- With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to
improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world
will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis
for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and
the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked
in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since.
We are going backwards.
-
- The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic
system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite
resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.
-
- This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental
truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who
possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery
that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church.
Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a
lunatic.
-
- Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status
of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless
exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them
from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity.
The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.
-
- The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be
true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological
production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism,
is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann
has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year
AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight
of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with
the repayment of debt.
-
- Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the
wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five
or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply.
Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result
of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares
of productive land.
-
- As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production
only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely
to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is
produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already
running dry as a result of overuse.
-
- One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple
as finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's
resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton
and dyes of the East Indies; the labour and land of Africa. The frontier
of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable.
Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has
moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite
future.
-
- An entire industry has been built upon the denial of
ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the
"disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted
much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying
the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas
for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced
in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware
and knickers.
-
- Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate
media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity
confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery.
-
- Last week this column discussed the competition for global
grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named
David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people
"breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence
that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing
to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must
be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilised to prevent her from
perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."
-
- There is no doubt that a rising population is one of
the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people,
but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth
in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed
to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next
few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor
can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one
factor which is repeatedly emphasised.
-
- It is possible to change the way we live. The economist
Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest
would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources
than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental
destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But
everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends
upon stealing from the future to give to the present.
-
- Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge
humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions
of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass.
Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children,
flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to
be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem
with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to
change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your
path.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2002
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,866980,00.html
|