The future of an affluent society - the case of Canada - Part One

It is customary to base long-term planning on forecasts of socio-economic changes made by projecting current trends into the future.

It appears, however, that we have now reached a crossroads in the history of human affairs, for globally, well established trends in agriculture, fishing, settlement patterns and basic lifestyles are suddenly being reversed along with corresponding changes in basic attitudes to the most general principles governing man's relationship with his physical and social environment.

Is Canada, with its relatively small population, huge land area and apparently limitless resources likely to be affected by such discontinuities? The answer is yes. Canada is not the cornucopia it's supposed to be. Only 6 percent of its land area is fit for cultivation. Its usable oil reserves are running out, and urbanisation and immigration are beginning to cause problems in the cities.

The principle that Canada must move away from a consumer society to a ‘conserver society', first put forward by the Science Council, is now accepted by the majority of those working within Environment Canada and a great deal of work is being done to determine what would be the implications of shifting Canadian society into this new direction.

The author of this report tries to show that this must be regarded as but a first step towards the achievement of an ‘ecological society' - one in which political and economic activities are considerably reduced in scale, in which local self-sufficiency is encouraged, and mobility is radically reduced. Such a society is, among other things, the one that can make the most rational use of increasingly limited and expensive resources, and that must minimize social and ecological disruption. It is probably also the one that best satisfies real human needs and aspirations.

The object of this report, commissioned by the Advanced Concepts Centre of Environment Canada, is to suggest how Canada, in the forthcoming decades, can reduce its vulnerability to global discontinuities.

If such a report has been commissioned, it is presumably because the possibility of the occurrence of major discontinuities capable of causing large-scale social upheavals in the next decades, is taken very seriously by many people in Environment Canada, as evidenced among other things by this Department's Perspective on the next decade published in October 1974.

If I, personally, was asked to do this report, it is that I have been examining, for some years, those biospheric and technospheric processes in which discontinuities are most likely to occur; that I edit a journal, The Ecologist, which is predominantly concerned with global problems; and that I was co-author of one of the first studies, Blueprint for Survival, which pointed out the probable occurrence of such discontinuities while suggesting a programme of change designed to adapt an industrial society to the conditions they would be likely to give rise to.

If the view of the future reflected in this and similar studies - such as the Club of Rome's very influential The Limits to Growth - is correct (and events in the five years since they appeared tend to confirm it), then the discontinuities we must expect are of a nature to justify a fundamental change in the course upon which an industrial society such as Canada is set.

At the same time, it must be realised that the implementation of a programme designed to move Canadian society along this course would undoubtedly be slow and difficult. Among other things, it would require a radical change in the values with which people are imbued; in the conventional wisdom imparted in Canadian schools and universities, which very much reflects these values; in the way your society is organised, in its physical infrastructure and in the institutions whose influence increasingly pervades more of its activities. For this reason it should not be adopted in extremis, when all else has failed and catastrophe looms ahead, but should be decided upon in time, so that it may be carefully orchestrated over sufficient period of time.

Unfortunately, these considerations do not appear to have affected the way the Federal Government is looking to the future, nor, a fortiori, the nature of the policies it continues to pursue, which can only be regarded as being based on the implicit assumption that the future will be like the past. Indeed, the accepted methodology for making predictions remains uncritically to project the trends of the last decades into the future, without taking into account the implications of significant global changes that have already occurred, are now visibly occurring and that can logically be expected to occur in the none too distant future.

I shall devote the first part of this report to examining the nature of these probable discontinuities.

Population and Food Production

A basic assumption underlying the recent discussions at the Habitat Conference in Vancouver was that, by the end of this century, world population would be somewhere between six and a half and seven billion.

This assumes that the present rate of population growth of about 2 percent will be maintained, or will taper off but very slightly, during this period.

It is indeed the case that the present very appreciable reduction in fertility in many industrial countries, including Canada, will not have significantly affected population levels by the end of the century because of the age-distribution of the population today. (The parents of the children who will be born during this period are to a large extent already here, and, because of previous population growth, they constitute an important segment of the population. (See Figure 1.)

However, the rate of population growth is not determined exclusively by the birth rate, but also by the death rate; and this we assume, will continue to fall, as it has done since the introduction of modern sanitation, modern medicine, and more recently with our apparent conquest of major infectious diseases. However, it is in this latter field that we are beginning to witness a major discontinuity. These diseases are staging a comeback. Pathogens are developing resistance to antibiotics, their vectors to pesticides and logistical problems are developing all along the line.

In the industrial world, gonorrhoea has returned with a vengeance, and has been admitted by WHO to be out of control. Pneumonia and tuberculosis are beginning once again to take a heavier toll of human life, [1] and in the tropics dengue and schistosomiasis are spreading to countries where these diseases were previously unknown.

Much more likely to affect population levels, however, is the reappearance of malaria whose ‘eradication', according to WHO, has allowed five hundred million people to be alive, who would otherwise have perished by it.

This disease is now beginning to affect populations deprived of the natural controls which previously made the disease endemic, killing off mainly the old and the weak. Already, in the last two years, millions of people have died of it, and one can predict that its ravages will increase still more drastically, as resistance to insecticides builds up still further among malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, as spraying programmes are trimmed for lack of funds, and as humans resistance to the disease is still further reduced by even more predictable malnutrition and famine.

