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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

ISSN: 0096-3402 (Print) 1938-3282 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbul20

From Political Economy to Political Ecology

Bertrand De Jouvenel

To cite this article: Bertrand De Jouvenel (1957) From Political Economy to Political Ecology,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 13:8, 287-291, DOI: 10.1080/00963402.1957.11457581

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00963402.1957.11457581

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Download by: [Purdue University Libraries] Date: 29 May 2017, At: 13:43
From Political Economy to Political Ecology

BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL

HIS paper, presented here in a greatly abridged

T and somewhat revised version, was inspired by


serious concern about the difficulties which Asian
countries may encounter in their process of economic
development. But, moreover, it reflects the author's be-
lief that the dependence of human life upon other forms
of life present at the surface of the earth is insufficiently
stressed.
It is all too readily assumed that Asian nations, because
they are late starters (with the exception of Japan) on
the path of industrial development, have a relatively easy situation of Indians is one in which Americans formerly
job, since they can draw freely upon the know-how of found themselves and from which they moved forward
advanced industrial nations, and since they have only to their present situation. If Americans could name some
to repeat an already established pattern of development: given moment of their past at which they were placed
the path to riches has been plotted out for them. Many as Indians are today, then it would be plausible to say
well-meaning people in the West are fascinated by a that the Indians have only to follow the path which
classification of the nations of the earth according to Americans made. But it is not so. Early settlers in Amer-
their national per capita income in dollars, and this calls ica had a far better life than the Indian masses of today
to their minds a ladder with India standing on the lowest and enjoyed infinitely more promising circumstances.
rung and the U.S. on the topmost.l They think of Indian Let me stress a physical contrast. India today has 387
development as a climb up the ladder by a repetition of million people on a territory of 1,963 thousand square
the stages through which the U .S. has passed. miles. This territory is hardly larger than that which in
I regard such a picture as quite erroneous and danger- 1810 supported 7.2 million Americans ( 1,723 thousand
ously misleading. It does not matter here that such com- square miles at that time). American economic develop-
parisons of national incomes are very faulty. My quarrel ment started under conditions of extreme abundance of
is with the assumption that all the Indians have to do natural resources relative to population. Indian economic
is to repeat a process carried out by Americans. (It will development, on the other hand, starts under conditions
be abundantly clear to the reader that the Russian pat- of extreme abundance of population relative to natural
tern is by no means more suitable. Indeed, Russian de- resources.
velopment is nothing but an attempt to reproduce the Living standards in the U.S. were at all times high,
American structure.) This assumption logically rests because manpower was always scarce and therefore at a
upon an unfmmulated postulate: i.e., that the present premium. Quite contrary conditions prevail in India. In
all American productive processes, manpower was ever
1 Thus a recent publication of the Committee for Economic De-
velopment (Economic Development Assistance, April 1957) gives the scarce factor, which had to be economized: therefore
national income per head in India as $54 as against $2,000 in the America led the world in productivity of labor. But the
u.s. scarce factor in Asia is not man, it is land, and that is
the factor which has to be economized: husbandry is the
Asian equivalent of American productivity.
Bertrand de ]ouvenel, eminent French economist
and political philosopher, is the author of Prob- The Underestimation of Natural Resources
lems of Socialist England, Power, and other books. The huge natural resources of the American continent
This article is an abbreviated version of a paper have benefited Americans directly and Europeans indi-
given in Tokyo at a conference on Problems of rectly. Their abundance has tended to make us forgetful
Economic Growth, sponsored by the Congress for of their importance. No doubt every lecturer in econom-
Cultural Freedom. ics teaches his students that output is a result of three
287
factors, labor, capital, and land (standing for all natural of its surroundings, and a civilization is merely a form
resources). But the emphasis is so very much on the first of exploitation which has been developed by the exer-
two that the third factor tends to be neglected. cise of intelligence. Such a form cannot be transported
This induces in the student a calm conviction that bodily from one set of circumstances to another very dif-
the flow of goods depends entirely on human labor. For ferent set. I was glad to find in Tokyo that Asian econo-
though labor is only one of the two remaining factors, mists are growing acutely aware of this.
the student learns that the other-capital-represents
the objects "given," at the moment under consideration, The Food-Producer
