Here’s an account of the passages that I found particularly interesting in Steven Stoll’s The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth.

I’m interesting in it because Stoll uses John Etzler, the subject of my first narrative chapter, to explain and epitomize the kind of Enlightenment thinking that he feels led us into the insanity of thinking that there are no biophysical limits in our world. As Stoll put his take on Etzler to me in an email, “He’s the madman we all became.” Which is a great line.

You can tell by the length of these quotes that I handtyped into Wordpress that I think this book is incredibly worthwhile. Be enticed by what’s here, but buy the book itself at Amazon. You won’t regret it.

Here we go.

5: People who sense dependable subsistence do certain hopeful things—they marry and have children, increase their consumption and thus cause an outward shift in the entire economy, amplifying commerce, employment and demand—in a positive feedback loop promising that most fundamental of human desires: a more durable existence. My concern is that this loop exists in its own imaginary world.

7: Like Etzler, we expect more of everything, if only in the passive reassurance that the leading economic indicators gained in the last quarter and that the jobless rate fell. We tacitly assume—simply by the way we live—that the transfer of matter from environments into the economy is not bounded by any condition of those environments and that energy for powering our cars, dehumidifers, leaf blowers, and iPods will always exist. We think of growth as progress.

17: Before [John, author of The Pilgrim's Progress] Bunyan, progress mostly referred to movement across a landscape or through the country. After Bunyan, it referred to the movement of the soul through the labyrinth of society to the sacred geography of heaven. The sense of movement took on moral direction… For centuries the natural environment had no particular role to play in salvation, but that was about to change… Spinoza ripped a hole in the keel of the old-time religion and nature came pouring in.

18: Progress became material.

19: Progress in the final stage took a different form than it had before: constant expansion. Society would never again evolve into something else; it would just get bigger and bigger, adding new markets, new territory, and more people into its benevolent vortex.

19: The theory of stages presented things the way things must have happened, probably happened, should have happened. Its central assumption, that history has direction and meaning, originated with the messianic faith of the Torah and the New Testament.

20: Things came together. An older metaphysical progress married a burgeoning productive capacity, creating a powerful ideology of growth—driven by the myth of human perfection and grounded in the precise observation of economic reality. Etzler is a nexus for the complex of ideas that boiled and simmered into a full-fledged conception of material progress.

21: There is something deeply pragmatic about Etzler’s schemes and something fundamentally utopian about economic growth, and vice versa. They share the same qualities, and Etzler illuminates them and almost every important materialist idea during the time in which he lived.

21: What happens when we read plenty into environments that have the same kinds of limits our own bodies do? What does it mean that wealth in capitalist societies must be thought of as endless if the system is to avoid contradictions that might destroy it?

22: Discoveries in the physical world gave hope to some that the Celestial City might be built, that Eden might be planted.

27: Philosophers as far back as Pluto described ideas and social structures as eternal, the truth as unchanging. Hegel blew that to bits and ignited his audience: everything is becoming, emerging, evolving through the winnowing process of historical conflict and the development of the mind.

30: For Hegel, all lines ran parallel, with thought and history—in fact, everything in existence—pointing toward the same fantastic culmination in absolute freedom, absolute knowledge, absolute goodness.

31: Humans could morally regard what htey found in environments as means, not ends: “Since it is our end which is paramount, not natural things themselves, we convert the latter into means, the destiny of which is determiend by us, not by the things themselves.” [says Hegel]

31: [Hegel]: “This pecularity in the world of mind has indicated in the case of man an altogether different destiny from that of merely natural objects… namely, a real capacity for change, and that for the better,—an impulse of perfectibility.”

32: If the way we see the world is directly caused by our material existence—by our social class, by how we consume, by the things we own—then a change in our condition would change our view of reality. This is the entrance to materialism, the notion that physical existence is the basis of reality and that social relations have material causes.

33: We are all followers of Marx in the sense that we all believe that the way people view the world is heavily influenced by their material means… Materialism can be overwrought. It can undervalue religion and culture, missing important factors in social change. But for the analysis it made possible, it stands as a remarkable accomplishment.

