At Systems Change Aliance, we recognise that real progress comes through cooperation and collaboration. That’s why our primary goal is to build an integrated movement by bringing together groups and individuals working towards positive social, economic and ecological change.
We are proud to count some of the most forward-thinking organisations and groups among our growing membership.
We also invite individuals to contribute to our community and activities.
At first glance, these two concepts may seem almost identical, one word is singular, the other plural. Two words with basically the same meaning. Or so I thought. Until I read the excellent book “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here” by scientist Hope Jahren.
Some years ago, Jahren took the opposite journey to myself: she moved from the US to Norway; I left Norway for the US in the mid-1980s. For decades, we have both been concerned about the environment and the fate of the planet’s more than seven billion humans.
In her highly readable book, Jahren gives a dramatic window
seat to the link between human consumption habits and our imperiled earth,
especially the looming dangers of climate change.
In a conversational narrative, she weaves scientific
observation and studies with personal experiences growing up in Iowa, the
American heartland of large corn fields and small, conservative towns. She
makes a compelling case for the need to solve climate change through global
system change. One person at-a-time.
In page after page, Jahren summarizes the evolution of our technological advances—from electric power to industrial farming, from automobiles to international air travel—the all-important inventions that have helped us but also released dangerous greenhouse gases into the planet’s fragile atmosphere.
The glorious story of more is the story of increased life expectancy, a tripling in cereal and meat production since 1969, the year Jahren was born. But it is also the story of capitalist greed and all its dark shadow sides: global fossil fuel use has almost tripled; one trillion tons of carbon dioxide have been released into the sky from the burning of these non-renewable energy sources; more than half of all amphibian, bird and butterfly species has declined in population; and the production of plastic has increased tenfold.
So, what can we do? There is a lot one human being can do to create system change. The 17-year old climate strike activist Greta Thunberg has shown us that. Hence, Jahren concludes her book by suggesting five actions we each can take:
Examine our values
Gather information
Walk our talk
Shop for change
Advocate for change
These suggestions are all well and good. If each one of us
took these steps to heart; we could make a big difference. But in reality, not
enough of us will ever make those individual changes. And that is the problem
with individual system change. With singular system change. It’s simply not
enough to make a difference.
“We live in a time of overlapping crises and we need to connect the dots, because we don’t have time to solve each crisis sequentially. We need a movement that addresses all of them.” ~ Naomi Klein
Authors like Jahren and many environmental organizations
have encouraged individuals to bring a cloth shopping bag to the supermarket
for decades without significantly reducing the plastic trash in the oceans or on
land.
Dramatic policy changes are needed for that. Today, plastic
trash is everywhere; even as microfibers in the air and in our lungs. Thus, we simply
need to ban plastic bags altogether. We need to invent and produce
biodegradable bags. Shops must no longer be allowed to sell stuff wrapped in petrochemical
garbage.
But to simply reduce plastics from the environment, that will require multiple changes. It will require cultural, scientific, political and economic systems change. Multilayered systems change. That is the kind of insight lacking in Jahren’s otherwise excellent book. And that is why we have opted to use the concept of systems change rather than singular system change.
Thus, we agree with author Naomi Klein: “We live in a time of overlapping crises,” she writes, “and we need to connect the dots, because we don’t have time to solve each crisis sequentially. We need a movement that addresses all of them.” Indeed, we do. That is why we started Systems Change Alliance.
What we need now is a movement advocating for integrated change, not simply a movement asking people to alter their behavior, to create superficial system change. That time has long gone. It’s time for a movement of people demanding deep systems change.
That’s the kind of movement Systems Change Alliance aspires to be. Want to join us?
At COP29 in Azerbaijan, Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, emphasized to the New Hour at Democracy Now that climate finance remains a critical issue, with developing countries needing an estimated $5 trillion annually to address climate challenges. Singh stressed that without substantial financial commitments from wealthy nations, progress on climate action will be limited.
The negotiations for a new climate finance goal to replace the previous $100 billion target have been slow and unproductive. After 14 meetings, rich countries have yet to commit to a specific number.
While COP28 in Dubai made historic progress by including language on transitioning away from fossil fuels, implementation remains challenging. Developed countries, such as the United States and Norway, are expanding fossil fuel production at home while pushing for discussions about carbon reductions abroad.
Inadequate Financial Support for Developing Countries
Another serious problem, according to Singh, is that much of the current climate finance comes in the form of loans rather than grants, exacerbating debt issues for developing countries. Singh argued that at least $600 billion annually should be provided as grants, especially for adaptation and loss and damage.
The COP29 climate summit is facing criticism over its proposed financial commitments, which many view as inadequate. The presidency has set a target of $1.3 trillion in climate finance by 2035, but only requires wealthier nations to contribute $250 billion annually to poorer countries, who are disproportionately affected by climate change despite contributing the least to the problem. This proposal has been labeled an “absolute embarrassment” by Oil Change International, likening it to giving control of a fire truck to an arsonist.
Greenhouse Emissions and Greenwashing
Singh emphasized the United States' responsibility to provide climate finance, noting that the U.S. is historically responsible for about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the EU is responsible for another 25%.
Regarding local environmental issues, Singh drew parallels between Delhi's severe air pollution crisis and the broader need to transition away from fossil fuel-based development models globally. The problem in developing countries is that they are using the same failed economic growth model as in the rich nations. Hence, widespread systems change is needed.
As discussions continue past the summit's official end date, the future of international climate finance remains uncertain, with strong calls for more substantial commitments from developed nations to support vulnerable countries in their climate adaptation efforts.
The Worst Climate Summit So Far?
Some experts consider COP29 the worst climate summit in recent memory for several reasons. One is delayed action. The proposed financial target is set for 2035, which is seen as a delay tactic, especially considering that previous commitments for 2020 were not met. Another is reduction in real terms. When accounting for inflation, the proposed $250 billion actually represents a 30% reduction from the previous $100 billion commitment made 15 years ago.
Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, described this COP as potentially the worst in recent memory, emphasizing that developing countries have long sought substantial financial support to combat climate change impacts. He criticized the presidency for failing to facilitate meaningful negotiations and for allowing wealthier nations to evade their financial responsibilities.
Claudio Angelo from Brazil's Climate Observatory echoed these sentiments, stating that the current draft is unacceptable and may lead to a deadlock if not revised. He noted that while Brazil's President Lula is advocating for fossil fuel expansion domestically, Brazilian diplomats are engaging constructively in negotiations.
Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, summarized the situation by stating that the current proposal is "a slap in the face of developing countries" and does not meet the urgent needs of climate action.
Here, where I live, in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, the impending arrival of Hurricane Helene transformed the serene landscape of Asheville and surrounding areas into a battleground against nature’s fury. As heavy rains poured down, even days before the hurricane arrived, rivers swelled to dangerous levels. Then, as the catastrophic winds from Helene downed power lines, crashed trees into houses, and increased the downpour to disastrous flood levels, residents braced for the worst.
In the aftermath, we are all grappling with the realities of a climate that have made such extreme weather events increasingly common. This personal account delves into the chaos and uncertainty brought by Helene, offering reflections on resilience, community service, and human connection in a region caught in the throes of a climate disaster.
Wednesday, September 25
Heavy rain begins to fall in the Asheville/Marshall area of North Carolina, where I have lived for 17 years. A cold front, slowed by the high mountains, has brought a flood of precipitation ahead of Hurricane Helene's arrival.
The city of Asheville, situated along the French Broad River, is known for its many yoga studios, artists, and exotic restaurants. The small town of Marshall (population 796), in Madison County, is also located along the river. It is known for its Mermaid Festival, surrounding organic farms, Appalachian music, and the Civil War massacre in Shelton Laurel in1863.
I stock up on extra candles, a new flashlight, oil for the old-fashioned oil lamps, extra dry food, and fill up about 100 liters of drinking water in anticipation of life without electricity. At midnight, Asheville Airport reports over 4 inches (10 cm) of rain. I imagine that creeks and rivers have already reached record-high flood levels and sleep only a few hours at a time. We had flooding on an island in the middle of the river in 2021, but I know it has never rained so much in such a short time before. I anticipate the worst.
Thursday, September 26
Climate hurricane Helene rages up the mountains from the unusually warm waters off the Florida coast. Precipitation and winds intensify. The neighboring county of Yancey experiences over 8.5 inches (22 cm) of rainfall in just over a day. The rivers, especially the French Broad River, swell dangerously with water from rushing creeks and smaller rivers.
I talk on the phone with my 89-year-old mother in Norway. But suddenly we lose contact. A few minutes later, I go out on the porch and see that a large pine tree has fallen over the power lines. Without electricity, there's no Wi-Fi and no water from the well for drinking, cooking, showering, or flushing the toilet.
In the evening, after not being able to call or write to my wife on a study trip in India, I read the classic travel book To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron by the light of two candles. As I go to sleep, I worry about my mother worrying about me.
Friday, September 27
Helene crashes through the forest around the house with heavy rainfall and strong winds. In the afternoon, I nervously drive down to the French Broad River and see rooftops, car parts, and plastic pipes violently streaming by.
A few days later, I read that Asheville Regional Airport lost communication after recording 13.8 inches (35 cm) of rain in less than 72 hours. That resulted in major flooding in the lowest parts of Asheville and many surrounding villages.
I imagine a grotesque sight: The Swannanoa River flooding through the windows of Andaaz, my favorite Indian restaurant. The water is a mixed soup of mud, plastic bottles, and pieces of wood. I envision Marshall completely underwater, the frozen food section in Madison Natural Food store submerged in chocolate-colored water and industrial sludge.
I wake up after only an hour's sleep and listen to the strong wind and heavy rain drumming on the roof. I sleep restlessly for the rest of the night. Branches occasionally falling onto the roof. What if one of the large oak trees outside will come smashing through the bedroom ceiling?
Saturday, September 28
In the morning, the wind has calmed down somewhat. I make a primitive oven from flat stones and cook breakfast with pancakes and a compote of berries over the fire. The floodwater in the French Broad River has begun to recede, and the extent of the destruction becomes clearer.
From a friend, I hear that the muddy water reached the roofs of many buildings in downtown Marshall. Some wooden houses were smashed to pieces by the strong currents. I drive around the neighborhood and see that several metal structures from an asphalt company have been swept into the river along with a wooden house. Further downstream, a whole row of houses and trailers have been crushed or swept away by the violent river. Some people chose not to evacuate and disappeared downstream along with their houses. One woman was later found in the neighboring state of Tennessee.
In the afternoon, electricity and running water return to Prama Institute, the retreat center where I work, but not to my home or my neighbors'. (It would take nearly two weeks before power was restored.) Our neighborhood of about 30 adults and children gathers for a warm lunch, the first in several days. I can finally check email and occasionally make phone calls. I receive an email from my Norwegian friend Trond Øverland: "You must be experiencing both tragedy and great solidarity in your area right now." "Good summary of the situation," I write back.
Sunday, September 29
The radio reports that the death toll has risen to 30, but 600 are still missing. A neighbor tells me that our friend Tom has lost his house in Chimney Rock, a place known from scenes in the movie The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis. Like many of the other houses, it was swept into Lake Lure.
Over 70 roads are destroyed, and Asheville is only accessible by car from South Carolina. The damage to houses and roads is, according to a politician, "post-apocalyptic." Thousands of anxious, hungry, and thirsty people are without electricity, water, and mobile coverage. On the radio, I hear that tap water may not be available for several weeks, perhaps months in some areas.
I take my first shower in several days, and I feel the guilty pleasure of privilege. As tragic as it is everywhere around us, we are among the lucky ones. We, up here in the now quiet, sunny forest.
Monday, September 30
Governor Roy Cooper inspects the damage from the air and on the ground, calling it "unlike anything ever seen in western North Carolina." The government organization FEMA begins registering residents for assistance as the long rebuilding process starts.
Anthony, a friend from Shelton Laurel, stops by with his truck. Despite a large oak crushing the kitchen in his new house, and his parents' home in the mountain town of Hot Springs now floating down the French Broad River, he is willing to help. He knows of a place in Tennessee where we can buy food and gas.
Later that day, I try my luck locally. But the lines are long at Ingles supermarket, and you need cash. With no open banks, I drive home disappointed. In the afternoon, some neighbors go to Marshall with shovels and rubber boots. They shovel half-meter thick mud out of Madison Natural Food store and Zadie’s restaurant.
Tuesday, October 1
Anthony finally returns from Tennessee with his truck full of vegetables and fruit. We have plenty of rice and beans stored, so we start cooking and serving hot meals to people in need outside our neighborhood.
In the afternoon, I check the propane tank for the kitchen stove; it's only 35 percent full. With the amount of food, we're now cooking, this will only last just under a week. Then we learn that Southern State Gas Company, where we get our propane from, is closed due to flood damage.
We are tired from all the cooking, serving, and the thick mud. We are filled with tragic and despondent feelings from all the destruction. We wonder if we can handle such physical and mental pressure for another day. But what else can we do? We must just keep on keeping on.
Wednesday, October 2
We cook hot food at the retreat center and serve 150 people in an apartment block in Asheville. They are mostly low-income retirees and partially disabled. They are victims of an unevenly distributed economic system and a failed health care system. Now they are also climate victims.
I read the following on CNN’s website: “Asheville was touted as a climate haven, a place to escape the worst ravages of extreme weather. But Hurricane Helene’s deadly path of destruction reveals this North Carolina city, like any in America, was never safe — it’s just that memories are short, and the reach of the climate crisis is consistently underestimated.”
Rich or poor, we are all fast becoming climate victims.
Thursday, October 3
I listen to a NASA climate scientist, prerecorded from a few days ago and speaking on his own behalf on the news program Democracy Now. He says that none of the news reports have mentioned the connection between Helene and climate change. Well, that's because they've been too busy reporting on the destruction and human suffering. And rightly so.
But today I read the following on Salon.com: "The destruction after Hurricane Helene in Asheville confirms that we cannot hide from climate change. The city in North Carolina was meant to be a climate refuge."
That's true. Since the mid-1990s, hippies, artists, environmentalists, organic farmers, musicians, and yogis have arrived in the area to find Shangri-La. I was one of them. Over the last ten years, this liberal, progressive, and colorful cultural area was discovered by the more well-to-do from New York and California.
Now the area has become too expensive to live in for many. The restaurant, Airbnb, hotel, and tourism industry dominate the economy. Some talk about wanting to escape to another haven. But as we have painfully experienced in recent days, there are certain problems we cannot escape from. And certainly not from the effects of climate change.
Friday, October 4
Some last thoughts. You may still wonder why our area was so hard hit by what is termed Hurricane Helene. Because we were not just hit with Ms. Helene; we were hit by two weather systems. We had already had days with heavy rain before Helene hit us.
A “perfect storm” of circumstances led to this catastrophe. The ground was already waterlogged before Helene arrived. Thus, two storm system stalled over the area, unleashing an extraordinary combination of hurricane winds and rain in a relatively small geographic region.
Then the mountainous terrain funneled this massive volume of water into the valleys below. This combination of pre-existing saturation, extreme rainfall, challenging topography, and extreme winds toppling trees and powerlines created the “ideal” conditions for this devastating disaster.
But why were we not better prepared: you don't prepare for hurricanes in the mountains any more than you prepare for snowstorms in Miami. But that should not be an excuse for not preparing better, for not becoming less dependent on the electrical grid, for example.
During the climate change era—with severe droughts there and rainstorms over here—erratic and extreme weather patterns have become the new normal. According to climate scientists, never-before-seen weather patterns, or extreme ones experienced once every 100 years or so, may now take place every 10-20 years. Or even more frequently.
So, what can we do to combat climate change? Business as usual offer quick fix solutions through schemes such as carbon capture. But there are no quick fixes. From a larger systems perspective, we need to rapidly move away from economies designed like extractive machines focused on maximum profit and production. Instead, we need economies emerging from and supporting the ecosystems of people, nature, and cultures.
We need political systems supporting regenerative and cooperative communities and regions. While recognizing that humans have basic needs to be met, we must align our economies with nature's processes to support dynamic balance and biodiversity.
In our own, small systems community, we have learned that we should have installed that solar well pump we talked about long ago. It would have saved us from going without water for over a week. It has now been ordered, and it will be installed soon.
We also need more solar generators in our homes to produce electricity for fridges and computers. While some of us already have whole-house solar power, we need to expand that capacity as well.
In this time of crisis, we discovered our capacity to rise together, transforming challenges into opportunities for connection and service. As the storms of the outside world intensified, we turned inward, nurturing our resilience through daily meditation and yoga. These practices became our anchors, helping us avoid the pitfalls of burnout and despair while serving the community at large.
Change on a systemic level requires a holistic approach, one that embraces transformation both large and small, collective and individual. It is about fostering well-being not just for small, exclusive groups, but for the entire community, weaving individual growth into the fabric of collective change and resilience.
Roar Bjonnes is the cofounder of Systems Change Alliance. He lives with his wife and dog Juno in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
As the climate crisis intensifies and global inequality deepens, thinkers and activists are increasingly calling for alternatives to capitalism. Three perspectives offering compelling visions for a post-capitalist world are the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout), Jason Hickel's degrowth eco-socialism, and Nick Estes' Indigenous resistance framework. While coming from different traditions, these approaches share striking similarities in their critiques of capitalism while proposing a more just and sustainable future.
Prout: A Vison for Economic Democracy and Spiritual Values
Developed by Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar, The Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout) offers a comprehensive model for a post-capitalist society rooted in spiritual values. Key elements of Prout include:
Economic democracy through localization and cooperatives
Guaranteeing basic necessities for all through full employment
Balancing individual and collective interests
Limits on wealth accumulation
Sustainable resource management
Progress is about fostering cultural and spiritual values
Prout envisions a cooperative economic system that transcends both capitalism and communism. It aims to provide meaningful work, meet everyone's basic needs, and foster both material and spiritual development.
Prout offers a restructuring of the economy into three structures—government control of key industries such as infrastructure for roads and energy, certain aspects of healthcare and education, corporations turned into worker-owned coops, while private enterprises will be kept small-scale and serving local needs.
This elegant reorganization of the economy offers a postcapitalist vison beyond the extreme wealth accumulation and environmental destruction by corporate capitalism and the economic ineffectiveness and rigidity of collectivist state control as under communism.
Degrowth: Reimagining Prosperity Without Growth
Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel is a leading proponent of degrowth - intentionally scaling down resource and energy use in wealthy nations while improving human wellbeing. Hickel contends that his de-growth policies can lift the world out of poverty while staying within planetary boundaries. Several key degrowth policies align closely with Prout's vision:
Shortening the work week
Providing universal basic services
Redistributing income and wealth
Limiting energy demands of elites and corporations
Like Prout, degrowth seeks to create an economy focused on human flourishing rather than endless GDP growth. Hickel argues this approach can unite both the environmental and labor movement in creating sweeping global change.
Indigenous Resistance: Defending Land and Life
Indigenous scholar and activist Nick Estes situates environmental struggles within a long history of resistance to colonialism and capitalism. He emphasizes Indigenous values and practices as alternatives to capitalist exploitation of nature and people.
Estes highlights concepts like Mni Wiconi ("water is life") that reflect a fundamentally different relationship to land and resources than capitalism allows. This resonates with Prout's spiritual foundation and degrowth's critique of “extractivism”.
Converging Visions for a Post-Capitalist World
While coming from different traditions and having different priorities, Prout, degrowth, and Indigenous resistance frameworks share key themes in their visions for transcending capitalism:
1. Prioritizing human and ecological wellbeing over profit and growth
2. Decentralizing economic power and fostering local self-reliance
3. Guaranteeing basic needs and services for all
4. Limiting wealth concentration and inequality
5. Reimagining work, leisure, and the meaning of prosperity
6. Cultivating spiritual and ethical values beyond materialism
7. Harmonizing human activity with ecological limits
All three approaches see capitalism as fundamentally unsustainable and call for systemic change. They reject the notion that markets, and technology alone can solve our economic, ecological, and social crises.
Building Bridges Between Traditions
A unique synthesis could bring these different anti-capitalist currents together:
Like degrowth, Prout provides concrete economic policies and structures for a post-capitalist society.
Like Indigenous frameworks, Prout is grounded in spiritual values and a holistic worldview.
Prout's cooperative model could help actualize the kind of democratic, community-controlled economies both degrowth and Indigenous activists envision.
Prout's concept of "cosmic inheritance" - that the earth's resources belong to all - aligns closely with Indigenous views and degrowth's critique of extractivism. Its emphasis on economic democracy resonates with calls for local control and self-determination.
A Path Forward: Unity in Diversity
Realizing these post-capitalist visions will require bridging divides between different groups and movements. As Estes writes, "we are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of earth from capital. For the earth to live, capitalism must die."
This provocative statement encapsulates the shared conviction that incremental reforms are insufficient. We need a fundamental reimagining of our economic system and relationship to nature. By combining Prout's cooperative model, degrowth economics, and Indigenous wisdom, we may yet forge a path to a more just, sustainable, and fulfilling post-capitalist world.
The task ahead is immense, but these converging visions offer hope and direction for the vital work of building a life-affirming alternative to capitalism's inhumane and nature-destructive logic. As climate chaos accelerates, the need for such radical transformation has never been more urgent.
Roar Bjonnes is the cofounder of Systems Change Alliance and the author of Growing a New Economy.
An odd noise has settled upon the sovereign world, bringing many restless evenings. The droning in our homes is not that of appliances, TV’s or chatbots. It’s more like the rumble of tectonic plates letting us know that human actions have disrupted the very behavior of this planet. Or maybe the call of ancestors mourning the loss of Earth’s biomass and energy. And part of this sound is surely the mortal cry that stems from our misunderstanding of the difference between price and value.
According to the IMF, world production declined $1 trillion in 2022, while the price of food and energy rose 7.3% in wealthier and 9.9% in poorer countries. Inflation, combined with crippling interest rates, has sharply increased the rates of joblessness and inequality, particularly in the Global South. A shortage of currency is causing cuts in public spending in countries representing half a billion people.
More than 50% of the world’s low-income economies, staggering under the high cost of debt, are at risk of default. Central banks are uncertain about hiking interest rates further and triggering recession, while their favored tool of inflation-targeting has not been reliable for many years. Debt restructuring by the G20 has also been delayed, largely through its reluctance to acknowledge that the great wave of globalization has ebbed and the geopolitical terrain is bifurcating.
It’s no secret that dozens of countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, which endured major defaults on foreign loans during the 1970s-90s, are now seeking independence from the non-convertibility of their currencies. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and a hundred other states known as BRICS+, are testing the West by working around its sanctions on Russia and teasing the possibility of forming their own monetary system.
This call for a new world order is taking place against the backdrop of global warming, land, water and air pollution, shrinking habitats, plunging biodiversity, soil degradation, species extinction and resource overconsumption. Is the clamor we’re hearing the lament of a planet failing to make the leap from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy and genuine incentives for sustainable equity?
Had the world paid attention fifty years ago, there may have been time to use fossil fuels to build a global infrastructure of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and other zero-carbon equipment, while edging away from dependence on fossil fuels. But the oil industry, governments and banks discouraged the idea of investing in the renewable energy industry and spurring it to produce enough power to grow and regenerate itself.
Now that the market can no longer rely on cheap and abundant supplies of fossil fuel, nations face the predicament of reducing their use of dirty energy while increasing clean energy production at the same time. Bottom line: either we get our signals straight or we default on the biophysical value of life.
It has long been known that the price of a commodity on an economic balance sheet does not express its intrinsic value as a resource. A century ago, Irving Fisher proposed an accounting system to connect economics with nature, and many technicians since the 1970s have been investigating such possibilities.
In January, three US agencies — the Office of Science and Technology, Office of Management and Budget, and Department of Commerce — announced a program for quantifying the value of ‘natural capital’. Their proposal, National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions, aims to replace the indicator of Gross Domestic Product by 2036 with a new standard arising from the interrelation of ecology and economy.
Perhaps a conflict-ridden world is still avoidable if the complex measures of nature can be orchestrated to end the noise within the economic system. As we hold our breath and dream, the growing crescendo for monetary de-dollarization and the drumbeat of war from high-powered militaries are scattering the world’s supply chains and compelling nations to increase their use of rapidly declining fossil fuels.
Then in the foreground appears a chorus of the Anthropocene, ancestors and analysts imploring: “How will natural capital end this dissonance when the value you add to the market is still removing value from nature without replenishing it?” For land’s sakes, could these be the voices keeping us up at night?
James Quilligan has been an analyst in the field of international economic development since 1975. From 1978-1984, he was a researcher and press secretary for the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, chaired by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. He is a founder and former Managing Director of Economic Democracy Advocates, which promotes equitable and sustainable resource management.
A fundamentally relational worldview as the basis for cultivating regenerative relationships between people, places, and planet.
This article is the result of a 1-hour virtual talk between our author Julia and Daniel Christian Wahl. After starting with a short general assessment of our most pressing societal issues in the following lines, Daniel speaks about how examining these from a relational perspective can provide new insights and help us move towards cultivating a more regenerative human presence on earth.
Where we are standing right now
What is the situation where we find ourselves in at the moment? Maybe we can fundamentally start from the point of saying: Things are clearly disintegrating around us. Cascading ecosystems collapse, failed states, and the global economy is hanging by a thin thread. All of this is part of a degenerative system we have built in the past and which, up to now, has pushed us to this point. Since the 1960s, we have consistently overstepped planetary boundaries and started to consume more than the bioproductivity of the living planet is able to regenerate every year. So we started to eat into the capital of our planet, rather than live off the interest, to give it an accurate economic analogy.
All our lifetime, we have been sawing on the branch we have been sitting on — and we have tried to ignore it. We have known about climate change, we have known about impeding resource depletion and scarcity, both in terms of energy, water, and food coming at us for many years, but we chose to keep partying on the Titanic. So now we are faced with two possible scenarios:
Do we want to keep pretending that we only need a new carpet on the Titanic, change the lights, or maybe consider powering the ship with a different renewable energy source? Do we want to continue engaging in processes of abstract problem solving and “solutioneering” that we see in the different COP1 processes, where we spend huge amounts of money and fly 50,000 people to Sharm-El-Sheikh to waste energy and human intelligence on coming up with one-size-fits-all solutions, which are then forcefully implemented in places where they don’t fit?
Or do we choose to acknowledge the amount of horror, collapse and calamity that we actually have coming towards us and look for real transformative actions? In this scenario, we need to ask ourselves: How can humanity operate locally and regionally while maintaining global solidarity and collaboration to build resilient infrastructures? How can we support each other in preparing for future crises while healing our communities and places by recognizing their commonalities as well as their unique qualities?
A fundamentally relational worldview as basis for change
As a human collective, we have lost terra firma. It has happened before, for example during the times of Reformation2 in Europe. At that time René Descartes3 tried to approach the present changes with the cogito ergo sum, the first distinction of I think (about the world out there), therefore I am. This first distinction led to an understanding that the world can be divided into different qualities, the measurable ones and the non-measurable ones, and it was said, “science isn’t bothered with the non-measurable ones”.
But it is exactly the qualitative, relational data that is essential. This understanding is coming back now, for example, with Nora Bateson’s4 work on warm data5, the so-called trans-contextual data, we actually need to pay attention to. It means the quality with which we bring forth this world together. We don’t need any more hard data points that AI (Artificial Intelligence) crunches for us and then tells us how to live appropriately. That’s just the perpetuation of the Cartesian split6and the separation of humanity from nature.
Carl Gustav Jung, inspired by different wisdom traditions, said that the thinking mind is powerful and useful, and that it is one of our ways of knowing — but intuiting, sensing and feeling are the other three. The very fact that we have got three ways of knowing qualitatively and one way of knowing analytically should make us pause for a moment. In many cases, the data tells one: “I know what the prediction is”, but it doesn’t feel right. So what is being asked for at this point of time is intuiting, sensing, and feeling what needs to be done. It is a gentle invitation to return to our innate capacity to go beyond being purely rational and analytical thinking, which is a massive opportunity, but requires a fundamental shift in being and not just in doing.
Remembering the regenerative power of life
As humans, we are regenerative by nature, with a heritage of being caretakers and emergent from place. Indigenous cultures worldwide view themselves as custodians, not owners, of their environment. Our ancestors’ ability to tend to ecosystems as gardeners and caretakers has resulted in our existence today. They sensed qualitative changes in ecosystem health and intervened to make them more abundant.
It is in our nature to be regenerative and deeply connected to the places we inhabit — the Native American prayer “to all my relations” embodies this idea. However, agriculture and city-building led to power structures built on domination, where nature became an “other” to be controlled instead of respected, admired, or even regarded as sacred. It is a paradox, of course: In opposition to our regenerative nature, the global system and processes we created are structurally dysfunctional — including neoclassical economics with its growth imperative and exploitation of the global South by the North. We are far from addressing the 500 years of trauma it caused and still causes, but to survive, humanity must remember and deal with past injustices and continuities.
The way to go further, fully be ourselves and share the gift that we came to share, is in service to the larger context we are in — whether it is our community or the Community of Life, the ecosystem, or the planet. All of it is fundamentally interconnected and nested and we need to find the higher ground that we all are actually relational expressions of life.
We cannot make peace with each other, if we don’t make peace with the larger family that brought us forth, which is life. Many wisdom traditions of the world have been trying to communicate this to us and we arrogantly ignored them. We are now going through a species level rite-of-passage to come home to the family of life and understand our role in bringing forth the world. If we, as human beings, understood ourselves as part of the Community of Life, we could see that everything we do, every word, every thought, every action does change the world. How we live matters and the only way to change the world is to live differently.
Coming home to place
To follow this thought further, we need to understand the link between planetary health and human health. However, the way to create planetary health is not by coming up with planetary solutions, but by people in place healing their places by regional work. What I propose is a planetary aware, cosmopolitan bioregionalism, which understands that all global problems like climate change, inequality, ecosystem collapse, as well as dangerously brittle and dysfunctional economic systems show up in every place. They are real for everyone, and at the same time, they can only be solved in the specific, by the people in place, where they show up.
We are usually taught to go into the abstract and then create and implement replicable and generic solutions. But by going into the specific and seeing the diversity of opinions and perspectives as literal expressions of life’s own diversity, we can approach these problems differently.
This could start with understanding that health is a community responsibility, that democracy means participatory engagement and commitment, and then figuring out with each other — for each community, for each place, for each region — what that might look like. We have the science to prove that the simple act of having a community garden — by sticking your hand in some compost every now and then and the simple act of being in relationship with soil, plants and other living beings — microbiologically and psychologically improves your own health. So health is not something that is trapped in what we perceive as individual bodies. Health is a dynamic process that links it all together: each individual cell, organ, person, family, community, ecosystem and the whole biosphere.
So in order to tap into the regenerative power of life with our own actions, we can use three questions, which I’ve found in my conversations with indigenous elders from different parts of the world. To take any significant decision, we need at least three good answers to all three of them:
Does it serve myself?
Does it serve my community?
Does it serve life?
To become mature members in the Community of Life we need to understand that it’s all about all my relations. Yes, there are many views of this “whole” that we are part of, but we don’t need to argue to be part of a larger context that has brought us forth. Let us be fascinated by how different the larger being that we are part of can express itself in another person. When you meet somebody very different from you, maybe you can even understand that their ignorance or even violence is a cry for help that has been created by not understanding how deeply related we actually all are.