This brings us to another major reversal of previous trends. In the 1960's FAO was predicting on the basis of previous trends, that world fishing catches would go on increasing from about 60,000,000 tons [2] at that time to over 100,000,000 tons by the year 2000. In 1971, with the failure of the Peruvian anchovetta catch, they began to fall, and as a result of previous over-fishing and of the growing pollution of coastal waters, have fallen ever since. [3]

In the case of agricultural production, discontinuities have either occurred or are visibly occurring in almost all of its major aspects. The most obvious is that there is very little more land to bring under the plough. Growing populations throughout history have been accommodated by systematically clearing forests for agricultural land. In this way more agricultural land has, up till now, been found when required, though it may have had to be sought ever further afield - sometimes in other continents.

A point has been reached where this will no longer be possible: The world is indeed finite, and yet another implication of this truism is being brought home to us. The world's forests, which have so far provided the main source of new agricultural land are shrinking rapidly, and from the ecological point of view, disastrously. What is more, in most cases, their further clearance, especially in South America, Africa and South East Asia, would yield only marginal agricultural land, unlikely to bear crops under modern intensive conditions for very long. [4]

In reality, the amount of agricultural land available to us is actually decreasing - as the result of two processes whose seriousness has been generally underrated: I refer to soil deterioration and urbanization.

Soil deterioration has occurred ever since the first development of large sedentary populations that tried to obtain, for their sustenance, more from the soil than it could provide on a sustainable basis.

North Africa, once the granary of Rome, has, as a result of such agricultural practices been transformed into a desert - a desert that is studded with the remains of once majestic and populous cities. [5]

However, modern intensive agriculture has vastly accelerated this process. According to Borgstrom, [6] in the last seventy years, we have caused more soil deterioration and desertification than during the rest of man's tenancy of this planet.

In the principal agricultural areas of the USA, on which the world increasingly depends for its sustenance, soil deterioration is already very advanced:

• Surveys have revealed losses of from 34 to 314 tons per hectare in the southern plains. [7]
• The US National Academy of Sciences has estimated that the US has already lost about one third of its topsoil. [8]
• Commoner [9] has calculated that the organic content of mid-West soil has declined by about 50 percent in the last 100 years. By the end of the century, erosion will probably have caused another 25 million acres of arable land to be lost.

In the tropics, the situation is far worse. Modern agriculture is destructive enough in temperate zones. It is considerably more so in the tropics where climatic and hence ecological conditions are quite different - as is eloquently shown by Biswas [10] of Environment Canada. In many countries desertification is now highly advanced, especially in mountain areas which are most vulnerable to erosion. In Africa, the Sahara Desert is said to be advancing across a wide front, in some places at the rate of 30 kilometres a year. [11]

Loss of agricultural land to urbanization is possibly equally serious in industrial countries - especially as development tends to occur in the rich plains and valleys. It is probable that in the UK the best agricultural land, in the valleys of the Thames and the Mersey for instance, has already been built over. In all, something like 100,000 acres are lost every year. [12] The Fens, from which most of the country's vegetables are derived, are particularly vulnerable. Dust storms are frequent - and it is estimated that within 50 years this area will cease to be of any agricultural value. [13]

Loss of agricultural land to urbanization is equally serious in the US, and has been estimated at about a million acres a year, [14] which means that if soil deterioration and urbanisation were to continue at the present rate, the US would be deprived on anything up to a tenth of it agricultural land by the end of the century - which, if one takes into account that this country's population will have probably increased to 300 million people, may be sufficient to deprive it of its exportable food surplus.

This, needless to say, would have terrible consequences for a world increasingly composed of food-importing nations which currently derive 75 percent of their imports from the US and Canada, [15] and whose requirements are expected by then (unrealistically as we shall see) to have doubled.

It would also, needless to say, have disastrous consequences for the US economy, which is becoming increasingly dependent on the foreign exchange earned from the sale of agricultural produce to finance its growing imports of minerals and fuel.

Climate

Another assumption that underlies current policies is that of the continuance of present climatic conditions. Thus, the new hybrid strains of the major cereal crops, whose introduction heralded the much vaunted Green Revolution, and whose imposition on Third World farmers is still our only answer to the population/food gap, were designed to provide higher yields with the appropriate inputs and in present weather conditions. How they will respond to climatic changes is not, I believe, known. In any case, the possible effects of long-term climatic changes have not been taken into account by those who predict a world population of 6.5 - 7 billion people by the end of the century.

Unfortunately, in the last few years, we have, witnessed new climatic conditions in almost every part of the world. These have been held at least partly responsible for the Soviet food shortage of the last few years, and for the famine in Sahelia, Ethiopia and Maharashtra Province of India. [16]

The climate of the last decades, which we have taken to be quite normal, and which we assumed would continue into the foreseeable future, appears instead to have been abnormal and we now seem to be entering a period during which climatic conditions will be far less favourable to man's welfare and indeed survival.

As Winstanley [17] of Environment Canada writes,

"The view held by some climatologists is that human activity has become ‘locked in' to the climatic conditions that prevailed during the first half of this century. There is considerable evidence to suggest, however, that these climatic conditions were, in many parts of the world, the most benign for several hundred years. The global cooling and high frequency of anomalous weather events during the last ten to twenty years are seen as indicators of climatic deterioration which, if it continues, will have an adverse effect on human activity, and in particular, on our ability to meet the rapidly increasing demand for food. In short, the mean climate conditions over the so-called climatic ‘normal' period 1931-60 cannot be projected with any degree of confidence to forecast climate for the next 30 years."

