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The Third Revolution by Paul Harrison, IB Tauris, pp 359, Pounds sterling
16.95

Publicised as a book about the terrible fate awaiting humanity from
population growth, Paul Harrison’s book is much more. It is more perceptive,
more compassionate and better written than almost anything published on
the topic – an exercise in the high standards of journalism that Harrison
has displayed before in works such as Inside the Third World.

Two-thirds of the book is a tightly argued analysis of the role that
population growth plays in the environmental perils facing communities across
our planet. The other third, interspersed with the main text, comprises
reportage from hot spots – from the doomed rainforests of Madagascar, from
the outer islands of Bangladesh that are the first port of call for cyclones
and from the West African desert margins of Burkina Faso.

Harrison writes in short sentences and paragraphs. This is not the tick
of a former newspaper journalist, but precision. If he can say in eight
words what it takes others 80 lines, he will do it and move on.

His thinking is rarely shallow. Unlike others who rail against profligate
procreation, Harrison refuses to rehash Malthusian determinism – a ‘baleful
theorem’, he says, from a man who in later years ‘became one of the first
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He also attacks another popular nostrum of doom-mongers, Garrett Hardin’s
‘tragedy of the commons’. This suggests that people will inevitably overuse
commonly owned resources, such as pastures or rainforests, ultimately destroying
them. This ‘bleak and cynical vision . . . in practice doesn’t usually
work out this way’, he says.

Harrison’s case is that fast population growth is usually the driving
force behind environmental degradation. He fairly portrays and then argues
against alternative arguments. In particular, he challenges the Left’s argument
that social and economic inequality are more important causes.

He argues well on the evidence of particular cases, but the general
case is not proven. The Left must be right about Brazil. This, by most standards,
is a heavily underpopulated country with vast natural wealth and, say recent
reports, the greatest gap between rich and poor on Earth. Surely, the unfettered
ransacking of resources by the rich, the theft of land from the poor, and
the scrabbling for survival among the dispossessed lie behind Brazil’s ecological
carnage?

And how about the Indian Himalayas, where soil erosion worsens because
the vast hill terraces are crumbling away through lack of people to farm
them? Too many men have left the fields to earn wages in the cities. Isn’t
local underpopulation the problem here?

Harrison does not dismiss these arguments. But he says that ‘it is through
population that inequality and expropriation work their impact on the environment’.
Thus in Bangladesh, population growth pushes people into the margins of
society. ‘Once marginalised, they become more vulnerable to dispossession
by the wealthy.’

The danger of this line of argument is that, however unwittingly, ‘it’s
the poor what gets the blame’, and who will bear the brunt of any solutions.
There is plenty of evidence that social and economic insecurity among the
poor, particularly among poor women, is a prime and perfectly rational
reason for having large families.

Efforts to persuade or enforce smaller families may undermine one of
the best defence systems that the poor have against the vicissitudes of
fate and the rich – lots of children. If you don’t tackle social injustice
first, then population policies may enforce another cycle of disadvantage
on the poor.

That said, one great virtue of this book is that Harrison disentangles
complex debates and provides first-hand evidence in a way that allows the
reader to think. And in later chapters, he offers a dose of optimism in
his discussion of the possibilities for transforming society into a ‘sustainable
world’ – the third revolution of the title.

Harrison is a million miles from the demagogic utterances of some campaigners
on population issues, such as the Duke of Edinburgh (though not his son).
Nor does he offer the spurious certainty implied by computer print-outs
of our future as offered by the Club of Rome. His approach, born of a journalist’s
desire to see and hear for himself, is much more human.

Confronted by Zafindraibe, a farmer from Madagascar burning down the
refuge for the last 400 golden bamboo lemurs on Earth, Harrison takes a
fine photograph, used on the cover of the book. Then he listens and reports
on the farmer’s predicament, and explains in print that ‘the farmers are
victims rather than criminals’ and that ‘to have any hope of controlling
the destruction, you have to look at it from the village point of view’.

It is a shame that the village point of view was that heard least in
the halls of the Earth Summit in June. This book makes a good antidote to
the news from Rio.