Garrett Hardin bemoaning India’s 600 million population in 1974

Hardin is one of the most widely-read twentieth-century intellectuals, most known for his two pieces “The Tragedy of the Commons” and “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” The two are intimately related, as one diagnoses a fundamental problem with resources and the other draws policy conclusions.

A key quotation, in which Hardin states his view of the problem with India:

“India, for example, now has a population of 600 million, which increases by 15 million each year. This population already puts a huge load on a relatively impoverished environment. The country’s forests are now only a small fraction of what they were three centuries ago and floods and erosion continually destroy the insufficient farmland that remains. Every one of the 15 million new lives added to India’s population puts an additional burden on the environment, and increases the economic and social costs of crowding. However humanitarian our intent, every Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for subsequent generations. If rich countries make it possible, through foreign aid, for 600 million Indians to swell to 1.2 billion in a mere 28 years, as their current growth rate threatens, will future generations of Indians thank us for hastening the destruction of their environment? Will our good intentions be sufficient excuse for the consequences of our actions? …”

The article’s conclusion:

“Without a true world government to control reproduction and the use of available resources, the sharing ethic of the spaceship is impossible. For the foreseeable future, our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be. Posterity will be satisfied with nothing less.”

A half-century later, I note that India’s population has passed the 1.2 billion mark that Hardin feared and is at 1.4 billion. Further, those Indians are living at a higher standard of living, including a historically-unprecedented lifting of hundreds of millions out of abject poverty. Even further, India’s forest coverage is increasing, according to official reports.

So a question: Is there a serious rethinking of Hardin’s argument occurring among intellectuals and policy makers — or is it still the prevailing Doom! and Control them! orthodoxy?

(And I wonder how many of those 800 million additional Indians have grown up to become Hardinesque intellectuals advocating policies that would have made their own lives non-existent.)

Source: “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Psychology Today, September 1974.

Related: My video-lecture discussion of the Tragedy of the Commons (or transcript here).