The C02 content of the atmosphere, for instance, is increasing at 0.2 percent per annum and could by the end of the century cause an increase in the temperature of the earth by 0.5C. [18]

The increase in the injection of particulate matter into the atmosphere could lead to a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5C in the next 50 years [19] which would be enough to trigger off another ice age. [20]

Were the present level of human activity to increase at the present rate for another 250 years, emissions of man-made heat would reach 100 percent of absorbed solar flux, causing a 60 percent increase in the Earth's temperature, which would be sufficient to render it totally unsuitable for human habitation. [21]

Heat emissions, however, only have to reach 1 percent of solar flux for noticeable perturbations to occur, and if economic activity increased at the rate of the last 20 years, this point would be reached within 40 years.

It is maintained by some climatologists, notably Reid Bryson, that man-induced pollution is already having noticeable effects on weather. He believes that the drought in Sahelia is at least partly attributable to air pollution over Western Europe. Whether this is so or not, [22] the fact remains that man's activities are now one of the most important influences on world climate, and it is but a question of time for them to lead in some way to largely unpredictable climate modifications, which, among other things, must introduce further instability into world agriculture.

The Price of Inputs

Another factor which makes reduced world food output is the radical increase in the price of the inputs into modern intensive agriculture, such as fuel, fertiliser, pesticides and machinery.

Fertiliser prices went up by as much as 3 times in the US corn belt in 1974. Since the main energy source for producing fertiliser is natural gas, whose price is still very low relative to other energy sources, it is likely that they will rise still further in the immediate future.

Already fertiliser is beyond the reach of all but a small minority of farmers in the Third World. This in itself makes nonsense of the Green Revolution, since the high-yielding hybrid strains on whose cultivation it is based, are only high yielding because they are sensitive to fertiliser applications which, very often, traditional strains are not.

It is now but a question of time before it ceases to be economic to use fertilisers even among farmers in the US and Canada. The reason is simple. It is well documented that the use of artificial fertiliser eventually meets with diminishing returns. In the UK, for instance, the amount of nitrogen fertiliser used has increased by eight times since the last war, [23] with an increase in yields of less than fifty percent. In the US, between 1951 and 1966, there was 146 percent increase in the use of nitrates and a 300 percent increase in that of pesticides for a 34 percent increase in yields. [24]

Such diminishing returns were tolerable so long as the price of fertiliser was falling, which was the case for decades. It ceases to be tolerable, however, once it starts rising - for then one meets with diminishing returns not only on the inputs, but - what is more serious - on the capital employed. (A series of studies by the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University [26] reveals that we have just about reached this situation already. Farms in the US cornbelt that use chemicals earn a little more per acre than do organic farms, but this advantage is largely offset by higher costs, which in 1974 (though not in 1975) more than compensated for these earnings.)

With regard to the use of pesticides, in fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that, in the long run, they have actually led to increased food production. In the US, for instance, despite a many-fold increase in pesticide applications in the period between 1948 and 1970, crop losses to insects have actually increased from 32 percent to about 36 percent. [25]

It would thus seem economic for the farmer to give up the use of chemicals especially in a period of capital shortage, since such capital could be put to more fruitful use elsewhere.

Undoubtedly, it will take some time before farmers understand the implications of such trends, and still more time for them to make the changes required to switch over to organic farming. Eventually, however, they must do so.

We are faced here with a major reversal of recent trends - a situation which no agricultural expert has predicted, and few would probably be willing to face today. Needless to say, it has major implications. It means among other things, that even in the most agriculturally favoured countries, overall yields are no longer likely to increase, for it will be more economic for farmers to aim for lower yields so as to reduce costs.

In fact, worldwide agricultural yields, though they have been systematically increasing for several decades, have already started to fall. Lester Brown attributes this to five principal factors (see figure 2):

"

1. the release for production of the 50 million acres of idled, below fertility cropland in the United States that, added to the global cropland base, almost certainly reduced the average crop yield;
2. the high cost and tight supply of energy;
3. the high cost and tight supply of fertiliser;
4. the build up of population pressures that reduce the fallow cycles of shifting cultivators in large areas of West and East Africa, Central America, the Andean countries and Southeast Asia to the point where fallow periods are now too short to allow soil fertility to regenerate;
5. the growth of the demand for firewood in developing countries to such an extent that local forests could not keep pace and that more and more animal dung was used as fuel and less and less as an essential source of soil nutrients." [27]

The same point has already been achieved in the fishing industry. If, for many years, catches have been rising, it is mainly as a result of the introduction of increasingly elaborate technology, and at the cost of seriously depleting stocks in a way that could not have been done with conventional fishing methods. Since this has been the main reason for the subsequent fall in fishing catches, further technological innovations, and in general, further investment in technology can only have the effect of further reducing catches. In this case, we have encountered not merely diminishing but negative returns on inputs, and hence, even before the increase in their price, on the capital employed to purchase them. [28]

Current price increases can thereby only accelerate the inevitable return to more traditional fishing methods - after that period required to amortize investments in capital equipment already in use. This could lead, pollution permitting, to a stabilisation of world fishing catches at a level somewhat lower than the present one.