34: Idealizing the capacity of nature as a prelude to any economic theory became a common way of speaking and writing in the nineteenth century, as all kinds of people tried to comprehend the promise of modernity.

44: Every one of [Etzler's] schemes began with energy. Energy from the sun, wind, and waves would free all people from one of the crucial costs and limitations of production… Etzler did not wirte his treatise on futurity with his eyes closed, but only after looking for years at the United States and the leading lights of the time. One of the oddest thinkers turns out to have been connected to larger currents.

47: Hot and cold running water, illuminated roofs and walks, agreeable scents, elevators, every convenience, and no work (all by “a sort turn of some crank”)—it sounds like an Arizona retirement village. And that’s just the point. Etzler designed not a world to come, but the world that came. His knowledge of physics might have been faulty, but his sense that human hapiness would be understood as the application of technology to convenience and leisure was dead-on. And rather than interpret Paradise as lunacy, it is more striking to consider all the ways that it reflected the thinking currenat at the time, the same thinking that has shaped expectations for growth in our time.

49: Shape someone’s surroundings and the way they acquire the necessaries of life, they all believed, along with Marx and Feuerbach, and you reshape their morals and outlook. One thinking claimed to have mastered that approach, and he stood out from all the others: Charles Fourier, the French theorist who published Le Nouveau Monde in 1829.

53: Etzler’s obsession with energy came from the insight that it virtually determined the social conditions of labor… Etzler called industrialism a vicious energy monopoly. Nothing but the cost of coal dictated that the Many would sweat for wages in factories owned by the Few.

53: Etzler had good reason to believe that eneryg on a revolutionary scale would soon be available. The boldest, most imaginative physical theorist of the time said as much in a short tretise that Etzler would have read during his education as an engineer. [Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi Carnot's Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.

55: Coal got [Thomas Ewbank] even more excited: “A first element of progress for all time, it is preposterous to suppose the supplies of coal can ever be exhausted or even become scarce.” Preposterous, he said, because it formed continually in “the depths of our oceans,” faster than people could burn it. Ewbank maintained that coal furnished energy in unlimited quantities: “The proposition is, that unlimited amounts of force are to be drawn out of inert matter.”

55: This is entropy: the irreversible transition from wood to ashes.

57: Science assembles models of reality in pieces. No one understood the delicate energetics of ecosystems until the twentieth century. Nonethless, a vision of the human economy running parallel with physical laws took shape during htis time of rapid discovery. Economic thinkers took what accorded with their views and then stopped listening. Science moved on, in other words, but most social theorists never did. The troubling thing is that economic growth still has nineteenth-century physics as its intellectual touchstone.

59: The most important thing ot know about this first model of eocnomic growth is that expansion solved all problems and created none. Though writers differed in all sorts of ways… all who believed in progress agreed that the achievement of modernity equaled a condition of never-ending growth.

61: Amasa Walker argued in 1866 that welath is “a perpetual progress, an unceasing self-multiplication.” People’s wants are not a debit but a credit; they are “the springs of wealth.” There would always be enough, they all said, because nothing made sense any other way. Providence, in secular form, supported a big theory on an imaginary foundation.

62: Barbon needed fowls and fish to be infinite in order for the model to work, because behind circulation, real people consumed real things; if these things ran short, then the mercantilists would ahve been right.

63: In his only lasting contribution to economic thought, Malthus hit upon the law of diminishing returns, or the idea that at a certain point, increasing units of labor result in less and less additional output.

64: When environmentalists of the 1970s embraced Malthus, they did so by ignoring the entire social and religious thrust of the Essay.

65: Every land system is a social system. Human communities spell out their tightly held principles in fields and boundaries.

71: Like neoliberals today, Etzler blithely ignored his failures and the collateral damage of expansion itself as in no way related to the principles he followed.

72: Civil society depended on expansion to continually prove and maintain itself, yet expansion boxed it in by pinning human progress to biophysical growth—a phenomenon with inherent limits, requiring violence and finally imperalism.

73: An English critic of Malthus, George Ensor, wrote, “Men are merchandise, without referring to the slave trade. They are money, without being stamped at the mint. Many men are themselves a great machine.”