References:
United Nations Climate Change Conference
16th century
French philosopher and scientist (1596–1650)
International researcher, writer, filmmaker and educator
Information about the interrelationships that connect elements of a complex system (more info: Warm data lab)
Separation between mind and body (consciousness of the mind — intelligence of the brain)
Spirituality is increasingly popular with young Australians: recent research shows 38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual.
It also reports 50% of them believe in karma, 29% in reincarnation and 20% in astrology. When it comes to activities equated with spirituality, 28% of Gen Z Australians practise meditation and 22% practise yoga.
In Australia, spirituality is strongly, enduringly central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and culturally and religiously diverse communities. Yet until recently, spirituality has received far less attention than religion.
Spirituality may be good for the environment too. The most recent trend in studies of religion – frequently associated with spirituality – is a reported close connection with nature. This was shared by 76% of Gen Z Australians.
In Australia, we believe spirituality is expressed as a down-to-earth “relational naturalism”. It’s particularly linked to Indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu and eco-spiritualities that acknowledge sacredness in and connection with the natural world, not just in heavenly heights.
Spiritual or not, nature-based connection is certainly on the rise. Young Australians also state that their affinity with nature informs their ethics – in terms of what they eat and consume, and their environmental activism.
So what is spirituality? How is it different from religion? And why is it so popular?
The most recent trend in studies of religion is a close connection with nature. Alessandra Montigne/Pexels
What is spirituality?
Spirituality is a connection with something greater than the self – which could be God, consciousness or nature – that results in a sense of responsibility to care for oneself and others. It often includes the natural world.
Spirituality has often been seen as the “individualised good-guy”, as a counterpart to the “institutional bad-guy” of religion. But this stereotypical binary is increasingly outdated.
Spirituality, like religion, is mostly practised in groups, or in communities. Often, it’s with a charismatic leader, and follows certain codes of practice, related to physical postures or activities, diet and lifestyle more generally.
According to Warraimaay historian Victoria Grieve-Williams, spirituality is deeply relational and ethical, honouring interconnections with human and more-than-human beings.
People can identify as spiritual but not religious, or as religious and spiritual. Both religion and spirituality can be social and inform how we live in the world.
In the Gen Z Australians survey, 22% self-identified as spiritual but not religious, with a further 16% identifying as both religious and spiritual.
How spiritual are Australians?
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have rich and diverse spiritual traditions. “The Creator Spirit was with us long before the British invaded our lands, and our faith has been nurtured over thousands of years,” writes Bidjara theologian and professor, Aunty Anne Pattel-Gray.
Grieves-Williams notes that connection to and responsibility for land and waterways – learned and shared through story – are central to Aboriginal spirituality.
Trawloolway theologian Garry Deverell explains that First Nations spirituality “begins with the earth”.
Through colonisation and migration, Europeans brought Christian and Jewish religions, which also include spiritual dimensions, to Australia. And many immigrants, particularly from the Asia-Pacific region, first introduced their religious and spiritual traditions to Australia in the 19th century, before the introduction of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act.
Many of their spiritual frameworks also stress interdependency with and compassion for all lifeforms.
Spirituality is big business
So-called Western interest in spirituality had earlier iterations in theosophy, an esoteric philosophy based on older religions and myths, and spiritualism, a way of life combining philosophy, science and religion. Both were popular at the turn of the 20th century.
But spirituality boomed globally as part of the alternative 1960s counterculture. In Australia, it took off after the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin, Northern New South Wales.
In Australia, spirituality took off after the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin. Flickr/Harry Watson Smith, CC BY
This includes the mainstreaming of teachings through social media, and of practices such as meditation, yoga, retreats, conscious dance, plant medicine, astrology and tarot. Many of these derive from Indigenous, Buddhist or Hindu traditions.
“True yoga is not just a workout,” says Indian-American yoga teacher and researcher Rina Deshpande, who urges people to learn the history of their practice. “Classically, it is an ancient Indian philosophy espousing an eight-limbed approach to conscious living.”
Spiritual movements and wellness influencers have gained prominence through critiquing the ills of modern capitalist consumerism, with a focus on personal and planetary wellbeing. Some high-profile examples include Jay Shetty, entrepreneur and host of the podcast On Purpose, and Australian Sarah Wilson, author of I Quit Sugar.
Many of these influencers focus on self-care and the need to slow down and be mindful – and to foster a more respectful and sustainable relationship with ourselves and the natural world. At the same time, some turn their goods and services into products to be marketed, increasingly through social media, to lift their profiles.
Spiritual risks and harms
While spirituality was previously associated with hippies and “peace, love and mung beans”, reports of spiritual harms – emotional, sexual and financial abuse – are increasingly being revealed in both religious and spiritual communities.
This includes many allegations of abuse by students of prominent gurus such as Tibetan Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche, famous for his teachings on death and dying, and Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram yoga. https://www.youtube.com/embed/AbsaUHdxGHg?wmode=transparent&start=0 Some spiritual leaders have been accused of abusing their followers, including the founder of Bikram yoga.
The uptake of conspiracy theories in spiritual communities – and vaccine resistance within them – have also been deeply troubling in recent years. This “conspirituality” is linked to spiritual exceptionalism and bypassing, where distrust of medical and state authority, combined with individual body sovereignty, led to denying the suffering the COVID pandemic caused society’s most vulnerable.
Not all ‘woo-Anon’
Conspirituality during COVID certainly made spirituality more public. It also seemed to draw more men into spiritual movements, with some Australian male conspiritual leaders mobilising “spiritual warriors” to “cosmic war”.
Just 2% of participants thought the virus was caused by global elites, pharmaceutical companies, aliens or demonic forces – and just 5% said they would not be vaccinated. By contrast, 88% supported lockdowns and 91% supported mask wearing.
This is significant, given that media coverage of conspirituality tends to overstate its prevalence within wellness communities.
It’s vital not to tar all spiritual people as “woo-Anon”, particularly as they represent an increasingly significant percentage of the Australian population.
The uptake of conspiracy theories among spiritual communities remains concerning. But research reveals relational spiritual narratives and practices can also play a significant role in both personal and planetary wellbeing. This includes countering vaccine resistance – in and beyond Australia.
Spirituality can be experienced in personal ways, but it is also complex and communal. It is important to be aware of spirituality’s potential benefits and risks.
This is the first article in the Religion and Spirituality series, arising from the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project on Australian Spirituality, led by scholars at Deakin University. This series considers the growing interest in spirituality in so-called Australia, and its relationship to wellbeing and risks.
The booming performance of large corporations in the United States, evidenced by the rise in the S&P 500 and a surge in dividends, has prompted significant scrutiny. While investors celebrate, concerns mount over wealth distribution, corporate conduct, and income inequality.
A report from Oxfam International spotlights a stark gap: while profits enrich shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends, only a fraction of companies publicly commit to ensuring a living wage for their employees. This disparity is compounded by a steep rise in CEO pay over recent years.
Critics argue that stock buybacks primarily benefit affluent executives and shareholders, diverting funds from potential investments in growth and fair wages. They advocate for restrictions on buybacks to ensure more equitable use of corporate profits.
Conversely, proponents contend that buybacks efficiently distribute surplus capital, potentially enhancing shareholder value by reducing available shares in the market, thus boosting earnings per share.
Moreover, Oxfam's findings illuminate how these corporate practices worsen gender and racial disparities in the workplace, notably in sectors like retail where executive representation and median salaries are unequal.
In response, President Joe Biden has proposed tax reforms targeting the wealthiest Americans, including a tax on individuals with over $100 million in wealth. Additionally, concerns about tax avoidance by corporations are escalating, with reports suggesting some large firms pay their executives more than their federal tax obligations.
The surge in corporate dividends and profits underscores the necessity for heightened scrutiny of corporate conduct and a reassessment of priorities to combat growing income inequality and ensure fair taxation. Efforts to champion equitable wealth distribution, support for workers, and measures to address tax avoidance are pivotal in forging a more just and sustainable economy.
In Europe, parallel concerns about corporate tax avoidance are burgeoning, with Statista highlighting instances where large companies allegedly pay executives more than their federal tax obligations. This transatlantic resonance underscores the urgency for concerted global action to tackle systemic inequities in corporate practices and taxation policies.
Environmental ministers in the European Union issued warnings about the bloc's credibility in addressing global biodiversity and climate crises following the decision to shelve the Nature Restoration Law. The law, aimed at restoring habitats and protecting biodiversity, faced opposition from member states after recent farmer protests over its requirements.
Despite initial approval by the European Parliament, the law encountered resistance, with some countries expressing concerns about its economic impact on the agriculture sector. Farmer protests, starting in France and spreading to other nations like Spain, Belgium, and Italy, influenced policymakers' decisions. Hungary's opposition to the law, allegedly politically motivated, drew criticism, with accusations against President Viktor Orbán.
Irish Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan lamented the potential consequences of shelving the law, warning of the collapse of political ambition and credibility on climate and biodiversity issues. Environmental groups echoed concerns about the EU's reputation and leadership in tackling these crises.
Despite the setback, EU Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius and other leaders expressed optimism about continuing negotiations on the law. Belgium's Minister for Climate Change, Alain Maron, assured efforts to find solutions and reintroduce the law for adoption, emphasizing ongoing commitment to addressing biodiversity and climate challenges.
The fate of the Nature Restoration Law remains uncertain, but there are hopes for its revival before the EU elections in June. As discussions continue, stakeholders stress the importance of upholding the EU's international commitments to combat biodiversity loss and climate change.
Sharing our Stories online enables us to define who we were, who we are, and who we will be as Indigenous peoples.
The scale of social media’s impact surprises me, especially considering that it sits in the palm of my hand. It is a thread connecting us to so many across the world. Over the past decade, there has been an expansion and evolution of social media that has changed the lives of people—both in how we build and maintain relationships and how we share and produce knowledge. It has created a culture all its own. One of the most significant impacts I have experienced is how Indigenous people have embraced the art of storytelling online.
I remember the first TikTok video I made that went viral, back in 2019. It was a tongue-in-cheek history of Thanksgiving and its significance today as a celebration of genocide. The video was removed from TikTok, supposedly for violating community guidelines, so I posted it on Instagram and Twitter, where it amassed more than a million views and thousands of likes. It was then I realized my own power and the power of social media as a tool for positive change.
I have seen it on a much larger scale as well, as Indigenous peoples have used social media to lift up and demand justice. I remember in 2016 how silent mainstream news media initially were about what was happening in Standing Rock between water protectors and the militarized police force. Social media enabled those on the ground to act as witnesses to the gathering of Native nations and the violence they faced, amplified by Indigenous activists and filmmakers such as the International Indigenous Youth Council, Myron Dewey (may he rest in peace and power), and Chad Charlie.
Storytelling is more than just recounting events. There is an inherent art and skill to one of the oldest and most widely practiced forms of communication and cultural preservation in human herstory. Indigenous storytellers are inspired by and pull from what I lovingly describe as the “sentient archive”—a living, breathing repository of memories, lessons, and knowledge built and shared from generation to generation.
There is an inheritance formed through the kinship of sharing a story, imparting strength, beauty, and wisdom that transcend temporal and spatial dimensions. Our storytelling enables us to define who we were, who we are, and who we will be as Indigenous peoples.
As an Indigenous trans femme, who I am, who I was, and who I will be exist because of my family, my community, and the people I choose to be in relationship with, as well as what I learn, embrace, and refuse in this life. My use of social media is informed and grounded by Diné ways of being and knowing, which I have inherited from and cultivated with my family and community.
Through online platforms, I have been able to reclaim what was long denied to me: my story. Social media enabled me to create new and complex representations of what it means to be Indigenous—along with fresh forms of queerness and transness that exist in alignment with my Indigeneity.
I have also studied the specific relationship between Indigenous peoples and social media while on my doctoral pathway at the University of Denver. This relationship is rooted in culture, community, and advocacy while celebrating all three. Bronwyn Carlson, an Aboriginal professor and head of the department of Indigenous studies at Macquarie University in Australia, highlights how social media has empowered Aboriginal peoples to redefine representation while challenging caricatures. Marisa Elena Duarte, an associate professor of justice and sociotechnical change in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, emphasizes that Indigenous peoples’ usage of social media is grounded in our tribal philosophies, spiritualities, and legacies, which destabilizes colonial power and supports decolonization.
Social media, too, exists in relation to settler colonialism. In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s book Control and Freedom, she highlights how early conceptions of the internet described it as an imagined electronic frontier: an unknown space to occupy and—dare I say?—colonize.
As with so many things, the internet enables both the good and the bad. I choose not to engage with the ignorance of trolls and the violence they create with their hateful comments and occasional death threats. Instead, I tackle misinformation about Indigenous peoples, our issues, and our rights. I breathe new narratives—inhaling what I know and exhaling something personal and new—rooted in supporting and celebrating the communities I cherish.
Alex Jensen of Local Futures, a Systems Change Alliance (SCA) member organization, reports that the World Social Forum Nepal 2024 brought together 50,000 individuals and 1,400 organizations from 98 countries in Kathmandu from February 15th to 19th.
This gathering echoed the original WSF's core belief from 2001 in Porto Alegre – the possibility of creating 'another world'. Participants shared a rejection of neoliberal globalization, corporate power, and militarism, advocating for justice, solidarity, and sustainability.
Key themes included climate justice, debt cancellation, agroecology, and solidarity economy. Despite diverse perspectives, a common goal emerged: steering away from corporate control and inequality toward political and economic democracy.
“A brief glance through the 27 pages worth of offerings during the Forum,” according to Jensen, “gives a taste of the massive diversity of concerns, broadly focusing either on resistance to the status quo, or on alternatives to it, and sometimes a combination of both.”
Critical offerings included:
• ‘Resisting False Solution on Climate Change’ • ‘Impact of Privatization on Public Services’ • ‘Fighting against Ecocidal Multinationals’ • ‘Mobilizing Against International Financial Institutions’ • ‘Resisting Free Trade in South Asia’
There were also many constructive initiatives:
• ‘Agroecology as a Transformative Approach to Tackle Climatic, Food, and Eco-systemic Crises’ • ‘Let’s Create Our Own Money’ • ‘Staying Hopeful and Sustaining Ourselves as Activists and Organizers’ • ‘Agrobiodiversity and Community Seed Banks’ • ‘Revitalizing Rural Reconstruction Movements: Addressing Multiple Crises’ • ‘Decent Work and Care Economy’
Local Futures was involved in several sessions at the Forum. Among these were the following organizations:
• Digo Bikas Institute from Nepal, which helped organize the Forum. Digo Bikas has participated in past World Localization Day events, and translates Local Futures’ materials into Nepali; • Kalpavriksh from India, which was instrumental in starting the Vikalp Sangam/Alternatives Confluence process that networks hundreds of organizations and thousands of social-ecological initiatives across India. Local Futures has been a participating member of this network since its launch a decade ago; • Bilaterals.org – focusing on news and critical analysis of free trade agreements; • Zambia Alliance for Agroecology and Biodiversity – part of the African Food Sovereignty Alliance; • Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) – an international network which is resisting international debt from countries to financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF.
The Forum highlighted the urgent need for global collaboration in challenging the current system and exploring alternatives, marking a significant step in the ongoing struggle for change.
The numbers are in. Last year was the hottest on record by a wide margin. The planet is now 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the fossil fuel revolution. Global heating is accelerating. This year (2024) is likely to set another record because the latter half of last year featured an El Nino climate pattern that continues to influence global weather. The last colder-than-average year, according to NOAA, was 1976.
The United States experienced a record number of billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023. Canada’s wildfires in June resulted in an unprecedented flurry of air-quality alerts in the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., with New York temporarily suffering the worst air quality of any city in the world. Wildfires also devastated Maui.
Elsewhere in the world, Libya, Guam, Malawi, and Peru experienced horrific floods. According to the United Nations, drought now affects a quarter of humanity. Developing countries were stuck with proportionally higher recovery costs on a per-capita basis.
The solution to climate change is to reduce and reverse the decades-long trend of annually increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the planetary atmosphere. So, let’s see what the numbers tell us on that score. The carbon dioxide (CO2) level in Earth’s atmosphere is now over 420 parts per million, up from 315 ppm in 1958 when the first direct measurements commenced. The atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing at over 2 ppm per year for the past several years.
This added CO2 in the atmosphere comes from human activities that release carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the air. U.S. carbon emissions were down 3 percent in 2023 due mainly to an ongoing national switch from burning coal to burning natural gas for generating electricity. But worldwide carbon emissions were up 1.1 percent compared to 2022. Since climate change is a global problem, it is the global statistic that matters.
Most emissions are energy-related, so phasing out fossil fuels in favor of low-carbon energy alternatives is critical. While it’s too early to report final data for renewable energy additions in 2023, last June, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasted that global renewable energy generation capacity would increase by a record 440 GW for the year (total world renewable energy generation capacity, including hydropower, stands at about 4,500 GW).
However, confusion sometimes results from failure to distinguish production capacity from actual generation since solar and wind installations typically generate only 20 to 50 percent of their theoretical capacity due to variations in sunlight and wind.
So, let’s look at the actual generation numbers. Of the roughly 30,000 terawatt hours of electricity generated globally in 2022, 8,500 terawatt hours (29 percent) came from renewables—over half of that from hydropower.
We must be careful to distinguish between “electricity” and “energy”—another frequent source of confusion. Electricity’s share of all end-use energy usage remains stable at about 20 percent. After accounting for conversion factors, renewables (including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biofuels, and traditional biomass—i.e., burning wood for cooking and heating) provide about 16 percent of total world primary energy.
Nuclear energy also entails relatively low levels of carbon emissions, but its share of world energy fell to a multi-decade low in 2023, and nuclear projects are notoriously slow and expensive to bring online.
To reach net zero emissions by 2050 (which the IPCC considers necessary to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius) by providing 100 percent of total global energy from renewables, we would need a nearly ten-fold increase in renewable energy production, even assuming zero growth in overall global energy demand during that time.
Annual additions of solar and wind capacity would have to increase by well over an order of magnitude (10x) compared to the current record rate. Electrification of transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and other sectors would also need to accelerate dramatically.
In its Net-Zero Roadmap report published in September 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the extreme difficulty of achieving these increases in renewable energy and suggested instead that 19 percent of final energy will still come from fossil fuels in 2050 and that final-energy consumption will be reduced by 26 percent.
To remove the resultant emissions, the IEA estimated that one billion metric tons per year of carbon dioxide would need to be captured by 2030, rising to 6 billion tonnes by 2050. Mechanized technologies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) that would be required to do this have been criticized as being too expensive, too energy intensive, and underperforming in terms of their goal.
Currently, about 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is captured annually, nearly all by forests; only 49 million metric tons are being removed from the atmosphere by carbon removal technology projects across the world. About 80 percent of that captured carbon is used for “enhanced oil recovery.”
Meanwhile, over 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are being released by human activities, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.
We can conclude from these scorecard numbers that, as of the start of 2024, humanity is not on track to avoid catastrophic climate change. The likelihood of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (the goal stated in the Paris Accords of 2015) is now extremely remote. Indeed, that threshold may be exceeded within just the next few years.
If world leaders genuinely hope to change these trends, dramatic action that entails reevaluating current priorities will be required. Not just fossil fuel subsidies but also continued growth in global energy-tied economic activity must be questioned. Otherwise, we may be destined to fulfill the old adage: “If you do not change direction, you will end up where you are heading.”
This article was published with permission from resilience.org
Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels.
A recent study published in the journal Science Advances has raised alarm bells about the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a vital system of ocean currents responsible for regulating global climate patterns. The study, conducted by a team of scientists using sophisticated climate models, suggests that the AMOC could be on a trajectory towards collapse, with profound implications for sea level rise and global weather patterns.
The AMOC, often referred to as the ocean's conveyor belt, plays a crucial role in redistributing heat around the planet. Warm waters from the tropics are carried northward towards the North Atlantic, where they cool, sink, and then flow back southward. This circulation pattern helps to moderate temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and influences weather systems across the globe.
For years, scientists have expressed concerns about the stability of the AMOC in the face of climate change. Rising temperatures and melting ice have disrupted the delicate balance of heat and salt that drives the currents, raising the specter of a potential collapse. While the AMOC has only been continuously monitored since 2004, evidence from sources like ice cores and ocean sediments indicates that it has shut down in the past due to rapid glacier melt.
The new study represents a significant breakthrough in understanding the potential collapse of the AMOC. By utilizing complex climate models and simulating the gradual increase of freshwater input into the system – representing factors like ice melt, rainfall, and river runoff – scientists were able to detect early warning signals for a collapse. The results suggest that the AMOC could weaken gradually before abruptly collapsing, a scenario with dire consequences for global climate stability.
One of the most alarming findings of the study is the potential for abrupt and extreme temperature changes in certain regions. Parts of Europe could see temperatures plummet by as much as 30 degrees Celsius over the course of a century, while countries in the Southern Hemisphere may experience increased warming. Additionally, disruptions to the AMOC could lead to sea level rise of approximately 1 meter (3.3 feet), further exacerbating coastal flooding and erosion.
While the study provides valuable insights into the potential collapse of the AMOC, uncertainties remain regarding the timing and extent of such an event. Scientists emphasize the need for further research, including models that account for additional climate change impacts such as rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite these uncertainties, the study serves as a stark reminder of the urgent need to address climate change and its impact on critical ocean circulation systems. Ignoring the risks associated with the potential collapse of the AMOC could have profound consequences for ecosystems, economies, and communities around the world.
Amidst the release of alarming federal data on the rise of factory farming in the United States, critics are sounding the alarm over the detrimental impacts on public health, the environment, and local agriculture. According to recent figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the number of large-scale factory farms has surged in recent years.
This trend is also increasing in other countries, particularly in Europe and China, with significant increases in the production of cattle, chickens, and hogs.
Environmental Working Group (EWG) Midwest director Anne Schechinger warned that without policy changes, the trend of factory farm expansion will continue, posing threats to various aspects of society. The data revealed a staggering growth in the number of mega factory farms, with cattle, chicken, and hog operations all seeing substantial increases.
Food & Water Watch (FWW) analysis echoed these concerns, highlighting a 6% increase in the number of animals raised on factory farms since 2017, reaching a staggering 1.7 billion annually. This expansion comes at the expense of small-scale, traditional farming operations, which have been dwindling rapidly.
FWW research director Amanda Starbuck emphasized the environmental toll of factory farming, noting that these operations produce immense amounts of waste, polluting water and air. Moreover, the concentration of animals in these facilities exacerbates public health risks, with toxins from animal waste posing dangers to both humans and wildlife.
Critics argue that urgent legislative action is needed to curb the growth of factory farming and protect local agriculture. The Farm System Reform Act, sponsored by Senator Cory Booker and Representative Ro Khanna, aims to address the monopolistic practices of meatpackers and corporate integrators while imposing a moratorium on large factory farms. Additionally, the bill seeks to reinstate mandatory country-of-origin labeling requirements, providing consumers with greater transparency, and supporting local farmers.
As calls for reform intensify, lawmakers are urged to prioritize the health of communities, the environment, and the future of sustainable, local agriculture.
‘Degrowth’ and the ‘Steady State Economy’ describe a grouping of related concepts and ideas which are critical of economic growth being a central tenet and goal of modern societies. Proponents of degrowth seek to arrest and ultimately reverse the primary global trend of the last 200 years or so (relentlessly growing economies), whilst those seeking a Steady State Economy imagine an economic system which would be stable in magnitude (via balancing feedbacks e.g., tight loops of material recycling) in order to stay within ‘planetary boundaries’. The latter would likely be the ultimate destination of the former, and together they may be labelled as ‘non-growth economic models’ [[1], [2]].
Degrowth traces its origins to several 19th century thinkers including John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau, and modern degrowth theory started to gain traction during the 1970s. This resulted from work undertaken by scientists, economists and philosophers such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and E. F. Schumacher, with pioneering work such as the ‘Limits to Growth’ (LTG) report also providing a significant tailwind at that time. For steady-state economics, one of the early proponents was (perhaps surprisingly) Adam Smith; although considered a founding hero of orthodox economic theory today, he concluded that economies of all nations would reach a final ‘stationary’ state, and these ideas were later built on by other famous economists such as Herman Daly, John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. Through most of their history, non-growth economic models have however been considered by the mainstream as fairly fringe ideas, existing mainly as unworkable theories in textbooks, and having little relevance to the supposed real world business of creating wealth and driving progress forward. However, in recent years that has started to change, and these models are starting to move much more towards the mainstream once again [[1], [3]].
This shift is being driven largely by increasingly wide recognition that the pursuit of endless economic growth is the driving force of virtually all aspects of the gathering global predicament, captured by the term ‘polycrisis’ (i.e., interlocking, interacting and worsening crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss, global toxification and financial system instability). The potential for growth to drive these phenomena was recognised 50 years ago in the groundbreaking LTG report, but despite these insights this growth has continued apace, and we now find ourselves collectively in a deteriorating situation. The renewed interest in non-growth economic models as means to ease us back from this precipice has to date focused on different key social, economic and infrastructure aspects. This includes concepts such as: ‘contraction-and-convergence’ (reducing growth in developed regions to give developing regions ‘room’ to alleviate poverty); ‘universal basic income & bullsh*t jobs’ (provision of an unconditional payment to all citizens to separate employment and survival, and elimination of unproductive and wasteful employment); and ‘doughnut economics’ (operating societies within the boundaries of upper ecological limits and minimum social metrics) [[4], [5], [6]].
Despite the increasing depth and granularity of non-growth economic model research, one aspect is currently relatively under-represented in these efforts, namely the nature of the energy paradigm that could underpin societies operating in this form. To address this question, there are two aspects to consider: the energy paradigm that would support the transition to a non-growth economic model (i.e., the implementation of degrowth), and that which would support a society into the longer term (i.e., ongoing operation of a steady state economy) [7]. The beginning of an answer to this question is explored in a book (‘Future Energy Options from a Systems Perspective’ [[8]]) which I co-authored with Professor Aled Jones at the Global Sustainability Institute (part of Anglia Ruskin University in the UK) during 2023.
This book considers the uniquely crucial role that energy plays in maintaining complex societies through an account of the ‘phases’ of human energy use through time, and the ‘energy bind’ we collectively find ourselves in (i.e., that we are wholly reliant on energy, but our current sources are proving harmful and depletable). The book presents three broad pathways (or ‘branches’) that global society could follow in future [9]; these trifurcating options are: the ‘Fossil-Seneca’ Branch (essentially fossil fuel business as usual, potentially leading to a climate change-induced collapse); the ‘Continued Growth’ Branch (hypothetical use of low carbon fusion or renewables systems to grow the global economy indefinitely, which may avoid climate collapse but would likely generate other severe negative consequences) and the ‘Stabilisation’ Branch (emulation of natural systems that achieve systemic equilibrium via a full renewables transition, combined with degrowth, giving the best chance of achieving societal stability and longevity). It is therefore this Stabilisation Branch scenario that is most directly relevant to this question.
Degrowth would likely be a necessary aspect of a transition to a fully renewables based energy system for several reasons. Such a system would have a lower overall ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) value (meaning that it would generate less ‘discretionary’ energy for non-essential but growth-supporting purposes such as consumption) and would generate intermittently as per environmental conditions. In these cases, the amount of renewables infrastructure could be made larger to offset these effects (e.g., through over-capacity and/or energy storage infrastructure to compensate for intermittency) but that would require more significant ‘re-materialisation’ (an increase in global mining activity, and energy and land demands), which could in itself generate destabilising dynamics for society. Therefore, the overall magnitude of an implementable and sustainable renewables system (even where materials recycling could be introduced) would likely be limited, and hence the scope of a society it could support would likely have to decrease to accommodate such a transition.
Once in place, a renewables-based system could be amenable to achieving an equilibrium output. This is because these systems extract energy from a fixed exogenous input (total solar energy), so once the extraction becomes aligned with a value at or below this total ‘flow’ limit, they could in theory continue without effective limit (assuming recycling loops for the required materials can be closed). This would emulate Earth’s biosphere, which has equilibrated around the solar input value (in terms of total biomass supported by global scale photosynthesis) and has thus achieved stability over geological time. This contrasts with the ‘stock’ based energy sources which global society currently uses, which will inevitably deplete in the long run. Detractors of non-growth economic models often cite concerns that societies operating under these conditions would become unstable, impoverished and/or stagnant, and would therefore not be practical or sustainable. The biosphere analogy may apply here again, in that although it has operated in a steady state over prolonged timescales, it has maintained rich and ever-changing diversity under a ‘hard’ and unchanging limit.
Non-growth economic models are still a far from accepted idea by the majority of economists, governments and business leaders, but the global predicament must urge us to consider them more seriously. Indeed, without action, degrowth may well occur in the form of uncontrolled economic contraction or collapse as a result of the growing feedbacks associated with the polycrisis. If degrowth were to happen to global society rather than it being a choice or strategy, there would likely be little chance of it settling into a controlled steady state in which hallmarks of modernity (e.g., power grids) would persist in a big way. In this scenario, human extinction may be unlikely, but organised societies and knowledge accumulation as we understand them could well be over. The Stabilisation Branch scenario described here indicates that a large scale renewables-based energy system may be an inherent feature and necessity of achieving degrowth, and that once in place, may be well suited to maintaining a steady-state economic system which may be much more stable than our current paradigm. Armed with this knowledge, perhaps it is time for the proponents of non-growth economic models to become more assertive in discussing them as a real possibility for the future.
[1]. Kerschner, C. (2010) Economic de-growth vs steady-state economy. Journal of Cleaner Production, 18, 6, 544-551.
[5]. Hickel, J. et al. (2022) Degrowth can work – here’s how science can help. Nature, 612, 400-403.
[6]. Raworth, K. (2017) Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Random House Business.
[7] Another important consideration might be the scale of such as society (i.e., whether it would be global or regional in scope), but for the purposes of this discussion it is assumed that a non-growth economic model would be global and homogeneous in its extent.
[8]. King, N., Jones, A. (2023) Future Energy Options from a Systems Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan Cham.
[9] Note that the focus is primarily the systemic characteristics of different energy paradigms, rather than the details of policy, economic or other practicalities of implementation.
Nick King is an environmental scientist working in professional consulting and the energy industry. He is also affiliated with the Schumacher Institute’s think tank.
In the article The Future is Feral—And Climate Resilient in Yes! Magazine, Irene Lyla Lee suggests that it is time to change our attitude towards feral plants. They are not just weeds; they are an integral part of the environment we live in.
Lee’s article delves into the significance of feral plants, particularly focusing on brassica rapa, a once-utilized plant now labeled as a weed. Her narrative expands to encompass the broader implications of human intervention in plant genetics and the potential consequences, drawing parallels with historical instances like the devastation caused by the Gros Michel banana and the Irish potato famine. It underscores the vulnerability of modern crops to climate change and emphasizes the need for innovative farming practices.
Highlighting various initiatives worldwide, including efforts in Mexico to preserve brassica rapa and projects in Arkansas to diversify rice genetics, the article showcases how feral plants hold the key to resilience in agriculture. The article also explores hemp cultivation in the Midwestern United States, where feral strains demonstrate adaptability and resilience, providing valuable genetic diversity for future breeding efforts.
Researchers like Shelby Ellison and Zachary Stansell emphasize the importance of conserving genetic diversity in crops for climate change resilience. Lee’s article navigates through the complexities of genetic manipulation, cautioning against oversimplification and stressing the need to consider broader ecosystem impacts. Indigenous perspectives, represented by Linda Black Elk, emphasize the interconnectedness of plants and ecosystems, urging a holistic approach to cultivation.