If one takes all these considerations into account, one cannot conceivably accept the current notion that world population will continue expanding into the next century. Paul Ehrlich considers the notion that the world population will double between now and the year 2100 as "the most frequently repeated imbecility of today". [29]

Winstanley considers that even under optimistic assumptions,

"massive foreign aid in terms of food and food inputs will be required by developing countries between now and 1985. Under less optimistic, but perhaps more realistic assumptions, many face widespread starvation and bankruptcy." [30]

In A Perspective on the Next Decade for Environment Canada, the authors came to a similar conclusion:

"the world in the decade 1975 to 1985 may experience famine on a scale never before seen. Estimates for 1974 have ranged through 20 million to 80 million deaths from starvation. It is probable that up to 300 million people will die from malnutrition and starvation in the next decade." [31]

My own opinion, and many students of the world food situation will agree with me, is that deaths from famine and disease in the next decade will be sufficient to prevent world population from rising very much beyond 4.5 - 5 billion - the maximum that this already terribly degraded planet can hope to support for even a single generation. Over a longer period there should be a further decline to a more sustainable level - unfortunately considerably below that of the world's present population.

What, one might then ask, are the implications of these predictable major global discontinuities for Canada?

In the eyes of the world, and perhaps still of many people in Canada itself, Canada is one of the world's remaining empty spaces, capable of absorbing a considerable proportion of the world's surplus population, and hence having a duty to do so. It is also viewed as having a limitless food-producing capacity and thereby being duty-bound to provide food in the form of trade or aid to all those countries that are increasingly short of it.

Though Canada's food producing capacity is indeed relatively high by most standards, and its population relatively low in a grotesquely over-populated world, it would be a dangerous error to regard this country as capable of providing a long-term means of solving or even appreciably reducing the world's population food gap.

The first thing we must realise is that Canada is not itself self-sufficient in all food products. In fact, the extent to which it depends for its sustenance on international trade is quite surprising. Thus, in 1973, Canada exported $3,003 million dollars worth of food but she also imported $2,160 million worth. [32] What is more, it is only in three commodities - wheat, feed and dairy products - that exports were higher than imports. In the case of all others, Canada imported more than she exported - sometimes as in the case of fruit, vegetables, and sugar, by a very wide margin: $401 million as against $34 million in the case of fruit, $193 million as against $59 million in the case of vegetables and $166 million as against $14 million in the case of sugar. [33]

It must also be noted that Canada's dependence on trade for its sustenance is increasing very rapidly. Thus, imports of sugar, dairy products, animals and meat were more than three times higher in 1973 than in 1965-69, while imports of fruit and vegetables were nearly double, as in the case of food imports in general. [34]

The question we must ask ourselves is whether the production of all these commodities can be increased sufficiently to meet the requirements of Canada's population at the end of the century - which Warkentin takes as about 30,700,000? (According to Statistics Canada, if one projects a medium fertility rate of 2.2 percent and a net annual immigration of 60.000. the population will be 30,000,000 by the end of the century.)

The notion of ‘requirements' can be interpreted in various ways. Warkentin suggests that they can be calculated in terms of Nutrition Canada's recommended diet, which diverges very considerably from the present one - mainly in that the proportion of cereals and even more so of fish and vegetables is increased at the expense of meat, beef, eggs, dairy products, potatoes and sugar.

"To satisfy these requirements, the present area devoted to vegetable production must be increased by 200,000 acres and that devoted to fruit production by 325,000 acres."

Can this be done?

Warkentin considers that it would be feasible to increase fruit and vegetable production by 50 percent at the maximum, using present agricultural practices and inputs. [36] Further increases would be possible but only with small-scale largely non-commercial production.

Warkentin, in fact, considers it "unlikely that production can approach consumption". For this reason he concludes, "Food production possibilities .. provide a limit to the desirable population for Canada." [37]

As for Canada's capacity to continue increasing its exports of wheat (they increased from 758 million tons during the period 1965 - 69 to 1,218 million in 1973), neither he nor other students of the Canadian agricultural scene such as Geno [38] are particularly optimistic.

This seems a shattering conclusion to come to, and it seems well worthwhile examining the considerations on which it is based.

First of all, because of Canada's cold climate (see Figure 3), the growing season is relatively short, largely as a result of which yields are quite low: 1,700 lbs per acre on average, as against 4,000 lbs in the USA.

Also, though Canada has 3.8 million square miles of territory, only a very small fraction is actually used for agricultural purposes. What is more, the prospects for bringing more land under the plough are poor. As Geno puts it,

"two thirds of Canada is useless due to climate for any commercial agriculture. Of the remaining one third, the greater part is limited by too much moisture, rockiness, or steepness. We are left with 200,000,000 acres of potentially useful arable land, and a developed area of 174,000,000 acres. Only about 100,000,000 acres is improved land, in crops, fallow or pasture. Only about a quarter of this (24,000,000 acres) is arable land in climatically favoured areas." [39]

So just 24 million acres are suitable, in fact, for growing fruit and vegetables. Another important factor to consider is annual precipitation. In this respect, the Prairies are not at all favoured. As Hammond Scott points out,

"Southern Alberta has the lowest annual precipitation of any region in Canada. Annual precipitation at Medicine Hat is twelve inches per year and at Pincher Creek nineteen inches per year. (However, this is only the average of wide and violent variations from season to season and year to year.) There are desert areas in the world receiving as much precipitation as this." [40]

