Mike Vandeman
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 Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2008 11:10 pm Post subject: The economic crisis is NOTHING compared to the ecological cr |
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"we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5
trillion every year, as a result of deforestation ALONE. The losses
incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion
and $1.5 trillion."
Remember that the economy - and many other aspects of our lives -
depends on healthy ecosystems - not the other way round.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/14/this-is-what-denial-does/
This Is What Denial Does
The economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch. But
they have the same cause.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 14th October 2008
This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The
financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the
real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.
As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of
numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank
economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are
losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every
year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so
far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5
trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the
services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that
forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or
living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the
nature crunch.
The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit
the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked
debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely
consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to
climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every
impending dislocation.
Gordon Brown, for example, was as much in denial about financial
realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his
Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40 per cent of the world’s
foreign equities are now traded here. “I congratulate you Lord Mayor
and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that
history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City
of London.”(2) The financial sector’s success had come about, he said,
partly because the government had taken “a risk-based regulatory
approach”. In the same hall three years before, he pledged that “in
budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk
takers”(3). Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of
the precautionary principle?
Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos - a
house or dwelling. Our survival depends upon the rational management
of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are
the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the
level of replenishment, your stock will collapse. That’s another noun
which reminds us of the connection. The OED gives 69 definitions of
stock. When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk - or
stock - of a tree, “from which the gains are an outgrowth”(4).
Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies.
Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.
The two crises feed each other. As a result of Iceland’s financial
collapse, it is now contemplating joining the European Union, which
means surrendering its fishing grounds to the Common Fisheries Policy.
Already the prime minister Geir Haarde has suggested that his
countrymen concentrate on exploiting the ocean(5). The economic
disaster will cause an ecological disaster.
Normally it’s the other way around. In his book Collapse, Jared
Diamond shows how ecological crisis is often the prelude to social
catatrosphe(6). The obvious example is Easter Island, where society
disintegrated soon after the population reached its highest historical
numbers, the last trees were cut down and the construction of stone
monuments peaked. The island chiefs had competed to erect ever bigger
statues. These required wood and rope (made from bark) for transport
and extra food for the labourers. As the trees and soils on which the
islanders depended disappeared, the population crashed and the
survivors turned to cannibalism. (Let’s hope Iceland doesn’t go the
same way.) Diamond wonders what the Easter islander who cut down the
last palm tree might have thought. “Like modern loggers, did he shout
‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never
fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood.’? Or: ‘We don’t have proof
that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter … your proposed ban
on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering’?”(7).
Ecological collapse, Diamond shows, is as likely to be the result of
economic success as of economic failure. The Maya of Central America,
for example, were among the most advanced and successful people of
their time. But a combination of population growth, extravagant
construction projects and poor land management wiped out between 90
and 99% of the population. The Mayan collapse was accelerated by “the
competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on
war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying
problems”( . Does any of this sound familiar?
Again, the largest monuments were erected just before the ecosystem
crashed. Again, this extravagance was partly responsible for the
collapse: trees were used for making plaster with which to decorate
their temples. The plaster became thicker and thicker as the kings
sought to outdo each other’s conspicuous consumption.
Here are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological
collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a
long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations;
small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging
those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival.
The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial
systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot
act until stocks - of either kind - start sliding towards oblivion,
we’re knackered.
But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and
predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and
the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the
global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too
will hit the wall.
I’m not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me
did on these pages last year(9), that we should welcome a recession.
But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink
this trajectory; an opportunity which is not available during periods
of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should
read Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics(10).
As usual I haven’t left enough space to discuss this, so the details
will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary
published by the Sustainable Development Commission(11). But what Daly
suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth
(”more of the same stuff”) with development (”the same amount of
better stuff”). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital
maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can
absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them
is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of
wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.
Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results
have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens
when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to
live in the real world.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Richard Black, 10th October 2008. Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’.
BBC Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7662565.stm
2. Gordon Brown, 20th June 2007. Speech to Mansion House.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/2014.htm
3. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/1534.htm
4. Oxford English Dictionary, 1989. Second Edition.
5. Niklas Magnusson, 10th October 2008. Iceland Premier Tells Nation
to Go Fishing After Banks Implode.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=azZ189JG.1S8&refer=home
6. Jared Diamond, 2005. Collapse: how societies choose to survive or
fail. Allen Lane, London.
7. Page 114.
8. Page 160.
9. George Monbiot, 9th October 2007. Bring on the Recession. The
Guardian.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/09/bring-on-the-recession/
10. Herman E. Daly, 1991. Steady-State Economics - 2nd Edition. Island
Press, Washington DC.
11. Herman E. Daly, 24th April 2008. A Steady-State Economy.
Sustainable Development Commission.
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/Herman_Daly_thinkpiece.pdf
--
I am working on creating wildlife habitat that is off-limits to
humans ("pure habitat"). Want to help? (I spent the previous 8
years fighting auto dependence and road construction.)
Please don't put a cell phone next to any part of your body that you are fond of!
http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande |
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