of computers every two years, arguing that increasingly small and efficient computer chips cannot equate to advancing crop yields, electrical engines, and steel production, because “decoupling economic growth from energy and material inputs contradicts physical laws”, and that “basic needs for food, shelter, education, and employment for the additional billions of people to be added by 2100 will alone demand substantial energy flows and material inputs" (qtd. in Desrochers 2.2). Therefore, the assumption that economic growth can be infinite is a "category error" (Smil). Smil therefore poses yet a more sophisticated argument than Ehrlich in what appears to be a hard-science perspective on growth concerns. However, for all of the raw material calculations and expositions on energy that Smil dedicates most of his work on (Desrochers 2.1), Vaclav still defaults to the same base concern as his progenitors: “anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist” (Kenneth Boulding, qtd. in Smil). This economist's famous quote reveals the Malthusian time table, in which all good things must come to an end, a remarkably Thanos-like injunction into which any moral system can be justified. But from such a detached point of view, we miss the granular level of individuals and societies, and mistake the dynamic relationship between people and the environment as absolute. While it may seem a stretch to link Smil in the same intellectual vein as Malthus and Ehrlich given their many contradicting views (see Desrochers), Ehrlich's and Smil's central concerns are essentially one and the same: we consume and grow more than we should. Certainly, if Malthus's projections of population growth were correct and mankind did grow exponentially faster than our food supply, we may run into some very uncomfortable challenges-- a premise Smil wholeheartedly endorses, calling it an "unassailable" natural law (qtd. in Desrochers 2.2). But in reality, the population has grown linearly, and is set to peak at around 11 billion people before 2100 (Bailey and Tupy 13), while the global economy is trending to grow between 5 and 10 times our current output (Bailey and Tupy 7). Today, famine is almost entirely absent, resulting only in situations of war or political strife (Bailey and Tupy 15), and the poorest region in the world, Sub-Saharan Africa, now has enough food to feed each person an average of 2,449 calories (15). Indeed, in an empirical analysis of the last two hundred and fifty years, Tupy and Pooley conclude that "data suggest that additional human beings tend to benefit rather than impoverish the rest of humanity" (Tupy and Pooley 237). But it is not hard to extrapolate the concern with an inelastic food supply to broader concerns with consumption of all kinds of natural resources. Pierre Desrochers, environmental professor at University of Toronto, notes that "reactionary thinking against industrialization and urbanization, coupled with a long-standing elitist dislike of mass consumption, further shaped modern environmental thought and activism" immediately following Malthus (1). This theme is consistent in both Ehrlich and Smil, who lament that our greedy nature and materialist lust is the heart of all problems. It is hard to separate the Malthusians’ hate of consumption from hate of the economy itself, or economic actors for that matter. In 2013, Ehrlich explained that "the human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources, and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socioeconomic-political arrangements to service [our] aggregate consumption" (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 81), while Smil calls to "put an end to material growth and forge a new society that would survive without worshiping the impossible god of continuously increasing consumption" (qtd. in Desrochers 2.2). Ehrlich and Smil therefore see growth itself, whether of the population or the economy, as perpetuating our prideful and idolatrous nature. Ehrlich himself calls growth "the creed of a cancer cell" (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 82). With such an outlook, an economic system which allows free agents to make decisions in their own presumably greedy interest, let alone industrious ambition and creative innovation, are themselves questionable enterprises, and are at worst, cancerous. The certainty with which the Malthusians prophecy showcases their unwavering faith in Nature, which demands repercussions for our idolatrous pride in ourselves as somehow separate from the biosphere and its laws. These infidels are innumerable, as Ehrlich says, “the one thing we will never run out of is imbeciles” (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 80). Such imbeciles will bring upon us all the natural fruits of our labors; the checks Malthus prophesied of over two hundred years ago, when "the capacity of the environment to absorb the punishment associated with [consumption]" will run out, and "food will be scarce enough that prices are really going to be high even in the United States", eventually leading to runaway processes and "a gigantic population crash" (Ehrlich, qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 81-82). In 1970, Ehrlich confidently stated that "if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" (Ehrlich, qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 80). But such persistent pessimism does not go unchallenged. Ehrlich famously agreed to a bet with Julian Simon, an economist who challenged him on his claims that prices would increase as the population grew. Simon allowed Ehrlich to choose any five resources. If after ten years their prices were lower, Ehrlich would pay Simon $1,000, and vice versa should the results justify Ehrlich. Ehrlich accepted and picked