Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 53
political systems that are frankly authoritarian. . . . Leviathan may
be mitigated but not evaded” (Ophuls, 1992, p. 216). Heilbroner
and Ophuls believed that survival in times of ecological scarcity
would require a great deal of sacrifi ce and a lot less consumption,
and doubted that the public could, on its own, discipline its appetites
suffi ciently to avoid disaster. James Lovelock agrees, saying,
“We may need restrictions, rationing and the call to service that
were familiar in wartime and in addition suffer for a while a loss
of freedom. We will need a small permanent group of strategists
who, as in wartime, will try to out-think our Earthly enemy and
be ready for the surprises bound to come” (2006, p. 153).
There are good reasons, however, why the case for authoritarianism,
in particular that made by Hardin, is not wholly convincing.
The history of common property resources, for example,
reveals that often they were well managed for centuries until
outside forces upset the balance of cultural and social restraints
on individual behavior. In the English case from which he drew
the analogy, the common grazing areas disappeared not due to
mismanagement but because they were seized by aristocrats over
several centuries of enclosure. Their aim was a more “effi cient”
and profi table agriculture, and they were willing to displace tens
of thousands of smallholders and subsistence farmers whose suffering
was justifi ed on the grounds that it supposedly served the
larger good. On the scale of history, our experience with coercive
governments in general is dismal. The response of the Soviet
Union to environmental deterioration, for example, ranged from
awful to abysmal. In that and other cases, the reasons include the
infl exibility of bureaucracies, the lack of agility in changing circumstances,
obliviousness to societal needs, and the many pathologies
of unaccountable power that tend to corrupt absolutely (Orr
and Hill, 1978).
Still, Hardin, Heilbroner, and Ophuls have a point that has
become more urgent with the passing decades. Even if we hold
CO levels below the threshold of runaway change, we have
2