Statistical analysis confirms our impact by showing that, absent alternate modes of expenditure, natural limits doom humanity to a slow collapse of population from overaccumulation.

Bataillean ecology, then, would force a choice conscious of the constraints of opportunity cost: when capital growth touches natural limits, capital burns up, catastrophically. Thus, a society must choose either to endure this burning or set fire to its wealth beforehand. That is, destroying wealth costs a society the opportunity for capital growth. Even though a Bataillean ecology would accept the growth of capital as good and the waste of capital as evil, it would choose evil. There is no transvaluation of values here.

Bataille extended his advocacy of practices of unproductive expenditure from his early writings into his later ones, from prose-poems to rigorous, if not systematic treatises, first as a means of fighting fascism, then as a means of staving off nuclear holocaust. Scholars of Bataillean ecology extend his ideas further still to the task of stunting material growth. This work depends on embracing Bataille's phenomenology of the scientific world (‘I picture the Earth projected into space, like a woman screaming with her head on fire’), and his characterization of eroticism as a volcanic sacrifice of excess wealth. One must keep these images in mind when addressing the science of sustainability and the practical programs that such research enjoins, if one wishes to hew to the course of environmental prudence. It is of some benefit that in the very origins of contemporary sustainability research, there already appears a slight reflection of these visions.

The Wolf in the Systems Model

The pivotal work in contemporary sustainability is the 1972 MIT study funded by the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (LtG), which enraged both ends of the political spectrum, from capitalists to communists, for unsurprising reasons. The study consists of the running-through of several computer models of different structures of social relations, and its results predict a slow collapse of population and capital, if the world stays the course of the Standard or ‘do nothing’ model.

From its publication and over the ensuing decades, orthodox capitalists and orthodox Marxists, both of whom reject the notion of natural limits, have rejected the findings of the LtG team. However, since the late-1990s, new assessments of this research have found that the world economy has indeed progressed in accord with its Standard model. One set of these reassessments by Graham Turner, observes that, continuing apace threatens the following outcomes: ‘Diminishing per capita supply of services and food cause a rise in the death rate from about 2020 (and somewhat lower rise in the birth rate, due to reduced birth control options). The global population therefore falls, at about half a billion per decade, starting at about 2030’. The worst famine in history is Mao's: 35 million people starved to death in China from 1959 to 1961. Turner suggests that these catastrophic figures will be exceeded if we continue to do nothing, predicting that a yearly average of 50 million people will die, mainly of hunger, for decades.

From almost the beginning of the crystallization of environmental crisis in LtG-style models, there lay a splinter of Bataillean ecology. Aurelio Peccei founded the Club of Rome in 1968; in 1973, he co-authored a defense of the LtG report. His co-author was Manfred Siebker, a physicist and member of the Club. From this point, Siebker would write a series of environmentalist screeds that would culminate with the CADMOS report, The State of the Union of Europe, edited by Denis de Rougement, a colleague of Bataille's who lectured at the College of Sociology. All of these writings express a Bataillean sensibility, but it is only in 1978's ‘Economania’ that Siebker cites Bataille explicitly, frames the ultimate problem in Bataille's terms, and proffers Bataille's brand of solution:

[...] I repeat the words of Georges Bataille—the fundamental problem of human societies is that of surplus, of excess, human wants can transcend immediacy, and human activities (production, services, rituals, etc.) are not programmed to self-limitation beyond immediacy. [...]

Many different solutions have been applied to the problem of how to get rid of surplus. [...] The most disastrous of all, for the long-term viability of the system, is the modern one which essentially substitutes a relatively mild disequilibrium problem by a snowballing mechanism: re-investment, leading to an exponential acceleration of the economic Machine [...]

In The Tears of Eros, Bataille pleads for a rational ordering of society that would avert catastrophe: ‘[...] unless we consider the various possibilities for consumption which are opposed to war, and for which erotic pleasure—the instant consumption of energy—is the model, we will never discover an outlet founded on reason’, a sentiment that Siebker iterates when he claims that the ‘real quest is for a sane society’.