Facing our globe’s future together

Back in the 1950’s and right up to the 1990’s it seemed credible to argue that the human will was the master of all creation; that the only acceptable way of thinking was a mechanistic way of thinking; that the earth’s natural resources were just that ---- resources ---- to be plundered because they were there for human use, without limit. It was on such terms that we founded our present age of convenience, a way of living that is now spreading around the world. But for all its achievements, our consumerist society comes at an enormous cost to the earth and we must face up to the fact that the earth cannot afford to support it. Just as our banking sector is struggling with its massive debts --- and paradoxically also facing calls for a return to so-called old-fashioned, traditional banking ---- so nature’s life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too. So, if we don’t face up to this, then nature, the biggest bank of all could go bust. And no amount of quantitative easing will revive it. We know, for example, that already the thickness of the Arctic sea ice has reduced by forty per cent in the last fifty years. The major ice caps in Greenland, Antarctica and many other mountain areas (including the Himalayas and Kilimanjaro) could soon begin a rapid melt as well, and this may cause river, lake, and sea levels to rise, thereby swamping some of the world’s most heavily populated regions, instigating mass migrations. We also know that global warming is thawing perma-frosted grounds where the release of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas indeed, has already gone up by seventy per cent in the last half century. Since the 1950’s, we have also reduced the size of the world’s rainforests by a third and we continue to do so at the rate of an area the size of a football pitch every four seconds. And, as the trees fall, we irretrievably lose species of plants and animals that may well prove essential to our survival. Hugging the equator, these rainforests are literally ---- literally ----- the planet’s lifebelt. The Amazonian and Congo forests alone release more than twenty billion tonnes of water vapour into the air every day. This keeps the climate cool and makes rain that falls over vast areas of farmland. The trees also store colossal amounts of carbon, so their destruction releases yet more CO2 into the atmosphere ---- more than the entire global transport sector. So we depend upon them for our water, our food and the stability of our climate. The myriad, invisible functions performed by these threatened ecosystems, operating in all their harmonious complexity, are a central element in the earth’s life-support system and yet we ignore the fact that without them we cannot survive --- both physically and spiritually, for, with the rampant removal of biodiversity in all its forms, we also destroy the reflection of nature’s miraculous balance within ourselves. We show the same scant regard for the thin and fragile layer of the top soil that grows most of our food. A recent UN. report presented the very gloomy news that in just the last fifty years our heavily industrialized, chemically-based farming techniques have so far managed to degrade to different degrees a third of the world’s agricultural soil. I could go on, but wherever you care to look our industrial economic model is operating on the same damaging, diminishing return. Our current model of progress was not designed, of course, to create all this destruction. It made good sense to the politicians and economists who set it in train because the whole point was to improve the well-being of as many people as possible. However, given the overwhelming evidence from so many quarters, we have to ask ourselves if it makes sense any longer --- or whether it is actually fit for purpose under the circumstances in which we now find ourselves? It seems to me a self-evident truth that we cannot have any form of capitalism without local capital. But we must remember that the ultimate source of all economic capital is nature’s capital. The true wealth of all nations comes from clean rivers, a healthy soil and, most importantly of all, a rich biodiversity of life. Our ability to adapt to the effects of climate change, and then perhaps even to reduce those effects, depends upon us adapting our pursuit of unlimited economic growth to that of sustainable economic growth. And that depends upon basing our approach on the fundamental resilience of our ecosystems. . If we carry on destroying our marine and forest ecosystems as we are doing, then we will rob them of their natural resilience and so end up destroying our own. That is why it seems to me of such profound importance that we understand that we are not what we think we are. We are not the masters of creation. No matter how sophisticated our technology has become, the simple fact is that we are not separate from nature ---- like everything else, we are Nature. The more you understand this fact the more you see how our mechanistic way of thinking causes such confusion. The way we so often go about meeting people’s needs invariably involves us seeking a solution to one problem without thinking of the impact this will have on the whole or the wider context of the situation ---- rather in the way that they tried to grow Brazil nuts in plantations some years ago. The entire crop in Peru and Bolivia comes from within the natural forest, which makes it a difficult and labour-intensive process. To try to ease the problem it was decided to establish Brazil nut plantations, but not one tree produced a single nut! This is because, as it happens, Brazil nut trees rely entirely on a tiny forest-dwelling wasp for their pollination. So, no forest, no wasp, and invariably no nuts. If you think about it, this is the approach that is invariably taken in all aspects of our existence. Modern agro-industry, for instance, may have made enormous strides to feed the burgeoning world’s population, but at a huge and unsustainable cost to ecosystems, through a massive use of artificial fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and water. As an example, we put plenty of nitrogen on the fields to make the crops grow quickly but, nitrogen being nitrogen; it makes the weeds grow too, so out come all the herbicides. When it drains into the streams, the nitrogen also makes the algae bloom, which sucks all the oxygen out of the water, suffocating many of the other life forms in the vital food chain---- to the extent that a recent U.N. survey identified four hundred so-called dead zones which have now occurred around the world where polluted rivers meet the sea and nothing grows in the delta at all. It is a reductive approach to one issue that is patently not durable because it sustains nothing but its own decline, solving one problem by creating countless others. This, of course, is not the way nature operates. In nature the entire system is a complex unfolding of inter-dependent, multi-faceted relationships and to understand them, we have to use joined-up thinking. The Ancient Greek word for the process of joining things up was Harmonia. So, joined-up thinking seeks to create harmony, which is a very specific state of affairs. In fact it is the very prerequisite of health and well-being. Our bodies have to be in harmony if they are to be healthy, just as an entire ecosystem has to be. This is the way nature operates. Natural sciences like microbiology and botany tell us very clearly that every kind of organism, be it big or microscopic, is a complex system of interrelated and interdependent parts---- which makes each organism a microcosm of its local environment; the very essence of it, in fact. The sum