Challenges inherent in working with feral plants, such as unpredictability and lower yields, are acknowledged. However, the potential benefits in terms of adaptability and genetic diversity outweigh these challenges. The article explores emerging technologies like CRISPR and their potential role in enhancing the resilience of feral crops, while acknowledging the importance of respecting the intrinsic value of each plant species.
Ultimately, the article encourages a paradigm shift in agriculture towards coexistence with feral plants, viewing them not as nuisances but as valuable contributors to food sovereignty and resilience. It calls for a deeper understanding of plant complexity and an appreciation for the intricate relationships between humans, plants, and ecosystems.
The article ends with an important point and a question: “Rather than looking at a species as having a single, human-centered function,” she writes, “to understand the feral is to see individual plants with the complexity that seeds entire ecosystems. What would our world look like if we, as humans, learn to adapt to plants instead of making plants adapt to us?”
Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance and the author of the book Growing a New Economy.
Why the potential of people, and the places that communities inhabit, is the key to addressing the climate crisis
Our times call for “stubborn optimism”, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac suggest in their 2020 book The Future We Choose. We all owe them gratitude for their very personal effort in making the 2015 Paris Agreement possible. Since then, they have continued to stimulate action towards a transformative response to climate change. Together with the outstanding strategic work of Nigel Topping as the UK’s High Level Climate Action Champion in the run up to COP26, there is a basis for hope that we will see bolder and more coordinated action within and across sectors after the Glasgow conference.
Pathways towards a regenerative future
The capacity building work that Bill Sharpe and the ‘Future Stewards’ coalition have undertaken with industry-specific climate champions around the world by training them in the use of the ‘Three Horizons’ pathways practice, will provide a shared mental framework to address and implement systemic transformations at local, regional and global scale. We urgently need to get better at discerning how our visions of the future and our problem-solving mindset affect our individual and collective agency in working with the future potential of the present moment.
To navigate this turbulent transition and steer our path towards a regenerative future requires the capacity to listen and learn from diverse perspectives. Without the need to agree on everything, we can nevertheless learn to disagree more intelligently as we build collective capacity for transformative innovation.
The Three Horizons pathways practice developed by Sharpe and colleagues in the International Futures Forum is distinct from the ‘Three Horizons of Growth’ used by McKinsey. It allows us to collectively explore sector — or location-specific — transformations through the managerial perspective of Horizon 1, the entrepreneurial mindset of Horizon 2, and the visionary call of Horizon 3 for profound systemic and world-view transformations that will enable a viable future. All three perspectives are necessary to contribute to a regenerative future.
The human potential for regeneration
A regenerative human impact on Earth is not only possible but has been the norm for most of our species’ deep history. Oral traditions of indigenous cultures that pre-date agricultural or fossil fuel-based societies describe how human beings used to nurture abundance and diversity while actively regenerating the health of local and regional ecosystems.
Our indigenous ancestors predominantly lived as bioregionally based regenerative cultures. Scientific evidence suggests that entire forest ecosystems From the rainforest of Colombia (ref.) to the old growth forests of the Pacific North West (ref.) and and the ‘lost forest gardens’ of Europe’ (ref.) we are learning that our distant ancestors nurtured these ecosystems into increased diversity, biological productivity and abundance. To this day 80% of the global biodiversity is found within the ‘biodiversity hot spots’ of indigenous territories around the world. To create a regenerative future we will have to value and humbly learn from the indigenous knowledge and practices that informed our regenerative past.
How do we become healing expressions — rather than owners — of place?
How do we participate appropriately in nested complexity as we aim to align with life’s evolutionary pattern of creating conditions conducive to life?
How can we better discern which modern technologies and innovations truly support us in co-creating diverse regenerative cultures everywhere?
Are we treating symptoms or root causes?
The recent IPCC report on the physical science basis for responding to climate change clearly states that “… limiting human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions” (IPCC, 2021, p.36). To do so is clearly an urgent prerequisite for a regenerative future. Yet we need to simultaneously address the deeper causes underlying the climate crises. We will fail if we structure our climate change response exclusively around carbon emissions.
At best, addressing climate change through the carbon lens will buy us time. At worst, techno-fix solutions and emissions trading will exacerbate an already wicked problem. How do we avoid carbon myopia and its unintended consequences? Precisely because of the urgency and the decreasing options if we get it wrong again, we should also ask ourselves:
What are we missing as we focus on carbon metrics and structure policy to stimulate emissions reduction?
Is ‘fighting climate change’ the appropriate framing?
Could it be that to ask ‘how do we get to net-zero emissions by 2050’ is a dangerously insufficient approach that predisposes us to potentially ignore root causes?
I feel uncomfortable calling out the elephant in the room, as I understand the urgency and know the deep commitment to making a positive difference of many people driving the ‘Race to Zero’ is not in question. Yet, it simply can’t be emphasized enough that our culturally dominant narrative of ‘separation from’, ‘power over’ and ‘ownership of’ nature creates the mistaken belief that we can manage, technologically innovate and (carbon) trade ourselves out of the evolutionary dead end we have been heading into for a couple of centuries.
As Camilla Moreno and colleagues warned in an essay entitled ‘Carbon Metrics: Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide’ published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation: “Carbon or GDP alone will not point us the way. We need to challenge our mental infrastructures, how we acquire the established foundations for our thinking. … the all-powerful carbon paradigm can entail profound injustices. Beyond carbon, we need a multi-dimensional perspective, one which is aware of the metabolic, life-maintaining processes of the planet, taking into account its natural limits, as well as the fundamental rights and needs of all human beings and the ground rules of participation and inclusion as we move on (ref., p.54).”
Regenerative development does not solve global problems through scaling-up universally applicable solutions. It is not aiming to deliver permanent solutions, rather, the focus is on improving our capacity to co-create and keep transforming in response to changing context. When we talk about co-creating ‘regenerative futures’ it is best to let go of the notion that we will ever arrive and live happily ever after. Co-creating regenerative cultures is an ongoing community and place based process of learning.
Participation and inclusion are not just social ideals to aim for but fundamental prerequisites for the emergence of diverse regenerative cultures everywhere. Co-creating a regenerative future is about supporting people, places and cultures to express their unique contribution to the health and vitality of the nested complexity in which we are embedded as expressions of life. To do so simultaneously serves ourselves, our communities and life as a whole.
The potential of people and place
Faced with the climate emergency humanity is now undergoing a species level rite of passage. We are challenged with nothing less than the redesign of the human impact on Earth. It is time to become mature members of the community of life and, as such, to learn how to create conditions conducive to life. Doing so appropriately invites us to pay attention to and learn from the bio-cultural uniqueness of place — community by community, ecosystem by ecosystem, bioregion by bioregion.
Paradoxically it seems that the path towards a globally regenerative human impact on Earth is one of local and regional regeneration everywhere. It is not a global problem-solving exercise, but rather an ongoing collective learning and capacity-building process of people in place. The American essayist and poet Gary Snyder called this process reinhabitation (ref.). We are coming home to place, rejoining the family of life.
Abstraction and generalisation, metrics and certification, control and prediction are central to a problem solving and solutioneering approach. This old way of working remains within the mental scaffolding of what Carol Sanford calls the ‘extract value’, ‘arrest disorder’ and ‘do good’ paradigms of modern living. To live regeneratively is to act from within a fourth paradigm: ‘evolve capacity/regenerate life’ (ref.). An approach aimed at building capacity and manifesting the potential of people and place focusses our attention on uniqueness and specificity, qualities and trust, participation and learning as we aim to regenerate life.
In a conversation I had with Bill Reed, principal at Regenesis Group he remarked “we can’t save the world, we can only save places.” For me this is an important reminder that what we do locally has regional and global effects. Just like the health of your body depends on healthy cells and healthy organs, planetary health depends on healthy communities, ecosystems, and bioregions.
To bring about the now urgently necessary transformations over the coming decades we have to reinhabit the places and ecosystems we live in as a regenerative and healing presence. Humans have the potential to be a keystone species that nurtures biodiversity and heals ecosystems. If we begin to think and work over ecological time scales, we can heal many of the ecosystems, communities and places damaged by centuries of exploitation of the planetary life support systems and suppression of the rights of the world’s indigenous people.
Responding to climate change is about much more than the ‘Race to Zero.’ An adequate response necessitates becoming conscious of our deeper relationship to life as a nested regenerative community. Life is a planetary process which has created the condition for more life to evolve and flourish over the long journey of 3.8 billion years. Our success and failure in co-creating regenerative futures will depend on our ability to realign with the syntropic evolutionary patterns of life itself — moving from competitive scarcity towards collaborative abundance.
The ReGeneration is rising!
I believe there is a basis for being stubbornly optimistic and confident that we can still choose a regenerative future. I base this optimism not on denying the real and present danger that cataclysmic climate change is imminent if we don’t change our current trajectory, but in people everywhere connecting with the regenerative impulse. Many of us are already nurturing the potential of a regenerative future and regenerative cultural impulses are connecting people and communities to their places and bioregions.
Here are some of my reasons for optimism: This year marks the launch of the ‘United Nations Decade on Ecosystems Restoration’ (ref.) and landscape scale regeneration projects are proliferating (ref.). Working with the Commonwealth Secretariat’s regenerative development programme (ref.) and Common Earth I had the opportunity to learn from regenerative practitioners in New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean and Africa about their place-sourced projects.
There are national initiatives in Costa Rica (ref.) and Australia (ref.). The ‘Regenerative Projects Map’ highlights many mature regeneration projects around the world (ref.). The Lush Spring Prize also offers a map of examples based on past winners and runner ups (ref.). The ‘Regenerosity’ platform is helping to resource regenerative projects around the world (ref.). Regenesis Institute is training regenerative practitioners which have formed regional networks. Carol Sanford is supporting people around the world through her change agents’ development groups.
Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm have deepened the conversation about regenerative leadership (ref.). John Elkington’s book Green Swans (ref.) and the ‘Green Swan Observatory’ have inspired boardrooms around the world.
Regeneration International (ref.) is connecting the rapidly growing regenerative agriculture movement. Extinction Rebellion has made ‘We need a regenerative culture’ one of its ten principles (ref.). The Capital Institute in New York has created the ‘Regenerative Communities Network’ (ref.) of bioregionally focused regenerative economy projects. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics Action Labs are taking regenerative economics to active citizens engaged in creating thriving places (ref.).
Many people are offering regenerative learning journeys and programmes to collectively live into the process of co-creating regenerative cultures. Paul Hawken’s very recent book Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation (ref.) highlights many of these reasons for stubborn optimism. I am under no doubt that the RSA’s Regenerative Futures Programme will inspire many more people to join the ReGeneration. I hope you are one of them!
[First published in the RSA Journal — link here — this is the pre-final draft without the edits by the journal editors.]
Daniel Christian Wahl is a consultant and educator in regenerative development whose 2016 book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ (Triarchy Press) quickly gained international acclaim.
The critique against continuous economic growth, a perspective gaining traction due to increasing environmental concerns, notably the climate crisis, is on the rise. The "degrowth" movement, once considered fringe, is now a significant player, calling for advanced countries to embrace zero or even negative GDP growth.
Influential figures such as Greta Thunberg and Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have highlighted the potential negative impacts of the relentless pursuit of GDP growth, including environmental damage and societal inequality. Suggestions made by the degrowth movement include dismantling global capitalism and promoting "post-growth economics."
These post-capitalist ideas were promoted by prominent degrowth writers Jason Hickel, Tim Jackson, and Georgios Kallis in a 2022 article in Nature. “Researchers in ecological economics,” they wrote, “call for a different approach — degrowth. Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.”
However, not all ecological economists support degrowth. Kate Raworth, well known for her book on Doughnut Economics, makes a point about being agnostic about growth: sometimes growth can be sustainable, such as with alternative energy use, other times it may not be, such as when using massive amounts of fossil fuel to produce luxury items nobody really needs.
The ecological critique of economic growth is gaining widespread attention. Even mainstream economists are challenging the growth orthodoxy, and the concept of "slow growth" is advocated by some economists like Dietrich Vollrath. Vollrath's analysis suggests that slower growth in advanced countries is a result of changing lifestyles, such as reduced labor force growth and a shift towards service-oriented economies.
Among economists and environmental activists, there is now an ongoing debate on whether "green growth" is a feasible alternative. Proponents argue for the possibility of absolute decoupling—economic growth without increased carbon emissions. However, recent data challenges this optimism, showing a rise in global carbon emissions over the past three years. As Systems Change Alliance co-founder Roar Bjonnes suggested in his book Growing a New Economy, green growth capitalism may be a contradiction in terms.
The challenges faced by proponents of degrowth include addressing distributional conflicts, poverty reduction, and the economic impact on developing countries heavily reliant on exporting goods and services. Some degrowth proponents suggest solutions like work-sharing, decentralized economics, income transfers, and even a universal basic income to manage the consequences of reduced growth.
No matter where ecological economists stand on the issue, all seem to agree on the importance of reevaluating the pursuit of endless economic growth, and to consider alternative strategies to balance environmental concerns, social equity, and global poverty reduction.
In a startling revelation, a joint investigation by The Intercept, The Nation, Drilled, and DeSmog has exposed seven major global news outlets for their role in producing and promoting misleading promotional content for the fossil fuel industry. The implicated media companies include Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and The Washington Post.
The investigation, spanning the period from October 2020 to October 2023, focused on advertorials or native advertising, sponsored content designed to mimic a publication's authentic editorial work. The report reveals that these outlets, often considered among the "most trusted" news sources, have been lending their journalistic credibility to the fossil fuel industry's key climate talking points.
The Deceptive Nature of Advertorials
The report highlights that major news outlets, such as Reuters, have been involved in creating misleading promotional content without transparently disclosing the sponsor's involvement. For instance, a podcast episode produced by Reuters Plus in partnership with Saudi Aramco features discussions on the energy transition without clearly stating the podcast's sponsorship by the fossil fuel giant.
The investigation, in collaboration with The Intercept and The Nation, analyzed hundreds of advertorials, events, and ad data, shedding light on the media's role in perpetuating the fossil fuel industry's deceptive messaging during a critical period of heightened public awareness about climate change.
Crisis of Credibility
All seven media companies under scrutiny have internal brand studios dedicated to creating advertising content for major oil and gas companies. This has raised concerns about the blurring of lines between journalism and advertising, with the potential to damage the reputation and credibility of these news outlets.
A 2016 Georgetown University study found that about two-thirds of people confuse advertorials for real content, contributing to the erosion of trust in news sources. Another study in 2018 by Boston University revealed that only one in 10 people recognized native advertising as distinct from reporting.
Impact on Climate Reporting
The investigation highlights the oil and gas industry's increased sponsorship of advertorials and events with media partners to portray itself as a climate leader. The conflict between independent climate reporting and sponsored content advocating industry-backed technologies has left readers confused about the actual impact of these solutions.
Historical Context and Financial Motivations
The fossil fuel industry's involvement in shaping media narratives dates back to 1970, with the creation of advertorials by Mobil Oil in collaboration with The New York Times. The advent of brand studios within media outlets has fueled the growth of such content programs, as fossil fuel companies willingly pay vast sums to bolster their social license and promote their agendas.
Recent data from MediaRadar revealed that The New York Times earned over $20 million in revenue from fossil fuel advertisers from October 2020 to October 2023, with Saudi Aramco contributing a significant portion. The financial reliance on such advertising further underscores the complex relationship between media outlets and the fossil fuel industry.
Consequences and Criticisms
Critics argue that the practice of producing advertorials and event sponsorships for fossil fuel companies undermines the integrity of climate journalism. Journalists, speaking anonymously, expressed concerns over the potential damage to their outlets' credibility and questioned the ethical implications of aligning with companies that have a history of casting doubt on climate science.
The investigation sheds light on the intricate connections between media outlets and the fossil fuel industry, raising important questions about transparency, credibility, and the responsibility of news organizations in the era of climate crisis awareness.
A new study finds the island's ice sheet is retreating 20% more than previously thought.
Article by Julya Conley
New research on the rate at which Greenland's glaciers are melting shed new light on how the climate emergency is rapidly raising the chance that crucial ocean current systems could soon collapse, as scientists revealed Wednesday that the vast island has lost about 20% more ice than previously understood.
Scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the study, published in Nature, which showed that Greenland's ice cap is losing an average of 33 million tons of ice per hour, including from glaciers that are already below sea level.
The researchers analyzed satellite photos showing the end positions of Greenland's glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022, examining a total of about 235,000 end positions.
Over the 38-year period, Greenland lost about 1,930 square miles of ice—equivalent to one trillion metric tons and roughly the size of Delaware.
An earlier study had estimated that 221 billion metric tons had been lost since 2003, but the researchers added another 43 billion metric tons to that assessment.
Previous research had not quantified the level of ice melt and breakage from the ends of glaciers around the perimeter of Greenland.
"Almost every glacier in Greenland is retreating. And that story is true no matter where you look," Chad Greene, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led study, toldThe New York Times. "This retreat is happening everywhere and all at once."
Because the glaciers examined in the study are already below sea level, their lost ice would have been replaced by sea water and would not have contributed to sea-level rise.
But as Greene toldThe Guardian, "It almost certainly has an indirect effect, by allowing glaciers to speed up."
"These narrow fjords are the bottleneck, so if you start carving away at the edges of the ice, it's like removing the plug in the drain," he said.
The previously unaccounted-for ice melt is also an additional source of freshwater that pours into the North Atlantic Ocean, which scientists warn places the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at risk of collapse.
AMOC carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic, allowing nutrients to rise from the bottom of the ocean and supporting phytoplankton production and the basis of the global food chain.
A collapse of the system would also disrupt weather patterns across the globe, likely leading to drier conditions and threatening food security in Asia, South America, and Africa, and increasing extreme weather events in other parts of the world.
One analysis found the collapse could take place as soon as 2025.
Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament representing the New Democratic Party, noted that the study was released as Canada's government continues to support fossil fuel production and what experts call false solutions to the planetary heating crisis—including a $12 billion carbon capture and storage project led by tar sands oil companies.
The Environmental Voter Project in the U.S. urged Americans to consider the latest statistics on melting glaciers when choosing the candidates and political parties they will support in 2024.
"Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice an hour," said the group. "So vote like it."
This article has been reprinted from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The contemporary corporation is primarily driven by the pursuit of short-term profits for its shareholders. In contrast, cooperative companies tend to adopt a more holistic perspective on business operations. Numerous studies have demonstrated that cooperative owners prioritize considerations such as long-term employment, working conditions, environmental impact, and the sustainability of their local communities. This heightened focus on broader societal aspects suggests that when ownership and power reside with the workforce, business decisions become more balanced and forward-thinking.
Adam Smith, often regarded as the father of capitalism, underscored a fundamental contradiction within capitalism. He noted that the interests of factory owners conflict with those of society, while the interests of laborers align with societal well-being. The cooperative movement contends that when workers assume ownership, this dichotomy diminishes, if not disappears.
Cooperative enterprises are more prevalent than commonly acknowledged, encompassing worker-owned industries, banks, farmers' markets, local work-exchange programs, agricultural processing plants, service projects, and health clinics worldwide. Approximately 15 percent of the global population, or around one billion people, are members of some form of cooperative. The turnover of cooperatives in the ten largest economies constitutes 5 percent of the GDP, slightly smaller than Italy's GDP, the world's seventh-largest economy.
In Europe, cooperatives directly employ 4.7 million individuals, with twenty countries boasting networks of cooperative banks that outperformed commercial banks during the last economic crisis. Notably, 1478 cooperative banks and businesses across forty-six countries reported turnovers exceeding $100 million each. The Mondragon cooperative, established in Spain's Basque region in 1959, stands out as one of the most successful, comprising 256 enterprises and employing nearly 74,000 workers. Economist Jaroslav Vanek asserts that these "democratic firms" outperform capitalist enterprises, particularly in economically underdeveloped regions.
Vanek advocates for the efficiency of coops as workplaces, emphasizing mutual supervision and increased capital productivity. Beyond efficiency, cooperatives foster solidarity and a sense of individual worth, contributing to a balanced use of resources and environmental benefits.
In Canada, cooperatively run hospitals are known to provide better and more cost-effective healthcare, showcasing the positive impact of the cooperative spirit on worker dedication and patient care. Contrary to concerns, cooperatives can coexist within a capitalist environment and often prove more efficient and flexible. Their ability to prioritize objectives beyond profit maximization allows for innovative responses to economic challenges, such as reducing working hours instead of layoffs.
However, challenges persist when operating cooperatives within a capitalist economy, particularly in competing globally. Cooperative economists, including Vanek, emphasize that coops are better suited to support decentralized or local economies.
Examining the Mondragon cooperative as a case study reveals both successes and challenges. Mondragon's success lies in its size and diversified interests, maintaining jobs through solidarity and equitable distribution of surplus. However, global expansion has presented challenges, including the bankruptcy of subsidiaries, raising questions about working conditions and cooperative principles.
In summary, the Mondragon cooperative serves as a valuable case study, offering insights into the complexities, successes, and challenges associated with worker-owned cooperatives. The examination sheds light on issues related to class, power dynamics, and the broader implications for social, environmental, and labor movements.
According to the Gini Index, in every major region of the world outside of Europe, extreme wealth is becoming concentrated in just a handful of people.
“In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065, less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations,” writes Fatema Z. Sumar from the Harvard Kennedy School. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively.
Globally, the richest 10% of people now possess nearly 76% of the world’s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% own just 2%, according to the 2022 World Inequality Report, which analyzes data and the work of more than 100 researchers and inequality experts.
Drivers of extreme income and wealth
Large increases in executive pay are contributing to higher levels of income inequality.
Take a typical corporate CEO. In 1965 the average CEO earned about 20 times the amount of an average worker at the company. In 2018, the typical CEO earned 278 times as much as their typical employees.
But the world’s roughly 2,700 billionaires make most of their money not through wages but through the speculative economy--investments in stocks and real estate.
Their assets also grow due to corporate and individual tax breaks, rather than salaried wages granted by shareholders. Often the rich pay little to no tax by exploiting various loop holes in the tax code.
This calculation does not even count the effects of tax breaks, which often slash the real-world capital gain tax to much lower levels.
Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk is currently the world’s richest man, with a fortune of $240 billion, according to a Bloomberg estimate.
The founders of several tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Amazon, have all earned billions of dollars in just a few years. The former Greek finance minister, Yanus Varoufakis calls them the new feudal capitalists, and we, the people in the streets, are the new serfs.
Reforming the Inequality Gap
Through economist Thomas Piketty’s books and other research, we have learned that 70 percent of all global wealth is owned by only 10 percent of the population (the top 1 percent holds 25-35 percent while the bottom 50 percent holds only around 2 percent).
Beyond the abstract numbers of inequality, there are millions of people struggling to meet basic needs such as clean water, food, education, and steady employment. In the US, one of the world’s richest countries, millions of people are living paycheck to paycheck, earning as little as $12,000 per year, the same as the average income in some of the poorest countries.
Piketty and other progressive economists suggest that to resolve the debt and inequality crisis, the wealthiest must foot the bill and thus ensure that the lower-income groups receive a bigger part of the pie.
In his latest book, A Brief History of Equality, Piketty is rather optimistic that this can be done and claims that over the great sweep of history we have moved towards more equality. And how can this be achieved: not through a smarter form of capitalism, but rather through better forms of democratic socialism.
Reform measures proposed by Piketty and other systems change economists:
A progressive tax on wealth.
Reintroduction of a progressive tax on income
Increase marginal income rates
Increase taxation on return on capital and reduce tax on work and productive economic activities
Differentiate between productive use of wealth, such as profits from manufacturing, and unproductive profits, such as capital gains and financial income from interest.
Tax unproductive profits higher than salaried work
Take steps to protect and preserve the real economy
Progressive Tax on Income
Taxes on the rich, especially in the US, have steadily decreased since the time of Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher, with the expectations that this would free up more capital for productive investments. This near-religious promise has not materialized as expected, however.
While investments shrunk, what grew was the level of speculation and the vast amounts of debt accumulated by governments and individuals.
By reversing the trend and returning to higher taxes on the rich, we can reduce the number of resources wasted on speculation, reduce debt levels, and put more resources into the productive sectors of the economy.
Therefore, in addition to the introduction of a wealth tax, governments should also reintroduce a progressive income tax. In the past, the top tax rate on income was nearly 80 percent, while in most industrialized countries today it has been reduced to around 35 percent. This trend must be reversed through progressive taxation.
Reducing Inequality Long Term
The tendency to concentrate wealth is inherent in a market economy, and as long as we have a market economy, this fact cannot be changed. Because extreme concentration of wealth destroys the necessary conditions of a market economy, the whole system eventually self-destructs.
In order to prevent this and maintain a level of equality that will create sufficient demand to allow the markets to function, outside intervention in the economy by the state and trade unions has always been required.
An interesting situation thus arises: the forces that oppose free-market policies become the forces that maintain the conditions that make free markets possible. A prime example of redistributive policies within the framework of a market economy is the Scandinavian model.
Scandinavia has in the past had comparatively low inequality, a robust economy, and the highest living standard in the world. In recent years, Scandinavia has followed the trend to deregulate the economy. Not surprisingly, economic inequality is now on the rise.
Below are some long-term solutions for avoiding extreme inequality:
Bailout people rather than banks
Ensure wages increase on a par with productivity gains
Reintroduce progressive taxation and welfare payments to reduce the gap between rich and poor
Tax unearned income at a higher rate than income from work
People’s incentives should be realigned with their contribution to society and the environment
Make bonuses for loss-making companies illegal
Place a much lower cap on salaries for top executives
Use the money saved to increase the minimum wage
Give incentives to cooperatives, since they ensure higher wages and worker involvement in the local economy
Ensure low unemployment through government infrastructure projects
What we need in the long term is a form of democratic economy that is high on distribution and low on concentration of wealth. A new economy that is also rooted in ecology, since without nature, there would be no economy at all.
Real sustainable wealth is produced by nature, not the stock market, not by the super-wealthy billionaires. At stake is the quality of life for millions of people. At stake is the quality of life for the entire planet.
In today’s economy, if an industrial plant upriver creates water pollution, and a community downriver is forced to cover the cost of the cleanup, it is considered an externality for the company causing the pollution. These types of externalities are a very common source of pollution: the local community, the nation, and the world bears the cost of industrial pollution while the corporation pockets the extra profit or increased market share by lowering the cost of its products.
The myth of a perfect market without externalities makes up a large part of the neo-liberal economy and is a leading cause behind the climate crisis. The actual cost of oil, if we include the military operations to protect the oil fields, the environmental impact of pollution, and the effect of greenhouse gases produced when burning the oil, would be many times higher than it is at present.
The same holds for nuclear energy. Recent studies have shown that the cost of dismantling old nuclear stations is far higher than anyone had previously thought. For example, it is estimated that it will cost more than $900 million to dismantle the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear power plant, which was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history.
The nuclear disaster in Fukushima and the subsequent leaks into the ocean have not been factored into the cost of electricity for Japanese consumers. The cost of processing and storing the final waste has also become much higher than initially anticipated. Including these costs in the price of electricity generated by nuclear power plants would make nuclear energy much more expensive.
Neo-liberal economists today recognize that externalities exist but believe that they can and should be dealt with by the market rather than by government regulations. Theoretically, they assume that externalities are internalized into costs and, therefore, are technically not externalities. On the practical level, economic policies find a way to internalize the externality, for example, by inventing carbon credits.
A business generally buys a carbon credit to justify or compensate for putting emissions into the atmosphere. It is essentially an accounting trick, which makes it possible for Business A to reduce or avoid creating a ton of CO2 so that Business B can buy the credit represented by the reduction and use it to ‘offset’ its emissions.
According to the Australia Institute, “Carbon credits may result in emissions reductions at a project level. But even if you assume all carbon credits are perfect, when they’re used as offsets, they, at best, only maintain the status quo. Carbon credits thus mean emissions are being moved from one sector to another, from the fossil fuel industry, for example, to the land sector (which is where most carbon credits come from).” In other words, when carbon credits are used to offset emissions, the overall result is an increasein emissions and a worsening of the climate crisis.
Another externality that neo-liberal economists do not account for is the free work provided by nature. Nature provides free services to us on a scale dwarfing the entire global economic output. Since nature’s total contribution is more significant than all business activities on earth, it is a far stretch to consider its contribution unimportant.
We are dependent on nature for our daily survival, even if we do not consider natural resources as adding economic value. Neither does the current system take note when our economic activities destroy the “free” resources that nature provides us.
Whatever economists today may assume, there are an overwhelming number of externalities in the real world that are not internalized or dealt with by the market. A self-regulating market creates externalities, and far from eliminating the need for government intervention, it makes such intervention necessary to avoid the destruction of the planet.
Hence, we cannot just theorize about externalities any longer or use carbon credits to whisk them away magically. If we continue, the trees will soon be gone, and the oceans will have more plastic containers than fish. The topsoil will be destroyed, and there will be no clean water to drink. We can no longer afford to internalize externalities on a massive scale. Because soon, the wheels of production will grind to a halt. Not for lack of technological ingenuity or financial smarts—no, due to a lack of our most precious economic resource: nature’s ecosystem services.
Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.
Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold. https://www.youtube.com/embed/MbBzzMh2CTk?wmode=transparent&start=0 In this Oct. 25, 2000, episode of the television drama ‘The West Wing,’ president Josiah Bartlet invokes the standard account of Green Revolution seeds saving millions from starvation.
But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.
As I explain in my book, “The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World,” the Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today – but not the ones that are commonly heard. Events in India show why.
A triumphal narrative
There was a consensus in the 1960s among development officials and the public that an overpopulated Earth was heading toward catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.
India was the global poster child for this looming Malthusian disaster: Its population was booming, drought was ravaging its countryside and its imports of American wheat were climbing to levels that alarmed government officials in India and the U.S.
Then, in 1967, India began distributing new wheat varieties bred by Rockefeller Foundation plant biologist Norman Borlaug, along with high doses of chemical fertilizer. After famine failed to materialize, observers credited the new farming strategy with enabling India to feed itself.
Plant scientist M.S. Swaminathan, often called the father of India’s Green Revolution, speaks at a world summit on food security in Rome on Sept. 10, 2009. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
Debunking the legend
The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions. First, India faced a food crisis, with farms mired in tradition and unable to feed an exploding population; and second, Borlaug’s wheat seeds led to record harvests from 1968 on, replacing import dependence with food self-sufficiency.
Recent research shows that both claims are false.
India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation. After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry. U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.
Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.
Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.
India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.
Once India’s 1965-67 drought ended and the Green Revolution began, wheat production sped up, while production trends in other crops like rice, maize and pulses slowed down. Net food grain production, which was much more crucial than wheat production alone, actually resumed at the same growth rate as before.
But grain production became more erratic, forcing India to resume importing food by the mid-1970s. India also became dramatically more dependent on chemical fertilizer.
India’s Green Revolution wheat boom came at the expense of other crops; the growth rate of overall food grain production did not increase at all. It is doubtful that the ‘revolution’ produced any more food than would have been produced anyway. What increased dramatically was dependence on imported fertilizer. Glenn Davis Stone; data from India Directorate of Economics and Statistics and Fertiliser Association of India, CC BY-ND
According to data from Indian economic and agricultural organizations, on the eve of the Green Revolution in 1965, Indian farmers needed 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of fertilizer to grow an average ton of food. By 1980, it took 96 pounds (44 kilograms). So, India replaced imports of wheat, which were virtually free food aid, with imports of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, paid for with precious international currency.