74: It required a truly strange imagination to predict the earth could sustain one thousand times its present population—and to promote that as a sign of progress.

74: At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the energy supply in a typical French diet (roughly 1,850 calories a day) equaled that of Rwanda in 1965, the year the World Bank named it the most malnourished nation in the world. Robert Fogel points out that at that level of nutrition, even the strongest males have limited vigor for work… No wonder eighteenth century economists upheld agriculture as the basis of all wealth! Trade and manufacturing might earn more money, but what kind of society do you ahve when nobody but the aristocracy has enough oomph to do more than get up in the morning.

77: Loss of economic freedom in a society that celebrated political freedom, dependence within memory of the birth of independence, poverty next to wealth—these became the contradictions of capitalism.

79: [American Fourier corporations]: The joint-stock company solved a nettlesome problem. Shares took the communism out of communal settlement by allowing families and individuals to enter and exit without undermining the organizational structure—an ideal compromise between modern mobility and the desire for belonging. The phalanx did away with individual settlement while preserving individual ownership.

81: If God created the world, they said, then God must intend for us to do what we want with it… Providence has underwritten the liberal conception of the world from the time of Adam Smith to that of George W. Bush… Economic liberals also conjured a world to come in which labor exercised against the eternal substance of the earth would yield capital eternally.

82: Growth became everyone’s favorite social program. Fourierists such as Etzler put forward the very philosophy now embraced by politicians and development agencies around the world—that the way to level the classes, uplift the poor, and create societies free of social conflict is to generate wealth.

83: Twenty-first century readers cannot recall a time when governments did not manage economies, but that notion has a history.

86: Etzler’s Paradise is a mosaic of the materialist thinking pervasive in the Atlantic World during the previous half century. The result was an oddly plausible utopia: cheap energy and a land regime that traced indelible patterns across the continent by removing American Indians and eradicating wildlife, leading to a soaring human population that would soon live by consuming manufactured products, all financed by joint-stock companies and protected by a government that encouraged growth.

89: A speaker addressing the American Institute admitted, “We gaze with astonishment upon the rapid succession of wonderful events which pass before our eyes… The most sanguine, enthusiastic mind, in its dreamy visions, can scarcely imagine a more prosperous growth, or a more rapid development of resources.” A correspondent, having visited the mills at Lowell, Massachussets, said simply, “A new and better social existence is being extended to the race.”

90: Society had become embedded in economy—not the other way around. [Like Polanyi, my old college favorite]

91: Southerners did not reject the basic premise that growth equaled civilization; they just looked at the problem from their own key factors of production—slave labor and virgin forest—and tended to resign themselves to some degree of decline. They felt limitations more immediately, and this became part of their resentment against the North.

91: The odd consequence of this revolutionized existence was that it became closed to feedback from anything outside itself, except in the form of fluctuating prices. Economic growth functioned as an open system, one that interpreted stasis as decline, when below the soil and under the sea, life continued to follow a thermodynamic process, as organisms  absorbed matter and energy for a time before giving them up, in a closed system of growth and disintegration.

91: Growth became the symbol of social happiness, the conduit of health and safety, presenting us with an unprecdented quandary. Even as it offered a better existence, it was running on a collision course with its own unexamined assumptions.

96: Etzler had his own designs for the tropics: he believed that they belonged to all humanity and that the energy concentrated there would fuel an agricuture rich enough to sustain one trilion people.

99: A friend of MacDonald’s reported that he had spent a few days with Etzler on a flatboard on the Ohio River, reporting Etzler’s attempt to “burn the brushwood in the vicinity of Louisville by means of ‘burning mirrors.’”

103: When Thoreau observed, “It would seem… that there is a transcendentalism in mechanics as well as in ethics,” he nailed his subject.

106: In the words of Karl Polanyi, economic liberalism was a “utopian endeavor,” set in motion by ideas “as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians.”

107: Climate could be social destiny. Increase the energy coming from the sky, and you eliminate conflict.