Again Scott Hammond draws attention to another factor many people overlook: the climate in the south renders much of the precipitation that occurs there useless. Evaporation rates at certain times are extremely high, and unfortunately especially at peak demand periods. [41] And as Geno writes,

"In general, the prospect of increasing productivity through expanding the land base seems poor. The lands that are available are less suitable on either soil or climatic grounds and some of these will not be suitable at all if the Canadian climate is indeed changing." [42]

What is more, Canada is losing land very quickly to soil deterioration, urbanisation and also farm abandonment. Geno estimates that soil losses in the Canadian Prairies are substantially as serious as they are in the US prairies. [43] Warkentin [44] tends to confirm this. The amount of organic matter returned to the soil is about 80 percent of what is removed for dairy-grass, which is sufficient to maintain soil structure, but only 40 percent in the case of intensive crops and 20 percent in the prairies, neither of which are sufficient, especially in the case of the prairies, to prevent a gradual deterioration of stability of structure [45] and hence of the land's food-producing capacity.

The loss of land to urbanization appears to be even more serious in Canada than in the USA, especially as it is occurring on the best agricultural land. As Geno [46] points out, the 24 million acres of climatically favourable land in Canada are also those areas where the major metropolitan conglomerates are situated. (see Figure 4)

It is precisely in these areas that lies any potential whatsoever for increasing Canada's production of fruit and vegetables. Geno considers that at

"a conservative rate of land conversion to non-agricultural uses of 300 acres per 1,000 increase in urban population, and a projected increase in urban population of 17-19 million in 2000 AD, this would mean taking 6.5 million acres of our best land out of production in the next 25 years .. Over 2 million acres of farmland have been lost in Canada over the 1961-71 period, which works out to a fairly high rate of 785 acres of farmland lost per 1000 increase in urban population." [47]

In other words, if current urbanization trends were to continue, the actual land lost in this way by the end of the century would be very considerably higher than Geno estimates.

Nowland [48] estimates that by the year 2001, Ontario will have lost 12 percent of its food producing capacity to urbanization, and Quebec as much as 25 percent. "This figure would be higher", as Warkentin [49] points out, "for fruit and vegetables because it occurs near cities."

Farm abandonment has also been very high in Canada as farming in marginal land and in areas in which large-scale capital-intensive farming is not practicable has ceased to be economic.

Thus on Prince Edward Island, 87 percent of the land was farmed in 1891 while in 1971 this figure had dropped to only 55 percent. [50]

Noble's [51] study of farm abandonment is particularly illuminating. Between 1891 and 1941, 30 percent of the farms whose history he studied had ceased to operate. In Ontario, as a whole, there has been a drop-out of some two and a half million acres of occupied farm land from 1941 to 1956, and over two million acres in Quebec during the same period. This trend is only likely to be reversed with a radical increase in the price of food, or more likely with the abandonment of large scale capital-intensive farming, and a return to traditional methods of husbandry.

Finally, in determining the prospects for increasing the amount of land that could be put under cultivation in Canada, one must consider the effects of possible - indeed, it would increasingly appear - probable - long-term climatic changes.

To these, Canadian agriculture is particularly vulnerable. According to Winstanley [52] a 1 percent fall in temperature, which might well be a feature of the new climatic regime that appears to be establishing itself, could further reduce the land available to agriculture (see Figure 5).

If the prospects for increasing Canada's food production extensively are relatively poor, what are those for increasing it intensively? We have seen why this is unlikely to happen in the US. The same factors conspire to make it unfeasible on any scale in Canada. Geno [53] considers that diminishing returns on "fertiliser and pesticides have been encountered in Canada, as elsewhere, while the increasing price of chemical inputs must render their use even less economic".

As we have seen, Canada cannot afford the loss of land that the further intensification of agriculture would inevitably give rise to, by accelerating soil deterioration, encouraging further farm abandonment and causing more prime agricultural land to be taken over for building motorways, housing estates, factories, parking-lots, shopping centres, etc.

Nor, as we shall see, could Canada afford, for very long, the environmental deterioration, especially to the country's vulnerable water resources that would be caused by further intensification of food production. (Levels of PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyls) in Coho salmon caught in the Great Lakes have been found in excess of the five parts per million regarded as safe for human consumption. (Fish tested in the Credit River. for instance, had levels as high as 23 parts per million.) The Ontario Health Ministry has warned people not to eat Great Lake salmon more than once a week. Pregnant women have been told not to eat any at all. [56])

As North points out, Canada is "short of good subsurface aquifers because so much of our territory is either Precambrian shield or impermeable igneous rock". [54] This means that most of Canada's water resources lie on the surface, "in easily polluted lakes".

Let us not forget how seriously polluted already (very largely with agricultural chemicals) is the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence system, Canada's chief source of fresh water, which the Science Council regards as the country's most serious pollution problem. [22]

For all these reasons, Canada's ability to increase its grain exports and hence contribute to the reduction of world malnutrition and famine must be regarded as considerably lower than is generally thought.

In any case, if Canada is to maintain its industrial society, like the USA, she is likely to become increasingly dependent on food and feed exports to finance imports of high-technology equipment and other manufactured goods - and remarkably soon too, as we shall see, imports of fuel and minerals. This tendency must also be accentuated since Canada's principal method of overcoming its foreign exchange deficit - which is to attract foreign investment - becomes less practicable, both because of the predictable world capital shortage, and also as resistance builds up still further within the country against further extension of the foreign ownership of Canadian resource companies.

