BURNING UP THE PLANET AND SEARCHING FOR AN EMERGENCY EXIT.
It is said we cannot sustain infinite growth on a finite planet. We have an economic system that must grow – or die. Therefore the system must be changed before the planet becomes denuded of the resources on which our lives depend and we all die.
Let us deconstruct this argument. Consider the sense of some of the words used: infinite/growth/system/death/change/resources.
Infinite. When people use the word infinite they want to describe something with no boundary; endless. But the mathematical meaning of the infinite is subjectively unimaginable by mortal beings. There are natural phenomena that we can imagine continuing forever, such as the flow of water in a river, or the daily rising and setting of the sun. Indeed such phenomena are hard for us to imagine not continuing.
But for the life of an individual living organism, such as a mosquito, a human or an elephant, there must come an end. Though each will use all in its power to extend its life span to its natural limit.
The human species is probably the only earthly life form that tries to escape finitude through the positing of a God or gods.[1] Religions may or may not include the notion of life after death (for humans) but are alike in bearing witness to the existence of transcendent worlds, not accessible to us in our normal state of being with our given sense organs (including their artificial extensions, such as microscopes and telescopes).
Since Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God, modern humans, still wishing, as ever, to deny the finitude of death, are left with only one plausible alternative to the promise of everlasting life that religion afforded to those who behaved themselves. This is the genetic endowment. We die but our genes live on, Science tells us. Each of our children ‘contains half our genes. The other half being those of the one we loved, the other parent. We are permitted to imagine that, if we have children, when we die, we are really, only half dead. And when they die, their children will contain little bits of us, in a different mix. And even if we die without having children, there are still relatives who share some of the same genes with us. Only extinction of the whole species can wipe out the gene pool that made us what we are or were. Indeed, if I do not misunderstand the science, we share thousands of genes with every other form of life, including plants. To extinguish all trace of everything that was in the least like any individual animal, the whole planet would have to be divested of all life, down to the individual bacteria that have lived for 650,000 years (albeit in a frozen state).
So ancestor worship, which was prevalent if not universal among primitive tribal cultures, finds some validation in the light of the science of modern genetics. At any rate, that elements of earthly life do indeed transcend the boundaries of birth and death of individuals, now seems confirmed by science, in a way that the monotheistic religions that came after are so far not.
What about the life forms that have undoubtedly evolved on other planets? We can be sure of one thing, none of them will replicate earthly life. Natural science demonstrates that local conditions determine outcomes. Local conditions are always going to differ because they occur at different times and places, in a universe where everything is in motion and in process of change of one sort or another.
Therefore extinction of all life on earth would be permanent. Eternal. Everlasting. Infinite….in extent.
The much revered laws of thermodynamics postulate that in the long run, everything will be reduced to nothing. Then that state of nothingness must last for an infinite amount of time, because there will be zero energy available to cause it to change. But nobody believes that, surely?
Growth. The literal meaning of the word growth refers to that process by which any quality of an entity becomes greater over the passage of time. So growth does not just refer to an increase in size. Size is one quality of an entity but never its only one.
Nevertheless, the sense in which the word is used in ordinary language is ‘more of the same’. There is some quality of an entity that there will be more of later than there is now, or more now than there was in the past.
In the case of a biological entity, such as a butterfly or a human, the word has a special meaning. Organic growth is a developmental process, driven and regulated by the organism’s genetic endowment. This process is characterized by continuing change as the organism responds to its genetic and epigenetic environments. The change from caterpillar to butterfly is more visible but perhaps not more life changing than the onslaught of puberty on the young human.
Under the ruling paradigm, growth of GDP is always counted as a good thing.
The quality of the various ‘products’ that are aggregated to arrive at this kind of number are not of concern to the neo-liberal economist. The earnings of arms manufacturers, prostitutes, surgeons and priests all fall into the same basket.
So there are two kinds of growth that are radically different. One is organic growth which is developmental. The other refers to measurable rates of increase of some specific entity within a system. This could be the red blood cell count in the bloodstream of a leukemia patient, the rpm of an engine, or the money in an economy. In the first case the system is cardio-vascular. In the second it is a mechanical system. In the third it is an abstraction. So what is a ‘system’?
System. I quote from Fritjof Capra (and Pier Luigi Luisi), authors of the book ‘The Systems View of Life’.