as the basis of production-objects which were them- It is well known to every student that the march of the
selves produced by labor at a previous period. Thus, the Industrial Revolution can be plotted in terms of a dimin-
means of production are reduced to human labor, in its ishing percentage of food producers within the working
different forms-labor rerpresented by its concrete re- population. In the U.S. in 1956 employment in agricul-
sults, and labor available. ture had fallen to 6.6 million people as against 58.4 in
While this method of presentation has its value, it other occupations. As American external trade in agricul-
has the great defect of suggesting that the flow of goods tural products was roughly balanced, this can again be
offered for the satisfaction of man's needs depends solely expressed in the following manner: the population of the
upon man's own effort, completely independent of his U.S. was fed by the labor of less than 4 per cent of its
natural surroundings. People are not sufficiently clear number. Or, if we think, perhaps more properly, in terms
that what we call "production" can never be anything of families, a farm population of little more than 20 mil-
but the processing of natural resources, and depends en- lion fed a total population of 170 million: one farm fam-
tirely on those resources, and it is imprudent to assume ily fed six non-farm families besides itself.
that any given form of economic development can be This offers a striking contrast with what we may think
precisely duplicated in a very different natural environ- of as typical medieval conditions: four peasant families
ment. feeding a total of five families. Clearly, the greater the
proportion of non-farmers which can be fed by the farm-
Ecology ing population, the greater the quantity and variety of
In a highly organized society such as ours, Nature dis- non-food goods which can be produced by the nation.
appears behind the mass of our fellow-creatures; each in- Indeed Stalin was so obsessed by this thought that his
dividual believes that his living depends on his relation- Grand Design was essentially to transfer manpower from
ship with his fellows, the services he renders them, and farming to nonfarming occupations at breakneck speed.
the return he receives for these; he has forgotten that he Indeed, the main factor in the fantastically rapid growth
lives on what the population of which he is a member of industrial production in the U .S. is to be found in the
can draw from its natural environment. Everything he multiplication of the industriallabor force (4.5 times).
makes use of seems to him to be the product of human Obviously, in order that such a transfer of manpower
labor; this is true so far as concerns its form; but its sub- should occur without a lowering of nutrition standards
stance is obtained from Nature. \Ve recognize our bor- (which was not the case in Russia), it is necessary that
rowing from Nature in bread, but we forget it in the productivity per head should grow apace in the farming
airplane-in its body, whose components are minerals, its population. In Russia mismanagement of the farm popu-
rubber tires, and the fuel it obtains from the bowels of lation hampered this process, the pace set being anyhow
the earth. extremely hasty, but the inherent conditions of Russia
Every living organism, without exception, attracts cer- are on the whole extremely favorable to the aforesaid
tain substances which it obtains from its environment, transformation. Russia is so land-rich that in time it may
absorbs those substances, transforms them, and utilizes approximate the American structure.
them. The growth of a whale, beginning with the egg, This, however, is certainly not the case in Asian coun-
is a process of construction which, so far as concerns tries. It is true that in the U.S. there are only less than 7
dependence on substances from outside itself, differs million land workers, but it is also true that there are 188
not a whit from the construction of a skyscraper; in both million hectares worked and 256 million hectares avail-
cases materials are taken, transformed, and adjusted ac- able for grazing. The abundance of the second factor
cording to a plan. The difference between the two contributes to make up total output with a scant labor
operations is that the one is biological and the other force. In order to achieve a similar output with far less
rational, and that the one procedure is identical on land, more men would be called for.
every occasion, whereas the other is perfectible; whales
were being constructed on the present pattern in the Change in Demographic Structure
days when men were only building huts out of mud and We shall now make a rough and immediate applica-
the branches of trees. tion of the preceding concept. Without concerning our-
Every form of life is inevitably a form of exploitation selves with numerical precision, which is unnecessary
288
for our purpose, let us say that the European Coal and being equal, the quantity of labor required to obtain a
Steel Community has the same population as the United particular agricultural product will be in inverse ratio to
States, and that it includes 21 million agricultural work- the amount of agricultural land available. The less need
ers, against 7 million in the United States. We shall there is to economize on the use of land, the greater the
therefore assume that the best method of raising the possibility of economizing on agriculturallabor.
standard of living of the Europeans is to bring the Euro- \\That is true of American agriculture is true of the
pean demographic structure nearer to that of America. American economic system as a whole; just as its ex-