Today, India remains the world’s second-highest fertilizer importer, spending US$17.3 billion in 2022. Perversely, Green Revolution boosters call this extreme and expensive dependence “self-sufficiency.”
The toll of ‘green’ pollution
Recent research shows that the environmental costs of the Green Revolution are as severe as its economic impacts. One reason is that fertilizer use is astonishingly wasteful. Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food. Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life. Producing and using fertilizer also generates copious greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. https://www.youtube.com/embed/mZ7ErNcQbuo?wmode=transparent&start=0 Excess nutrients are creating dead zones in water bodies worldwide. Synthetic fertilizer is a major source.
In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky. Ethiopia offers a cautionary case. In recent years, the Ethiopian government has forced farmers to plant increasing amounts of fertilizer-intensive wheat, claiming this will achieve “self-sufficiency” and even allow it to export wheat worth $105 million this year. Some African officials hail this strategy as an example for the continent.
The Green Revolution still has many boosters today, especially among biotech companies that are eager to draw parallels between genetically engineered crops and Borlaug’s seeds. I agree that it offers important lessons about how to move forward with food production, but actual data tells a distinctly different story from the standard narrative. In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.
They're in the world's water, air, food, and even in our blood—and now researchers in Japan have discovered microplastics in clouds, raising the specter of super-contaminating "plastic rainfall" and possibly affecting the Earth's climate.
Analyzing cloud water samples from high-altitude mountains in Japan including Mt. Fuji, researchers from Waseda University in Tokyo found nine different types of polymers and one type of rubber in the airborne microplastics (AMPs) they detected.
"Research shows that large amounts of microplastics are ingested or inhaled by humans and animals alike and have been detected in multiple organs such as lung, heart, blood, placenta, and feces," notes a summary of the study, which was originally published in the journal Environmental Chemistry Letters.
"Ten million tons of these plastic bits end up in the ocean, released with the ocean spray, and find their way into the atmosphere," the summary continues. "This implies that microplastics may have become an essential component of clouds, contaminating nearly everything we eat and drink via 'plastic rainfall.'
Here's a sentence one could only read in the capitalocene:
"This implies that microplastics may have become an essential component of clouds, contaminating nearly everything we eat and drink via ‘plastic rainfall’”
Earlier this year, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Patna discovered AMPs in the city of Patna's rainwater, with polyethylene, terephthalate, and polypropylene being the most common polymers found.
In the Japanese study, the researchers found that "the presence of hydrophilic (water-loving) polymers in the cloud water was abundant, suggesting that they were removed as 'cloud condensation nuclei.'"
"These findings confirm that AMPs play a key role in rapid cloud formation, which may eventually affect the overall climate," they added.
Accumulation of AMPs in the atmosphere—especially around the Earth's poles—could also upset the planet's ecological balance, with devastating effects on biodiversity.
"AMPs are degraded much faster in the upper atmosphere than on the ground due to strong ultraviolet radiation, and this degradation releases greenhouse gases and contributes to global warming," Waseda University professor Hiroshi Okochi, who led the study, said in a statement. "As a result, the findings of this study can be used to account for the effects of AMPs in future global warming projections."
"If the issue of 'plastic air pollution' is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future," Okochi added.
Calling on Norway to "live up to the responsibilities" it has as co-chair of an international panel on sustainable oceans, more than 30 climate and conservation organizations on Monday delivered a letter to nearly two dozen Norwegian embassies on all continents, intensifying global outcry over plans for deep-seabed mining in the Arctic.
The groups, including Greenpeace, Sustainable Ocean Alliance, and the Blue Climate Initiative, called on officials to abandon plans to open 281,000 square kilometers—an area nearly the size of the United Kingdom—to deep-sea mining, saying the world currently lacks "the robust, comprehensive, and credible scientific knowledge to allow for reliable assessment of impacts of deep-sea minerals extraction, including impacts on the planet's life-support systems and human rights."
Therefore, they said, the plan violates Norway's "ambition to act according to a knowledge-based and precautionary approach."
"By embarking on mining in the deep sea without sufficient knowledge, we risk destroying unique nature, eradicating vulnerable species, and disrupting the world's largest carbon sink," said Sofia Tsenikli, global campaign lead for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. "At a time when humanity is racing against the clock to tackle both the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, we should protect nature—not destroy it."
Mining companies have lobbied for deep-sea mining, claiming it is necessary to source cobalt and copper, but advocates have noted that the minerals are already found elsewhere on the planet and have warned that the mining process could disturb the habitat of thousands of marine species.
The advocates behind Monday's letter, which was delivered on the day Norway's parliament began its autumn session, noted that the country's co-chair on the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy—Palau—is among a growing number of governments that have urged caution regarding deep-sea mining.
"European countries like France, Germany and Spain have taken a precautionary position, advocating a precautionary pause, a moratorium or a ban on deep-sea mining," wrote the groups. "Scientists, Indigenous groups, fisheries and seafood organizations, civil society organizations, and major businesses including Storebrand, BMW, and Google are all calling for a stop to deep-sea mining. The European Investment Bank has excluded deep-sea mining from its investments as it is deemed 'unacceptable in climate and environmental terms,' and the European Parliament has called for a moratorium multiple times."
The international coalition further called on Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre to "step back from the brink of introducing this destructive industry and to support a global moratorium on deep sea mining."
The letter was sent a week after Greenpeace activists confronted Støre and other Norwegian Labour Party politicians with a 45-foot long octopus model that displayed a banner reading, "Don't destroy my home."
Greenpeace campaigners in Denmark shared on social media that on Monday, the letter was delivered by an activist dressed as a jellyfish.
"Norway opening for deep-sea mining while chairing the international Ocean panel, and committing to 100% sustainable use of its waters, is hypocrisy and risks destroying both ecosystems in the vulnerable Arctic and Norway's reputation internationally," said Louisa Casson, senior campaigner for the group's Stop Deep-Sea Mining campaign. "If Norway decides to proceed with their plans, they must give up their seat in the Ocean panel to a state that delivers on ocean protection."
With adverse weather conditions and hard-hitting calamities ravaging all parts of the world, corporations need to start addressing their contributions to climate change now more than ever. It is estimated that global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high of 36.6 billion tons in 2022. Preventing or stopping rising temperatures will require a significant decline in these emissions. Another concern is the depletion of oil, which is high in demand but is also responsible for adverse environmental impacts. Advancements in renewable energy technology will need to be made to take oil's place and keep most of it in the ground.
The good news is that more and more efforts have emerged to address this challenge. Various fields are making changes in order to fight climate change. Sciences, business, fashion design, and more have made a focus on environmental studies and sustainability a major consideration. Even better, climate change is being seen as a vital part of a student's education. Case in point, climate change is being introduced to mathematics classes at every level of education. This is important as mathematics plays an important role in predicting the effects of climate change. Modern mathematics courses provide specializations in data science, coding, machine learning, statistics, and predictive modeling, which professionals can use to help address pressing climate change issues. From calculating the rate at which ice in the arctic thins to creating carbon calculators to cut down personal emissions, it's clear that these fields are of great importance now more than ever. As the world becomes more environmentally aware, companies need to focus on reducing their carbon emissions to save the planet.
Why carbon emission tracking is vital
A lot of climate change action has been put forward as the responsibility of individuals. Still, a considerable part of the problem lies in large corporations — many of whom do little to remedy their footprint. It has been found that a fifth of carbon emissions come from the supply chains of a small number of multinational companies, and their footprints are sometimes larger than that of some countries. Using technology to keep track of emissions can help businesses spot problem areas in their processes and find ways to incorporate sustainable solutions in their place.
This awareness and change are also linked to better business, as consumers are more likely to purchase from companies that practice sustainability. Ethical consumerism is also helpful in tapping into more potential customers, especially the youth, who are becoming increasingly concerned about emissions and the environment.
How companies are tracking emissions
From an environmental and business standpoint, it is clear that action regarding emissions is becoming a necessity for corporations, and many have been starting to make changes. For example, clothing company Patagonia has built repair shops around the world to increase the longevity of their products and reduce the carbon footprint of creating new items.
Despite these good moves, a significant problem the US faces is that the reporting of corporate sustainability is mainly voluntary and often wildly inaccurate. For instance, data regarding methane levels in the Arctic permafrost was found to be five times higher than what was reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Data and sustainability reports are currently being relied on to keep track of emissions, which is insufficient.
As technology advances, more ways to foster carbon awareness will likely appear soon. Software and apps are being developed to monitor and report on a company’s carbon emissions. For example, Emitwise is developing a platform that allows companies to automatically measure the electricity used by suppliers, the airplane flights taken by employees, and the hundreds of other energy uses that happen on any day of operations. This will help make reports much more frequent and regular, giving more numbers and data to work with. Advancements in satellites and cameras that detect these emissions as they pass through the atmosphere can also help point out patterns and allow businesses to address key problems.
There is still much to be done in emissions tracking, but with more growth in technology and well-trained professionals, change can be made to address these issues.
In February, 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued “a stark warning about the impact of climate change on people and the planet, saying that ecosystem collapse, species extinction, deadly heatwaves and floods are among ‘the dangerous and widespread disruptions’ the world will face over the next two decades due to global warming.”
The UN News wrote that the IPCC adaptation report is “a damning indictment of failed global leadership on climate.” In an op-ed article penned for the Washington Post, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, described the latest IPCC report as "a litany of broken climate promises", which revealed a "yawning gap between climate pledges, and reality."
Scientists have warned that we are perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate effects. The current models of change have failed us. There is an urgent need for systems change. But what is systems thinking and what is systems change?
Systems Thinking
According to systems thinking, there are parts and wholes, as well as whole/parts. Each connection is part of a hierarchy, or rather a holarchy, of parts and wholes and whole/parts. Simply put, a cell is part of an organ, which is part of an organism, which is part of an ecosystem, a culture, an economy.
Too often individual actors in a system are unable to see or experience the whole of which they are a part, and this limited worldview will then affect their vision and decision making.
In the last three decades, systems thinking has evolved as a new, unified concept at the forefront of science. In the words of one of the pioneers in the field, Fritjof Capra, this new outlook is “a unified view that integrates life’s biological, cognitive, social and ecological dimensions. At the very core of this new understanding of life we find a profound change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.”
Systems theory advises us to discover the web of interactions between nature and economy, between science and culture, between personal habits and political policies. Systems theory also advises us to find “a new web of meaning,” as the great systems philosopher Jeremy Lent puts it. Because without a web of meaning replacing nature as machine and human beings as “homo economicus”—that irrational and outdated idea that an economy is mainly profit and growth-oriented—we will continue to seek false ideals, create fractured societies, and perhaps destroy civilization.
As regenerative thinker and activist Daniel Christian Wahl says, “whole-systems thinking is living systems thinking.” Therefore, we need “a systemic understanding of processes by which life continuously regenerates conditions conducive to life and offers a pathway to creating regenerative businesses and organizations within a regenerative economy as enabling factors of a regenerative culture.”
What are Systems?
Systems are complex and of many different types. There are ecosystems—the interaction of various organisms with their physical environment. There are political systems—the interaction between politicians, government institutions, lawyers, economists, bureaucrats, and voters. There are also social, cultural, educational, and technological systems.
There are also different types of systems thinkers. Hard systems thinkers look for concrete problems and solutions for definable systems. Soft systems thinkers, on the other hand, focus more on people and their perspectives of a given system, and how these could be reconciled to make improvements. Therefore, it is not easy to find a singular definition of what a system is. Moreover, we must also account for scientific definitions as well as public, political and government opinions, and policies about the same systems. Systems are complex, and they often require complex, integrated solutions. There are different schools of thought, depending on the discipline and the context, of how people define systems. Here is a definition from John H. Holland, often called “the father of genetic algorithms” and the dean of complexity studies: “A system is a configuration of interaction, interdependent parts that are connected through a web of relationships, forming a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.” Donella Meadows, another well-known systems theorist defines a system as “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own patterns of behavior over time.”
Systems are in Flux
An important insight of systems theory is that ecosystems, societies, economies, and cultures are always changing and in dynamic flux. Therefore, a theory of change needs to be a living conversation, a dynamic adaptation. We need to test our assumptions about how change happens. This requires an adaptive learning approach as we gain feedback from the work undertaken. We must try to avoid failure, but when we do fail, we engage feedback loops into the different stages, and we allocate time to revisit and improve through course-correction.
Today, we are in an unmistakable, planetary flux. This global instability—in the form of climate change, species extinction, economic inequality, food shortages, political autocracy, and the fear of nuclear war—poses a real and present danger to human civilization. In short, we are failing to create a sustainable planet. Without further delay, we must engage scientific, political, environmental, and economic feedback loops so that we may save the one and only planet we have.
What is Systems Change?
Systems change is the emergence of a new pattern of organization or systems structure. It is both a process and an outcome. Today, we are facing unprecedented economic, social, and environmental crises, and most reforms have offered ineffective and shallow solutions. It is time for systems change. This is the moment for a new culture and economy to emerge from the principles of systems thinking.
We need to “connect the dots” between economics and nature, between science and culture, between politics and wellbeing. We need to address the root causes of all current crises facing people and the planet from a systems perspective.
Economies are not just machines and assembly lines created to pump out products for profit. New economies are emerging from the ecosystems of people, nature, and cultures. New economies are emerging that recognize both that humans have basic needs that must be met and that these needs are remarkably similar. Whether you live on a farm in Africa or a city in Europe, we all need food, medical care, housing, employment, clothing, and education.
At Systems Change Alliance, we connect the dots between individuals, groups and organizations working in different fields to collaborate, educate, advocate, and implement positive systemic change.
Regenerative and Whole Systems
We may define a ‘system’ as a set of interconnected elements forming a coherent pattern we may term a ‘whole’. This wholistic system exhibits properties emerging out of the interactions and relationships of the individual elements within it. This definition can refer to a molecule, a cell, a human being, a community, or the planet itself.
In many ways a system is less a ‘thing’ than a pattern of relationships and interactions — an organized web of constituent elements. The Greek root of the word system is ‘synhistanai’ and literally means ‘to place together’.
Whole systems thinking is a theory and a map, but it is not the same as the territory. In the words of Daniel Christian Wahl: “We can reduce the world to a whole just as easily as we can reduce it to a collection of parts. Neither the whole nor parts are primary; they come into being through the dynamic processes that define their identity through relationships and networks of interactions.
In a society based on reductionist rather than wholistic thinking, ecological, economic, political, and cultural constraints often become irreconcilable challenges. We must remember that the part and the whole are dualistic. When we say that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts, we are actually referring to a third dimension of the system (its evolution) which is not accounted for in this dualism.
This is the progressive nature of evolution in system change. In a society based on dynamic systems thinking, these spheres of life become regenerative support systems, breathing new life into dynamic cycles of collaboration and change.”
Systems of Competition and Cooperation
Both competition and cooperation have played an essential role in bringing forth thriving and diverse ecosystems. The spectacularly colorful coral reefs we see today exist thanks to an early mutualism between a coral and a photosynthetic algae. Likewise, in an economy, there is both competition and cooperation.
Our current economic system, however, has been primarily based on the idea that evolution is all about the survival of the fittest. Thus, the capitalist market places too much emphasis on competition over cooperation, to the detriment of both people and the environment.
A systemic understanding of nature’s processes in which life continuously regenerates conditions conducive to dynamic balance and biodiversity can teach us a pathway for creating a more regenerative and cooperative economy. In this new eco-economy, healthy competition and cooperation may become mirrors of the mutualism evolved in the liquid world of coral reefs.
Likewise, as we embark upon systems change to save people and planet from potential climate collapse, we need to embrace both competition and cooperation while striving to create a more regenerative economy, a more sustainable application of science, and the blossoming of a more united human society.
Systems Change Booklet
This article is a summary of a booklet we are working on, titled "Understanding the Systems to Change the World". We have a draft being reviewed by major systems thinkers, and will publish it in the future as an illustrated booklet. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive information when it is published.
The world teeters on the brink of economic disaster due to energy shortages caused by war. The main oil-producing nations are unable and unwilling to increase output, even though prices are high and threatening to go much higher. The solutions being proposed—electric cars and renewable energy technologies—are coming on line, but not fast enough. Building them to the scale required to maintain current levels of economic activity and societal complexity would require enormous amounts of minerals and metals that are also becoming scarce. We appear to be hurtling toward geopolitical and economic turmoil.
Does anything about this scenario sound familiar? It might. It happens to be almost exactly what I discussed in my book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, published in 2003. I have no interest in rubbing salt in society’s worsening wounds by saying “I told you so,” but it would be a dereliction of duty for me not to point out the facts.
My book was one of the first to discuss peak oil—the point when supplies of the world’s most economically pivotal resource start to dwindle. Of course, the most pessimistic predictions for the timing of the peak were wrong. Many analysts thought that petroleum production would start to decline in the years between 2005 and 2010. Instead, the rate of global conventional oil extraction flatlined during that period, and is just now beginning to descend from its long plateau. Meanwhile, unconventional oil (tar sands and tight oil produced by fracking and horizontal drilling) enabled new heights of production starting around 2010. The general consensus thereafter was that oil supplies can easily continue to increase for the foreseeable future; all it takes is more investment.
My organization, Post Carbon Institute, documented in great technical detail that the new unconventional oil sources were a flash-in-the-pan, and that world oil production was still set to enter its inevitable long-term decline phase quite soon. But very few listened. Where peak oil was still mentioned, it was framed in terms of peak demand resulting from the universal electrification of transport modes.
Today oil supplies are tight once again, as they were in 2008, before the fracking boom. But now there is no fracking cavalry waiting on the horizon to swoop down and rescue the global economy. Indeed, the only factors keeping oil prices from going stratospheric today are depressed Chinese demand (due to Covid restrictions) and fears of a global recession (triggered by high energy prices).
In July, President Biden went hat-in-hand to the Saudis, begging for more oil output. Instead, as of mid-October, OPEC+ (a loose affiliation of the 13 OPEC members and 10 of the world’s major non-OPEC oil-exporting nations) is planning to cut its production by two million barrels per day. Political elites in Washington read this as the Saudis trying to interfere in the upcoming US midterm elections by causing gasoline prices to rise, thus nudging voters toward Republican candidates. While that interpretation may ring true, the fact is that OPEC and Russia cannot produce much more oil in any case. If their tired old oilfields were forced to yield more oil over the short term, the result would be less production potential over the longer term.
On October 11, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser told a conference in London, “Today there is spare capacity that is extremely low. If China opens up, [the] economy starts improving or the aviation industry starts asking for more jet fuel, you will erode this spare capacity.”
Is Nasser exaggerating for political effect? If anything, the Saudis have been hiding their production capacity constraints for years in order to garner more investment cash and world influence by maintaining the common belief that they are sitting on limitless oceans of oil.
Production prospects are not much better in US, even though fracking has propelled the nation back to the forefront of petroleum producers. The Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, where tight oil resources are most plentiful, can still grow its production somewhat, but other fracking plays (the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Niobrara) are all past peak. Growth potential in the Permian is now struggling to overcome declines everywhere else in the US—from Alaska to California to North Dakota.
World oil production stopped growing in 2019, just before the Covid pandemic. Even if a new peak of production occurs before 2030, it will likely exceed the 2019 level by only a tiny fraction, and only for a short time. There is simply no breathing room left for petroleum-powered world economic growth.
Printed with permission by the Post Carbon Institute.
Green economics is supposed to save us from climate change and environmental catastrophe. There are, however, competing ideas about how to best proceed.
Degrowth advocates claim that it is unregulated growth that drove us into this predicament in the first place, therefore we need to reduce our GDP, and production in general, to become more sustainable.
Green growth advocates, on the other hand, point to great improvements in air quality in the Western world as a great example that green growth is the most efficient way to save the planet. We can grow the economy while at the same time regulate our way to sustainability.
So, which way is the best?
Green Growth vs Degrowth
Is economic growth incompatible with environmental sustainability? Green growth and degrowth proponents have vastly different economic philosophies. They do agree on one thing: the current economic growth model is unable to effectively change the catastrophic course we are on.
We are in the middle of an escalating climate change crisis and moving rapidly toward a global, ecological disaster. The disagreement between the two camps—growth or degrowth—lies in how to proceed with the necessary changes.
Political economist Jason Hickel is one of the most prominent and eloquent advocates of degrowth. In a recent debate between him and green growth advocate Samuel Fankhauser, he passionately articulated the case for global degrowth as the only way to save the planet.
Hickel argued that GDP growth forever is neither good nor necessary. Fankhauser claimed the opposite is possible: increased GDP as well as sustainability through green growth.
In his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will save The World (Penguin), with a foreword by leaders of The Extinction Rebellion, the political economist argues that it is capitalism’s inherent demand for perpetual expansion that is the problem. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. This is of course a compelling argument.
Here are Hickel’s two main reasons for why we need degrowth:
(1) Because growing the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] means growing energy demand, and this makes the task of switching to renewables significantly more difficult (nearly three times more difficult between now and 2050, which virtually rules out success).
(2) Because our preoccupation with growth makes it extremely difficult to get the regulations we need to avert ecological breakdown. Politicians resist such measures precisely because of the risks they pose to growth.
GDP is a measure of total economic output. Planting trees increases the GDP, but so does drilling for and using more oil, so does cutting down the rainforest. Growing GDP can mean both bad growth as well as positive degrowth.
Cutting down the rainforest to grow soybeans and graze cattle is bad GDP growth, while an increased number of organic farms growing more vegetables is positive GDP growth. In other words, not all increase in GDP is good for the planet, thus it is not an accurate measure of progress.
However, the degrowth proponents have a point: we need to reduce growth in those areas of the economy that is bad for people and planet. So, part of the challenge for the degrowth movement, and for the rest of us, is to better define what is meant by green growth and unsustainable growth.
The other challenge is that degrowth is a tough political sell. To win over policy makers, they need to be able to sell it to voters. And voters generally vote with their pocketbooks. They do not like to sacrifice their own wealth to save the planet. To that argument, Hickel says there is no other choice. We need to reduce the wealth of the wealthy as well as those of us who live in rich countries. That is indeed a tough political sell. But it must be made. Besides, maybe there are ways to make it easier?
Degrowth and Green Growth
The challenge for the degrowth movement is to spell out where the economy needs to grow sustainably and where unsustainable growth needs to be dramatically curtailed. Here are some areas where we need degrowth: Reduction in the use of fossil fuels for heating and production; reduction in emissions from cars and airplanes; reduction in our consumption of meat and milk since fossil fuels are nonrenewable resources and because all these human activities have a very high carbon footprint.
These examples show that degrowth in some areas will lead to green growth in other areas—in alternative energy production, in new technological innovation, production of new airplanes and cars, and in a dramatic increase in organic plant-based farming, In other words, degrowth and green growth need not be mutually exclusive.
Green Growth vs GDP Growth
The degrowth advocates are not against green growth in certain areas of the economy. Their point is rather fundamental: that we cannot have GDP growth forever, we cannot, in economic terms, have aggregate expansion of the total economy forever.
So how do we grow? We can grow more in quality, less in quantity. We can grow by increased sharing of the wealth, and in more sustainable use of the planet’s resources.
An Economy Beyond GDP
GDP only measures the speed at which the total economy grows, and that is a very limited measurement. Her are six ways, commonly referenced in the New Economy Movement, to measure growth beyond GDP.
We need to measure if the economy meets the basic needs of its people.
We need to measure the wellbeing of the people.
We need to measure the sustainability and the carbon footprint of the economy.
We need to measure the health of the commons, the source of all our natural resources.
We need to have a reasonable standard for economic equality.
We need to measure if physical and mental health is improving.
All these indicators will improve the social economy and the wellbeing economy, but not so much the profit economy and the GDP growth economy.
We need to shift our understanding of economics—from a system of profit and growth to a social system governed by ecological laws and social values.
Scientifically, we need to employ Buckminster Fuller’s vision: to do more with less. To make goods that last. To make goods that can be reused, recycled, and become “nutrients” in other forms of production. We need to create an industrial ecology that mirrors nature in operation.
A different economy beyond GDP can grow in leisure time through reduced working hours. It can grow in shared wealth and more economic equality. It can grow in more energy efficient houses. By producing healthier foods in more sustainable ways.
Most importantly, the social, well-being part of the economy can grow in virtual space, in inner space—through literature, poetry, art, science, music, and spirituality. The human potential for growth is virtually endless, and it is most certainly growth that is both green and sustainable. In other words, degrowth and green growth need not be mutually exclusive concepts.
Sure, trees are renewable sources of building materials and even energy. After cutting, they will eventually grow back. But trees are also one of the main ways that nature absorbs harmful CO2 gasses. Therefore, given the climate crisis, cutting trees makes no sense in curbing green house emissions.
The New York Times report that the EU “began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power.”
This policy has created a booming market, and wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source. But in the long run, this energy source is not green.
Forest is Finland and Estonia were once considered important sources to reduce carbon emissions but are today harvested so intensely that government scientists consider them to be carbon emitters.
The campaign to use wood pellets as fuel has made people think they are making sustainable choices. However, according to David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency in London, these practices are driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests.
With the halting of the supply of Russian gas to the European continent, there is growing pressure from the public that energy prices will increase. This has resulted in street protests and governments, such as in France, of announcing the potential for regular blackouts this coming winter.
These pressures have led both Central European and Nordic countries to keep wood subsidies and the wood chip industry alive and well.
The New York Times report that “in 2018, the last time the subsidies came up for a vote, nearly 800 scientists signed a letter urging lawmakers to stop treating logged trees as a green source of energy. While trees can be replanted, it can take generations for a growing forest to reabsorb the carbon dioxide from burned wood.
“Using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries,” the scientists wrote.
Prof Gert-Jan Nabuurs, who researches forestry at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, told the BBC that he acknowledges that wood does not burn as efficiently as natural gas or coal "and that is why for the same amount of energy, you are emitting more".
He also argues that "this biomass for bioenergy is a short cycle" as the trees are replanted.
But this runs contrary to one of the main climate change problems we face today: the lack of bio-diverse forest covers to absorb carbon. Diverse forests are replaced with plantations of a single tree species, and this makes them more vulnerable to disease and much less efficient at sequestering carbon.
The current EU policy of encouraging the cutting of trees to produce wood pellets appears to be not only shortsighted economic policy—as the economy needs to shift toward non-polluting sources of energy—but it is also a direct contributor to global warming.
Already, the legions of consultants who are running the pattern of ‘selling the new’ are archiving their folders on ‘integral,’ ‘lean,’ ‘smart,’ ‘circular’ and ‘sustainable,’ while busily studying up on how to sell the new trend: regenerative. In the process, the danger is that novices pretend to be seasoned practitioners and the deeper transformative agency of the work gets lost. Also, in ‘selling the new’ much useful and necessary work is in danger of being devalued. In over 20 years as a professional in the field of sustainability, I have met many practitioners who were working on sustainability in a regenerative way.
Sustainability is an important bridge we have not yet crossed. Working regeneratively will help us cross that bridge faster and move beyond avoiding negative impacts to healing the damage done and building capacity for place-sourced regeneration. Framed appropriately, the SDGs can serve as a platform of conversation to introduce working regeneratively to more and more people. So, let us not dismiss ‘sustainable’ — nor let us continue the old pattern and just change the label to ‘regenerative!’
After decades of pioneering work by people such as Carol Sanford, Pamela Mang, Ben Haggard, Joel Glanzberg, Bill Reed and others, the genie is now out of the bottle of carefully curated communities of practice. The deep practice of regeneration operating from a profoundly different and at the same time ancient worldview is meeting the current mainstream accustomed to dumbed-down soundbytes and demanding instant gratification and ‘sexy’ sales pitches. It is our responsibility not to lose its essence and hence the unique contribution in the process.
I celebrate that organizations such as Sustainable Brands™ or the Spanish sustainability platform Quiero are helping to take the dialogue about regenerative practice to many more companies. And I enjoyed contributing to the curation of the Regenerative Pathways platform developed by Future Stewards “to accelerate a regenerative future.”
During a fascinating conversation with Lachlan Feggans — Asia Pacific director of sustainability at Brambles — on “The Regenerative Revolution” podcast, we explored how to find a nuanced, ‘glocal’ approach to re-regionalising production and consumption; and hence, decentralising supply chains. These are important questions; and how we work with them depends on how we understand our participatory agency within nested living systems.
At the heart of regeneration is realignment with the developmental and evolutionary impulse that has not just sustained life as a planetary process for 3.8 billion years, but has revealed life itself as a regenerative community across scales generating and regenerating the abundance, diversity, and vitality of a magnificent variety of places, bioregions and the planet as a whole.
Regenerative practice starts and continues with personal development. It is not a tool but a practice of conscious participation and co-creation. Living in right relationship and practicing the art of transformation, we are realigning with life itself. Working regeneratively is working in an evolutionary way. In a problem-solving and solution-scaling-oriented culture, it is revolutionary to invite a more humble approach by catalysing and revealing the potential of people as regenerative expressions of place.
Working regeneratively fore-grounds our collaborative journey of learning and capacity building. Our projects, products, solutions and answers are stage posts of a continuous apprenticeship, as we are practicing to manifest the inherent potential in ourselves and in teams, businesses, communities and places. Working regeneratively is about revealing potential, rather than disappearing down the rabbit holes of solving problems in isolation.
The systemic and participatory worldview that informs regenerative practice carries a central lesson: Helping to manifest the unique contribution of an individual, team, community, business, bioregion or of humanity not only becomes more possible but actually requires being in service to the ‘adjacent whole’ — the industry, community, bioregion, ecosystem, and ultimately to humanity and all life.
From this perspective, success is not measured in corporate internal ecological balance and loss accounting, or scored against a regenerative certification scheme; it is subtly reflected in the health and vitality of the communities, ecosystems and bioregions the business operates in. Ultimately, the measure of success is the improvement of local and regional capacity to face an uncertain future creatively and be of healing influence in the nested contexts in which we operate.
Maybe a good way to start the journey is by letting go off the habit of asking ‘what can regenerative do for my company’ and inviting a wider inquiry into how can we as human beings orient this company towards a thriving future in service to community and place?
Another useful way of describing what working in a regenerative way means is to start with articulating first principles. Carol Sanford suggested seven foundational principles of a regenerative approach: i) wholes, ii) potential, iii) essence, iv) development, v) nested, vi) nodes, and vii) fields. I like the way Bill Reed presents these in relationship and condenses them to four ways of working, which I built on here:
1. Working with whole systems as conscious participants in and expressions of those systems-created, co-evolutionary pathways into the future
2. Manifesting inherent potential invites place-sourced approaches informed by the bio-cultural uniqueness of particular localities and their inhabitants,
3. Developing capability of people in place to become regenerative expressions of that place enables long-term response-ability in the face of complexity and uncertainty,
4. Building a field of collaboration through embracing diversity while sharing meaning, purpose and practice enables individuals and the collective to express their unique contribution in service to self and community, as well as, place and planet.
So, if you really want to embark on the journey of working regeneratively, you better be prepared that the learning never stops and both the practice and you yourself will transform over time. Then again that is precisely the point. As my friend Bill Reed once pointed out to me: “The delivery is capability.”