This means that, like the US, Canada will not be in a position to provide food to countries where it is required on humanitarian grounds, but rather, will tend to sell it to those that can best afford to pay for it - which largely means the already-industrialised countries, and those in possession of key resources, such as oil.

It should now be clear that Canada is not the limitless cornucopia that many people think it is. Nor for that matter can it serve as a limitless dumping ground for the world's surplus population. Its carrying capacity is, in fact, very considerably smaller than people have thought in the past.

(Many past estimates appear quite ludicrous in the light of the above considerations. Consider for instance that G. C. McGree, MP for Vancouver, believed only a few decades ago that British Columbia and Alberta alone could support 100 million people. Sir Donald Mann believed Canada needed 150 million people. Griffith Taylor, a famous Canadian geographer, stated in 1936 that the Prairie Provinces alone could support a population of 90 million, at European standards of living. Stephen Leacock, in his book, Economic Prosperity in the British Empire, stated that Canadian resources would support a population of 250 million.) [57]

Immigration

In the last 30 years 4 million people have entered Canada - that is about 130,000 a year. [58]This means that, during this period, immigration was directly responsible for an overall population growth-rate of more than 0.56 percent which alone would cause the population to double in about 125 years.

It must not be forgotten too, that the fertility of the new immigrant population is higher than that of the native Canadians, which is now at its lowest point since the depression of the early 1930s.

It must also not be forgotten that the immigrants tend to concentrate in the cities, where their impact on amenities and on the environment is greatest. Indeed, the rural migration of the native population to the cities has been radically reduced, as pointed out by ZPG and inter-urban flow appears to be biased away from the larger cities to the medium-sized urban centres. The only continuing strong component of urban population growth is immigration. [59]

This is borne out by the fact that, in the period 1961 - 71, immigration accounted for half of Toronto's growth, one third of Vancouver's and a quarter of Montreal's. During 1941 - 71, immigration was responsible for 31 percent of Ontario's population growth and internal migration for 13 percent. [60]

Immigration, therefore, not only increases food requirements, but by causing further loss of land to urbanisation, it must further reduce the country's food-producing capacity. What is more, the contribution that immigration can make towards alleviating world malnutrition and starvation is negligible. World population is currently increasing by 70 million people a year. It is difficult to see bow allowing 130,000 a year into the country - less than 0.02 percent of the total does more than ease the conscience of a few Canadians increasingly ashamed of living in what is still - for the moment at least - a land of plenty, in an increasingly deprived world.

It must also be realised that the net effect of migration from poor countries with a low level of consumption to rich countries with a much higher level of consumption, is correspondingly to increase the migrants' impact on their natural environment. Indeed, an extra 130,000 Canadians probably have the same environmental impact as an extra 3 million Africans or Asians.

If immigration is to be limited - as is proposed by the Survival Institute of Canada and ZPG - so must all other measures to be taken for reducing population growth, at least so as to stabilise it (as both these organisations suggest) at about 30 million by the end of the century, and preferably, at a still lower level. No efforts should then be spared to reduce it progressively to a sustainable level, i.e. one that can be supported with minimal environmental deterioration.

Among other things, this may mean, as ZPG suggest developing the sort of economy that will not have to depend on importing skilled or unskilled workers to make it function; [61] nor, it might be added, on technologies that are as environmentally destructive as those we make use of today. It is in this way that Canada can make the greatest contribution to the solution of the problems that confront us, both by the example it would set other countries, and also by preventing the further deterioration of 7 percent of this planet's terrestrial surface - much of which is still largely unspoilt.

Forecasts of Transport Requirements

Forecasts of transport requirements in Canada, as in the UK, also tend to be exclusively based on projections of current trends, which in the light of current developments, cannot conceivably be maintained. For instance, the inevitable fuel shortages of the next decades do not seem to have affected projections of the number of automobiles entering into service, nor have the equally inevitable capital shortages that have already led to drastic reductions in motorway construction plans. [62]

Nor for that matter, have such factors influenced Canadian air traffic forecasts. As Budden notes, the forecasts figuring in Transport Canada's new release of 21 April 1972, Passenger and Cargo Forecasts including Methodology, are based on the assumption that the past rate of growth in air travel will continue into the future. Thus, in 1970, 6.3 million passengers were accommodated and by the year 2000 this is expected to increase to 61.9 million. Such trends must inevitably come to an end, for, as Budden points out,

"Air travel requires land for airports, fuel for consumption, air to burn fuel and scarce metals to build aircraft. All of these ingredients are available in limited quantities on this earth." [63]

Urbanization

Also implicit to the Federal Government's apparent view of the future is that current global urbanization trends can be projected to the end of the century. This assumption also underlay the discussions at the recent UN Habitat Conference in Vancouver.

In the pamphlet issued on this occasion by the British Government's Department of the Environment, it is categorically stated that the world, by the end of the century will be (not may be) totally urbanized. The very possibility of a reversal of this disastrous trend does not even seem to have occurred to the scientists of the British Department of the Environment. Yet if they had taken the trouble to examine what would actually be involved in "totally urbanizing" the world in 25 years, they might indeed have realised that, for all practical purposes, such an enterprise is simply not possible.