We shall reduce the number of farmers and increase their penditure of land per agricultural worker is very high,
productivity; we shall increase the number of nonagricul- so is its expenditure of raw materials per industrial
tural workers and raise their production. All this is cor- worker. To understand the peculiar characteristics of
rect, but within certain limits. the American economy, we need only remember that
Let us now suppose that, by the wave of a magic the country is a veritable treasure-house of natural re-
wand, 14 million agricultural workers have been trans- sources, so that the only problem facing the European
ferred from their fields to factories and offices. Waving settlers, who at first were few in number, was that of
her wand again, our helpful fairy provides the 7 million economizing their only rare resource-man-and their
remaining agricultural workers with the same equip- original concern was with what is now called "pro-
ment possessed by their American equivalents; but she ductivity ."
can do nothing about natural conditions: she cannot
give our 7 million farm workers the same amount of Illusions Fostered by the Example
land as their opposite numbers in America. The Euro- of England
pean Coal and Steel Community covers an area equal to There is a tendency to overlook the unique character
about one-sixth of that of the United States. Owing to of the American situation, because England, the great
this fundamental difference, the output of our 7 million object of the economists' admiration before the United
European farmers will be far below that of the Ameri- States, was concerned with the same problems, despite
cans. its very different geographical characteristics.
In the circumstances in which the magic wand has Long before the United States, England transferred
placed us, we Europeans shall doubtless produce more a gradually increasing fraction of its increasing popula-
per man than in our present circumstances, at the cost of tion from agricultural to nonagricultural work; and its
a greater expenditure of land per man. But as we shall nonagricultural population used increasing quantities
be unable to parallel the expenditure of land per man of raw materials in the process of production. Yet Eng-
which prevails in the United States, we shall certainly land's land resources were small, and though in coal
not attain the same production, and we shall fall below output the limit seems only now to have been reached,
our own present production. Moreover, the transforma- the country's consumption of copper and lead, even
tion we have effected will call for a greater total ex- before the end of the 19th century, was already far in
penditure of raw materials and energy, assuming that excess of what could be obtained from its own soil.
such expenditure increases pari passu with the number Suppose a country with a much greater population,
of nonagricultural workers. such as India, were to recapitulate the history of Eng-
It is important not to make productivity into a fetish. land. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that the
\Ve live on products, not on productivity. In a closed population continues to increase at the rate of 1.25 per
economic system, the most effective agriculture is that cent per annum, so that in about forty-five years' time it
which produces the desired quantity of foodstuffs, not will be as dense as that of the United Kingdom and
that which shows the greatest productivity. Agricultural its total figure will be 690 million; imagine that by
productivity might conceivably increase until there was that time India is a larger version of the present United
only one agricultural worker left, but the rest of the Kingdom, and that its imports of raw materials bear
population would not be there to admire this champion the same proportion to its population; those imports
-it would have perished almost to a man. will then be thirteen times higher than the present
A human community which is growing at the rate, British imports. \\There would those products be ob-
let us say, of 1 per cent per annum, requires, in order tained, and how would they be paid for?
to maintain its subsistence level, an equal rate of in- It may be objected that this supposition is complete-
crease in agricultural output, and in order to raise its ly fantastic. Agreed; but it is equally fantastic not to
subsistence level, a more rapid rate of increase in that perceive that the English example, like the American
output. example, cannot be imitated everywhere.
Consequently, the best agricultural procedures will be All plans and projects drawn up in any country of
those which ensure the desired increase in agricultural the world have the effect of increasing the demand for
foodstuffs with the least possible expenditure of labor. natural resources. The great inspiration common to
It immediately becomes evident that, all other factors them all is economy of labor, at a time when manpower
289
is constantly increasing; and little thought is given to tain moment, a geographical fact. But that geographical
economizing natural resources, though these are limited. fact can no longer be regarded as constant. In the first
place, because the distribution over the earth's surface of
The Hungry Machi~ a particular resource is affected by the exploitation of the
A short time ago, anxiety about natural resources was different deposits at varying speeds; in the second place-
directed mainly to sources of energy-which was under- and even more important-because industrial chemistry