Beyond serving the project, the company, the industry, or the nation state is being in right relationship with the dynamic living planet upon which all of them depend. Being in right relationship is primarily about nurturing the dynamic health and resilience (including the capacity to transform and the capacity of anticipation) of the nested systems (or dynamic wholeness) in which we participate. Working in a regenerative way is about appropriate participation!
To me, this ‘capability’ Bill calls the deliverable is about the capacity and lifelong practice to consciously participate in one of life’s core patterns: regeneration. As Janine Benyus summed up the core lesson of biomimicry so expertly: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” The delivery is in living in right relationships. Such relationships create shared abundance rather than competitive scarcity, and improve the health and vitality of the whole.
Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
When editor-in-chief of multinational business magazine Fortune, Alyson Shontell, asked in its June/July 2022 issue if it’s time for a maximum wage, she got my attention. Back in the early 90’s, when I was an editor I published an article by Sam Pizzigati, co-editor of Inequality.org, which emphatically proclaimed that it was indeed time for a maximum wage. Does this now mean that Fortune, the glossy voice of corporate capitalism, and progressive activists like Pizzigati, finally agree that it’s time to curb the wealth of the Uber-rich? If so, how can this be done?
Growing Corporate Inequality
This is not the first time Fortune magazine has aired the sentiment, however, that corporate CEOs get paid way too much. In 1982, a Fortune cover story called the payment to corporate leaders at the time “madness.” And in 2003, the magazine said that “CEOs got paid more than ever.”
Since the late 1970s through 2020, writes Shontel, “compensation for chief executives rose 1,322 percent.” During that same period, however, annual worker compensation only rose by a paltry 18 percent. At the end of her editorial, Shontel asks: “Is [this] capitalism at its best? Or a bubble that’s finally ready to burst?”
When Fortune posed that question to its 1.8 million LinkedIn followers, they received over 10,000 responses and 65 percent of those said--yes, it’s time for a maximum wage. So, why this disconnect? Why is there no political change, when even conservative voices think the gap between the highest paid chief executives and the assembly line workers is so enormous? More importantly, what would that change look like?
The Political Power of Lobbyists
A study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University? and Benjamin Page of Northwestern concluded that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. As they put it, "economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence." In other words, there is no policy change regarding a maximum income because the rich and other special interest groups do not want to rock the boat by reducing their own wealth.
This is not just a US problem. According to Lobby Planet, a report by the Corporate Europe Conservatory, there are over 25,000 EU lobbyists in Brussel, most of them representing corporations. The report “takes you on a tour of the EU Quarter to explain the many – and often shady – methods of corporate lobbying used to influence decision making in the European Union.” Hard core capitalism and wealth concentration has also become a European past-time.
Increased Wealth Inequality Within Nations
My research suggests that globalization has reduced global wealth inequality between nations but has increased wealth inequality within nations. Typically, poorer countries are characterized by greater inequality than richer countries. However, there are exceptions to this rule: in some industrially developed countries, such as the United States and Russia, inequality is very high. In others, such as Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, economic disparity is relatively low.
According to French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the 2013 international bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, growth in inequality is largely due to the massive wealth gained by the extremely rich: the top one percent. Many wealthy people increase their fortunes due to old wealth, or inheritance, but at present, inequality is mostly the result of increased wages. And Piketty assumes that the rich will keep fighting to not only keep this wealth but to make even more. History seems to support Piketty’s theory. So how can the increasing wealth inequality and wage gap be reduced?
In the above-mentioned social democracies of the Nordic countries, the economic inequality gap is relatively low due to two main reasons: a comparatively high and progressive tax rate—the more you earn, the more taxes you’ll pay—and because each year, the labor unions will sit down with management to negotiate salaries, paid holidays (generally five to six weeks), paid maternity leave, and other benefits. If labor demands are not met, then the workers will often go on strike until a negotiated settlement is reached. These negotiations have over the past many decades shaped the economic equality and socially humane conditions of the social democracies of Scandinavia.
Taxing the Rich
Piketty’s answer to the global increase in inequality is a progressive tax rather than a fixed maximum wage. Historically, such a progressive tax is not unheard of, not even in the US. President Roosevelt and his New Dealers during WWII, right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, needed revenue to boost and win the war, so they proposed a 100 percent top tax rate. FDR settled for a marginal tax rate of 94 percent. In the next three decades, progressive taxes became the norm in most Western countries. However, that trend ended, especially in the US, with globalization’s neo-liberal free trade policies and Reaganomics in the early 1980s.
Pizzigati points to one important weakness of taxing the rich: they will cheat! But this does not need to be the norm, he writes in an article for Common Dreams. “Legislative decisions created a tax system that winks at tax evasion. Legislative decisions could, by the same token, fashion a tax system that clamps down on wealthy tax cheaters. That refashioning now appears to have some real momentum,” he writes.
“In the House of Representatives,” Pizzigati continues, “members of Congress belonging to the Progressive Caucus have introduced legislation that would, for starters, require the IRS to audit at least 20 percent of returns reporting at least $1 million in income and give the IRS the funding necessary to reach that goal.”
Pizzigati also points to Elizabeth Warren’s “legislative lead on a “wealth tax” that would raise an estimated $3 trillion over the next decade from the nation’s 100,000 richest households,” as well as a bill by the Nordic Economic Model advocate and senator Bernie Sanders. The bill “would hike the federal estate tax rate to 65 percent on bequests over $1 billion and plug decades-old estate tax loopholes along the way. The legislation figures to raise $430 billion over the next 10 years.” However, as optimistic as these bills sound, none of them have passed through Congress yet, so the US remains as unequal as ever.
Taxing the Rich is Challenging
Recent studies by The Brookings Institution were contradictory in determining whether taxing the rich would have a significant effect on income inequality. Other studies have shown that tax evasion is and would continue to be a significant challenge to dramatically reduce economic inequality. Meanwhile, the Nordic economic model of social democracy has shown that a capitalist system with strong government regulation and ownership stakes in key industries such as energy, a strong union movement, and a progressive tax system can significantly lower income inequality.
According to an article by Beth Daley in The Conversation, “The Nordic countries are among the most equal in terms of distribution of income. Using the Gini coefficient measure of income inequality (where 1 represents complete inequality and 0 represents complete equality) OECD data gives the US a score of 0.39 and the UK a slightly more equal score of 0.35 – both above the OECD average of 0.31. The five Nordic countries, meanwhile, ranged from 0.25 (Iceland – the most equal) to 0.28 (Sweden).”
Outside of the Nordic countries, however, the law of the economic jungle increasingly reigns. According to an article in Forbes magazine, The Pandora Papers, an investigation conducted by over 600 journalists uncovered the ways “powerful politicians, billionaires and celebrities utilized offshore accounts and other measures to hide trillions of dollars over the last 25 years. Many have done this legally through well-connected tax accountants, lawyers, offshore tax havens, and by exploiting loopholes.”
“In addition to politicians and celebrities,” ThePandora Papers “found that religious leaders, drug dealers, successful business owners, doctors and affluent people have been hiding their investments in large yachts, mega-mansions, high-end beachfront property and other hard to trace assets.”
Thomas Piketty and the Long Road to Equality
Piketty’s monumental book Capital in the Twenty-First Century offered perhaps one of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics ever published. Piketty’s voluminous tome provided searing insights into capitalism’s strengths and failings. He presented a well-documented case for how to solve the gap between the rich and the poor—both within nations and between nations.
Since then, Piketty has published two more books. In a review of the most recent one, history Professor Gary Gerstle writes in the Washington Post that “Piketty’s latest work, ‘A Brief History of Equality’, neatly summarizes the findings of his two original volumes in a ‘mere’ 250 pages of text. Readers will find this work attractive for its brevity alone. But ‘A Brief History of Equality’ is also a very different kind of book from the first two.”
The core message of Piketty’s last book is his confidence in the progress toward more equality made by European social democracies in the past 80 years. The social democratic evolution, combining the best of socialism with a capitalism reined in by taxes and labor unions, has laid the groundwork for the emergence of a more equal world, Piketty proclaims.
So, what are Piketty’s main proposals for a more equal economy? 1. Public financing of elections. 2. Transnational assemblies to complement national legislatures. 3. A two percent global tax on all individual fortunes that exceed 10 million euros (about $10.4 million). 4. Worker engagement in the management of large corporations to promote a move towards cooperative enterprises. 5. New global treaties to enhance rather than hamper the reduction of greenhouse gases and easing economic inequality between the Global North and the Global South.
Piketty’s wealth tax of two percent is rather timid. Many of his other proposals are practical and doable, though challenging to implement. That is, unless there is a growing global uprising putting pressure on political legislatures and corporations to create reforms. But the deeper questions we need to ask are: are such reforms enough and could there be a more effective way to reduce inequality?
Reducing the Wealth Gap Through Taxes or Cooperatives?
As mentioned above, implementing taxes to curb the growing wealth of the one percent will be challenging. Add to that the massive amount of wealth hidden in tangible assets and tax shelters which is unavailable for taxation and the increasing levels of higher incomes, and we start to see the enormity of the problem. Additionally, in the US, the CEO-to-worker income ratio is now on average 339 to 1, with the upper end of the spectrum surpassing more than 2000 to 1. Strangely, according to a 2016 Stanford University survey, most Americans think a fair executive-to-worker pay ratio should be considerably smaller—a stunning 6 to 1. Still, US inequality keeps growing.
Hence, Piketty might be onto something fundamentally important when suggesting a movement towards cooperatives as a major solution for inequality. According to TheFinancial Times Stock Exchange index (FTSE), the average CEO salary in European companies is $7 million a year. This yields a CEO-to-line-worker pay ratio of 129-to-1. In contrast, the co-ops in Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain, which employs around 80,000 workers, have decided on a ratio that runs from 6-to-1 to 9-to-1. No CEO of a Mondragon co-operative makes more than $1 million a year.
Roberto Lovato writes in the Craftsmanship Quarterly that “estimates vary wildly on how many people work in co-ops (perhaps because people differ on how a co-op is defined).” A 2014 report for the U.N., for example, puts the figure, worldwide, at 12.6 million. However, the Harvard Business Review counts more than 17 million (or 12% of the U.S. workforce) who are employed in ESOPs [Employee Stock Ownership Programs], credit unions, consumer and purchasing co-operatives and other worker-owned enterprises.”
“Whatever the figure,” he writes, “nowhere is the co-operative advantage as obvious as in the struggle to close today’s gargantuan, ever-widening income gap, both in the U.S. and across the world. Defeating the dragon of income inequality, may, in fact, be one of the most appealing social benefits of the continued interest in cooperativism.”
Beyond Taxes: Toward Economic Democracy
While Piketty has received growing support for his soft version of socialism--even from billionaires like Bill Gates--there is also another progressive economy movement afoot today. As with Piketty’s way of thinking, this movement also seeks to create a new and more equal economy. However instead of using tax reforms to do so, it focuses on structural changes through the concept of economic democracy.
In theory, democracy distributes power equally to all people, but it is often a small, powerful elite that runs for office, forms parties, owns the media, and frames political policy. Those with money and power are the ones who control the flow of news and opinion, and often politicians are more beholden to the corporations than to the people they represent. Hence, political democracy today also concentrates power in the hands of the few. Therefore, many new economy thinkers believe that the long-term solution to reducing inequality and creating more sustainability is to move away from this concentration of power and initiate more democracy in the economy as well.
Economic democracy means, in part, to change the distribution of income and wealth. It means a powershift in economic decision making—from the corporation and the wealthy elite to the people, just like in the Mondragon coops. Presently, the production of wealth is socialized—everyone contributes—but most of the benefits of the production is privatized. A small minority reap most of the economic and political benefits from everyone else’s hard work, hence the growing economic inequality.
A restructured economy through economic democracy avoids much of the bureaucracy needed to implement an effective tax-the-rich economy. Moreover, a more cooperative economy has many other benefits, as it creates stronger social bonds and pride in one’s community. It also gives people the opportunity to exercise their decision-making powers locally every day, not just once every two to four years on election day.
Mathematician and philosopher David Schweickart defines economic democracy through these four distinct features:
Worker self-management: each productive enterprise is controlled democratically by its workers.
Social control of investment: funds for new investment are returned to the economy through a network of public investment banks.
The market: enterprises interact with one another and with consumers in an environment largely free of governmental price controls.
Protectionism to enforce trade equality between nations
Trade unionist and social activist Alan Engler defines economic democracy as an alternative structure to corporate capitalism. Economic democracy is “a world of human equality, democracy and cooperation,” he writes. It is the alternative to capitalism and “the goal will be to transform capitalism into economic democracy through gains and reforms that improve living conditions while methodically replacing wealth-holders' entitlement with human entitlement, capitalist ownership with community ownership and master-servant relations with workplace democracy.”
Economic democracy has become a rallying call within the growing new economy movement, and it generally means to have more worker and local control of the economy and by that to achieve reduced economic inequality. The Indian social reformer and economist, P. R. Sarkar, was, like the influential political economist and social philosopher Karl Polanyi, highly skeptical of a market without it being an extension of environmental and societal laws and values. Sarkar thus expands on the features above by suggesting the following steps to achieve economic democracy and to avoid concentration of wealth in the hands of the one percent:
Economic democracy is essential, he claims, “not only for the economic liberation of human beings, but for the wellbeing of all—including animals and plants.” In other words, economic democracy needs to be grounded in a deep ecological ethic to be truly sustainable.
Guarantee the basic minimum necessities, such as education, food, housing, employment, and medical care to all people. This can be fulfilled through a universal basic income scheme, but Sarkar suggests that a constitutional guarantee of employment is a more progressive way to fulfill this guarantee. For those who are temporarily unable to find work, a universal basic income can step in to cover basic needs.
A three-tiered restructuring of the economy through a) government-owned large-scale industries such as for energy, water, road, and bridge infrastructure, b) privately owned corporations to become cooperatively owned enterprises much like in Mondragon, and c) small-scale privately-owned enterprises, such as shops, restaurants, small farms etc.
Limits on how much wealth an individual can accumulate.
Increase development in rural areas through decentralized planning, so that local economies can thrive and be more sustainable.
A more balanced overall economy with a sustainable combination of agriculture, manufacture, and services.
Protectionism by not allowing trade of local raw materials from one area to another, only finished goods.
According to economic democracy advocates, we cannot assume that limits on wages and wealth accumulation through higher taxes or caps on wealth would be enough to stem economic inequality. As in the Mondragon coops, the difference in income between the lowest and the highest paid person in society must be an inherent part of the economic structure itself, not an afterthought implemented and enforced through taxation, as that opens for loopholes such as tax evasion and the hiding of wealth in additional properties or offshore bank accounts.
Moreover, capitalism as a system is inherently based on maximizing profits, and the best way to balance the inevitable impulses for greed in an economy may, in the long run, be to restructure the economy itself through economic democracy. Systems change through the new economy movement, on the other hand, is not solely profit-driven but rather welfare and democracy driven by making sure basic needs are met and that the economy is environmentally regenerative.
In the Nordic countries, economic democracy is established through high wages for workers relative to the management, a high tax rate which gives back to the population through welfare services, such as free health care and education, and a relatively high retirement income. Partly due to changes in and pressures from the global market economy, however, economic inequality is now also increasing in the Nordic countries.
It is unlikely that Fortune magazine and the wealthy class that it supports will start advocating for radical changes like economic democracy any time soon. The proposals advocated by the new economy movement are therefore more important than ever, as they do seem to hold the promise of a brighter future of reduced economic inequality. Perhaps more importantly, economic democracy may also increase worker satisfaction and engagement in the local economy through increased cooperation and service to people and planet. And if Sarkar’s promise of economic democracy having as its foundation a deep environmental ethic, then economic democracy may not only solve the widening inequality gap but also the widening environmental sustainability gap.
Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance, an international platform for organizations and individuals advocating for environmental, social, and economic systems change. He is also the co-author of the book Growing a New Economy, which environmental activist and author Bill McKibben called a “hopeful account of the possibilities contained in our current crisis.”
References:
Thomas Piketty, Capital In the Twenty-first Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017
Ibid, A Brief History of Equality, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022
Alyson Shontell, Is it Time for a Maximum Wage?, Fortune Magazine, June/July, 2022
Roberto Lovato, Could Coops Solve the Inequality Crisis?, Craftmanship Quarterly, Summer, 2020Martin Gilens, Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Allan Engler, Economic Democracy: The Working-Class Alternative to Capitalism. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, Engler, 2010
David Schweickart, After Capitalism, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002
Gary Gerstle, Thomas Piketty’s optimistic blueprint for easing global inequality, The Washington Post, June 19, 2022
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Amereon Limited, 2021
Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction, Innerworld, 2016
P. R. Sarkar, Proutist Economics: Discourses on Economic Liberation, Ananda Marga Pracaraka Samgha, 1992
More electric cars are needed to save us from using fossil fuels to save us from global warming. These electric cars need cobalt, a naturally occurring metal and an essential ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries powering everything from cell phones and laptops to Elon’s Tesla.
In the race for climate sustainability, the current cobalt market feature prices soaring up to $60,000 per metric ton. Experts have predicted no less than a 14,900% increase in demand for cobalt by 2030. But with dwindling cobalt resources in copper and nickel mines, there is, from a purely profit and production standpoint, a dire need for more cobalt.
Today, 60% of the global supply of cobalt comes from copper mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with calamitous consequences to the local environment. The pollution from copper and cobalt operations has poisoned and ended fishing in the Katapula tributary of the Congo River.
The same pollution is threatening to engulf the entire city of Lubumbashi in toxic acidity. High concentrations of toxic metals in the air are causing respiratory illnesses and birth defects.
Not only is the precarious ecology of the country threatened, so is the health and wellbeing of more than 40,000 boys and girls who work the mines, according to an investigative report by the Washington Post. The demand for more sustainable production of electric luxury cars and the race for a cleaner environment is ironically wreaking havoc on both people and nature.
As the push for producing more electric vehicles is accelerating, mining companies are searching for new areas to extract cobalt. Ocean minerals are thus becoming increasingly valuable in the current market. With increasing commodity prices, mineral resources such as cobalt, copper or zinc are now sought after in an even more precarious environment: the deep blue sea.
Cobalt is found on the seabed at depths between 800 to 2400 meters and are therefore impossible to extract without sophisticated robots and AI to vacuum the mineral rocks off the ocean floor, loading them on ships to be shipped to factories for processing.
A quick Google search on deep sea mining resulted in this statement: new cobalt ventures are needed to create “a more sustainable production of our future resources - for the benefit of mankind.” To the environmental activists in Greenpeace, however, such mining ventures would come at a great environmental cost, potentially destroying the delicate ocean ecology for good.
And time is of the essence. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is set to decide the fate of the world's oceans behind closed doors by fast-tracking regulations for the launch of the deep-sea mining industry by July 2023 at a meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, from July 18-29.
In notes sent to the Jamaica Observer, the organization stated, "Civil society and frontline communities are protesting this destructive industry, which threatens one of the world's largest carbon sinks as well as the lives and livelihoods of billions of people living in coastal communities. Greenpeace is calling on the car companies — the supposed customers of this industry — to support a moratorium."
Greenpeace also noted, "The ISA is charged with protecting the oceans as the 'common heritage of mankind'. However, it is now trying to open a vast new frontier of the global ocean commons to large-scale industrial resource extraction and has implemented severe restrictions on the participation of civil society that diminishes our engagement in one of the most critical discussions about the future of our oceans."
Countering Greenpeace’s warnings, the ISA is claiming that deep sea mining offers a “greener more socially just” alternative to land based mining. Many scientists, according to Greenpeace, are warning that deep sea mining is not only threatening the ecological balance of the deep seas, our most effective sink hole for carbon, but also the livelihoods of millions of coastal people at risk.
The activist organization said that calls for a moratorium have grown as more countries, civil society, scientists, automobile and technology companies, financial institutions, and the fishing industry have stated that deep sea mining is not worth the environmental risk.
Indeed, several technology and electric vehicle industry heavyweights are now calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, including Rivian, Renault, BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo Group, Scandia, Google, and Samsung SDI.
Moreover, Greenpeace are “calling on US automakers Ford, GM, and Tesla to come forward and take a stand to protect our oceans."
While we are racing to halt the heating of our planet by searching for green alternatives to fossil fuels, we are in the danger of simplifying our complex challenges with technological fixes driven by greed and a one-shoe-fits-all solution to our energy problem.
Deep-sea mining to fuel our electric vehicles is wrought with ecological, cultural, political, and economic complications. Here are a few important considerations before we take the robotic plunge toward the bottom of the sea:
First, we cannot fix our energy problem, nor climate change, if profit-making in the name of sustainability is the sole driver of progress. Second, green growth is often a double-edged sword, and thus we need to become comfortable with letting some sources of energy stay in the ground.
Third, as Buckminster Fuller said, we need to look for less-is-more solution—ways to decrease the use of energy through more public transportation, walkable cities, bicycles, reduced consumerism and meat consumption, and a dramatic increase in cultural and leisure activities. All activities that are very high on the human wellbeing scale but very low on the energy scale.
After all, a low-growth economy—where economic sufficiency and wellbeing, not GNP, are the best measures of progress—is more likely our best hope in outgrowing our energy predicament without destroying the environment in the process.
Deeper systems changes are required while we search for new sources of renewable energy and other ways to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. This will require political, economic, and cultural innovations—solutions that go way beyond mining our seabed to fuel technological fixes and electric vehicles alone.
We're going to have to start coming to terms with nature's limits.
RICHARD HEINBERG
July 27, 2022
Will civilization collapse because it's running out of oil? That question was debated hotly almost 20 years ago; today, not so much. Judging by Google searches, interest in "peak oil" surged around 2003 (the year my book The Party's Over was published), peaked around 2005, and drifted until around 2010 before dropping off dramatically.
Well, civilization hasn't imploded for lack of fuel—not yet, at least. Instead, oil has gotten more expensive and economic growth has slowed. "Tight oil" produced in the US with fracking technology came to the rescue, sort of. For a little while. This oil was costlier to extract than conventional oil, and production from individual wells declined rapidly, thus entailing one hell of a lot of drilling. During the past decade, frackers went deeply into debt as they poked tens of thousands of holes into Texas, North Dakota, and a few other states, sending US oil production soaring. Central banks helped out by keeping interest rates ultra-low and by injecting trillions of dollars into the economy. National petroleum output went up farther and faster than had ever happened anywhere before in the history of the oil industry.
Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy.
Most environmentalists therefore tossed peak oil into their mental bin of "things we don't need to worry about" as they focused laser-like on climate change. Mainstream energy analysts then and now assume that technology will continue to overcome resource limits in the immediate future, which is all that really seems to matter. Much of what is left of the peak oil discussion focuses on "peak demand"—i.e., the question of when electric cars will become so plentiful that we'll no longer need so much gasoline.
Nevertheless, those who've engaged with the oil depletion literature have tended to come away with a few useful insights:
Energy is the basis of all aspects of human society.
Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption.
It takes energy to get energy, and the ratio of energy returned versus energy spent (energy return on investment, or EROI) has historically been extremely high for fossil fuels, as compared to previous energy sources.
Similar EROI values will be necessary for energy alternatives if we wish to maintain our complex, industrial way of life.
Depletion is as important a factor as pollution in assessing the sustainability of society.
Now a new research paper has arrived on the scene, authored by Jean Laherrère, Charles Hall, and Roger Bentley—all veterans of the peak oil debate, and all experts with many papers and books to their credit. As its title suggests ("How Much Oil Remains for the World to Produce? Comparing Assessment Methods, and Separating Fact from Fiction"), the paper mainly addresses the question of future oil production. But to get there, it explains why this is a difficult question to answer, and what are the best ways of approaching it. There are plenty of technical issues to geek out on, if that's your thing. For example, energy analytics firm Rystad recently downgraded world oil reserves by about 9 percent (from 1,903 to 1,725 billion barrels), but the authors of the new research paper suggest that reserves estimates should be cut by a further 300 billion barrels due to long-standing over-reporting by OPEC countries. That's a matter for debate, and readers will have to make up their own minds whether the authors make a convincing case.
For readers who just want the bottom line, here goes. The most sensible figure for the aggregate amount of producible "conventional oil" originally in place (what we've already burned, plus what could be burned in the future) is about 2,500 billion barrels. We've already extracted about half that amount. When this total quantity is plotted as a logistical curve over time, the peak of production occurs essentially now, give or take a very few years. Indeed, conventional oil started a production plateau in 2005 and is now declining. Conventional oil is essentially oil that can be extracted using traditional drilling methods and that can flow at surface temperature and pressure conditions naturally. If oil is defined more broadly to include unconventional sources like tight oil, tar sands, and extra-heavy oil, then possible future production volumes increase, but the likely peak doesn't move very far forward in time. Production of tight oil can still grow in the Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, but will likely be falling by the end of the decade. Extra-heavy oil from Venezuela and tar sands from Canada won't make much difference because they require a lot of energy for processing (i.e., their EROI is low); indeed, it's unclear whether much of Venezuela's enormous claimed Orinoco reserves will ever be extracted.
Of course, logistical curves are just ways of using math to describe trends, and trends can change. Will the decline of global oil production be gradual and smooth, like the mathematically generated curves in these experts' charts? That depends partly on whether countries dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. If the world gets serious about limiting global warming, then the downside of the curve can be made steeper through policies like carbon taxes. Keeping most of the remaining oil in the ground will be a task of urgency and complexity, one that cannot be accomplished under a business-as-usual growth economy. We'll need energy for the energy transition (to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, heat pumps, electric cars, mass transit, etc.), and most of that energy, at least in the early stages of the transition, will have to come from fossil fuels. If oil, the most important of those fuels, will be supply-constrained, that adds to the complexity of managing investment and policy so as to minimize economic pain while pursuing long-range climate goals.
As a side issue, the authors note (as have others) that IPCC estimates of future carbon emissions under its business-as-usual scenario are unrealistic. We just don't have enough economically extractable fossil fuels to make that worst-case scenario come true. However, even assuming a significant downgrade of reserves (and thus of projected emissions), burning all of the oil we have would greatly exceed emissions targets for averting climate catastrophe.
One factor potentially limiting future oil production not discussed in the new paper has to do with debt. Many observers of the past 15 years of fracking frenzy have pointed out that the industry's ability to increase levels of oil production has depended on low interest rates, which enabled companies to produce oil now and pay the bills later. Now central banks are raising interest rates in an effort to fight inflation, which is largely the result of higher oil and gas prices. But hiking interest rates will only discourage oil companies from drilling. This could potentially trigger a self-reinforcing feedback loop of crashing production, soaring energy prices, higher interest rates, and debt defaults, which would likely cease only with a major economic crash. So, instead of a gentle energy descent, we might get what Ugo Bardi calls a "Seneca Cliff."
So far, we are merely seeing crude and natural gas shortages, high energy prices, broken supply chains, and political upheaval. Energy challenges are now top of mind for policymakers and the public in a way that we haven't seen since oil prices hit a record $147 barrel in 2008, when peak oil received some semblance of attention. But now we run the risk of underlying, irreversible supply constraints being lost in the noise of other, more immediate contributors to the supply and price shocks the world is experiencing—namely lingering effects from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas, and far stricter demands for returns from domestic investors. Keeping the situation from devolving further will take more than just another fracking revolution, which bought us an extra decade of business-as-usual. This time, we're going to have to start coming to terms with nature's limits. That means shared sacrifice, cooperation, and belt tightening. It also means reckoning with our definitions of prosperity and progress, and getting down to the work of re-configuring an economy that has become accustomed to (and all too comfortable with) fossil-fueled growth.
Our current economic and monetary systems are structurally dysfunctional and at best serve a few (for a while) while more and more people share less and less. Under no circumstances will they deliver a healthy, meaningful and happy life for all. On a crowded planet with failing ecosystems we have to learn that out-competing others while destroying the planetary life-support systems is not an evolutionary success strategy. Win-lose games in the long run turn into lose-lose games. Yet there is another way! We can transform our global economy to play a subsidiary and collaborative function as we embark on strengthening resilient regional and local economies as the foundations of thriving, diverse, regenerative cultures.
We need to urgently break out of the vicious circle of bad economic design decisions — they reinforce a perspective of scarcity, separation and competition that drives ecological and social degradation. Human beings designed this system and human beings can redesign it to serve people and planet. Nothing about our current economic system — apart from the biophysical reality that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet — is inevitable or unchangeable. Neo-liberal economics is a dangerous ideology that seems to produce mass delusion and collective suicidal tendencies oblivious to the biophysical reality and socio-ecological context.
Unlike biology and ecology, economics is not a science. We created our current economic system and we can redesign it, based on ecological insights, biophysical limits, and social values. A thriving economy will serve our common purpose: promoting the health and wellbeing of humanity and the community of life. To redesign economics from the ground up challenges us to design new monetary systems, trade policies and financial institutions, as well as scale-linked local living economies and regionally focused circular biomaterials economies. The role of the global economy should be subsidiary supporting global collaboration and resource- and information- sharing.
The regenerative processes that enable living systems to thrive must also characterise the economic systems designed to create conditions conducive to life. Local and global collaboration in the co-creation of regenerative enterprises and diverse bioregional economies that serve the thriving of regenerative communities and cultures can potentially unlock a very different future for humanity.
Healthy ecosystems functions form the basis for all agricultural productivity and all bio-productivity. This ‘primary production’ is the basis of all value creation. Without this biological basis we cannot maintain communities and societies — let alone civilisations. Regenerating and maintaining the biospheric health of the planetary ‘household’ that all life depends upon is a precondition for human thriving.
“Ecosystems form the basis of all wealth creation. […] Ecosystems provide societies with soil fertility, food, water, shelter, goods and services, medicines, stability, pleasure, knowledge and leisure. […] Today 60 per cent of the services provided by ecosystems are threatened. Economic activities aimed at achieving short-term wealth are destroying ecosystems worldwide and thus economies’ primary asset. Restoring damaged ecosystems is essential if we are to secure the livelihoods of future generations.”
- Willem Ferwerda 2012: 13
Here is a recording of an online talk I gave last April on the theme of ‘Regenerative Economies for Regenerative Cultures’. The talk had to be delivered online rather than in Lisbon as planned because of the lockdown.
Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
When editor-in-chief of multinational business magazine Fortune, Alyson Shontell, asked in its June/July 2022 issue if it’s time for a maximum wage, she got my attention. Back in the early 90’s, when I was an editor I published an article by Sam Pizzigati, co-editor of Inequality.org, which emphatically proclaimed that it was indeed time for a maximum wage. Does this now mean that Fortune, the glossy voice of corporate capitalism, and progressive activists like Pizzigati, finally agree that it’s time to curb the wealth of the Uber-rich? If so, how can this be done?
Growing Corporate Inequality
This is not the first time Fortune magazine has aired the sentiment, however, that corporate CEOs get paid way too much. In 1982, a Fortune cover story called the payment to corporate leaders at the time “madness.” And in 2003, the magazine said that “CEOs got paid more than ever.”
Since the late 1970s through 2020, writes Shontel, “compensation for chief executives rose 1,322 percent.” During that same period, however, annual worker compensation only rose by a paltry 18 percent. At the end of her editorial, Shontel asks: “Is [this] capitalism at its best? Or a bubble that’s finally ready to burst?”
When Fortune posed that question to its 1.8 million LinkedIn followers, they received over 10,000 responses and 65 percent of those said--yes, it’s time for a maximum wage. So, why this disconnect? Why is there no political change, when even conservative voices think the gap between the highest paid chief executives and the assembly line workers is so enormous? More importantly, what would that change look like?