Surprisingly enough, they themselves concede that it will mean building as many houses in the next 25 years as have been built since the beginning of the historical era, but this does not appear to daunt them. They seem to regard it as just another challenge, which man, with his ‘limitless ingenuity' to use a well-worn phrase, will be able to meet, as he always has those of the past.

Where, however, will this gigantic enterprise - the land, the water, the timber, the metals and fuel with which to power it and the capital to finance it? Also, let us not forget that cities are built with resources extracted from the countryside; but can the countryside, from which we must also derived our food, support further depredations on quite this scale?

Have the DOE scientists also considered the massive costs of supporting a totally urbanized world population on a global scale? Of providing it with capital intensive jobs, of transporting food from where it is grown to the vast asphalt jungles where it will be consumed, the cost of evacuating and dispersing the huge quantities of waste products that the cities must generate, of maintaining the roads and motorways, the sewers, the hospitals, the schools, the universities, the prisons, the de-alcoholisation centres, and the vast state-welfare institutions needed to sustain the increasingly alienated city masses?

It should also be unnecessary to point out, that, in to what extent we are failing, even today, to provide such amenities, and thereby to accommodate present urbanization pressures.

It should also be unnecessary to point out, that, in spite of the massive and very costly conference in Vancouver, no remotely feasible plan has been formulated for dealing with the problems already caused by industry in any major country, let alone on a global scale.

What then is it assumed will happen? Is it really believed that the governments of the world, aided and abetted by the international agencies, will simply go ahead systematically manufacturing misery and squalor on an ever more massive scale until it encompasses the greater part of humanity?

Is it not more likely that something will collapse, somewhere along the line, that one at least of the many aberrant conditions that have rendered possible this fatal process will suddenly cease to be satisfied?

Self-fulfilling Predictions

If we continue insisting that the future will be like the past, it is also that we wish to justify present activities to which we are committed psychologically and also financially? As Taylor points out,

"The forecasters are often at the same time the planners, and often too they have decided in advance to undertake projects such as Pickering Airport and ‘Design for Development' and must rationalise such decisions by forecasting a need for them." [64]

Once such projects have been undertaken, the predicted urbanization and economic growth will have been accommodated, thereby rendering it that much more likely to occur. In this way the original forecasts will have been self-fulfilling. In Taylor's words,

"they are implicitly based on the decision to provide the public capital and urban facilities necessary to service the forecasted growth, otherwise the growth would not occur."

There is, in fact, another factor involved. The different aspects of the urbanization process tend to be examined in isolation from each other. If they were regarded together, as Kenneth Watt [65] has attempted to do for the US, and as we shall also attempt - in very rough outline - in this report, then we must quickly come face to face with reality. For one thing, the total cost of urbanization at a national, let alone a global level, cannot conceivably be met for very long even in the US, let alone in many other countries, with much shakier foundations such as Canada and the UK.

Kenneth Watt [66] has shown just how much cheaper it is to sustain a small population in small towns and villages than in large cities. He shows, for instance, that the cost of public welfare in towns of less than 10,000 people is about $12 per capita, while in large cities such as New York it is $192. The cost of police protection in the small town is $5.70 and in a large city $52. The difference is also appreciable, though not quite so dramatic, for education, fire, and direct general expenditure.

J. C. Kapur [67] does the same exercise for a Third World Country. He and all other serious students of the socio-economic problems facing India can only see their solution in terms of a programme of radical decentralisation. For one thing, as Kapur points out, the capital necessary to provide just one job in Bombay will provide 22 in the villages.

People until recently have been required in the cities as necessary components of the production-consumption process to which everything else has been subordinated. Today, this process is saturated with people. It requires no more. It cannot, in fact, even absorb those that have already been introduced into it. Over and above the number it can make use of, people are random to it. They constitute ‘noise' or, ‘pollution', since they serve but to interfere with its proper functioning. This means that the state must care for them - and that capital must thereby be diverted from activities that contribute to the perpetuation of the production-consumption process, to others that are largely parasticial to it.

If these costs be taken into account, it is not difficult to show that urbanization has, among other things, become uneconomic and that, on economic grounds alone, systematic de-urbanization is required. In fact, it can be shown that in many countries de-urbanization is the only alternative to bankruptcy, social breakdown and famine in the very short-term. It is not surprising, in fact, that such a policy has been adopted by a number of governments that are not ideologically committed to fostering the lifestyle that goes with urbanization.

Thus, in China, urban migration appears to have ceased, and as many as 8 million young people have left the cities for the countryside, the population of Shanghai itself having fallen in the last decade by 500,000 to 5.6 million.

The same trend is occurring in South East Asia with the communist victories in South Vietnam and Cambodia, though in the latter case de-urbanization is apparently occurring with considerable brutality. Thus, it is said that the population of Phnom Pen has been reduced from 2 million to 20,000 - and according to some reports to an even smaller figure.

The Government of South Vietnam has announced its intention of moving 10 million people from the cities to the countryside. Sooner or later, other countries will probably follow their example.