standable, for coal and oil deposits are in the nature is conferring value upon resources which previously had
of "savings," which took thousands of years to accumu- none, and this is bound to lead to changes in the map
late and which are being expended very rapidly. There of geographical reserves.
were many gloomy predictions about the exhaustion of Incidentally, that map will acquire increasing impor-
oil supplies, in particular; but it was noticed that tance. Industry arose in tiny patches of the globe; its
the discovery of fresh supplies kept pace with the an- products were rare and could be very profitably ex-
nual extraction. Though it seems obvious that this can- changed for raw materials which were of no value to
not go on indefinitely, atomic energy has now appeared those who supplied them, since they, having no indus-
on the scene, overthrowing prophesies of a shortage of tries themselves, could make no use of such materials.
energy. It seems as though the fear of a shortage is less As industrialization spreads, the possessors of raw ma-
justified in regard to energy than anywhere else, for terials develop a clearer sense of their value, and inter-
solar irradiation of the earth, measured in terms of coal, national trade has to be carried on at rates more favor-
is in the neighborhood of 2,500 tons per hectare per able to these raw materials and less favorable to the
annum. So the problem of the energy available for finished products.
man's use is simply one of capturing that energy. If, as would appear, frenzied industrialization in the
Neither is there any real justification for the fear that USSR manner is to become the ruling principle of
man will ultimately be faced with a shortage of the raw every country, this will increase the tendency to sur-
materials he obtains from ores. There are two reasons render national raw materials only in exchange for for-
for this. In the first place, man's consumption of metals eign raw materials ( processible and combustible ma-
is not a complete waste of those metals; the metal used terials) needed by the exporting country, and not in
in the manufacture of a car may be thrown away when exchange for industrial products.
the car is worn out, but it is not lost, it can be re- We may describe what is at present going on as the
covered; the recovery and reprocessing of such mate- very rapid populating of the world by machines. The
rials will become an increasingly important activity and machine population made its first appearance in a small
will do much to improve the appearance of suburban corner of the world, in Western Europe, and spread
districts. The other reassuring reason is that the outer out at first in certain privileged directions and then in
crust of the earth is one vast reserve of ores of various others. A population of machines which is less flourish-
kinds. Obviously, the ores of the metals most familiar ing than another, owing to smaller resources, will ask
to us will gradually cease to be available in the form of that other to supply it with raw materials, but will have
rich deposits lying close to the surface, because such nothing to offer in exchange, since its own products
deposits, being easily handled, are the first to be ex- will be inferior to those of the other: this is the position
ploited. But there is no reason to doubt that we shall of Western Europe in relation to the United States.
succeed in taking advantage of deposits which are either Still considering machines as a population, we may
far less rich or far less accessible; the progress of indus- say at present its distribution over the earth's surface is
trial power will in itself enable us to penetrate much extremely unequal, but that this inequality will gradu-
farther below the earth's surface in our search for the ally diminish, while the machine-population density will
raw material required by industry. increase in all areas. There seems to be little to impede
I do not think, therefore, that world industry, which this increase of density, as machines feed on dead mat-
calls for ever increasing quantities of raw materials and ter of which there is an abundance in the earth's crust
energy, is in danger of running short of these at any (as well as in the seas, which contain so great a quantity
foreseeable time. But the gluttonous appetite of indus- of mineral salts), and on energy which the sun supplies
try will lead to two consequences, one probable, the in abundance.
other certain. The probable consequence is that, to ob-
tain the necessary raw materials will require an increas- De.truction of the Conditiona of Human Life
ing industrial effort, and thus become more and more With the human population, matters are very differ-
costly in terms of industrial products. ent. Man feeds on living matter, which is incomparably
rarer, on our planet, than dead matter. His feeding is
A. Population of Machine. essentially the transformation of another form of life,
The other consequence is the following. The distn'bu- whether animal or vegetable, into human life. As every-
tion of the raw materials needed for industry is, at a cer- one knows, any living matter, consumed by fire, is
290
reduced to fairly simple chemical constituents, but in ruined Italy was not so much the large estates but rath-
living matter those elements are present in combina- er the repeated passage of flocks and herds across ground
tions of tremendous complexity-a complexity such eroded by deforestation.
that very few protein molecules have ever been satisfac- In the Far East and in Egypt, the course of develop-