five difficult-to-mine metals. After a decade, the price of the metals had collectively dropped by 36 percent, despite the global population increasing by 800 million (Tupy and Pooley 80). Ehrlich later complained that ten years was a short time frame, and that "the price of those metals will go up eventually, but that's a minor point. The resource that worries me the most is the declining capacity of our planet to buffer itself against human impacts" (Tupy and Pooley 81, emphasis added). Simon offered to extend the bet, but Ehrlich refused (Tupy and Pooley 80). The inevitable apocalypse seemed to have been delayed. But is it truly as inevitable as the neo-Malthusians insist? To understand why economists seem to be so optimistic about the future, we would benefit from reviewing the basics of economics in simple terms. The Malthusians insist on the finitude of the natural world and its absolute scarcity, but this perspective is far too expansive for everyday people. Individuals throughout history have not had the time or means to calculate the sum total of all natural resources, goods, and services present across the globe, nor the environmental impact of every action related to those items. Even today, there is not a sufficiently rich data set to review every decision in the world, nor can there be. No, individuals instead outsource that problem to the market, and bring their faulty data to the place of exchange, there to be averaged in near real-time with the rest of the relevant parties involved in an exchange for a given good or service. We call this average a ‘price’. Prices put relative scarcity into context, thereby helping people know how much of a resource they can individually access given our individual circumstances. Relative scarcity is far more important to individuals than absolute scarcity, because it meets them where they are at. An increasing population effectively increases demand, or the aggregated desires of the population on any given good or service. If supply is fixed, prices go up-- meaning that those who desire the good or service most (as represented by their willingness to pay a higher price) make the exchange. Put differently, the good or service goes to the highest bidder. But what is supply? Is it the amount of the good or service, waiting to be divvied up based solely on who desires it? David Glasner, economist at the Federal Trade Commission, reminds us that "economic exchange is not the mere trading of physical goods but trading rights to property or rights to engage in certain types of conduct affecting property" (Glasner). That is to say, what we actually purchase is time with the good (to tinker, store up, improve, or waste), or time with the service (rights to the seller's time, in order to provide the service). Quoting British economist P.H. Wicksteed, Glasner agrees that “supply” is a misnomer, because "{the} costs of production of one thing are nothing whatever but an alias of efficiencies in production of other things" (qtd. in Glasner). We can therefore understand supply not to mean the stock of stuff that exists, but the stock of stuff, together with the price of the goods and services and time employed to make that stock available, depending on the demand for that stuff. We might then be justified in considering economic demand as aggregated consumer demand, and economic supply as nothing other than aggregated producer demand, a concept written about by economist Brian Albrecht. Finally, we can escape the "fallacy that there is a subjective side (consumers) and an objective side (producers) of the economy. It’s all just demand; it’s all subjective" (Albrecht). I add that the forces of economics that we call supply and demand therefore encompass these subjective matters, layered over the stock of stuff we call “resources”. Personal and societal availability is the real problem, not absolute scarcity. Ehrlich himself says that overconsumption not only strains the planet, but "the ability to do the job at an attractive cost will also 'run out'" (qtd. in Tupy and Pooley 83). The desire to produce resources in the first place must be included in their cost, again tying together our subjective relationship to what is natural. Therefore, I propose that supply is indeed a subjective layer stacked on top of, and inseparably intertwined with, the stock of stuff that exists on the planet, and that this is the real meaning of "natural resources". I argue that aggregate supply is a snapshot in time of humanity's know-how, vicariously exchanged through goods and services in an attempt to satiate humanity's desires. Our ingenuity brings value to what is natural, and how we interact with the world around us actually gives it its value. The knowledge that human beings possess, distributed in specialized individuals functioning as a collective, puts the "resource" in what is otherwise inert, inaccessible matter. Returning to the famous wager, we see that Ehrlich was blinded by his obsession with the absolute scarcity of natural resources, while Simon had confidence in the processes that make resources increasingly available and abundant. What made Ehrlich's chosen metals more affordable? Tupy and Pooley point to the myriad innovations and discoveries over the decade, which together contributed to the decreased prices: New nickel mines had been discovered and exploited, ending a Canadian monopoly on the commodity. Glass cables had replaced copper wires, driving down demand for the metal. Aluminum replaced tin in cans, eventually leading to the collapse of the price-setting international tin cartel. Across the board, technological improvement and entrepreneurship made mining and refining so much more efficient and therefore cheaper that new supply outpaced the rising demand of a growing population. (81) We