North America and east to Russia, and to later include Japan and Australasia along
with a few oil-enriched outliers.
This ‘industrial’ revolution generated wealth from the exploi-
tation of natural resources, and opened the way to a widespread
‘civilizing’ (mainly Christianizing and Westernizing) of indige-
nous peoples. Social injustices arose from the duping of first-
nation peoples, along with environmentally prejudicial forms of
selective trade expansion, now thoroughly documented.^3 The
consumerism equated in turn with resource capture, resource
exploitation, and the abandonment to nature of unprofitable
wastes and toxins. In writing of this in The Wealth of Nations(1776)
Smith laid the foundations of contemporary social, particularly
economic, science. The focus was essentially British first,
European second. Then came the New World where France and
Britain were sorting out territorial claims in North America,
whilst the likes of Captain Cook were reporting favourably on
settlement prospects in New Zealand and Australia. There was,
at the time, no conscious plan for industrialization; it was simply
ordained.
In Smith’s time – the late eighteenth century – the socio-cultural
perspective of the then industrialized nations was derived
principally from Judaic and Christian belief, perceiving human
creatures as superior torather than as an integral part ofnature.
This sense of moral superiority and righteous consumer lust was
ordained by God, upheld as the Creator of Earth for humankind
to occupy and make perfect; and on the surface of which, in
accordance with the received view, He had in His beneficence placed the
plant and animal species. Judaic-Christian humankind was guided by the
Scriptures to use its God-given human skills to fashion ‘civilization’, a condition
assumed, without much questioning, to be a proper improvement upon wild
‘nature’.^4
Thomas Malthus, stimulated by the findings of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham,
and William Godwin (the utilitarians), published in 1798 a series of reactionary
essays on population. The immense power and rapacity of the collective industrial
‘machine’ worried Malthus; and in An Essay on Population written when the
North American mid-west ‘breadbasket’ had been barely explored, he envisaged
the approach of an end to the further expansion of agricultural production.
Population was forging ahead at compound rates of interest, at a time when it was
believed that food production could only be increased by arithmetic additions; and
to Malthus the known last frontiers for grain production as he understood the sit-
uation had already been put to the plough. Christian philosophers of that era had
a vision of the earth’s vitality falling away as time passed. What they did notreckon
with was the geographical abundance of the New World, with not much more than
a hint at that time of Australasia’s pastoral potential; nor did they envisage the
multiplier power of agricultural technologies yet to be discovered.
Charter for Conservation with Development 75Adam Smith’s philosophy
in summary! ‘In the
beginning was Smith, and
Smith told us not to
worry about economic
growth. Left alone
people would sort
things out, do what they
do best, make
appropriate choices to
maximise return. The
market would take care
of the rest, rewarding
reason and quickness
and knowledge and
punishing the opposite.
All of this, moreover,
would work to the
general advantage,
augmenting wealth and
leading nations through
a natural progression of
stages from agriculture
and industry to
commerce. Long live the
invisible hand.’
David Landes, ‘Rich
Country, Poor Country’,
New Republic, 1989