“Cartesian mechanism was expressed in the dogma that the laws of biology can ultimately be reduced to those of physics and chemistry…..At the turn of the 19th C this lack of understanding triggered the next wave of opposition to the mechanistic conception of life, the school known as organismic biology, or “organicism”……an organism, or living system, is an integrated whole whose essential properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts….the whole is more than the sum of its parts…
Deep ecology….ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence…..It questions the entire paradigm from an ecological perspective: from the perspective of our relationships to one another, to future generations, and the web of life of which we are part….These two tendencies – the self-assertive and the integrative – are both essential aspects of all living systems….Neither of them is intrinsically good or bad. What is good, or healthy, is a dynamic balance: what is bad, or unhealthy, is imbalance – over emphasis on one tendency and neglect of the other.
Power, in the sense of domination over others, is excessive self-assertion…..not the hierarchy but the network….the inherent value of nonhuman life….deep ecological experience of being part of the web of life…..Cartesian fallacy…The paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level involves a perceptual shift from physics to the life sciences.”
A fundamental aspect of living systems is their cyclic nature. There are two life imperatives present in every organism. A species cannot exist unless each of its individual members ‘knows’ how to feed itself. In addition at least some of its members must ‘know’ how to breed, to reproduce.
All living organisms in an eco-system have one thing in common. They all feed on the living or dead parts of other organisms.
Death is essential to life.
If we love life we must accept death. And of course we love life because we are alive. What is hard for humans to accept is that we cannot make an exception for ourselves. The dream of medical science to lengthen the human life span indefinitely is itself not sustainable. In an eco-system we cannot have one species opting out of the laws of nature. We naturally wish to continue to savour the joys of life as long as possible, as does every other animal, but there are natural limits. The earth has a fixed size. Its land has a bio-capacity that may be variable, but only within limits. There is a limit to the population size of each of its life forms, which are all inter-dependent.
We cannot change this. What then can we change and why should we?
Change. The first thing we should change is our attitude to other life forms. We should really ponder and reflect on Darwin’s discovery that ‘we differ from other animals in degree but not kind’. If we accept Deep Ecology’s assertion that life has intrinsic value, we can start to change our Cartesian mindset (amplified by our free market ideology) which assumes that the earth and all its products are ripe for plunder by humanity no matter how many unique and intrinsically wonderful other species are driven to extinction in the process.
The second thing we need to change is our attitude to other humans. The same free market ideology that rules our global economic system and paralyses our political system, divides us into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. If other animals have a right to live, surely all humanity have equal rights to live? A rational economic system would be one where the goal is to provide everyone with the means to live a decent life, before all else. Instead, Oxfam tells us, 86 people have the same wealth as half the rest of the global population – 3 billion people. One billion people are not getting enough to eat and their children are dieing of easily preventable diseases. Another billion, at the other end of the spectrum are suffering from obesity related health problems due to the over-consumption of addictive junk food that has proved so profitable to its purveyors.
The third thing we need to change is our attitude to every natural ‘product’ that we would like to extract or harvest as a ‘resource’ designed by some godlike agency for the benefit of humanity.
Resources. Etymologically, resources are assets and assets are useful things.
For example, since, for banks, debts are assets, the larger the population willing to become debt slaves available to the bank, the greater are the bank’s potential resources. We do not normally describe aspects of the natural environment as resources because they are not useful to some sector of humanity but vital to all living things. Clean air, fresh water, healthy soil are vital to all life, including humanity, not just useful to one sector. But because our economic system classes these vital bases of all life as ‘externalities’, as essentially useless, they become degraded, polluted and exploited as dumping grounds for waste products of the industrial system.
Our global economic system is at war with the global eco-system which it is fast destroying. We can change the former but not the latter. We did not create the eco-system but it created us.
Gaia has tolerated much antisocial behavior from her youngest child but she is fast reaching her limit.
The dominant economic system we have is founded on the myth that infinite growth is possible. The operating narrative goes further. Not only is continuous growth possible, but it is necessary and desirable. Without growth the system would collapse, and it is taken for granted that the system has been proven to be the best and the most natural. It must, at all costs, be prevented from collapse. TINA – ‘there is no alternative.’
