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More than twenty years ago, the scientist Peter Vitousek and others published a landmark paper titled Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis showing that we as a species are crowding out other species and our activities could cause what he called a “greater reduction in organic diversity than occurred at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago”. In other words, humans are more dangerous than the huge meteorite that struck the earth in the Yucatan Gulf and wiped out the dinosaurs. This has to be a robbery on the grandest scale ever imagined--the “Appropriation” in Vitousek’s title in plain language means “grabbing”, and at the expense of others. Nature has a much greater power to retaliate against such transgressions than any human system of justice and punishment against gangs of thieves.
Twenty years ago, humans were appropriating about 40 percent of the products of photosynthesis but since our economy and its demands double about every 25 years, we are probably somewhere near taking 80 percent. Clearly this cannot continue forever: as the ecological economist Kenneth Boulding famously said, “Anyone who believes that growth can continue forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”. Some will also say that humans must appropriate what they need or think they need because they are, thanks to their consciousness and intellect, the most important species on the planet. This may be so, but from pure self-interest, if it comes to that, if necessary, we should recognise that we have no guarantee of staying alive ourselves in the longer term if we persist in destroying the habitat and life possibilities of so many other species.
You probably know that the root of the English words Economy and Ecology is the same--it is the Greek OIKOS which is the domain, the household and, in the broader sense, our whole habitat. For religious people it is the Creation. Nomos means the rules for management of the household; Logos is the Word or the Reason, as in Saint John’s Gospel, “In the Beginning was the LOGOS. So normally, you would think that the LOGOS would be greater than and superior to the NOMOS, as the principle is superior to the housekeeping rules. But in our system, this is not the case. The way we measure wealth is indeed completely mad and the so-called “science” of economics cannot give us the information we need, or only when it is too late.
Most people no longer even notice that the description of capitalist economics, as seen by economists, is completely irrational. So that I can illustrate this notion without a board and a piece of chalk, please imagine a big box--this is the economy. Inside the box is a sphere--this is the biosphere--which the economy dips into to take raw materials, including food, oil, minerals, fish and so on. These raw materials are put through the production process and turned into goods and we get rid of the resulting heat and CO2; we get rid of the pollution and other waste products that are created during this production process. We dump them inside the box.
That is, we think we are getting rid of this heat, these gasses, these wastes but that is impossible. They are still there. In English, we say that we “Throw away”--but there isn’t any “away”. The real, rational way to look at the world is not as a big box containing nature but as a sphere, the biosphere and which we cannot increase by a single square centimetre. The sphere contains the box, not the other way around, and the sphere has its own limited capacity to supply our raw materials and to absorb our wastes. The conventional economist, however, believes you can keep on increasing the size of the box--this is called “growth” because for him, the box is not contained inside any delicate limiting membrane. All his professional tools are crooked. I recognise that many economists share this view, but it is not yet alas mainstream and the conventional economists; the kind one finds in major international institutions like the International Monetary Fund is simply incapable of telling us what we need to know when we need to know it.
As you can well imagine, this leads to other kinds of craziness, like not recognising feedback mechanisms. The economist makes nice clean graphs, adding 1 + 1 + 1--for example a unit plus a unit plus a unit of CO2--and gets a nice straight line that can go up forever. But since feedbacks and retroaction do exist in the real world of the biosphere, that straight line can suddenly go off the chart at any moment and our so-called economic science will never give us a warning. The question to me, therefore, is not whether human activities cause global warming, because that much seems blindingly obvious except to people like George Bush, but whether we have already committed the irreparable and our climate graph has already gone off the chart.
The craziness also extends to such basic concepts as time and space. Economic time is not the same as natural time; capitalism requires a profit right now and managers and company directors who are following the NOMOS will do whatever is necessary to achieve that profit. This includes mass layoffs, outsourcing to cheaper suppliers and any other cost-cutting measures which can supply greater liquidity and increased shareholder value.
Shareholders now demand more than 15 percent increases every year and it is quite impossible to care for, much less repair the environment under pressures like that. So cut down the forest, mine the minerals, use up the oil, exhaust the soils, deplete the fish-stocks of the oceans, keep the machine turning over, keep the money flowing whether or not nature can replenish what the gang of thieves demands, right now, figuratively speaking, at gunpoint. Capitalist space is not the same as real space either--capitalism has no room for useless, worthless, unproductive, empty space. It too has to be “developed” in order to create a profit. Cut down the forest even though it will take 400 years to regenerate, assuming it ever does.
You get my point. Economists do not and cannot tell us what we need to know and people are so used to this that they are like fish who don’t know that they are swimming in water. Most people are not conscious of the medium in which we are swimming either, the economic medium. Please note that I have been referring to “capitalism”, not to “the market”. Markets have existed for thousands of years, for as long as people have been able to travel and exchange. We have scientific archaeological evidence that merchants around the Mediterranean routinely used at least ten different systems of weights, measures and currencies to conduct their business. This is not the same as demanding a return on capital--a higher and higher return in our time, for companies listed on stock markets. Unfortunately, it also applies more and more to small and medium enterprises as well which are often suppliers to the larger corporations and put under the same if not greater pressures.
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