of these parts builds and maintains a coherence ---- an active, harmonic unity ---- with no waste. No one part operates either in isolation or beyond the limits set by the whole. But, our culture has developed a resistance to that word limit because we continue to make what have become conventional assumptions about unlimited growth and prosperity. So much, it seems to me, depends on how we define both growth and prosperity. Most would agree, I think, that the main result of progress should be less misery and more happiness. But in our modern situation these ends have become dangerously confused with the means, to the point where, now, wealth, innovation and growth have become the final goals. They have become the destination, when they were only ever at best a vehicle for getting there. It seems that through a drift of ethics, the direction of our economic system has ended up being an end in itself ---- an entity that must be grown, rather than directed and honed to reflect the aspirations of communities, human well-being and the limits of our effects to the ecology. I think it is worth reflecting that the recent scholarly reviews on the economics of climate change set out the case as to why, even in traditional economic terms, it is quite irrational to continue as we are; while the U.N Millennium Ecosystem Assessment --- perhaps the most comprehensive review yet of the state of nature ----- told us why we might not meet the millennium development goals on poverty alleviation if we continue to destroy and degrade natural habitats and ecosystems in the way that we are doing now. It is certainly the case that, as we have liquidated natural assets in pursuit of what we call progress, many of the social challenges that we hoped economic growth would solve remain deeply resistant to resolution. Experience now tells us that poverty, stress, ill health and social tensions cannot be ended by economic growth alone. So, we may well be told that we live in a post-modernist age, but we are still conditioned by modernism’s central tenets. Our outlook is dominated by a mechanistic thinking that has led to our disconnection from the complexity of nature, which is, or should be, equally reflected in the complexity of human activities. But in many ways we have also succeeded in abstracting our very humanity to the mere expression of individualism and moral relativism, to the point where so many communities are threatened with extinction. Facing our future together, therefore, requires a shift from a reductive, mechanistic approach to one that is more balanced and integrated with nature’s complexity ---- one that recognizes not just the build up of financial capital, but the equal importance of what we already have ---- environmental capital and, crucially, what I might best call local community capital. That is, the networks of people and organizations, the village shops, the post offices and pubs, the churches and village halls, the mosques, temples and bazaars, the markets and food stalls ---- the wealth that holds our communities together; that enriches people’s lives through mutual support, love, loyalty and identity. Just as we have no way of accounting for the loss of the natural world, contemporary economics has no way of accounting for the loss of this local community capital. And this is why we need to ask ourselves whether the present form of globalization is entirely appropriate, given the circumstances confronting us. I mean there are, clearly, benefits, but we need to ask whether it requires adaptation so that it also enables, as it were, globalization from the bottom up. This, after all, is the way nature operates! It grows things from the roots up, not from the leaves down. At the moment we operate under a form of globalization that tends to render down all the rich diversity of a culture into a uniform, homogenized mono-culture. And this is where the modernist paradigm needs to be called into question before the damage being done is irretrievable… It seems to me that one of the problems of the form is that globalization relies entirely upon maximizing the economic rather than the social and environmental values of markets leads us to a frightening state of uniformity, and perhaps conformity, to a model that we now know cannot be sustained. However, we each have within ourselves, as do our communities, more than one aspect to our identities ----- a complexity which is one of the defining characteristics of our common humanity. In fact, I have a hunch that this cultural diversity may provide us with the intellectual and social resilience to the challenges that we face at this moment of transition, just as biodiversity provides resilience to the domination of diseases found in monocultural systems. And this is why I have again and again been at such pains to argue for the communities of understanding across different disciplines and economic sectors. One of the chief architects of our present economic model was Adam Smith and this year happens to be the 250th anniversary of the publication of his Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he sought to define the balance between private right and natural freedom. Interestingly, he was a scholar who recognized that, although individual freedom is rooted in our impulse for self-reliance, it must be balanced by the limits imposed by Natural Law. As he prepared his book, he moved away from the notion that we are born with a moral sense and to the principle of there being a sympathy in all things. It is this sympathy that binds communities together. But there is little chance of such sympathy if what people need is provided through commercial structures that place an ever greater distance between the supplier and the consumer, because economies of scale can and often do destroy the economics of localness. It has become, again, a purely mechanical process with no room for the complexity and multi-faceted dimensions of a proper local relationship between a community and the suppliers that serve it. Once again, there has to be a balance between the markets on the one hand and societies on the other, otherwise real problems occur. So, with that in mind, how could we better empower different communities to create a much more participative economic model that safeguards their identity, cohesion and diversity ---- one that makes a clear distinction between the maintenance of nature’s local capital reserves and the income it produces? Thus, the challenge we face, it seems to me ---- is to see nature’s capital and its processes as the very basis of a new form of economics and to engage communities at the grass roots to put those processes first. If we can do that, then we have an approach that acts locally by thinking globally, just as nature does ----- all parts operating locally to establish the coherence of the whole. Could this, then, be part of the solution to the problems we face? Could it be one that might give us hope, for we do still have within our societies and within our existing technologies the solutions that will enable us to transcend our current predicament. All we lack, perhaps, is the will to establish a more entire and connected perspective. Without such a systemic approach, I fear, we will continue to deal with each individual crisis without seeing the connections between them. Arguably, this makes our response to our immediate problems tactical rather than strategic. I think it was the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, who memorably wrote in the fifth century B.C. that Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Defeat in this instance, would be catastrophic. (To be continued) The author is a Development Policy analyst Email: bbazimya@yahoo.co.uk