The Political Power of Lobbyists
A study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University? and Benjamin Page of Northwestern concluded that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. As they put it, "economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence." In other words, there is no policy change regarding a maximum income because the rich and other special interest groups do not want to rock the boat by reducing their own wealth.
This is not just a US problem. According to Lobby Planet, a report by the Corporate Europe Conservatory, there are over 25,000 EU lobbyists in Brussel, most of them representing corporations. The report “takes you on a tour of the EU Quarter to explain the many – and often shady – methods of corporate lobbying used to influence decision making in the European Union.” Hard core capitalism and wealth concentration has also become a European past-time.
Increased Wealth Inequality Within Nations
My research suggests that globalization has reduced global wealth inequality between nations but has increased wealth inequality within nations. Typically, poorer countries are characterized by greater inequality than richer countries. However, there are exceptions to this rule: in some industrially developed countries, such as the United States and Russia, inequality is very high. In others, such as Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, economic disparity is relatively low.
According to French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the 2013 international bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, growth in inequality is largely due to the massive wealth gained by the extremely rich: the top one percent. Many wealthy people increase their fortunes due to old wealth, or inheritance, but at present, inequality is mostly the result of increased wages. And Piketty assumes that the rich will keep fighting to not only keep this wealth but to make even more. History seems to support Piketty’s theory. So how can the increasing wealth inequality and wage gap be reduced?
In the above-mentioned social democracies of the Nordic countries, the economic inequality gap is relatively low due to two main reasons: a comparatively high and progressive tax rate—the more you earn, the more taxes you’ll pay—and because each year, the labor unions will sit down with management to negotiate salaries, paid holidays (generally five to six weeks), paid maternity leave, and other benefits. If labor demands are not met, then the workers will often go on strike until a negotiated settlement is reached. These negotiations have over the past many decades shaped the economic equality and socially humane conditions of the social democracies of Scandinavia.
Taxing the Rich
Piketty’s answer to the global increase in inequality is a progressive tax rather than a fixed maximum wage. Historically, such a progressive tax is not unheard of, not even in the US. President Roosevelt and his New Dealers during WWII, right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, needed revenue to boost and win the war, so they proposed a 100 percent top tax rate. FDR settled for a marginal tax rate of 94 percent. In the next three decades, progressive taxes became the norm in most Western countries. However, that trend ended, especially in the US, with globalization’s neo-liberal free trade policies and Reaganomics in the early 1980s.
Pizzigati points to one important weakness of taxing the rich: they will cheat! But this does not need to be the norm, he writes in an article for Common Dreams. “Legislative decisions created a tax system that winks at tax evasion. Legislative decisions could, by the same token, fashion a tax system that clamps down on wealthy tax cheaters. That refashioning now appears to have some real momentum,” he writes.
“In the House of Representatives,” Pizzigati continues, “members of Congress belonging to the Progressive Caucus have introduced legislation that would, for starters, require the IRS to audit at least 20 percent of returns reporting at least $1 million in income and give the IRS the funding necessary to reach that goal.”
Pizzigati also points to Elizabeth Warren’s “legislative lead on a “wealth tax” that would raise an estimated $3 trillion over the next decade from the nation’s 100,000 richest households,” as well as a bill by the Nordic Economic Model advocate and senator Bernie Sanders. The bill “would hike the federal estate tax rate to 65 percent on bequests over $1 billion and plug decades-old estate tax loopholes along the way. The legislation figures to raise $430 billion over the next 10 years.” However, as optimistic as these bills sound, none of them have passed through Congress yet, so the US remains as unequal as ever.
Taxing the Rich is Challenging
Recent studies by The Brookings Institution were contradictory in determining whether taxing the rich would have a significant effect on income inequality. Other studies have shown that tax evasion is and would continue to be a significant challenge to dramatically reduce economic inequality. Meanwhile, the Nordic economic model of social democracy has shown that a capitalist system with strong government regulation and ownership stakes in key industries such as energy, a strong union movement, and a progressive tax system can significantly lower income inequality.
According to an article by Beth Daley in The Conversation, “The Nordic countries are among the most equal in terms of distribution of income. Using the Gini coefficient measure of income inequality (where 1 represents complete inequality and 0 represents complete equality) OECD data gives the US a score of 0.39 and the UK a slightly more equal score of 0.35 – both above the OECD average of 0.31. The five Nordic countries, meanwhile, ranged from 0.25 (Iceland – the most equal) to 0.28 (Sweden).”
Outside of the Nordic countries, however, the law of the economic jungle increasingly reigns. According to an article in Forbes magazine, The Pandora Papers, an investigation conducted by over 600 journalists uncovered the ways “powerful politicians, billionaires and celebrities utilized offshore accounts and other measures to hide trillions of dollars over the last 25 years. Many have done this legally through well-connected tax accountants, lawyers, offshore tax havens, and by exploiting loopholes.”
“In addition to politicians and celebrities,” ThePandora Papers “found that religious leaders, drug dealers, successful business owners, doctors and affluent people have been hiding their investments in large yachts, mega-mansions, high-end beachfront property and other hard to trace assets.”
Thomas Piketty and the Long Road to Equality
Piketty’s monumental book Capital in the Twenty-First Century offered perhaps one of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics ever published. Piketty’s voluminous tome provided searing insights into capitalism’s strengths and failings. He presented a well-documented case for how to solve the gap between the rich and the poor—both within nations and between nations.
Since then, Piketty has published two more books. In a review of the most recent one, history Professor Gary Gerstle writes in the Washington Post that “Piketty’s latest work, ‘A Brief History of Equality’, neatly summarizes the findings of his two original volumes in a ‘mere’ 250 pages of text. Readers will find this work attractive for its brevity alone. But ‘A Brief History of Equality’ is also a very different kind of book from the first two.”
The core message of Piketty’s last book is his confidence in the progress toward more equality made by European social democracies in the past 80 years. The social democratic evolution, combining the best of socialism with a capitalism reined in by taxes and labor unions, has laid the groundwork for the emergence of a more equal world, Piketty proclaims.
So, what are Piketty’s main proposals for a more equal economy? 1. Public financing of elections. 2. Transnational assemblies to complement national legislatures. 3. A two percent global tax on all individual fortunes that exceed 10 million euros (about $10.4 million). 4. Worker engagement in the management of large corporations to promote a move towards cooperative enterprises. 5. New global treaties to enhance rather than hamper the reduction of greenhouse gases and easing economic inequality between the Global North and the Global South.
Piketty’s wealth tax of two percent is rather timid. Many of his other proposals are practical and doable, though challenging to implement. That is, unless there is a growing global uprising putting pressure on political legislatures and corporations to create reforms. But the deeper questions we need to ask are: are such reforms enough and could there be a more effective way to reduce inequality?
Reducing the Wealth Gap Through Taxes or Cooperatives?
As mentioned above, implementing taxes to curb the growing wealth of the one percent will be challenging. Add to that the massive amount of wealth hidden in tangible assets and tax shelters which is unavailable for taxation and the increasing levels of higher incomes, and we start to see the enormity of the problem. Additionally, in the US, the CEO-to-worker income ratio is now on average 339 to 1, with the upper end of the spectrum surpassing more than 2000 to 1. Strangely, according to a 2016 Stanford University survey, most Americans think a fair executive-to-worker pay ratio should be considerably smaller—a stunning 6 to 1. Still, US inequality keeps growing.
Hence, Piketty might be onto something fundamentally important when suggesting a movement towards cooperatives as a major solution for inequality. According to TheFinancial Times Stock Exchange index (FTSE), the average CEO salary in European companies is $7 million a year. This yields a CEO-to-line-worker pay ratio of 129-to-1. In contrast, the co-ops in Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain, which employs around 80,000 workers, have decided on a ratio that runs from 6-to-1 to 9-to-1. No CEO of a Mondragon co-operative makes more than $1 million a year.
Roberto Lovato writes in the Craftsmanship Quarterly that “estimates vary wildly on how many people work in co-ops (perhaps because people differ on how a co-op is defined).” A 2014 report for the U.N., for example, puts the figure, worldwide, at 12.6 million. However, the Harvard Business Review counts more than 17 million (or 12% of the U.S. workforce) who are employed in ESOPs [Employee Stock Ownership Programs], credit unions, consumer and purchasing co-operatives and other worker-owned enterprises.”
“Whatever the figure,” he writes, “nowhere is the co-operative advantage as obvious as in the struggle to close today’s gargantuan, ever-widening income gap, both in the U.S. and across the world. Defeating the dragon of income inequality, may, in fact, be one of the most appealing social benefits of the continued interest in cooperativism.”
While Piketty has received growing support for his soft version of socialism--even from billionaires like Bill Gates--there is also another progressive economy movement afoot today. As with Piketty’s way of thinking, this movement also seeks to create a new and more equal economy. However instead of using tax reforms to do so, it focuses on structural changes through the concept of economic democracy.
In theory, democracy distributes power equally to all people, but it is often a small, powerful elite that runs for office, forms parties, owns the media, and frames political policy. Those with money and power are the ones who control the flow of news and opinion, and often politicians are more beholden to the corporations than to the people they represent. Hence, political democracy today also concentrates power in the hands of the few. Therefore, many new economy thinkers believe that the long-term solution to reducing inequality and creating more sustainability is to move away from this concentration of power and initiate more democracy in the economy as well.
Economic democracy means, in part, to change the distribution of income and wealth. It means a powershift in economic decision making—from the corporation and the wealthy elite to the people, just like in the Mondragon coops. Presently, the production of wealth is socialized—everyone contributes—but most of the benefits of the production is privatized. A small minority reap most of the economic and political benefits from everyone else’s hard work, hence the growing economic inequality.
A restructured economy through economic democracy avoids much of the bureaucracy needed to implement an effective tax-the-rich economy. Moreover, a more cooperative economy has many other benefits, as it creates stronger social bonds and pride in one’s community. It also gives people the opportunity to exercise their decision-making powers locally every day, not just once every two to four years on election day.
Mathematician and philosopher David Schweickart defines economic democracy through these four distinct features:
Worker self-management: each productive enterprise is controlled democratically by its workers.
Social control of investment: funds for new investment are returned to the economy through a network of public investment banks.
The market: enterprises interact with one another and with consumers in an environment largely free of governmental price controls.
Protectionism to enforce trade equality between nations
Trade unionist and social activist Alan Engler defines economic democracy as an alternative structure to corporate capitalism. Economic democracy is “a world of human equality, democracy and cooperation,” he writes. It is the alternative to capitalism and “the goal will be to transform capitalism into economic democracy through gains and reforms that improve living conditions while methodically replacing wealth-holders' entitlement with human entitlement, capitalist ownership with community ownership and master-servant relations with workplace democracy.”
Economic democracy has become a rallying call within the growing new economy movement, and it generally means to have more worker and local control of the economy and by that to achieve reduced economic inequality. The Indian social reformer and economist, P. R. Sarkar, was, like the influential political economist and social philosopher Karl Polanyi, highly skeptical of a market without it being an extension of environmental and societal laws and values. Sarkar thus expands on the features above by suggesting the following steps to achieve economic democracy and to avoid concentration of wealth in the hands of the one percent:
Economic democracy is essential, he claims, “not only for the economic liberation of human beings, but for the wellbeing of all—including animals and plants.” In other words, economic democracy needs to be grounded in a deep ecological ethic to be truly sustainable.
Guarantee the basic minimum necessities, such as education, food, housing, employment, and medical care to all people. This can be fulfilled through a universal basic income scheme, but Sarkar suggests that a constitutional guarantee of employment is a more progressive way to fulfill this guarantee. For those who are temporarily unable to find work, a universal basic income can step in to cover basic needs.
A three-tiered restructuring of the economy through a) government-owned large-scale industries such as for energy, water, road, and bridge infrastructure, b) privately owned corporations to become cooperatively owned enterprises much like in Mondragon, and c) small-scale privately-owned enterprises, such as shops, restaurants, small farms etc.
Limits on how much wealth an individual can accumulate.
Increase development in rural areas through decentralized planning, so that local economies can thrive and be more sustainable.
A more balanced overall economy with a sustainable combination of agriculture, manufacture, and services.
Protectionism by not allowing trade of local raw materials from one area to another, only finished goods.
According to economic democracy advocates, we cannot assume that limits on wages and wealth accumulation through higher taxes or caps on wealth would be enough to stem economic inequality. As in the Mondragon coops, the difference in income between the lowest and the highest paid person in society must be an inherent part of the economic structure itself, not an afterthought implemented and enforced through taxation, as that opens for loopholes such as tax evasion and the hiding of wealth in additional properties or offshore bank accounts.
Moreover, capitalism as a system is inherently based on maximizing profits, and the best way to balance the inevitable impulses for greed in an economy may, in the long run, be to restructure the economy itself through economic democracy. Systems change through the new economy movement, on the other hand, is not solely profit-driven but rather welfare and democracy driven by making sure basic needs are met and that the economy is environmentally regenerative.
In the Nordic countries, economic democracy is established through high wages for workers relative to the management, a high tax rate which gives back to the population through welfare services, such as free health care and education, and a relatively high retirement income. Partly due to changes in and pressures from the global market economy, however, economic inequality is now also increasing in the Nordic countries.
It is unlikely that Fortune magazine and the wealthy class that it supports will start advocating for radical changes like economic democracy any time soon. The proposals advocated by the new economy movement are therefore more important than ever, as they do seem to hold the promise of a brighter future of reduced economic inequality. Perhaps more importantly, economic democracy may also increase worker satisfaction and engagement in the local economy through increased cooperation and service to people and planet. And if Sarkar’s promise of economic democracy having as its foundation a deep environmental ethic, then economic democracy may not only solve the widening inequality gap but also the widening environmental sustainability gap.
Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance, an international platform for organizations and individuals advocating for environmental, social, and economic systems change. He is also the co-author of the book Growing a New Economy, which environmental activist and author Bill McKibben called a “hopeful account of the possibilities contained in our current crisis.”
References:
Thomas Piketty, Capital In the Twenty-first Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017
Ibid, A Brief History of Equality, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022
Alyson Shontell, Is it Time for a Maximum Wage?, Fortune Magazine, June/July, 2022
Roberto Lovato, Could Coops Solve the Inequality Crisis?, Craftmanship Quarterly, Summer, 2020
Martin Gilens, Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Allan Engler, Economic Democracy: The Working-Class Alternative to Capitalism. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, Engler, 2010
David Schweickart, After Capitalism, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002
Gary Gerstle, Thomas Piketty’s optimistic blueprint for easing global inequality, The Washington Post, June 19, 2022
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Amereon Limited, 2021
Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction, Innerworld, 2016
P. R. Sarkar, Proutist Economics: Discourses on Economic Liberation, Ananda Marga Pracaraka Samgha, 1992
At 66, I am old enough to remember when the local economy was still thriving. I grew up in an extended family on a small island in Norway. All the apples, berries, pears, and cherries we ate, especially during fall and winter, had been cultivated in our own garden. In the fall, the whole family—including my grandmother and grandfather—picked mushrooms, blue berries, and cranberries in the forest. Indeed, all our neighbors lived like that—in a largely self-sufficient and local economy.
A few years later, when I had moved to the US, and I came home to visit, I discovered that the fruit trees and berry bushes had been cut down. The whole garden had been turned into a large lawn, empty of life. “Why had they done that?” I asked. “Well, because it was too much work and these apples from the supermarket are so much shinier,” my sister replied.
I remember that as a very dark and depressing day. I remember it as the day our organic, homegrown apples had become shiny and full of pesticides. I remember it as the day the local economy and culture was destroyed by globalization and its neo-liberal, corporate agenda.
Today, I live in a small eco-village in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. My neighbors, Kevin and Kate Lane are organic dairy farmers. They operate Lane in the Woods Farm and Creamery, and they make blue and white cheeses which they sell at several local farmers markets. In a radius of about 100 miles from our doorsteps, there are more than 100 local farmers markets.
I have always prided myself on being an environmentalist. My wife and I grow vegetables and berries for enjoyment and to help lower our carbon footprint. But in these mountains, there are small farmers, deeply conservative, who put me to shame. They do not call themselves environmentalists, still their carbon footprint is much smaller than those of us who shop organic at Whole Foods and vote for the Green Party. We have a lot to learn from these old timers about sustainability and community values.
Many of these local farmers, as well as the influx of young neo-hippies who have turned hundreds of old tobacco farms into thriving fruit, bee, berry, vegetable, and dairy farms, are members of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), an organization representing these farmers’ interests. The motto of the organization speaks for itself: “Local Food, Strong Farms, Healthy Communities.”
There are currently more than 12,000 farms in Western North Carolina where I live. In many ways, the local farm economy is thriving, and the farmers markets are bustling economic and cultural ventures where people meet, greet, purchase, and celebrate local food.
When we look at the overall economic and environmental trends, however, the global economy is still dominating the local economy. Its centralized machinery, fueled by a fossil-energy-driven economy is still hell-bent on crushing these local efforts. But here in Appalachia, we are fighting back, one small farm, one small farmers market, one local restaurant at-a-time.
Here in our mountains, the progress of that wholesome struggle for a more thriving local economy speaks for itself. “Twenty years ago,” according to ASAP, “we listed 58 farms, 32 farmers markets, and 19 restaurants in our Local Food Guide. Today, we list over 800 farms, more than hundred markets, and more than 200 restaurants.”
And, thankfully, in Norway, too, there is a similar trend going on. More and more local products, from smoked meat to various new cheeses, breads, and jams, are sold at local farmers markets all over the country. The growth of the slow food economy is speeding up, it is most certainly experiencing a new renaissance.
P.S. This article was written by request for Local Futures and their annual event World Localization Day. For more information: https://www.localfutures.org/world-localization-day/
Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of Systems Change Alliance. He studied agronomy in Norway where he helped organize an agricultural school to become fully organic. He is the author of five books, including Growing a New Economy.
Whenever there's an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.
Everyone who owns a gasoline-burning car has noticed that fuel prices have shot up in recent weeks. And most of us have read headlines about high energy prices driving inflation. But very few Americans have any inkling just how profound the current energy crisis already is, and is about to become.
"'Humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished'—mostly by deforestation and the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas."
This lack of awareness is partly due to economists, and those who depend on economists' readings of the tea leaves of daily data (a group that, sadly, includes nearly all politicians and news purveyors). Recently I heard an NPR staff commentator confidently state: "The only way to get gasoline prices under control is to get inflation under control." Anyone who understands recent events and how economies work will immediately realize that the statement is ass backwards. Energy prices are rising for specific physical reasons, most of which are widely reported. Those higher prices show up in economic statistics as inflation, a phenomenon that economists equate to a malevolent miasma that occasionally drifts into the economy from a mysterious alternate dimension. "Ah," say the economists, "but we have a magic spell to drive the miasma away—higher interest rates!" The Fed's assumption that raising interest rates will somehow reduce current high energy costs is comparable to medieval physicians' belief that leech bloodletting would cure diseases like tuberculosis.
Of course, the goal of raising interest rates is to cool demand, which theoretically should help lower prices. But if prices for a particular commodity are rising due to physical shortage caused by novel circumstances or events rather than increasing demand, then higher interest rates may offer little relief while bringing serious unintended consequences of their own (see 1970s, "stagflation"). The comparison with leeches still stands.
There's already enough bloodletting going on in the world. What we need now is sound thinking based in physical reality. Let's start with symptoms and identify clear, understandable causes. Then we'll explore the current extent of the energy crisis and its deeper societal implications, especially with regard to food. Finally, we'll look at the energy crisis in the context of a broader, longer-term view of our economic system and see what things our leaders could do that might actually improve the prospects of ordinary citizens and future generations.
Why Prices Are Up
What's making energy more expensive? Simple: physical scarcity resulting from pandemic, war, and depletion. Let's unpack each of these causes.
The economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are old news, but they keep reverberating. A persistent worker shortage, which you may have noticed at local restaurants, is also impacting energy companies and shipping firms. Further, the crash in oil demand early in the pandemic (when few people were driving to work) led to production cutbacks in the petroleum industry, notably in the US—where fracking companies had been giddily burning through investor cash for years. Now demand has recovered but investors are wary, and so companies are slow to drill wells likely to prove unprofitable. Raising interest rates—which will make it more expensive for oil companies to borrow money to fund operations—certainly won't increase the flow of oil and gas.
The energy impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are likewise straightforward and widely reported. Western oil companies have pulled out of Russia, making an ongoing decline in future Russian crude production virtually certain. The European Union has proposed a ban on oil imports from Russia, though time will tell if it can reach the consensus needed from members states, many of which are heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas. Russian production is already down by nearly 1 million barrels per day, and exports have reportedly fallen by about 4 million barrels per day. This is a substantial chunk of the world's 100-million-barrel-per-day liquid fuel demand.
Looming back of every other aspect of the oil supply story is depletion. If there's a shortage of oil, why not just open the spigots in other nations to make up the shortfall? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. OPEC's tired old wells are about half depleted following decades of continuous extraction. Increasing the rate of pumping at this point would damage reservoirs, reducing the amount ultimately recoverable. The owners and managers of those oilfields are understandably reluctant to jeopardize their patrimony—and they're relishing the higher prices their product is selling for. So, OPEC has barely nudged its output in response to shortages brought on by the war.
The other potential source of increased supply is the US, whose tight oil extraction rates have soared in recent years. But most of the geological formations that have been the source of this bonanza (such as the Bakken in North Dakota) are already in irreversible decline due to depletion. The world as a whole saw its peak output of conventional petroleum in 2016, following a long plateau that began in 2005. Oil importers, therefore, are largely out of options for replacing those lost Russian barrels.
There are some other factors complicating the current fuel supply system. I've focused on oil, simply because it's the most globally traded of fuels and delivers the most energy to society. But supplies of natural gas are also being hammered as a result of the war, with prices already at record levels and poised to soar even higher. The "normal" price for natural gas in the US is about $2.50 per million BTUs; today gas is selling at three times that level, with other nations seeing gas trade at over $15. I'll discuss some consequences of that below.
Further wrinkles have to do with diesel fuel, which is essential for trucking and hence global supply chains; and jet fuel (kerosene), which powers global aviation. Diesel and kerosene are made up of relatively long molecular hydrocarbon chains, but the light tight oil that the US has brought to market in recent years from fracking contains mostly short-chain molecules. Gradually, as world conventional oil production has plateaued and started to decline, with US light tight oil providing the main source of growth, diesel and kerosene output have stalled and sputtered. Diesel and kerosene prices have risen to unprecedented levels, and there are clear and persistent signs of worldwide shortage.
How Bad Is It?
Energy is essential for everything we do. It's not just a part of the economy; in a real, physical sense it is the economy. Therefore, whenever there's an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.
The links between energy and the economy are perhaps at their most transparent when it comes to diesel fuel. Trucks, freight trains, and tractors burn diesel. Therefore, when diesel gets scarce, supply chains start to seize up and food prices climb.
At the start of May, inventories of diesel on the US east coast plunged to the lowest seasonal level since government records began more three decades ago. Wholesale and retail diesel prices hit all-time highs.
Among the millions of trucks that run on diesel are Amazon.com's roughly 70,000 delivery vans and semi-trucks. That company just announced a disappointing quarter and outlook due largely to higher costs for trucking packages to customers.
Most of us don't really care much whether Amazon turns a profit. But Jeff Bezos's current woes are echoed throughout industry after industry. Even companies whose business model doesn't include physical delivery of goods still depend on other companies that burn diesel. That's partly why global stock markets have recently seen massive sell-offs. But the market has yet to fully internalize the nearly existential risk posed by declining energy.
The signs of energy crisis are everywhere. In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, airlines recently threatened to cancel virtually all flights in response to surging kerosene prices. US retail gasoline prices just hit a new record. And Europe is preparing for the likelihood of severe natural gas shortages next winter.
Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, speaking at the World Utilities Congress in Abu Dhabi in early May, said, "The world needs to wake up. The world is running out of energy capacity at all levels. It is a reality." One may question the motives of the Saudi minister: a so-called "NOPEC" bill making its way through the US Congress would make it possible to sue the OPEC cartel for price fixing, so the Saudis might like to heighten the perception that they are providing the world with an increasingly scarce good. Nevertheless, the prince's statement is clear, direct, and supported by abundant evidence.
How Bad Is It?
Energy is essential for everything we do. It's not just a part of the economy; in a real, physical sense it is the economy. Therefore, whenever there's an energy crisis, it can quickly become an everything crisis.
The links between energy and the economy are perhaps at their most transparent when it comes to diesel fuel. Trucks, freight trains, and tractors burn diesel. Therefore, when diesel gets scarce, supply chains start to seize up and food prices climb.
At the start of May, inventories of diesel on the US east coast plunged to the lowest seasonal level since government records began more three decades ago. Wholesale and retail diesel prices hit all-time highs.
Among the millions of trucks that run on diesel are Amazon.com's roughly 70,000 delivery vans and semi-trucks. That company just announced a disappointing quarter and outlook due largely to higher costs for trucking packages to customers.
Most of us don't really care much whether Amazon turns a profit. But Jeff Bezos's current woes are echoed throughout industry after industry. Even companies whose business model doesn't include physical delivery of goods still depend on other companies that burn diesel. That's partly why global stock markets have recently seen massive sell-offs. But the market has yet to fully internalize the nearly existential risk posed by declining energy.
The signs of energy crisis are everywhere. In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, airlines recently threatened to cancel virtually all flights in response to surging kerosene prices. US retail gasoline prices just hit a new record. And Europe is preparing for the likelihood of severe natural gas shortages next winter.
Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, speaking at the World Utilities Congress in Abu Dhabi in early May, said, "The world needs to wake up. The world is running out of energy capacity at all levels. It is a reality." One may question the motives of the Saudi minister: a so-called "NOPEC" bill making its way through the US Congress would make it possible to sue the OPEC cartel for price fixing, so the Saudis might like to heighten the perception that they are providing the world with an increasingly scarce good. Nevertheless, the prince's statement is clear, direct, and supported by abundant evidence.
Why the Big Picture Is Essential
Most news articles treat diesel, gasoline, and food price hikes as transitory phenomena. After all, historically whenever prices have gone up, they've later settled back down. Temporary shortages inspire innovation and trigger investment. It's the magic of the market. So, once the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war are in our rear-view mirror, we can all surely get back to normal.
Missing from those articles is a systemic understanding of our current crisis. The big picture of our energy situation is perhaps best captured by a study published seven years ago, "Human Domination of the Biosphere: Rapid Discharge of the Earth-Space Battery Foretells the Future of Humankind." Lead author John Schramski, an associate professor in the University of Georgia's College of Engineering, likened Earth to a battery that has been charged slowly over billions of years. "The sun's energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels," says Schramski, "but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished"—mostly by deforestation and the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. Once that battery is discharged, there is nothing humans can do within a relevant timescale to maintain the energy flows that currently support complex industrial civilization and a population measured in billions.
No doubt there will be some temporary work-arounds. Solar and wind energy sources could substitute for fossil fuels in some applications, though material limits would prevent a full-scale replacement. But there really is no solution to our energy crisis, if by "solution" we mean a return to how energy markets have functioned during the past few decades. We are victims of systemic dependency on depleting fuels and minerals, and an economic model founded on unsustainable growth.
Once we understand that, then it's possible to chart a course of adaptation that minimizes suffering and destruction. Instead of prioritizing growth, we must aim for rapid reduction in overall energy usage, with an emphasis on equity—both equity between the rich and poor within nations and globally. As I've written elsewhere, efforts should center on rationing increasingly scarce resources and developing local cooperative organizations of all kinds. Learn to work with nature and heal ecosystems.
Crises make incumbent politicians look bad. But denying or politicizing problems that result from our own prior mistakes just makes those problems worse. Here's some free advice for policy makers and members of the Fourth Estate: take the long view, even if it's scary. And tell the truth, even if it means losing an election or Twitter followers.
This article was first published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) by Common Dreams at commondreams.org
The publication of Growing a New Economy by Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves[1] was a milestone in the history of Proutist literature because it was the first comprehensive introduction to Prout economics that firmly situated the Proutist agenda within the emerging New Economy Movement. The term New Economy Movement (NEM) is a rather loose description of a growing literature that rejects not just neo-liberalism but also its neoclassical foundations. Neoclassical economics is the orthodox economics taught in virtually all universities since the 1950s and informs most social and economic policy around the world. The NEM, by contrast, reconstructs the very foundations of economic theory, drawing on ecological, feminist and humanist principles, and incorporating proposals such as the guaranteed minimum requirements of life, alternative production models (for example, cooperatives), complementary currencies and a radical overhaul of global trade and finance.
Before publication of Growing a New Economy, Proutists, including myself, were inclined to accept the absolute foundations of economics to be the intersecting supply and demand curves in microeconomics and the circular-flow-of-income model in macroeconomics. Afterall, the diagrams of these in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook have been the basis of Economics 101 since the second world war. They were, and continue to be, deeply ingrained in the mindset of generations of economists and even Proutists have been constrained by them when attempting to illustrate what a Prout economy might look like.
Growing a New Economy instead embraced the image of three concentric circles, the economy ensconced inside a society, which is in turn ensconced inside the biosphere of planet Earth. Variants of this iconic image are to be found in much of the NEM literature, and it also graces the landing page of Prout’s website (https:\\prout.info). Bjonnes and Hargreaves not only rejected the tenets of neoliberalism (free markets, free trade, privatization, small government, and the primacy of finance), they also demonstrated how Prout principles mesh with those of the NEM.
In the last four years, three additional groundbreaking books have been published which, I believe, clearly demonstrate that the New Economics has finally grown into a mature, principled synthesis of theory and practice based on humanist ethics and sound science. They are Doughnut Economics – Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth (2018),[2] Mission Economy – A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato (2021),[3] and The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy by Stephanie Kelton (2021).[4] The books form a natural sequence and are best read in the above order. Doughnut Economics paints the big picture. It integrates all the strands of the NEM into a coherent whole. In particular, it lays out the ethical and ecological foundations of the New Economy. A Moonshot Guide on the other hand demonstrates how, once a set of ethical and ecological principles have been accepted, governments can galvanize a society to, for example, abolish poverty or work towards a net-zero carbon economy. The book’s title comes from the commitment that President Kennedy made to land a person on the moon and how all stops were pulled out to achieve that goal. And finally, The Deficit Myth explains why poverty and unemployment are the result of deliberate policy choices made by politicians and are not some unavoidable (if unfortunate) byproduct of governments having to balance budgets under severe financial constraints.
Kate Raworth begins her book by reminding us of the “power of pictures”. She believes that generations of economists have been unable to escape the grip of neoclassical economics (despite its obvious failings) partly because they have been imprinted with the images in Paul Samuelson’s texts. Her solution is to imprint a new set of images that better correspond to the real world. Her first image is a “doughnut”, consisting of two concentric circles. The space in between them is the doughnut. The outer circle represents the ecological constraints within which any economy must operate if it is to be sustainable. The inner circle represents the minimum wealth that an economy must generate if its people are to enjoy an acceptable and equitable standard of living. A sustainable economy must sit within these constraints, hence doughnut economics. Outside the doughnut leads to ecological collapse – the hole in the centre leads to social collapse. Raworth identifies nine key ecological indicators (proposed by an international group of earth-system scientists) and 12 key social indicators (derived from the United Nations 2015 Sustainable Development Goals) to identify the bounds of the doughnut. In this sense, doughnut economics is based on science and on real-world data (as opposed to mathematics and unreal assumptions).