torily described; and we also know that these complex ment seems to have been different. As the population,
structures are built up, in the first place, in the vegetable and more especially the town population, increased,
kingdom alone. This leads the chemist to assert that all great irrigation works increased the fertility of the soil;
animals live as parasites on the vegetable kingdom, in- but that soil was cultivated with ever increasing inten-
cluding man, whose parasitic activity is either direct, sity, being thickly populated with agricultural workers
when he eats vegetable products, or indirect, when he who scratched a wretched subsistence from their labors.
eats herbivorous animals, or more indirect, when he eats
carnivorous animals. It is in the sphere of his vital neces- Conclruion
sities that man has the least justification for calling him- My remarks have two purposes. One is to point out
self "producer." The producer is the growing plant. that, contrary to current beliefs, the Asian countries have
\Ve may regard this from a different angle, if we a much harder task than ours was, because natural re-
remember that living matter does not travel by a one- sources were far more readily available to us, whether we
way street, but follows a circuit, a cycle. We can then had them on our own territory, or whether the lack of
say that the human population forms part of an eco- competing demand allowed us to obtain them easily from
system, in biotic fellowship with other forms of life. abroad. Asian leaders will perforce have to keep this dif-
It is "vitally" interested-the word can be used here, for ference in circumstances in mind while planning their
once, without exaggeration-in maintaining the ecosys- development, and we should be conscious of it while
tem on which it depends for its food. In his everyday shaping our friendly policies toward them.
life, man is obliged to destroy other forms of life, but as My second purpose is to alter our state of mind regard-
a long-term policy he is obliged to preserve other forms ing natural resources. Western man has a narrowly an-
of life. He does not always succeed in doing so, or in thropocentric view of the universe. Nothing seems to
remembering the necessity. him precious and worth preserving, other than Man. He
l\lr. Koestner suggests 2 that civilization has an in- tends to count nothing as an expenditure, other than hu-
herent tendency to destroy the conditions required for man effort: he does not seem to mind how much mineral
human existence. It is an impressive fact that the finest matter he wastes and, far worse, how much living matter
archeological remains (of cities) have been found in he destroys. He does not seem to realize at all that human
semi-desert regions, and a map showing them would life is a dependent part of a ecosystem of many different
coincide, to a greater extent, with the present areas of forms of life. As the world is ruled from towns where
depopulation and destitution. Mr. Koestner defines two men are cut off from any form of life other than human,
present-day conditions which apply to the majority of the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived.
very ancient centers of civilization: infertility and de- This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of
population, or, in the valleys of great rivers, overpopu- things upon which we ultimately depend, such as water
lation of an agricultural character. and trees.
Mankind has only quite recently, and in its lesser frac-
Let us see if we can illustrate these conditions by
simple examples. During its earliest period, Rome was tion, entered into the Industrial Age. Our power to tax
Nature is increasing and is ever more widely used: it is
the fortress of a population of agricultural workers, who
also a power to destroy. This is a problem which begins
personally cultivated the surrounding fields.
to appear under certain aspects (pollution, erosion, local
During its second period, Rome grew rich on the
scarcity of water) even in resource-rich America: it must
tributes it exacted, and its buildings and ships in-
appear at an earlier stage in countries less fortunately en-
creased rapidly in number. The inevitable result was
dowed. My stand is not an anti-progressive one. I am
the deforestation of the countryside and the disturbance aware that our techniques are not only capable of impair-
of its natural water system. In a third phase, the in-
ing but also of repairing natural resources, provided we
creasing population of Rome and the increasingly high
put our minds to it. This will increasingly claim our
standard of living of the Romans called for considera- attention, and it must claim attention in resource-poor
ble quantities of meat; and the Roman campagna, to- countries, from the very inception of their development.
gether with much of the country districts of Italy, be- More generally, we shall be led to regard Nature not as a
came an area traversed by large herds of cattle. What store on which we can freely draw, but as a flow which we
2 Mr. Koestner, an economist on the staff of the National Bank
must be careful to replenish. It will greatly help us toward
of Egypt, has some extremely interesting ideas on this subject, such an attitude to realize that human life is completely
very few of which, unfortunately, have so far been published. Cf., dependent upon a great company of other forms of exist-
however, Marginal Notes on the Problem of "Underdeveloped"
Countries, published in English by Wirtschafsdienst, May 1954. ence. This is why I speak of Political Ecology.
291

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