see that market forces made the metals affordable, despite the absolute finitude of the earth that Ehrlich and Smil may appeal to. This case casts doubt on our ability to accurately measure such finitude in the first place. And yet the increase in supply was not due to the discovery of more deposits, but in the new mines to extract, the creation of better substitutes, and the toppling of static corporate gigantism. The prices plummeted because the total utility wherewith those materials were used increased above and beyond the hard stock of the material itself. This is an excellent example of a process called dematerialization: doing more with less. As we have previously noted, incomes were barely above zero for most of history. Therefore, almost everything appeared relatively scarce until there was enough knowledge, trade, and subsequent wealth to bring unknown, expensive, or unreachable goods into individuals’ lives. The increasingly global economy, developed before and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, did just that; connecting previously inaccessible goods and services across the seas (see Bernstein). Additionally, the innovations behind the increasingly efficient modern economy enable us to grow and produce more with less water (Bailey and Tupy 121), land (112,131), and carbon (116). Matt Ridley, British parliamentarian and expert on the history and mechanics of innovation, notes that the U.S. also uses less steel, aluminum, copper, fertilizer, and water than it did at its peak consumption, and this despite an increasing population. In the decade between 2008 and 2018, "energy use fell by 2 per cent", despite the economy growing 15 per cent (Ridley 268). Additionally, technological improvements like fracking have revealed that seemingly non-renewable resources like oil and natural gas are in reality so abundant that it is projected we will hit peak demand well before we run out of supply (Bailey and Tupy 117-120). Marion Tupy and Gale Pooley calculate that "resources have been growing more abundant by over 4 percent per year, thereby doubling every 16 years" (Tupy and Pooley 237). These trends makes Matt Ridley optimistic about the future, in a voice diametrically opposed to Smil and Ehrlich: "those who say that indefinite growth is impossible, or at least unsustainable, in a world of finite resources are therefore wrong, for a simple reason: growth can take place through doing more with less" (268). Smil dismisses Moore’s Law, but this marvelous trend actually serves as an incredible example of how innovation works. Jim Keller, legendary chip architect with tenure at Apple, Tesla, AMD, and Intel, states that we know we can build transistors at a millionth the size of our current transistors, but that the remaining problems to be solved are manufacturing issues, not a physics limitation (Keller 2:30-8:00). Importantly, Keller agrees that Moore’s Law is not an arbitrary force, but is actually the combined result of thousands of small innovations being worked on by thousands of small teams of people (5:00-10:00). These distributed teams tackle fractionated pieces of the puzzle, requiring the joint expertise of metallurgists, mathematicians, engineers, electricians, opticians, atomic physicists, and software developers (Keller 5:00-8:00). This division of labor allows for thousands of failures and successes to aggregate, driven by incredibly high market demand, and rewards those who can deliver the best product the fastest. Natural laws slows progress just as hard in computer science as it does in any other field, but the successful approach of breaking apart the problem into smaller problems to be iteratively solved through a differentiated and specialized workforce is a powerful example of human potential when coupled with market forces, unerring optimism, and dutiful persistence (Keller). When individuals engage in an ambitious, creative, and honest way with both the natural and social world, we should not be suspicious about their motives or dismiss them as cancerous, ungrateful, or greedy. We could instead choose to find inspiration in their humble contributions to humanity’s distributed knowledge, which in aggregate transforms scarcity into abundance. This is Iron Man’s superpower: that which overcomes previously conceived notions through attention, ingenuity, and persistence over time, especially in the face of the “inevitable”. Tupy and Pooley optimistically conclude that “the Earth's atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have" (199). Matt Ridley calls this Innovation: a slow, gradual process that is rarely accompanied by strokes of brilliance, and is distinct from invention, as it is especially concerned with making things accessible and useful, not just new or different (245-247). Innovation turns accidents and limits into ideas, improves incrementally, and eventually reduces costs and prices (Ridley 245-247), thereby increasing material abundance for all. Indeed, "scarcity gets converted to abundance through the price system" (Tupy and Pooley 5), by unleashing the means whereby human ingenuity is vicariously exchanged through goods and services. Through this lens, innovation is the practice of unlocking supply in an otherwise finite world. Resources could be as infinite as our useful knowledge, and the natural world could flourish from our purposeful hand without sacrificing our needs and wants. Neo-Malthusian doctrines veiled behind faux environmental compassion are antithetical to this achievable future, and is the cinematic villain with whom optimistic men and women with iron wills must contend. We can continue learning, discovering, innovating, and building in a way that best cares for both people and planet. 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