Another powerful image is Raworth’s more detailed presentation of the three concentric circles representing Earth, society and economy. Ecologists identify four fundamental ecosystem processes, water cycling, nutrient cycling, energy flows and species relationships. Raworth shows these processes entwining and penetrating the social and economic spheres. Note also that she identifies four “provisioning sectors” within an economy, the unpaid household sector (including for example, child-rearing – what use is a politician if he has not been toilet trained – but you can be sure his mother was not paid for it!), the commercial sector, the government sector, and the Commons. The Commons includes all wealth created by self-organizing groups. Consider, for example, the largest repository of information on the planet, Wikipedia. Note that money (financial flows) only appears in the smallest, inner-most layer of this diagram. GDP (measured in dollars) is no longer the paramount indicator of economic performance. All the principal indicators are measured in real units, for example, tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere, the rate of underemployment.
Once the big-picture goals are established, Mission Economy tells us how to achieve them. Mazzucato’s main message is that a strong, highly skilled, and well-resourced government sector is critical to achieving big goals. The elimination of poverty or reaching a net-zero carbon economy will never be achieved by a small, impoverished public service and treasury officials tinkering with interest-rates. Boris Johnson’s recent demand that 20% of the UK civil service be slashed to pay for tax cuts is social and economic suicide. Similarly in Australia, a succession of flood and bushfire disasters over the past three years has revealed the inability of the Australian government to cope with emergencies. Indeed, the message from the country’s conservative prime minister is that it’s not his job!
Apart from reskilling the public service sector (stop outsourcing) and establishing the administrative and physical infrastructure required to achieve big-picture goals, Mazzucato has interesting things to say about the government’s role in creating value.
“The ambition of government should be to set off catalytic reactions across society.” Mazzucato.
Government can infuse (and enthuse) the public service and the public imagination with positive sentiments about big picture goals. The idea is to link ethical values with economic values. Values (in both senses of the word) should be at play in markets. Markets for goods and services, says Mazzucato must be biased towards desired end goals. One way to do this is to tax “bads” and subsidise “goods”. Mazzucato describes this as “shaping markets” and “tilting the playing field” towards goals. Furthermore, supply and demand in a market can be influenced by catalytic sentiments, thereby influencing prices. In other words, economic value is not a static concept dependent on material constraints. Value has psychological determinants, and these can also “tilt” markets towards goals. This introduces a fascinating area of economics which in Prout is referred to as psycho-economics. The discipline is only in its infancy.
Both Raworth and Mazzucato acknowledge the important role of finance in the new economy but insist that it must be subservient to the production of real social and ecological value. This brings us to The Deficit Myth. Kelton is a high-profile economist within the Democratic Party in the USA and has acted as advisor to Bernie Sanders. She is the best known of a growing number of advocates for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). MMT attracts praise and condemnation in equal measure — condemnation because MMT’s critique of the financial system gets to the heart of capitalist exploitation and praise because MMT states that there is no purely financial constraint that stops governments from achieving full employment and eliminating poverty. Poverty is a policy choice made by governments who are protecting the wealth of those who are already wealthy. One of MMTs proposals is the Job Guarantee, which makes it attractive to public welfare groups who already know that there is something rotten at the heart of capitalist finance.
This is not the place to elaborate on MMT. Even advocates admit that it takes time to “get your head around it”. But one of the most common attacks on MMT is that policies such as the Job Guarantee would be inflationary. MMT advocates are at great pains to explain that they are not proposing the unrestrained printing of money. What they are saying is that all capitalist economies are grossly underperforming and not utilizing the resources available to them. High levels of underemployment (currently running around 16% in Australia and 24% in the youth age-group) are, by definition, indicative of a stagnant economy. MMT says that creating jobs for the unemployed is not inflationary if those jobs produce value. And this returns us to Mission Economy and all that the government sector can do to co-create value with the sectors of the economy.
Despite the maturity of the New Economics, there remains much that the Proutist perspective can offer. The five fundamental principles offer a solid theoretical underlay to Raworth’s powerful pictures. The three-tier enterprise system, socio-economic units, block-level planning, and economic decentralization are frequently implied in the NEM literature, but the ideas could be much further developed. What the NEM offers is an emerging progressive movement with whom it will be possible to grow a new economy.
[1] Roar Bjonnes and Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy – beyond crisis capitalism and environmental destruction, Innerworld Publications, 2016. ISBN: 9781881717539.
[2] Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics – Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House UK, 2018. ISBN: 9781847941398
[3] Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy – A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Penguin UK, 2021. ISBN: 9780141991689
[4] Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy, Publisher: John Murray, 2021. ISBN: 9781529352566
If you are concerned about global warming and you are the CEO of a corporation in Europe or the US, and your company’s production plants pollute the air and water with various chemicals, then you’d naturally want to do something about it. Luckily, there is a solution—it’s called carbon offsetting. To compensate for your emissions, you spend a small portion of your budget planting trees in Africa so that they can do what they do best: suck carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow.
This sustainable business activity is visibly highlighted on your website and in all ads selling your products. But does it really work? Not if you ask Greenpeace. The organization thinks the practice is nothing more than greenwashing—creating a better corporate image without doing much good to the environment.
In a recent article, Time magazine agreed. In “A closer look at carbon offsets” Kyla Mandel writes that, “Tech options, like carbon capture, are nowhere near the scale needed, leaving nature-based solutions, like growing new forests, as the current best choice.”
The problem with carbon offsets
For Greenpeace, the main problem “with offsets isn’t that what they offer is bad – tree planting or renewable energy and efficiency for poor communities are all good things – but rather that they don’t do what they say on the tin.” In other words, carbon offsets are not enough to cancel out the actual emissions to which they are linked. It becomes an environmental deficit—and, thus, greenwashing.
Nature is only able to absorb a limited amount of carbon from the atmosphere each year, and because we humans keep increasing our carbon footprint, there is simply not enough land and water to meet the increasing demand.
Not exactly systems change
The great ecologist O.T. Odom famously said: “In nature, nothing is too big to fail.” But that kind of environmental insight is not followed by today’s corporate CEOs. For most of them, it would be unthinkable to radically restructure their business and production practices according to more ecological principles since short-term profit goals are still the main driver of corporate policies.
Carbon offsetting is a much easier way to pass the buck, to pay someone else to take care of the corporation’s problems. How does it work? By planting trees in developing countries, carbon is sucked out of the air, and by delivering energy-efficient cooking stoves, bicycles, or solar panels to communities in developing countries.
In theory this practice sounds great, but in practice it is not that simple to reduce our global carbon footprint. What we need to do in addition to planting trees and saving biodiversity in the forests and the oceans is to cut emissions directly—not through offsetting.
Greenpeace writes that, “offsetting allows companies like BP and Shell as well as airlines to continue with their unsustainable behavior while shifting their responsibility for the climate onto the consumer.” Carbon offsetting services are offered by many companies, including airports like Heathrow and airlines such as Easyjet. This allows passengers to feel like good citizens by paying to plant up to 12 trees per month. Other companies like BP and Shell run similar campaigns, and they laud this as a panacea to solving the climate crisis.
“A newly-planted tree,” writes Greenpeace, “can take as many as 20 years to capture the amount of CO2 that a carbon-offset scheme promises. We would have to plant and protect a massive number of trees for decades to offset even a fraction of global emissions. Even then, there is always the risk that these efforts will be wiped out by droughts, wildfires, tree diseases and deforestation.”
Deeper systems changes are needed to tackle the climate crisis. These companies are not too big to fail, indeed they have already failed both the people and the planet. The solution lies in deeper systems change through a comprehensive plan for sustainable drawdown of carbon in industry, agriculture, fishing and in the general human population through consumer lifestyle changes.
Less is indeed more when it comes to capture carbon and the future of our civilization. It is time we capture the problem at its main sources—our failed cultural, industrial, and economic systems. They are no longer too big to fail. We can no longer keep offsetting these systems’ inherent failures and simply pass them on to future generations.
“The world's richest ten percent are responsible for an estimated 47 percent share of global CO2 emissions,” writes Florian Zandt at Statista. This is the result of a recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. The study focused on how alleviating poverty worldwide would impact carbon emissions.
As the chart below shows, the difference between the poorest and wealthiest is staggering. On average, a person in the lower 50 percent income group only produces about one ton of CO2 per year while someone in the one percent group emits nearly 50 tons of carbon dioxide per capita.
“Of course,” writes Zandt, “the results are different depending on the region.” In the rich countries of Europe, the bottom 50 percent had a higher estimated share of total emissions than the top ten percent, while the top one percent in lower income Sub-Saharan Africa induced more carbon emissions than the bottom 50 percent.
How would raising people out of poverty on a global level impact the overall carbon footprint? The effects on global warming would be surprisingly minimal according to the study. “Lifting more than one billion people above the poverty line under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1 would only raise the estimated global CO2 output by roughly two percent,” writes Zandt, “even though carbon emissions in low to lower-middle income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa could potentially double.”
To dramatically reduce global carbon emissions, we need to accomplish these four tasks simultaneously:
1. Dramatically reduce the conspicuous consumption and carbon footprint in rich countries. Yes, how many types of cereal brands (there are currently over 5000 in the US alone), toilet papers, plastic bags, or containers do we really need?
2. Reduce the income gap between rich and poor overall by having a maximum wealth cap, since the rich ten percent pollute by far the most. Some studies estimate that a private jet passenger produces ten times more carbon footprints than a commercial passenger.
3. Reduce carbon emissions globally by developing more renewable energy resources, reduce consumption of luxury goods, and produce goods in a more sustainable manner. To do that, we need a new economic system, one that combines sustainability with equitability.
4. We need to save nature and the poor by making the ultra-rich one percent go extinct. We can accomplish that by an aggressive tax-reform and by having a maximum wealth cap. Nobody needs to be a billionaire. According to Professor Richard Wilk at Indiana University, a billionaire has a carbon footprint over a thousand times that of an average person. So, let the billionaires go extinct, not the elephants and the tigers.
The Western diet is increasingly meat-centered and raising livestock accounts for nearly 15% of global greenhouse gasses. If livestock were a nation of their own, it would be the third greatest emitter of greenhouse gasses. Moreover, meat consumption has enormous human and monetary health costs. Humans can live healthy and long lives on a primarily plant-centered diet, which would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint. Whatever ways we achieve a more plant-based diet, studies have convincingly shown that such a strategy is a win-win for both people and planet.
The main purpose of regenerative agriculture is to improve the health of the soil by restoring its carbon content, which in turn restores the health and productivity of the crops. Studies have shown that photosynthesis is one of the most effective methods to capture carbon dioxide from the air. By not tilling the soil, carbon is captured in a plant cover often containing between ten to twenty-five varieties of cover crops, each giving back nutrients to the soil and helping to sequester carbon. By feeding the soil through regenerative farming, we can dramatically improve both human and climate health.
The city of San Francisco collects over 500 tons of organic waste every day to be to be used as compost on local farmland, vineyards, and ranches. While many landfills have methane management, it is far more effective to turn organic waste into compost, thereby dramatically reduce emissions and creating fertilizer for plants who will furthermore draw down additional carbon. Composting can easily be done by individuals and families at home, but it is even more important to create composting facilities at scale in every city and town.
In ancient Amazonian societies, it was customary to bury and burn organic waste into charcoal, which was used as a soil amendment called terra preta (black earth) in Portuguese. Black earth, or biochar, agriculture once covered 10 percent of the Amazon rainforest feeding hundreds of thousands of people, and those areas still retain extraordinary amounts of carbon. Biochar production for modern farming is a small but growing industry with tremendous potential for both increased agricultural yields as well as carbon sequestering.
If you place cattle inside a fence or on feedlots and measure their impact on the climate, this type of farming will rank next to coal as one of the greatest hazards to planetary health. If the same animals were to graze like migratory herds of herbivores on wildlands, on the other hand, they would cocreate a type of soil and biodiverse grassland that will sequester large amounts of carbon as well as reduce the use of pesticides, fertilizer, and diesel fuel. Pastures make up 70 percent of the world’s agricultural land, so managed grazing could have significant impacts on climate if it were to become widespread.
In our Systems Change Deep Dives video podcast series, we take a systemic look at some of the greatest social, economic and environmental challenges that we are facing as a global community and the ideas and projects that have the potential to catalyze systems change. For our first deep dive topic, Beyond Carbon Capture, we spark conversations with people leading carbon capture initiatives around the world to discuss the benefits and challenges of their work and how it fits into the wider paradigm of systemic change.
In the second episode, we spoke with Joel Salatin, Co-Owner of Polyface Farm, a thriving multi-generational regenerative family farm that services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets and a farmer’s market. When Joel is not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the calluses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems. He is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, he writes several magazine columns, co-hosts a podcast titled Beyond Labels, is a frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts and writes a blog called Musings from the Lunatic Farmer.
Keep reading for the the key points from the discussion with Joel:
Cattle and Time in the Carbon Conversation
Joel is keenly aware that, in recent years, cows have received a lot of negative publicity when it comes to the carbon conversation. However, he calls our attention to the fact that, at earlier points in Earth’s history, there was a lot more megafauna around. So the problem shouldn’t be in the animals themselves, but in the way that they have come to be managed.
In Nature, there is an important element to grazing which is almost always left out of the equation in modern production farms, and that element is time. “Nature does this (...) with fire seasonality and predators: wolves here in America, lions in Africa, and of course there were predators and other areas as well. What that movement does is that it stimulates, through strategic pruning, it stimulates the perennial prairie, the grasses, the forbs, all that, to actually produce more than it would if it just went into senescence.”
Technology nowadays actually enables us to steer our “four-legged pruners” across the landscape with precision and create a mosaic, making sure that at any given time, there is always a portion of the landscape in senescence, a portion growing rapidly and a portion blossoming and supporting biodiversity. It is possible to do this with all sorts of animals, pigs, sheep, poultry, ducks, and create a system that feeds the animals and leaves fertility behind.
“Routinely there's a lot of people asking me, well, how did you innovate these systems? And so the answer is very simple; when you look at nature, animals move.”
Grasslands, Forests, Perennials and Annuals
“People think about trees as being the biggest carbon sink, but actually the fastest way isthrough grasses, because their metabolism is so much faster than trees. Now, it's counter-intuitive because when you look at the forest, you say, well, look at all that carbon, but you're seeing, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 years of carbon storage above ground. You don't see that in prairie and grasslands. But if you took your lawn clippings and you were able to take a square meter of those lawn clippings, put them in a box and put that box in a storage shed, and in 60 years we opened that door and said: here's the carbon that came off of that square meter, it would make a believer out of you, to see it all in one place.”
Grasses go through three stages of growth, an initial slow period, a secondary fast growth period and finally it slows down again. The method of natural systems, with the choreography of movement of these large ungulates across the prairies, was to prune the grasses back so that they could re-start the regrowth cycle, but then leave it to rest until it regrew to that second tier of growth. Nowadays, with overgrazing, there’s not enough of a rest period for the forages to regrow and capture carbon in the process. And recently, animal production farms actually take a lot of these herbivores off of perennials and put them on annuals in feedlots, annuals which actually deplete carbon.
“Perennials increase carbon. The energy flow of a perennial is down into the ground. The energy flow of an annual is up and out. So when people say, well, (...) we need to all go vegan and eat squash and watermelon instead of beef, what they're not recognizing is that if every plant were as efficient as a squash or a watermelon or a soybean, we wouldn't have any soil. Because it is the organic matter that's pumped in by perennials that actually built those soils, those legacy soils that we are now monocropping with corn and soybeans and wheat and rye.”
Supporting the Local Economy
“We call ourselves the economic reversal or the economic inversion. In other words, we're bringing money from the city to the country. The normal industrial system brings rural money to the urban sector, (...) agricultural lands are economically hemorrhaging their wealth to the cities. And we would like to see that reversed. We bring that to the farm and I think the spinoff is pretty big.”
Polyface Farm buys large amounts of grain from local GMO-free farmers, which supports their activities and protects the farms from the chemical industrial approach. There are 25 people employed on the property, and there is also a stimulus to the local economy caused by the annual influx of visitors to the region, coming to see the farm, a number that can reach 15 000 per year. And that also supports a community trying to work on artisanal and craft-type food and fiber.
Individual Food Choicesand Taking Action
“Imagine you're getting ready to eat. And as you look at what's on your plate, just take a moment to squint through the plate and try to imagine the landscape that grew the food on that plate. Just imagine that landscape and then ask: is that landscape the kind of landscape I want my grandchildren to inherit?
If you happen to be around Virginia, you are more than welcome to take a day trip to Polyface Farm, or even take part in one of the educational activities they organize, and see how everything takes place with your own eyes. But to Joe, the most effective way to help the cause is to change our mindsets and then our actions to heal and regenerate Earth.
"The way to help me is to simply join the awareness team, join the thinking team. (...) There's a kind of sense that what I do today doesn't matter. But the fact is that where we are today on the planet, our track record, our stewardship, all of these things are a physical manifestation of trillions and trillions of little decisions that we and our ancestors have made for centuries.”
“Get your mind, get your head, get your heart, wrapped around the privilege, the honor of knowing that these hands and this intellect can engage, can participate with healing. If more people would understand that privilege and responsibility, we would have a different world.”
“My dad was a visionary very much ahead of his time and was all about trying to regenerate this piece of land. In my lifetime, I've watched it go from rocks and infertility to arguably the most abundant farm in the community. And I'm not saying that proudly, I'm saying that humbly recognizing that nature's templates do work, given enough time and enough persistence, they do work.The joy of my life is to have been a participant in that healing. It's not something that you have to be a non-participatory bystander in, you can touch the earth, touch the land and watch it respond.”
Deep inside the Lysefjord, on the Norwegian southwestern coast, heavy rain is the main energy source in producing clean energy. Waterfalls cuts into the mountains. The fjord’s wide gorge has steep, partly overhanging rock walls on both sides.
In this spectacular landscape, where Viking warriors once roamed with their sleek wooden ships, an ultramodern industry has made Norway one of the main producers of the world’s most lightweight metal: aluminum.
Aluminum is often used in the production of electric cars. Also quite often, the aluminum is recycled, making the production even more energy efficient.
For over a hundred years, Norway has built industry using hydropower, which was also the beginning of the country’s modern society. Today, when reduced emissions are critical in stopping climate change, Norway has a great advantage: an entire industry powered by clean renewable hydropower.
An Aluminum Superpower
By taking advantage of its access to renewable hydropower from nature; Norway has become an aluminum superpower. According to Norsk Hydro, an aluminum producer partially owned by the Norwegian State, 40 percent of all aluminum used in Europe is produced by the company.
The company claims that aluminum is an important component in making the world greener, both because it has a low carbon footprint, and because the finished products become lighter. For an electric car, for example, this will mean increased range without increased power consumption.
“We make aluminum with only a quarter of the carbon footprint of the world average, and we can largely thank the Norwegian hydropower for that,” says Ingrid Guddal.
She is factory manager at Hydro Karmøy, which since 1990 has cut its emissions by 55 percent. Hydro REDUXA aluminum is produced here with a footprint that is a quarter of the world average. Much thanks to hydropower, including from the power station in Lysefjord.
“We are working, among other things, to mix recycled aluminum into the production of new, which further reduces the footprint. Aluminum is eternal, it loses none of its qualities no matter how many times it is recycled,” says factory manager Ingrid Guddal.
Aluminum Recycling Around the World
Alongside glass and steel, aluminum is one of the easiest to recycle materials on the planet. According to the Aluminum Association, nearly 75 percent of all aluminum that has ever been produced is still in use to this day; with the majority of aluminum cans that you purchase in a store having already been recycled many times over.
Aluminum recycling rates around the world have, for the most part, continued to improve with time. A September, 2019 report by The Aluminum Association found that the consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans recycling in the United States is 49.8 percent, whereas the industry recycling rate is 63.6 percent. Similarly, a June 2018 report by European Aluminium found that the overall aluminum can recycling rate for Europe was 76.3 percent in 2015.
Countries with the highest aluminum recycling rates include Japan, which had a 77.1 percent recycling rate in 2015 (albeit down from 90.9 percent in 2006), and Brazil, which reached an astonishing 98.4 percent aluminum can recycling rate in 2014.
If aluminum producers and users could find better ways to recycle the trash from aluminum soda cans and other throwaway products that are never recycled, then producers and consumers would be on the right track to reduce the global carbon footprint from aluminum even further. And, as in Norway, we need to produce aluminum with increased sources of renewable energy.
In our Systems Change Deep Dives video podcast series, we take a systemic look at some of the greatest social, economic and environmental challenges that we are facing as a global community and the ideas and projects that have the potential to catalyze systems change. For our first deep dive topic, Beyond Carbon Capture, we spark conversations with people leading carbon capture initiatives around the world to discuss the benefits and challenges of their work and how it fits into the wider paradigm of systemic change.
In the first episode, we spoke with Niklas Kaskeala, Chief Impact Office from Compensate, a nonprofit addressing the current voluntary carbon market from within. Niklas oversees Compensate’s sustainability approach, carbon capture portfolio, and advocacy efforts to reform the voluntary carbon market. He is also the founder of Protect our Winters Finland, the Finnish affiliate of the International Protect Our Winters movement, and has more than 15 years of experience in development, sustainability and climate change.
Keep reading for the the key points from the discussion with Niklas:
Additionality
According to Compensate’s recently published white paper, focusing on the need for reform in the voluntary carbon market, 90% of carbon capture projects certified by international standards do not pass their evaluation process. The most prominent reason for this is the lack of additionality, which is a crucial aspect of a good carbon project or a good carbon credit.
“If you don't have additionality, the buyer of the carbon credit is paying for something that would have happened in any case and so is paying for nothing basically (…). If you then use that carbon credit to offset (...) some emissions and you want to neutralize them using a non additional carbon credit, the climate impact won't be there.”
Environmental and Social Impact
Biodiversity is one of the other essential factors influencing the success of a carbon capture project within the organisation’s framework. For example, a forestry project will be rejected on the grounds of having a harmful impact on biodiversity if it is based on a plantation or uses pesticides.
Similarly, projects are assessed for social impact: “You can have negative social impacts where it is unclear how much the revenue of the sale of carbon credits flows back to local communities. You might even have forced evictions from project areas, community conflicts, all kinds of things. So, this criteria is quite holistic in that sense, it looks at different aspects.”
Reduce Emissions Before Offsetting
Despite a big part of Compensate’s work being based on carbon credits and offsetting, Niklas highlighted that the highest priority of any individual or institution in their endeavour to address the environmental impact of their activities should be to radically reduce their carbon emissions. However, as it is not possible to achieve zero emissions immediately, the carbon market exists to redress the balance.
“You should never start by thinking, how can I offset emissions? You need to radically reduce emissions. Think about how you can avoid them, how you can minimize them. And then the last option on the table is our carbon credits. And then you have me to make sure that you use good quality, transparent credits.”
Regulation and Responsibility
“We're going to need more regulation in the EU. We have a proposal from the commission to start regulating carbon removals. We need corporate responsibility standards, like the science-based targets and others who are already taking a good stance on how to make sure that we define the role offsetting has in corporate climate action so that it has the right role and that we always emphasize the importance of emission reductions.
If you're a buyer of carbon credits, read the studies and white papers that are out there and ask the right questions from the sellers of carbon credits. If they're unable to answer or you're not satisfied with the answers, then don't buy from them.”
Risks of Nature-Based Solutionsand Overcompensation
“One of the big risks with these nature-based projects is the permanence of the carbon. (...) Obviously it's impossible to fully guarantee that carbon will be stored in some kind of biomass for no more than some decades or hundreds of years at max."
Since it's impossible to have those types of assurances with nature-based offsets, Compensate advocates for overcompensation, an approach where " ...we use more carbon credits than would be technically necessary to offset a certain amount of emissions. We make sure that we do more than would be necessary to achieve a one-to-one ratio of offsetting.”
“If you reduce emissions, it's real, there are no risks. You've avoided adding CO2 into the atmosphere. But when you use carbon credits, there are always these risks involved and you need to make sure you understand them and communicate them to your stakeholders or customers or whoever so that you're not creating a false image of the climate impact.”
In spite of the risks associated with nature-based carbon sequestration solutions, Compensate has focused on them because the current technology-based solutions, such as Direct Air Capture, are not likely to be scalable in the near future. However, 20% of their offset payments support what they call Innovative Carbon Capture Solutions, such as biochar production, which is capable of storing carbon for hundreds of years and has the added benefit of improving soil quality wherever it is used.
Getting Involved
For those inspired to do more, Niklas recommends looking more deeply into the subject and reading some white papers from those analyzing the field in order to start asking the right questions and participate in initiatives for meaningful carbon market reform.
"There are a lot of initiatives right now to reform the market, and many of them are very good initiatives. (...) a lot of them have open consultations where anybody can take part and contribute with their views, so really engage yourself."
When it comes to slowing climate change, there’s one natural solution that has recently gripped the world: large-scale tree planting and reforestation.
But a new study warns that other natural climate solutions should be considered first.
By comparing different natural climate solutions against four criteria, the study proposes a hierarchy: protect ecosystems first, then improve their management, and lastly restore them.
Protecting natural ecosystems offered the greatest climate benefits, fairly quickly, at relatively low cost, while at the same time providing other benefits for people and wildlife, such as reducing the impact of extreme weather and yielding clean air and water.
When it comes to slowing climate change, there’s one natural solution that has recently gripped the world: large-scale tree planting and reforestation. But a new study warns that other natural climate solutions should be considered first.
In fact, by comparing different natural climate solutions (NCS) against four criteria, the study proposes a hierarchy: protect ecosystems first, then improve their management, and lastly restore them.
“I am really happy this paper was published,” said Forrest Fleischman, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, U.S., who was not involved in the study. “A huge amount of time, energy, and rhetoric is being put into restoration as a low-cost climate solution, whereas scientists have been saying that protecting existing ecosystems is the high-priority climate solution. It is generally much cheaper and more reliable than restoring damaged ones. What the hierarchical framework helps with is in making the cost-benefit calculation on these different investments clearer.”
The crises of climate change and nature loss are intimately linked. Scientists predict climate change will alter ecosystems, causing many species to face extinction. As ecosystems like forests, grasslands and wetlands change, they not only release carbon that they once locked in, but they commit the additional carbon they could have stored in the future to the atmosphere. This is why, in addition to reducing emissions from humankind’s burning of fossil fuels, many scientists advocate for tackling climate change and nature loss together, through what they call natural climate solutions, actions that enhance the ability of Earth’s ecosystems to store carbon.
Deforestation in Indonesia’s Riau province. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
“Very importantly, natural climate solutions are not a substitute for fossil-fuel emissions reduction. We absolutely need those,” said Susan Cook-Patton, the lead author of the new study, who works for global environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy (TNC). “That said, even if we were to sharply drop our emissions, we’re still going to need to pull additional carbon out of the atmosphere and natural climate solutions are particularly helpful in that context.”
There are more than 20 NCS, according to Cook-Patton, but for the purpose of the study, she and her colleagues from TNC and Conservation International, both headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and WWF, based in Washington, D.C., focused on three big ones: protection, improved management, and restoration of ecosystems. The scientists then compared the potential of these three solutions against four criteria that they could assess at a global level. These were the amount of climate benefit each solution offers; how quickly the climate impacts become apparent; cost-effectiveness, that is, how much climate benefit each provides per dollar invested; and co-benefits to people and nature.
The analysis showed that, on a broad scale, protection of natural ecosystems offers the greatest climate benefits, fairly quickly, at relatively low cost. Improved ecosystem management comes next, followed by restoration. Prioritizing protection of intact ecosystems also brings other benefits, the authors write. These include protecting the livelihoods and cultures of Indigenous peoples and local communities, reducing the impact of rising sea levels and extreme weather events, and providing clean air and water.
Consider the example of Canada: In a study published earlier this year, Cook-Patton and several co-authors showed that, by 2030, out of more than 20 NCS, preventing the conversion of grasslands and peatlands to other land uses like agriculture would provide the single largest climate benefit by keeping carbon stocks locked in the soil. Improved management of agricultural lands and forests would also offer big benefits.
However, the country has instead been prioritizing tree planting, Cook-Patton said. “Canada has this 2 billion tree program that is all about tree planting and restoration of tree cover. And what we found was that in 2030, there’s very little mitigation available from it.” The benefits of restoration efforts would only start appearing by 2050, the June study found, and not within the next decade, which scientists deem critical for keeping planetary warming below 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit).
“If you want large, near-term climate mitigation, you really should think about protecting those intact ecosystems, and improving the management of agricultural lands,” Cook-Patton said.
William Bond, a grasslands researcher and emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who was not involved in either study, said the new study’s hierarchical framework would be particularly useful to evaluate in developing countries, “where international funding of tree planting is a major incentive.”
“It is not a rational response to plant trees to combat climate change,” Bond said in an email. “It is an emotional concern exploited by those who benefit, for example, by delaying more rigorous [fossil-fuel] emissions control. So it is up to us, the ecological and restoration ecology communities, to inform and broaden public opinion on options for NCS. The authors used credible carbon economy data and credible economics to develop their case.”
Cook-Patton acknowledged that local contexts could change what solution people prioritize. Yet, she said the purpose of the paper was to get people working for corporations and governments to think about their options for protecting and better managing ecosystems first, before jumping onto the restoration bandwagon.
Timberlands dominate the southern Georgia, U.S., landscape. These properties of expansive pines and cypress offer ideal nesting habitat for swallowtail kites, but they are always on the chopping block for harvest. Image courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.
Bond said the paper’s protect-manage-restore message can serve another audience: people wanting to contribute to climate projects who could use more information about where their money will have the greatest effect.
“At the personal level, I am generally extremely reluctant to pay the ‘carbon tax’ when travelling. I know it is highly likely to be spent on some poorly planned reforestation project planting trees where they likely never existed in a pristine grassland,” he said. “If I knew that the carbon tax was instead going to support protection of those grasslands and managing them for greater carbon storage, I would fully endorse paying the carbon tax.”
Fleischman, while agreeing that the new paper’s findings are valuable, highlighted a concern. “What does it mean to ‘protect’?” he wrote in an email.
Indigenous people, for example, play an important role in protecting natural landscapes. But big conservation organizations, including those that employ the paper’s co-authors, have historically focused on creating strict protected areas, which have often had tremendous negative impacts on the well-being of Indigenous communities, Fleischman said.
“The paper nods briefly to this, but I think it’s really important that this paper not be read as an endorsement of fortress conservation policies which these organizations have historically pursued,” he said. “Note that I’m not at all critical of these scientists, who I believe are excellent and many of whom have played a role in highlighting Indigenous contributions to conservation in their own work, but their employers.”
Fleischman also said it’s important to be clear about why restoration is having a big moment in global discourses, while protection is not.
“Protection is often harmful to powerful interests that would like to destroy natural ecosystems to extract resources,” he said. “These interests have a big seat at the global decision-making table. Restoration often fails but it makes a nice slogan, and organizations that are harming the earth can commit to long-term restoration as a way to greenwash their work. Since restoration takes decades, it will be decades before we can hold them accountable for the likely failures and shortcomings. Hopefully, this paper will make it harder for these organizations, but we’ll have to see.”
That is Cook-Patton’s hope too. “My title is senior forest restoration scientist, and I love tree planting, I love restoring forests; my science is targeted around quantifying accurately, the mitigation potential of that,” she said. “But even I want to make sure that people don’t forget there are these other powerful ways in which we can use nature to help tackle climate change.”