The growth myth underlying the prevailing system was underpinned by Herbert Spencer’s misinterpretation of Darwin’s phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’. What Darwin was referring to, as Kropotkin correctly noted, was the thriving of those individuals (and their genes) endowed with the most ‘reproductive fitness’. And these individuals are, typically, those who make themselves most attractive to the opposite sex. Again, typically, these are not the most aggressive, competitive and selfish, but the opposite. Those who make themselves popular and desirable tend to have a caring and loving disposition towards their own kind. That is why mutual aid is so prevalent between members of successful species, even finding expression in inter-specific acts of kindness by some creatures of high intelligence, as when sea mammals have been reported saving the lives of drowning humans.
Kropotkin said ‘mutual aid is the predominant fact of nature’. The most numerous organisms in nature, by far, are not the solitary predators but the social animals who are predominantly herbivores. So much for justifying the status quo on the basis of ‘cut throat competition’ being in tune with the natural order. Far from it.
Hobbes saw ‘red in tooth and claw’ as the predominant fact of nature. Who was right, Hobbes or Kropotikin?
The basic mistake of apologists for the free market system is to translate the virtues of competition found in nature to our economic system. They failed to note that predominantly, competition in nature is found between groups and species, not within them. Within families, extended families, tribes and colonies, cooperation, sharing, and even outright altruism and self sacrifice are the norm.
So a system that prioritizes competition over cooperation within one species, namely the human, is automatically divisive and unnatural, since it says in effect, the owners of the means of production are the real humans and the workers are a different kind of animal.
We must move rapidly towards a steady state. We must eliminate the immense waste entailed in our present system and cooperate to ensure a state of universal sufficiency, rather than, as at present, accepting, as a kind of god given inevitability, that there must always be winners and losers.
On a finite planet, growth, beyond a sustainable limit, leads to real scarcity and inevitable conflict. Cooperation and sharing are the only peaceful pathways.
In so far as our fossil fueled industrial system may be thought of as a form of life we would have to agree with Shakespeare ‘we know ‘tis natural all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity’. Yet it is not a form of life, although it embraces the sum total of all activity that one species considers vital to its existence.
It is life-like in the sense that it was born and grew lustily from the mid 19th century for about 150 years. Then it lived for a while, in a precarious equilibrium shattered and somehow nourished by two world wars, and is now, arguably, beginning the process of dying.
From the start of the first industrial revolution growth has been greatly accelerated by the burning of fossil fuels.
Human fossil fuel burning is causing an unprecedented build up of green house gases in the atmosphere and steadily rising average temperatures, precipitating the melt of land borne ice that has been frozen for the last 400,000 years.
Unless this ice melting can be stopped the eventual result (albeit in a few hundred years, probably) will be that 80% of the world’s largest cities will be underwater, and at least half (probably more), of the world’s agricultural land will be similarly inundated.
It would be convenient if the reserves of oil underground could continue to be pumped out and then, when these reserves were exhausted, alternative sources of energy were deployed quickly enough to stall the melting and start the re-freezing process. Unfortunately scientists categorically reject this as a possibility.
The timing is critical. Unless a process of rapid reduction in oil extraction starts immediately (it needs to be well underway by 2020 at the latest) natural positive feed back loops will ensure that global warming will continue beyond human control, indefinitely.
There are signs that this reality is at last dawning on the majority of people who are beginning to see through the misinformation propagated by oil industry executives and their running dogs, think tanks and lobbyists who own and control the mainstream media.
And this drastic change, putting the machinery of the world’s foremost industry in reverse, therefore must occur, somehow, under the existing institutional framework of private ownership of the means of production and the widespread belief that markets will solve all problems if not interfered with by governments.
There is not time for the necessary institutional upheaval that will shift the whole global economy from one of accumulating ever greater amounts of wealth in the hands of an ever smaller number of people, to one of planning to balance local bio-capacity with local needs, to the maximum possible extent, in every single human settlement on earth.
That must occur soon, but only after we have taken the emergency exit from the threat to civilization resulting from civilization’s own eco-blind rampage.
We are at a critical stage in the progress of civilization. Some have said that we must stop growing and start un-growing.[2] But of course nobody wants to eliminate all kinds of growth. Humanity naturally wishes to keep growing in knowledge accumulation, health and longevity, the arts, culture and science.
But can we maintain qualitative growth in a world of quantitative contraction?
[1] Elephants seem to be aware that their forebears have died and there are many observations of awareness of the mystery and awe of natural phenomena in several species, along with communal ritual observances. But only primitive human tribes, as far as we are aware, have actually denied the reality of death and constructed a system of belief based on the notion that their ancestors remain, for ever, alive, in some way.
[2] Naomi Klein in her latest book ‘This Changes Everything’
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