Abstract
One of the objections to the report to the Club of Rome, mentioned by Aurelio Peccei and Manfred Siebker in a paper written at the end of 1972, is: ‘LIMITS predicts hell in 50 years. Hell is already present on earth in places such as Calcutta’. Peccei and Siebker offer no further comment on this reaction. (1)
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Notes and List of references
Aurelio Peccei and Manfred Siebker, ‘Point and Counterpoint: a Summary of the Debate over The Limits to Growth’, in: IDOC International, North American Edition, no. 52, April 1973.
Development and Environment, Report submitted by a Panel of Experts, June 1971, 1. 4. (Founex report).
Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth, 1972, p. 295.
Barbara Ward writes in The Economist (27th May, 1972): ‘In concrete terms, the next American baby will make 500 times more claims on the earth’s resources than any child born in India or Chad or Mongolia’.
Two Dutch books on applied ecology are: Biosfeer en mens, Centrum voor Landbouwpublikaties en Landbouwdokumentatie, Wageningen, 1970; and Het verstoorde evenwicht, publ. Oosthoek, 1970.
Cf. also the well-known popular work on this matter by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humain, Paris, 1955.
G. Picht, Die Demontage der Natur - ökologische Krise und industrielle Planung, in: Evangelische Kommentare, April 1972.
Stanford Biology Study Group, A Legacy of Our Presence, The Destruction of Indochina, 1970. This publication presents an alarming survey of the two main environmental destruction programmes used by the USA during the latter years of the Vietnam war. The three-fold aim of this campaign, a crime against environment and man was, according to the American army, to starve out the civilian population and soldiers who remained in the regions controlled by the Viet Cong, to prevent ambushes along heavily forested roads and rivers and to expose the headquarters of the Revolutionary Army and its supply routes.
Barbara Ward, op. cit., p. 285. Her definition of ‘technosphere’ is: ’The constructed world order of technological innovation, investment flows and commercial exchanges’.
Gunnar Myrdal points out this possibility in his article ‘Economics of an improved environment’, in: International Technical Cooperation Centre Review, vol. 2, no. 2 ( 6 ) April 1973. Whether or not this effect appears depends of course on the allied substitution-elasticity.
Founex report, op. cit., Chapter 4, passim.
Surendra J. Patel, The cost of the technological dependence Ceres, March-April 1973.
Patel, op. cit., 4.13.
Stephen Hymer, The Multinational Corporation and the Law of uneven Development. Center Paper, no. 181, Yale University, 1972.
Gunnar Myrdal, op. cit., p. 29. Myrdal’s estimates are very vague. They do, however, fit in with the projections which Tomas Frejka gives in his book The Future of Population Growth, 1973.
V. M. Dandekar and N. Rath, ‘Poverty in India’, in:Economic and Political Weekly, vol. VI, no. 1/2, Jan. 1971.
See: R. Dumont, l’Utopie ou la Mort, p. 26.
A translation of Harry Cleaver’s article, together with some other critical articles on the Green Revolution, can be found in Nesbic-bulletin, vol. 7, no. 8, Sept. 1972, ‘De Groene Revolutie: katalysator van de onderontwikkeling’.
Harry Cleaver has thus joined an already sizeable company, which includes Mansholt and Dumont. With Cleaver however, the accent is clearly on the criticism of the capitalist organizational structure of the Green Revolution. In his opinion, this causes the ecological risks to be much greater than strictly necessary, technically speaking. See article in Nesbic-bulletin, referred to in no. 18.
Lester Brown, The Environmental Consequences of Man’s Quest for Food, in: Peter Albertson and Margery Barnett (eds.), Managing the Planet, 1972, p. 46.
R. Dumont, l’Utopie ou la Mort, p. 30.
Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth, p. 224.
It must be noted here that the organization of these kinds of public works is very difficult. It appears that even in China, serious mistakes were made in the years 1958–1960, and it is only because of the extent of the work that was indeed successful, that the ultimate balance of the results during these years probably tends to be positive. See, e. g. E. L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism, 1970.
Data derived from R. Dumont, op. cit., pp. 33–34.
Data derived from Lester Brown, op. cit. See also, Robert Heilbronner, ‘Ecological Armageddon’, in: Johnson and Hardesty (eds.), Economic Growth versus the Environment, 1971.
Science, 10 Dec. 1971.
Heilbronner, op. cit. (note 25).
Lester Brown, op. cit., p. 43.
J. J. Logue, ‘What is the ocean problem?’, in: World Federalist, World edition, March/April 1972.
The Economist, 1 Sept. 1973.
Data on the mercury poisoning affair in Japan are derived from Barbara Ward and René Dubos, op. cit.; J. J. Mulckhuyse, ‘Moeten wij de oceaan degraderen tot vuilnisbelt?’, in: Inter– mediair, vol. 7, no.. 39; Michael Harwood, ’Stervende Ocea– nen’, in: Volkskrant, 26–10–1971 and De Tijd, 16–10–1973.
J. J. Mulckhuyse, loc. cit.
R. Dumont, op. cit., p. 10.
R. Dumont, op. cit., p. 148.
R. Dumont, ibid.
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Terhal, P.H.J.J. (1976). Mondial Aspects of Environmental Problems. In: Nijkamp, P. (eds) Environmental economics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4907-7_8
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