109: With food dripping from land known to be “productive of 100 times more than all the rest of the world,” the fortunate emigrants would spend their time cultivating their interests. This is why Etzler identified the tropics as the location of all future human progress. It appeared to offer all the material necessary for sustaining civilization, made possible entirely through the intensity of sunlight shining on the green stuff of the earth.

111: Ritter influenced a generation of German idealists, including Hegel and Marx (who attended Ritter’s lectures at the University of Berlin), by imagining the earth as an eternal structure animated by divine power. Ritter postulated that ‘nations, like men, are formed under a law superior to themselves,” which took the form of climate—a set of physical qualities (latitude, elevation, proximity to mountains and oceans) that formed hte DNA of societies, explaining their historical patterns.

112: Guyot believed that the shapes of continents indicated the mental abilities of their human inhabitants. Lacking the peninsulas of Europe, which to him suggested a capacity for complex thought, the southern bodies produced only “the most deformed and degenerate races, and the lowest in the scale of humanity.” Thus spake Guyot—the globe his only datum, his sole experiment.

115: This use of tea, in particular, was already established by 1800, when English workers spent 5 percent of their income on the dried leaves of an evergreen bush from China.

115: The tropics—underdeveloped as a mirror image of the development they made possible—financed the economic growth of the twentieth century.

115: In his myopic calcuations and outrageous conceits, Etzler predicted the capitalists who followed him.

122: [A key passage vis a vis green tech history... And one worth debating.] It is tempting to think of Etzler as an innovator of clean, renewable energy systems, but that implies a sense of economy he never demonstrated. He made no attempt to think through an energy budget in estimating the work capacity of his machines. He neglected friction, not necessarily because he denied its realit, but because he was so smitten with the unending supply of energy that he never bothered to estimate it in units. How hard would the wind have to blow to turn the windmills? How high did the ocean swells need to rise in order to move the Naval Automaton at a given speed? What size engine would it take to move the floating island? In fact, no machine based on wind or water could have generated the power Etzler needed. And although his work might look like some Paleolithic version of industrial ecology—the science of reengineering production to function within ecological systems—that would also be too generous. Just as he never bothered with units of energy, he also never bothered with material units. Etzler had no need for efficiency, for he recognized nothing that needed to be conserved.

123: [Etzler] regarded the only limiting factor to be technical form, without in any way allowing for limitations in natural capital or energy. In this Etzler was no different from other believers in material progress from his time. Growth has existed in the historical moment that he shares with Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, W.W. Rostow, and Alan Greenspan, a moment during which matter is usable form—what we call resources—could be viewed as limited only by its cost.

135: Anyone reading political economy in the 1840s came across such dubious statements as “The productive energies of the material world, are always equal to the supply of human wnts.” Many shared in the belief that accumulation accorded with the underlying logic of the universe, that human wants joined in the natural order… The ideal of human progress never formed a parallel between the merchant’s economy and the economy of living things.

139: “Etzler’s vision,” said De Voto, “came down to a promise that man’s will would yet be law to the physical world.”

139: Etzler’s paradise came down to a realm of pleasure and convenience strikingly similar to the highway-strip, big-box-sore, low-rise-condo sprawl that has caused so many people to reconsider the meaning of consumption. Etzler accurately predicted in the 1830s that people would turn their minds “to the earthly improvements of life,” that they would increasingly define their well-being by their standard of living. Future boosters of economic growth would speak the same language of transformation, harmony, and wealth.

140: [Buckminster] Fuller was the Etzler of the 1930s.

141: Fuller understood that a big chunk of everything consumed by people passes through the domicile. A new design would not only increase resource efficiency, it would serve as a stamping mill for a new twentieth-century human—or, as he said, “The goal is the emergence of humanity.” In the houses Fuller imagined, people would be freer—”free to explore, free to device, include, refine, free to compose and synchronize.” … All his inventions had the same premise—that new spaces created new social potential by connecting people to one another and to the universe in new ways.

142: Like Hegel, Fuller saw a parallel between mind and universe. Like Etzler, he bet everything on an open-ended source of power. His influences miht have been different, but his idealism is strikingly similar. Fuller told his Depression-weary readers that they would soon be free of scarcity: “The quantity of physical, cosmic energy… arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity… We have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth.”