In the meantime, a trend towards de-urbanization is discernible even in Western industrial countries. Mainly as a result of ethnic problems and the associated escalation of the crime rate in the major cities of the US, there has been a systematic exodus of the middle class which has had a positive feedback effect. Offices and factories follow in the wake of this exodus, with a resulting decline of job opportunities in the cities (by more than 10 percent in the four years between 1970 and 1974 in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, and by more than 18 percent in Detroit and St. Louis over the same period). [68]

The consequent increased expenditure on welfare has to be met from a reduced tax base, putting the city government into financial difficulties. As a result, the cities are simply being run down. In fact, some city areas, where crime and general dilapidation are particularly bad, are simply being abandoned. in 1973, the City government in Philadelphia was actually selling abandoned houses for one dollar apiece - at the time there were 30,000 of them. [69]

In general, amenities are being eliminated, museums closed down, the police force reduced, teachers and security guards in schools laid off - all of which must render life there still more unattractive and accelerate the trend towards yet further de-urbanization.

In fact, in the US since 1970, the number of people living in big cities is down 1.9 percent, those living in suburbs up 8.4 percent and those living in small towns and rural areas up 5.0 percent. in the eastern half of the US, practically every large city is losing population, those in which the trend is most pronounced being Minneapolis (down 12.0 percent) and St. Louis (down 10.3 percent). [70]

The notion that the problems facing US cities are a specifically American one is a terrible illusion. The same situation must occur to a varying degree throughout the industrial world, as the environment provided by modern conurbations comes to satisfy, ever less adequately, man's biological, social and aesthetic needs.

The presence in many US cities of large Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican minorities, which find it even more difficult to adapt to urban and industrial living than does the mainstream society and tend to form a depressed proletariat at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, is of course an aggravating factor - especially in a society whose members are exposed from infancy to egalitarian values.

Immigration is leading to precisely the same problems in the UK, contrary to all the predictions of the experts who have continually evoked all sorts of arguments to rationalise their desire to show that British cities would be exempt from the problems that are devastating the cities of the US.

The signs are too, that the same problems are beginning to occur in Canadian cities - in particular Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. As large cities in the US, and in general throughout the industrial world, become increasingly run-down and abandoned by all who can afford to do so, they will be left to ever more demoralised slum-dwellers, living off an ever more bankrupt welfare system, and ever more addicted to crime, vandalism and various forms of retreatism -such as alcoholism, drugs, etc. - that permit people to escape, albeit temporarily, from an increasingly intolerable social environment.

What solution is there to such a problem? There is only one: the slum-dwellers must be moved out and efforts must be made to integrate them into smaller communities that provide a physical and social environment that better satisfies basic human requirements than does a modern conurbation. In other words the only solution to the urban problem is de-urbanization.

De-urbanization, as already intimated in this report, will be necessary for other reasons as well: firstly so as to reduce the consumption of fuel and mineral resources, secondly to reduce pollution levels, and thirdly, as we shall see, to reduce the loss of agricultural land. (Geno [71] points out that attitudes are changing rapidly. For instance, the Alberta Land Use Forum gathered over 450 written and oral presentations to the forum members - and the most often represented theme was the importance of preserving agricultural land from further development pressures.)

Changing attitudes will partly facilitate this process. Disillusionment with the urban, industrial way of life is setting in very rapidly among middle-class youth in industrial countries, and will probably soon spread to the working classes. A new ethic is developing which stresses such things as natural foods, self-sufficiency, small-scale enterprise, the rural way of life, community living and a search for cultural identity. There is every reason to suppose that these are not just fads but the necessary components of an emerging post-industrial culture.

In reality, we have little choice. De-urbanization will occur whether we like it or not, for among other things, we can no longer afford our cities. Either they are phased out or they will die a natural death - and this would be very much more painful.

Economic Growth

Population growth, increased food production, urbanization, the substitution of capital inputs for human labour - these are the necessary components of economic growth. To suggest, as I have done, that all these trends are going into reverse implies that the continued increase in the material consumption that has marked the last 150 years can no longer be maintained and hence that the ‘march of progress' itself - at least as it is defined today - is coming to an end.

Needless to say the implications of such a development are immense. Among other things if economic growth is to be no more, then capital will cease to be available to provide material and institutional solutions to people‘s problems. Since no government can admit to its electors that it cannot solve their problems, a totally new range of solutions must be found - and to provide its rationale a new interpretation is required of man‘s relationship with his physical and social environment.

This means a revolution in our most basic assumptions. Secretly, most people know that this revolution is necessary, that present attitudes to basic issues are archaic. The events of the last four years should by now have dispelled any doubts as to the validity of the thesis of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth and of A Blueprint for Survival. What is more, they should have made it amply evident that these limits will manifest themselves much sooner than the authors of these documents envisaged, in fact, that they are already beginning to do so.

Maurice Strong recently said in a speech in Ottawa that the energy crisis, the rapid development of the environment issue, and the chronic shortages of food are no longer isolated events, "but the harbingers of a major transition in human affairs - comparable in effect to the discovery of fire, the advent of agriculture and the industrial revolution." [72]

This major transition is unlikely to be directly triggered off by resource shortages, pollution, social breakdowns and the growing gap between population and food supply as suggested in Limits to Growth. Their effect is to render conditions ever less suitable to the industrial process and a symptom of this is the dramatic increase in the cost of maintaining our industrial society. In fact, it seems increasingly clear that it is inflation and capital shortage that will directly bring the industrial society to its knees and bring about the major transition that Maurice Strong refers to. Since there is nothing in current economic theory that suggests why this should occur, it may be worth reexamining this theory in the light of the problems we face today.

Part Two.