One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future

  • Paul R. Ehrlich &
  • Anne H. Ehrlich
Island Press: 2004. 430 pp. $27 1559638796 | ISBN: 1-559-63879-6
Credit: CHRISTIAN DARKIN

What, you might say, yet another book from Paul and Anne Ehrlich on the environment, population and consumption, and about how humans are grossly degrading Earth's life-support systems? Can the Ehrlichs have anything new and different to offer about the crises they have been trumpeting for decades? Well, they certainly do in this latest book, which is full of pioneering analyses and innovative insights.

The book's initial purpose is to present our predicament in terms of the environmental ruin, fostered by political hubris and citizens' myopia, that overtook the ancient Assyrian capital Nineveh. The disaster was poetically exemplified by Rudyard Kipling's “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.”

After this stage-setting, the Ehrlichs review our dire environmental prospect, focusing on shortages of food and energy, biodepletion, loss of ecosystem services, and grand-scale pollution, among a litany of related ills. Then they assert that there are two principal drivers of our predicament: too many people and too much consumption. All these topics are dealt with in detail and with evidence piled on evidence. Certain sections could have been compressed, as they have been rehearsed on many occasions already — even if not everyone has been listening.

Parts of the book are a vigorous critique of US President George W. Bush and his policies — and, by extension, of the ultra-right community that seems to dominate American society. Bush often reiterates his father's thesis, as enunciated, for example, at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when Bush senior declared, with reference to his country's fixation on fossil fuels: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” Both presidents Bush have asserted that a shift away from fossil fuels would knock deep dents in the US economy. And both have failed to see that it is precisely the fixation on fossil fuels that will, courtesy of global warming, transform the American way of life from top to bottom. I suspect that people of the future will not regard today's spot price of oil or the latest sales figures for sports utility vehicles as the key statistics of our time, rather that the United States, with 4.6% of the world's population, produces 24% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.

The Ehrlichs deal several times with the absurdity, if not the arrogance, of the presidential proclamations, pointing out that not even the United States, however powerful it may be, can insulate itself from links with the climate. The winds carry no passports and Americans are becoming, first and foremost, citizens of the global community, even though many of them prefer to proclaim their ‘exceptionalism’. They epitomize the dictum that, first, no country can support an indefinite increase either in its number of people or in its consumption of environmental resources, let alone both; and second, most mainstream policies of most governments assume, on the contrary, that they can. This is true of most nations, to a degree, but the United States is in a league of its own.

The environmental crisis has been well covered in the Ehrlichs' earlier books, so what is new and different about this one? Here the Ehrlichs offer us much more on the hard-nosed solutions needed to expand society's understanding of our environmental travails and the institutional inertia that ensues from ignorance (or ignore-ance). Instead of lengthy lists of obvious safeguard measures such as switching off unnecessary lights (even while leaving computers and microwaves on standby), the Ehrlichs take us through the systems, political and otherwise, that we deploy to run our societies. They highlight the cultural disconnection between what most people think is going on (the stock market, say) and the environmental breakdowns that will eventually prove much more important. The technological underpinnings of our societies have far outstripped our cultural understanding. “A 747 jetliner embodies much more information...than all of the DNA packed into the pilots' cells...The transition to a state of ubiquitous cultural ignorance has occurred in an evolutionary twinkling of an eye, and humanity is having great difficulty dealing with it.” This applies particularly to those technologies that promise much but inflict severe harm on the human cause.

The book is not only about the usual environmental problems. It tackles sources of problems, such as cultural roadblocks, group (mis-)behaviour, contagion of attitudes, “stickiness” of thinking, social discontinuities, special interests and other forms of social rigidity and perversity. The Ehrlichs also present plenty of solutions through their assessments of collective action, optimized governance, pre-emptive initiatives, ethical imperatives and huge changes in personal and community outlooks. This material makes up the bulk of the book, in contrast with the Ehrlichs' earlier writings. Here they deal with issues that deserve intensive analysis but receive comparatively little research.

Not surprisingly, the Ehrlichs suggest that the Millennium Development Goals proposed by the United Nations in 2000 — to tackle malnutrition, child mortality, female illiteracy and water shortages, for example — be supplemented by a Millennium Assessment of Human Behaviour. Such a measure could be founded on the idea that we live at a time when what is idealistic is swiftly converging with what is realistic.

This listing of the principal components of the Ehrlichs' message may sound a trifle earnest, but the book's spirit is saved by the jaunty style that informs the text. The authors are masters at finishing paragraphs with one-liners, such as: “We have utterly changed our world; now we'll have to see if we can change our ways.” Better still, the style suggests that the authors are not a whit dispirited by their message; rather, it implies that they sense not only profound problems but superb opportunities. The Ehrlichs have often been called the ultimate pessimists, but their book is, frankly, heartening.

In short, they have spread their conceptual net much wider than before. The book is decidedly new and different. And as a final bonus, it contains more than 700 references and 1,000 notes.