143: But why did the most ardent materialist thinkers ignore changes in the material world? Some idea or habit of mind prevented them from seeing the economy as part of the environment. That thing was physics.

145: Adam Smith saw social atoms moving according to some unseen force that transcended the history and institutions of society itself.

146: Though almost forgotten today, [Henry] Carey was the most visible, influential, and imaginative political economist in the United States for three decades. [1830s-1860s]

147: In the transformation of matter, wrote the chemist John Pitkin Norton, “we discover that nothing is lost: if we burn a piece of wood it disappears, but has merely been converted into carbonic acid and water.” But something is lost. The wood! By substituting physics for biology, Carey failed to see organisms and thus environments.

148: [Describing the work of George Perkins Marsh one of Carey's "most insightful contemporaries"] The interconnectedness of all things implies the very feedback that advocates of growth denied at all costs.

149: The entropy law establishes an economy of matter in particular forms running through organisms and environments.

150: “To put it bluntly,” writes Philip Mirowski, “the progenitors of neoclassicism copied down the physical equations and just changed the names attached to the variables.” … By accepting physics as a metaphor and a set of mathematical practices, economists developed a system of analysis that, while it seemed to explain capitalist motion, created a world unto itself, a Plato’s Cave in which shadows passed for reality.

151:”After a certain point,” [Joseph A. Tainter, anthropologist] writes, “increased investments in complexity fail to yeild proportionately increasing returns. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly.”

151: According to the critic Bruno Latour, all cultures create hybrids between nature and culture.

152: The feedback is getting stronger that economic growth, as the sign of some ultimate stage of social evolution, cannot be maintained.

153: Beyond a certain point, [Georgescu-Roegen] claimed, an economy can continue to grow only by consuming its natural capital, because any rate of increase beyond the regenerative capacity of ecosystems spends them down. He spoke to environmentalists throughout the 1970s, but no one else listened. No idea could have been more unpopular in policy circles during the 1980s than that of physico-economic limits.

153: It was [Kenneth Boulding] who said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

154: [Herman Daly] set out to dismantle a simple premise, one that Adam Smith first proposed in The Wealth of Nations— that man-made capital (fishing boats) could substitute for natural capital (cod).

155: The way most economists think of it, only energy and technology place limits on production. If you want to harvest more wood, build a better chain saw… The logic thrived on new frontiers, but there are signs that return to labor have begun to flatten out. Fish provide an example. The harvest of Atlantic cod, in particular, peaked in 1970, after which it began to decline. In 1991 the cod fishery collapsed… The limiting factor, in other words, is no longer tools but natural capital. The cod themselves now determine the size of the industry.

155: In the past, that always meant improving the tools of the take, but now it means something different—enhancing natural capital, the new limiting actor. Daly finds precedent in “fallowing,” or the practice of letting land regenerate after a period of cultivation. Fallowing is investment in short-term nonproduction in order to maintain long-term yields.

158: Oil is not simply implicated in everything we call growth—there has never been growth without it.

159: Imagine the amount of space necessary to convert any metropolitan area to even 25 percent solar power if every common lightbulb needs its own square meter of photovoltaic panels.

161: If growth does not result in social equality and the reduction of poverty, it abdicates its single social justification. It would then be left naked as a process of wealth creation for the upper 1 percent of the population, which is exactly what appears to have taken place.

163: We will likely look back at the period between 1600 and 2050 as the Era of Expansion. The first date marks the beginning of surplus agriculture in England, when its population began to climb out of famine, when agrarian people all over the world began a period of wildfire frontier settlement and when capitalism appeared. The second date marks the year when present trends in consumption will reach a level equal to double the earth’s capacity, requiring a second planet.

164: Faith in economic growth ignited during a certain moment, when a providential belief in the limitlessness of the earth coalesced around the acclerated production made possible by fossil fuels. Progress toward salvation became progress of a more durable existence.

165: [Americans] have accepted efficiency as the soul of what it means to be green, but they have not yet recognized a biophysical limit on the quantity of their consumption. The end of growth will not mean the end of progress, to the extent that we can redefine progress as consisting of something other than accumulation.