Cook-Patton, S. C., Drever, C. R., Griscom, B. W., Hamrick, K., Hardman, H., Kroeger, T., … Ellis, P. W. (2021). Protect, manage and then restore lands for climate mitigation. Nature Climate Change, 11(12), 1027-1034. doi:10.1038/s41558-021-01198-0
Drever, C. R., Cook-Patton, S. C., Akhter, F., Badiou, P. H., Chmura, G. L., Davidson, S. J., … Kurz, W. A. (2021). Natural climate solutions for Canada. Science Advances, 7(23), eabd6034. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd6034
In British Columbia, there’s a little valley where the Squamish River snakes down past the cliffs of the Malamute, a popular hiking spot. The hills in all directions are, like much of BC, thickly forested with firs. And nestled in that valley is a newfangled industrial plant that aims to replicate what those millions of trees do: suck carbon dioxide out of the air.
The plant was built by Carbon Engineering, a pioneer in the technology known as direct air capture (DAC). In a long, squat building, a huge ceiling fan draws air inside, where it reacts with a liquid chemical that grabs hold of CO2 molecules. This “sorbent” flows into a nearby machine that transforms the gas, which is then stored in pressurized tanks. The goal is to help rid the atmosphere of its most ubiquitous climate change culprit. The Squamish plant will process up to 1,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. That’s a minuscule drop in the bucket of the planet’s annual emissions, an estimated 33 billion metric tons last year, but this plant is only a pilot facility.
If the process can be scaled up massively, what might happen to all the captured CO2? There are several possibilities, CEO Steve Oldham explains. You could, for example, sell some of it to companies like soda makers or concrete manufacturers. You could also convert it into liquid fuel to burn in cars, trucks, planes, and power plants. That would release still more CO2, but in Oldham’s vision, which involves a vast network of his company’s machines, you would simply run that pollution right back through the process. You could do it over and over, he says, allowing a society to burn fossil fuels in perpetuity without adding to global warming. Call it catch-and-release. Oldham thinks we should all hop on board with this mode of carbon recycling: “We can’t wait. We have to get on with decarbonizing now.”
Given our plodding embrace of renewables, the IPCC figured we’d have to start pulling carbon directly out of the atmosphere by 2100. Alotof carbon. Ten billion metric tons per year.
Of course, governments around the world could go much further than catch-and-release. They could flat-out try to reverse climate change by using direct air capture to grab surplus atmospheric carbon and bury it deep in the Earth—rewinding the Industrial Revolution. Ridding the atmosphere of the billions of tons of so-called legacy carbon we’ve emitted over the past 150 years wouldn’t come cheap. At current prices, nations would have to shell out, collectively, about $5 trillion a year for the rest of the century. But a dire report in August from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that our climate situation could decline so rapidly that we are left with little choice. Policymakers may well decide that removing all that legacy carbon is worth the cost, Oldham argues. “I personally like the analogy of water treatment,” he says. “When water was a problem with cholera and typhoid, governments worldwide built a water treatment infrastructure. It’s part of what they provide to their citizens. Today we have an air problem, so we need an air-treatment infrastructure.”
Solving climate change with CO2-sucking machines? It sounds, at first, like something from a Neal Stephenson sci-fi novel—or a particularly delirious Silicon Valley TED Talk. And for years, indeed, DAC resided in mad-scientist territory. Only a handful of startups worldwide were fiddling with prototypes, and few serious investors were paying attention.
That all changed in 2018, with the release of an earlier IPCC report. The panel warned that if we wanted to keep the planet from warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius—the goal of the Paris agreement on mitigating climate change—we’d need to slash atmospheric CO2 dramatically. Planting forests would help. Shifting to renewables would be crucial, too. But given humanity’s plodding embrace of wind and solar, the IPCC figured we’d have to start pulling carbon directly out of the atmosphere by 2100. Alotof carbon. Ten billion metric tons per year, equal to nearly a third of our current CO2 output.
Direct air capture, along with other capture and sequestration schemes—from planting trees to figuring out how to make marine organisms lock up surplus carbon—was suddenly hot, perhaps even crucial to our long-term survival. Policymakers and corporations, and even some environmentalists, snapped to attention. By spring 2021, more than 100 of the world’s largest companies—including PepsiCo, Alaska Airlines, Colgate-Palmolive, and Wall Street giants like Morgan Stanley—had pledged to get to “net zero” emissions by 2040, and Elon Musk’s foundation put up $100 million for the XPrize, a four-year competition to spur development of any tech, including DAC, that results in “negative emissions.”
Public money has begun flowing in, too. The federal government and a couple of states have passed tax credits for firms that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The infrastructure bill the Senate green-lighted in August contains $11.5 billion for various carbon-capture efforts, including $3.5 billion to build four “regional direct air capture hubs” that the feds hope will create big networks of clean-energy jobs. The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget blueprint included $150 billion to compensate energy producers that switch to lower-emissions processes—a move favored by the swing vote of Joe Manchin—that could include direct air capture. And some Democrats are pushing higher tax credits for DAC in particular. In June, the Department of Energy announced a modest $12 million grant to support, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm put it, the “brilliant innovators” developing DAC technologies that can “help us avoid the worst effects of climate change.” Even a few tech firms, like Stripe and Shopify, have budgeted millions to buy up CO2 sequestered by any reasonable means. “You’ve got this enormous momentum,” says Erin Burns, executive director of the think tank Carbon180.
In response, the DAC pioneers are gleefully rushing out new plants. Climeworks, based in Switzerland, is contemplating a facility in the Middle East. New York’s Global Thermostat is gearing up to create its first large-scale installation next year in Chile. Oxy Low Carbon Ventures (a division of the oil giant Occidental) will use Carbon Engineering’s technology to build a Texas plant eventually capable of removing up to 1 million metric tons of atmospheric CO2 per year, 1,000 times the rate of the Squamish facility.
This may all sound like a smart idea, but it grows more complex as you look closely at the world these companies envision. The only viable path to saving the planet, according to the entrepreneurs, is to get fossil fuel companies on board. That’s partly because Big Oil has the infrastructure and know-how to build these kinds of facilities at scale and to pipe captured CO2 to locations where it can be permanently sequestered. But it’s also because, in the eyes of the DAC inventors, internal combustion will be with us for a while yet. They envision using DAC mostly for catch-and-release over the next few decades: Harvest CO2 from the air, convert it into synthetic fuels, burn those fuels, and recapture the CO2. We wouldn’t start removing legacy carbon until 2060 or 2070 because only then will DAC, by small improvements, become cheap enough that companies and nations (at today’s tax rates, anyway) will be open to paying for it.
Their tech can save us in the long run, the inventors insist. In the meantime, they’re looking for help from the government—and from their partners at companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Occidental Petroleum.
Burial
CO2 is transported to locations whose underground geology enables permanent sequestration.
Downside
Requires 65,000-plus miles of risky pipelines.
Synfuels
CO2 is converted into liquid hydrocarbons to be burned in existing engines and power plants.
Downside
Extends fossil fuel era and creates additional pollution.
Enhanced oil recovery
CO2 is pumped deep into gas and oil wells to boost production output.
Downside
Extends fossil fuel era and requires pipeline expansion.
Manufacturing
CO2 is diverted to produce beverages, dry ice, cement, carbon-fiber materials, and more.
Downside
Existing markets are minuscule.
The Danger of Business as Usual
Many environmentalists view the game plan of the DAC visionaries as preposterous, a complex bank shot that can’t possibly work. The sheer scale of the endeavor “would make dealing with coronavirus look like playtime,” says June Sekera, a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, who analyzed 200 academic papers on DAC to identify its risks. Sekera came away from her analysis convinced that extracting, shipping, and burying so much captured CO2 would invite disaster.
Sure, one could co-locate DAC plants alongside synfuel plants, but to bury billions of tons of excess carbon permanently would be, Sekera says, a logistical nightmare. First you’d need to transport the CO2 from your DAC installations to locations with the type of subterranean rock needed to sequester the gas. This would require a web of specialized high-pressure pipelines crisscrossing the country. (Existing oil and gas pipelines won’t cut it.) We would need, by one estimate, at least 65,000 miles of them by 2050—12 times more than we have today. This and other considerations led the authors of a 2020 study in the journal Nature Communications to declare DAC an “energetically and financially costly distraction.”
CO2 pipeline leaks could be lethal. Heavier than air, the gas hovers near the ground, where it can sicken and asphyxiate pets, livestock, and people.
What’s more, CO2 pipeline leaks could be lethal. Carbon dioxide is heavier than the nitrogen and oxygen that dominate the air we breathe. If a pipeline breaks, concentrated CO2 initially hovers near the ground, where it can sicken and asphyxiate pets, livestock, and people. (Recent pipeline ruptures in Louisiana and Mississippi, where CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery, sent dozens to the hospital.) And if history is any guide, the new pipelines would be routed through some of America’s poorest areas, says Carroll Muffett, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, who opposes DAC. “When you’re adding carbon capture or direct air capture at—or around—industrial facilities, those facilities are overwhelmingly concentrated in communities of color,” he adds. “That’s true not only in the US, but around the world.”
And finally, we have the energy paradox. The machines needed to suck up 10 billion tons of CO2 each year would consume more than half the world’s current energy supply, according to a 2019 study in Nature. Using DAC to build a closed-loop cycle with synthetic fuels would require even more energy, and a huge expansion of solar and wind capacity.
So why, environmentalists often wonder, would we bother to expend all of that clean energy on DAC? Instead, why not just push hard to electrify our economies and get rid of as many oil-burning engines as we can, as fast as we can? The sooner we do so, the less DAC we’ll need in the long run, says Lindsay Meiman, a communications specialist with the environmental group 350.org. “We have those solutions—we have them,” she says. “It’s about the political will and investment and the priority.” The government should prioritize investments in “free public transit to create millions of jobs that will dismantle these current fossil fuel projects.”
“Once you start doing the numbers, you realize that it makes much more sense to just eliminate most of your emissions,” says David Morrow, research director at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the way DAC is now being rolled out and subsidized, critics say, is that it lets fossil fuel interests go on with business as usual. As Muffett sees it, the petroleum giants regard partnerships with companies like Global Thermostat and Carbon Engineering as a survival ploy. Polluters spent the past few decades claiming they could capture CO2 from smokestacks to make coal- and gas-powered electricity emission-free, but they never did. Now they’re claiming we can extract carbon from the sky. For fossil fuel firms, “any technology that says, ‘Hey, we don’t have to stop emitting this stuff—we can just find a way to make it disappear,’ is highly desirable,” Muffett says.
A Progressive Case for Carbon-Sucking
Despite their deep skepticism, even many environmentalists repulsed by the fossil fuel industry have a nagging question in the back of their heads: What if carbon sequestration is necessary? What if humankind can’t—or won’t—move fast enough on renewables, and discovers later this century that the IPCC was right: We simply have to get rid of that excess carbon? Greenpeace’s Noël is hotly opposed to Big Oil and Gas. “We need to have a political, financial, and cultural full-court press to isolate the fossil fuel industry in all corners of life,” he practically shouted at me over the phone. “In policy circles they should not be allowed at the table. They should not be allowed to advertise. They shouldn’t be invited to any serious meeting.” He thinks they’re using DAC as a ruse: “The technology has been captured, manipulated, utilized, thrown into a PR machine.”
Yet still—still—Noël admits it’s probably a good idea for governments to fund scientists and engineers to work on DAC technologies. He’d like us to have the option in pocket, in case it’s ever needed. “I have a 9-month-old daughter and we’re at 415 parts per million” of CO2, he says. Given the serious effects we’re already seeing from climate change, Noël is deeply worried about what it’ll look like decades from now if we fail to hit the brakes on emissions. He’s fine with someone doing the work as long as it’s “fully decoupled from the fossil fuel industry.” Other environmentalists offered the same cautious approval. Morrow told me carbon-sucking should be our last resort, to be used sparingly only after we’ve shifted as much of the economy as possible toward renewables: “The role that DAC can play is an important but limited one, where we’re cleaning up stuff that we don’t have a good way to clean up otherwise, or drawing down legacy carbon.”
One can even make an explicitly progressive case for DAC. That’s the view of Holly Jean Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo, and author of the book Ending Fossil Fuels. Buck points out that America is not only wealthy—in part because we enjoyed cheap energy for decades while emitting CO2 freely—but we also have lots of land that’s geologically suited for sequestration; more than most countries. As a matter of environmental justice, the United States could pursue DAC at home to help counter the emissions of a developing global south: “We put away some carbon and other countries can continue to have more time to figure out what their transition pathway looks like.”
It’s also possible that, managed correctly, DAC could become a good source of union-scale jobs in the United States. Erin Burns, the head of Carbon180, points out that the solar industry has suffered politically here, in part because we ceded most of our panel-making to China, so solar has not yet produced many manufacturing jobs. (Installation jobs are booming, however.) We could do better this time around by developing policies that compel domestic DAC firms to use locally produced steel, pay union wages, and seek meaningful input from affected communities. Burns hails from southern West Virginia, where coal-mining communities haven’t reaped many good jobs from renewables: “We want to learn from that experience and say, ‘Okay, what does it look like to scale up direct air capture in a way that’s just and equitable?’”
Skeptics say direct air capture should be wrested away from the oil and gas industry. Yet no one has envisioned a clear path to making DAC a reality without it.
DAC skeptics all insist that control of the development and rollout be wrested away from the big polluters. Yet no one really has set out a clear path to make DAC viable without the fossil fuel sector. The government can fund researchers to figure out sequestration science and build prototypes, but it doesn’t possess the human or industrial resources to design and mass-produce DAC machines. Most large-scale things the government procures now are built by contractors anyway, so at best it would be outsourcing construction of government-owned CO2 pipelines and DAC machines to major industries, including oil and gas.
Even so, the public may have a surprisingly robust voice even in how the private sector tackles this problem. Because no free market yet exists for captured CO2, anyone pursuing DAC technology will require generous subsidies. This means, as Buck points out, that input and lobbying from environmental and public interest groups can shape the trajectory. For example, every skeptic I interviewed wants Congress to amend the 45Q credit so fossil fuel firms can’t collect when they use captured CO2 for oil recovery. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has proposed legislation—the Clean Energy for America Act—that would do precisely that. (Going out on a limb, Buck posits that the feds could even nationalize oil and gas companies and force them to roll out DAC. Those industrial giants helped create a socialized crisis, after all, she says, so maybe the public should take ownership of them, just as the feds took on massive—if temporary—stakes in several automakers after the 2008 bailouts.)
Lastly, the progressive argument insists that DAC isn’t our first tool of choice. Before devoting major public funds to incentivize it, we should first throw our subsidies at renewables. As for sucking up carbon, we’d want to pursue as many low-tech, nature-based techniques as possible. Just how far can we push reforestation? Ocean sequestration—such as treating beaches with chemicals that compel sand to suck up CO2 or growing plankton that metabolizes it—could be explored more aggressively. And though BECCS might be a boondoggle, farms do produce a lot of biowaste—about 104 million tons a year—that can be used for sequestration.
But we still might need those DAC machines. When I first spoke with Lackner, he argued that humanity had already blown far past the ideal time to step away from oil and gas. “In 1980, we could have said, ‘Let’s stop!’ And instead we procrastinated,” he told me. We’ll be lucky if his technology works as well as he hopes. When I visited his lab in the summer, it had the atmosphere of all the tech startups I’ve ever visited: a lot of excitement, but no guarantees. DAC is the classic industrial Wild West tale—nobody has any idea who’ll win or whether winning is even possible.
Yet Lackner is hopeful, in his dry and chill fashion. He took me outside to a gravelly construction area where, later this year, his team will install the first prototype of his next-generation carbon-sucking tree. A cherry picker stood in the middle of the ground. Lackner’s latest tree consists of a 30-foot stack of sorbent disks. It may not look like much, he said, but neither did windmills in the ’80s and ’90s and look how powerful they are today. “If we can pull wind energy out of the air,” he said, “we can pull CO2 out.”
Imagine a group of campers carelessly polluting the forest, leaving beer cans, plastic wrappers, and propane tanks strewn about the understory. An ecologist comes upon their campsite and explains how they are harming the forest ecosystem. The campers decide to stop polluting, but never clean up the mess. This is analogous to a climate strategy without carbon removal.
At its root, the climate crisis is a chemical imbalance. Global heating is just one of its side effects. To restore the ecological conditions in which we evolved, we must restore the balance of carbon flows between our atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. This means not only halting carbon emissions, but returning carbon to where it came from.
Where to Put All This Carbon
Since 1750, an estimated 26 to 46 percent of cumulative historical emissions have been released from the biosphere through deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction. Fortunately, ecosystems have myriad ways to reverse this process. Even on the mouth of a smokestack, the most advanced technology scrubbing the densest coal plume pales in comparison to a tropical forest, which itself pales in comparison to a mangrove. It’s true that nothing sequesters carbon more quickly than nature.
But the world’s ecosystems have a carbon ceiling, or carrying capacity. Even if we somehow returned all converted land to its preindustrial state, models estimate we could only sequester around 41 percent of cumulative historical emissions — in other words, roughly as much carbon as the biosphere originally contained.
This is because at least half of the carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere has come from the lithosphere, through burning fossil fuel from the Earth’s crust. There is no natural process to reverse this at the necessary scale and speed.
Despite this reality, many leading climate advocates argue that carbon capture is unnecessary. They point out — correctly — that if we rapidly decarbonize, the planet could make it halfway back to preindustrial carbon dioxide levels by the end of the century.
But again, the changing climate is only one consequence of the global chemistry experiment we’ve been running. If we leave all this carbon in the atmosphere, levels will eventually decrease once we stop emitting. That’s because most of it will dissolve into the ocean, triggering a chain reaction with carbonic compounds that acidifies seawater. Removing carbon from the atmosphere reverses this process. Even if we should reach preindustrial temperatures in the 2100s by emissions cuts alone, we will have done nothing to address ocean acidification. Is it a victory to achieve a planet where there are vast areas of ocean with no oysters to filter water, no corals to shelter fish, no pteropods to support food webs?
Worse yet, without burying carbon, the effects of temperature change will be catastrophic on both sea and land. We will almost certainly cross the two degree threshold, virtually dooming corals to extinction, liquidating the Arctic sea ice, sinking hundreds of cities from Bangkok to Miami, and killing millions of people in heatwaves. To survive, we must stabilize our climate — and quickly.
Ungreenwashing Carbon Capture
While leadingbiogeochemists have long made the case for carbon capture technology, its most visible proponent is the fossil fuel industry. Its lobbyists use it to sell carbon credits to big polluters and empty promises to world leaders. Its interest in the technology isn’t motivated by an obligation to humanity or the planet, but rather a strategy to silence critics and stay in business — whether that means emitting less or more. Today, most of the small amount of carbon the industry captures isn’t stored, but rather used in enhanced oil recovery to lubricate geological fissures and accelerate carbon extraction. Needless to say, this exacerbates the problem.
There are only a few forms of carbon capture technology that yield net-negative emissions. First, some catalyze natural processes, such as enhanced rock weathering and ocean iron fertilization. However, the sequestration potential of these approaches is generally thought to be modest — and with a high risk of negative ecological side effects.
Then there’s bioenergy carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. BECCS augments the theoretically net-neutral process of growing and burning biofuel with capturing carbon at the smokestack, storing it underground to push emissions into the red. This method could potentially sequester a lot of carbon, but at a high cost in land. While we wouldn’t have to expand cropland if we drastically reduced agricultural land use by farming fewer animals, using land to grow biofuels would sacrifice its higher potential for carbon sequestration through rewilding.
This leaves direct air capture (DAC), perhaps the most technologically challenging of all. DAC generally involves a system of enormous fans sucking air through a chemical sponge that filters roughly a thousand air molecules for every four of carbon dioxide. These are then liquefied in solvents and pumped back underground.
The drawbacks associated with direct air capture are low compared to other forms of geoengineering and related to the risks we already take during fossil fuel extraction, including seismic destabilization and injection well leaks. However, DAC is water-intensive, and although we might develop passive systems that use wind, absorbent solvents, or electrodialysis, today’s direct air capture technology demands high quantities of energy and is only emissions-negative if powered by renewables.
Therein lies the most significant caveat: carbon capture is no excuse for aggressively cutting emissions. It will only help if we also rapidly phase out the fossil fuel industry.
Unfortunately, that’s who’s getting all the funding. Fossil fuel corporations are raking in public investments and tax exemptions to research and develop carbon capture, yet posting pathetic results. Despite decades of R&D, billions in carbon capture subsidies, and proposals for $100 billion more, ExxonMobil reported capturing less than 1 percent of its emissions in 2019.
The charitable interpretation is that carbon capture engineering is uniquely challenging. A less credulous explanation is that fossil fuel corporations simply have no incentive to develop carbon capture technology. Funding isn’t contingent on progress, and scaling isn’t worth the capital of thousands of engineers and millions of construction workers. Either way, the research and development of carbon capture technology can only be successful if we decouple it from the fossil fuel industry and build it within the public sector, far from the tyranny of the profit margin.
Despite such misinvestment, net-negative carbon capture technology does exist. In August 2021, a prototype called Orca went online, making it the biggest direct air capture facility in the world. While its developer, Climeworks, is at best a net-neutral corporation — it sells carbon offsets to make a profit — Orca is net-negative, running on geothermal and drawing down a relatively impressive four thousand tons of CO2 per year. At that rate, we’d need more than eight million of them running for fifty years to capture all the fossil carbon we’ve burned (and it would take longer for the atmosphere to level out).
The good news is that the facilities are not that big — about the size of a shipping container, of which we have around 43 million — and like solar and wind, we can expect this technology to gain efficiency over time. Plus, if considering where to install them, we do already have millions of drill pads complete with tubes connected to oil deposits or porous shale strata. Lastly, it’s not all or nothing. Every atom counts.
The Real Net Zero
Carbon capture is not the easy road to net zero that oil lobbyists want to sell us. The real net zero is somewhere around 280ppm CO2. We should think of carbon capture more like putting an imperceptibly diffuse toothpaste back into countless millions of leaky tubes — essentially reverse-engineering fossil fuel, our most disastrous geoengineering experiment ever. It’s a moonshot, yet it’s not rocket science. And while there is a complex engineering case for carbon capture, the ecological case is simple: we need to rebury carbon to reverse ocean acidification.
Carbon capture is a challenge we cannot afford to turn away from, regardless of the venal purposes for which the technology has so far been developed. Today, it is used as a justification for prolonging our dependence on fossil fuel and enriching those who have profited from its extraction. Tomorrow, it may be the only way to remedy the crime against nature that precedes and precipitates climate change — the distortion of planetary chemistry.
The story of how we got to climate change is familiar to most of us: our extractive human habits, free market economies, and short-sighted use of new inventions gave us coal-fired power plants, industrial farming, and gas guzzling automobiles. These inventions released increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. And here we are today, inheritors of an imbalanced civilization on an overheated, imperiled planet.
The window of opportunity for change is small. Some scientists even think it is already too late to reverse the trend. One thing is clear: more short-term solutions and market economic fixes will not help us. This time, we need to understand the systemic causes and solutions to global warming.We need to go beyond technological and short-sighted market economic solutions and instead look for more integrated solutions.
Increased CO2 is a symptom of deeper systemic issues—fossil fuels for energy and transport, unrestrained material growth and consumption, animal food production, agricultural and industrial pollution, deforestation, and more. Our profit-driven economic system and the reductionist worldview our sciences are built upon, are increasingly seen as the main, underlying causes of ecological destruction and climate change.
The time for scientific and economic bandaids is over, the time for groundbreaking changes has come. Thankfully, a growing movement of scientists, economists, environmental and indigenous activists are favoring a more integrated worldview, more interdisciplinary sciences, and a more circular economy. In short, there is a growing movement of people in favor of a society that is not at odds with the natural world.
It is from the emerging worldview of these new cultural patterns, and from these new models of regenerative and decentralized economics that we must envision the urgent task of reducing our carbon footprint. Nothing less can help mend our fractured planet.
Currently, there are three main ways to capture excess CO2, the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and the cause of global warming: carbon capture at source of production; removal from the air by capturing carbon with technology, or in the soil, the oceans, and in plants; carbon capture by engaging in environmentally regenerative activities and producing products with no or low carbon footprints. From a planetary systems-view perspective, global warming, in the form of increasing temperatures, wildfires, droughts and storms, is caused by a broader set of issues that need to be treated systemically, from the inside out.
We need to go beyond the labs of science to understand the numerous systemic causes underlying climate change. We need to go beyond the science of carbon capture and reduce the production of carbon in the first place.
The causes of too much carbon are many, and they are interlinked: they are political, economic, cultural, agricultural, as well as the faulty use of technology. These causes are expressed in the way we consume, drive, build, fly, grow, eat, drink, heat, cool, package, and store. In other words, carbon capture is a complex concept and to accomplish the task of saving our planet from ecological implosion, we need to—as with all systems change issues—connect all the dots. Below are some of the systemic dots that need to be connected and integrated.
Technological, Agricultural, and Natural Methods of Carbon Capture
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a method of capturing CO2 from large point sources, such as a coal fired power plant, before it enters the atmosphere and then transporting it and storing it in an underground geological formation. There are considerable costs involved in this process, safety risks and environmental concerns have been voiced, such as in Norway, which is also an oil producer, that carbon capture has allowed Norway to legitimize its continued fossil fuel production from its North Sea oil fields. Currently, large amounts of government funding are being directed to the development of these solutions, but so far projects have mostly failed to meet targets and produce promising results. [1,2]
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) includes afforestation, agricultural practices that sequester carbon, bio-refinery, carbon mineralization, direct air capture when combined with use, among other methods.
Afforestation, reforestation, and forestry management
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, "Halting the loss and degradation of natural systems and promoting their restoration have the potential to contribute over one-third of the total climate change mitigation scientists say is required by 2030.” In order to accomplish that, monumental economic and agricultural policy changes are needed.
Trees and plants, especially moss, convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds through photosynthesis. Since these plants remove and store carbon from the air, they are important for regulating CO2 levels in the air.
Monumental economic policy changes are needed to halt the clearcutting of rainforests, for example, and to set aside biodiverse natural preserves for future generations. Biodiverse old growth forests are especially effective at carbon capture and thus a global ban on the cutting of old growth needs to take effect immediately. In urban areas, more trees need to be planted and buildings can be covered in plants and mosses, vegetable gardens can flourish on roofs and in abandoned lots.
Despite the outstanding benefits that planting and restoring forests has aside from carbon capture and storage, some scientists are skeptical that we could plant enough forests to solve the problem. Even if we covered all available land with trees, at current emission levels, we’d only capture enough carbon to offset about ten years of emissions at current rates. [3]
Agricultural practices
Government and other incentives for increased “carbon farming” are urgently needed. The aim of carbon farming is to increase the sequestering of carbon in the soil by, for example, no tilling practices with the goal of creating a self-regulating, agricultural system.
Other methods include increasing the soil’s organic matter content, which can aid plant growth, increase total carbon content, improve soil water retention capacity and reduce fertilizer use. Carbon farming must be locally adapted, and the challenge is to create soils that can be both agriculturally productive and climate friendly. [4]
Another promising strategy is integrating animals in grazing rotation systems, which can contribute to soil restoration whilst also locking up carbon in healthy pastures All this, while maintaining a sustainable and localized financial model. [5]
Restoring wetlands is a vitally important practice as so-called blue carbon sequestration in the world’s oceanic, river, and coastal ecosystems is highly effective through mangroves, algae, seagrasses, salt marshes and other coastal ecosystems.
The plants in these ecosystems store carbon in their biomass, and also in the sediments around them, and can store up to 10 times more carbon than forests. [6] Unfortunately, wetlands are being destroyed at a fast rate, and releasing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the process. Restoring these and other important ecosystems would be ideal, but even halting their destruction and protecting them as permanent stores of carbon would already go a long way.
Biochar
Biochar can be obtained via the thermal decomposition of organic material (biomass such as wood, manure or leaves) under limited supply of oxygen (O2), and at relatively low temperatures (<700°C). This process mirrors the production of charcoal but can be distinguished from it in that a primary application is the use as a soil amendment. [7] This allows for the improvement of soil function and the reduction of emissions from biomass that would otherwise naturally degrade to greenhouse gasses. This method is commonly applied together with other carbon farming methods mentioned above.
Naturally occurring minerals are some of our best carbon sinks, as carbon dioxide in the air and water chemically bind to them and permanently turn to stone. Carbon mineralization accelerates these processes, helping minerals absorb CO2 from the ambient air at rates much faster than those occurring in nature. This can be done, for example, through artificial rock crushing and exposure to CO2 in reaction chambers or spreading them over large areas of land or ocean, increasing the surface area over which the reactions can occur.
The main challenge with this process is that it can be expensive and energy-intensive, due to the need to transport and process large quantities of heavy materials. [10]
Direct air capture and use
Direct air capture is achieved by trees, plants and other photosynthetic organisms, but it can also be achieved through man-made technologies, in which case the byproduct (normally a concentrated form of CO2) can be either stored or used to produce other products, such as fuels (which seems to slightly defeat the purpose), carbon nanotubes, fibers, fertilizers and even some food products [8].
Direct air capture solutions could in theory be scaled up very quickly, which is a plus given the urgency of the situation, but the high energy costs involved also need to be taken into account when considering these technologies [9].
The photosynthetic power of trees is well known, but what is not so often discussed is the even larger photosynthetic ability of phytoplankton (aquatic photosynthetic microorganisms) and some types of macroalgae.
In some places, enhanced growth of these organisms is being achieved through artificial upwelling (nutrient-rich currents originating from the bottom of the oceans) powered by sea waves. Marine permaculture farms promoting the growth of kelp regenerate the local biodiversity and help replenish fish stocks, while processed microalgae can be turned into other products of commercial value. [11]
Beyond Carbon Capture: A Systems View
The conclusion we have drawn from our preliminary study of carbon capture is that there are no simple solutions to this problem. There are no quick fix technological or economic solutions. We therefore need to look for more systemic solutions, and here we are presenting some possible solutions that can be part of a more comprehensive package of policy changes.
A peer reviewed study commissioned by Global Witness and Friends of the Earth Scotland found that carbon capture and storage technologies still face numerous barriers to short-term deployment and, even if these could be overcome, the technology “would only start to deliver too late.” Researchers also found that it was incapable of operating with zero emissions, constituted a distraction from the rapid growth of renewable energy “and has a history of over-promising and under-delivering.” [12]
Hence, the methods we have focused on above through agriculture, wetland restoration, biochar use, mineralization and bio-refineries have a much higher rate of success as they mainly use nature’s own cycles of capture. These methods, if practiced well, will help us to live within global natural boundaries, and also within the ecological boundaries set forth in new, circular economic thinking, such as in Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics. [13]
From a systems change point of view, these are the directions we need to move when searching for solutions to reducing our carbon footprint. However, the title of this essay is Carbon Capture and Beyond. The word Beyond urges us to look at the underlying causes of carbon pollution. We need to ask: why do we produce too much carbon in the first place?
The simple answer to that question is that we live on a planet that produces too much carbon dioxide emissions. More importantly, the most industrialized countries of the planet, the 38 member countries in the OECD, while representing only one-sixth of the world’s population produce two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions. The same countries consume one-third of the world’s meat and one-third of the world’s sugar.
But what is the link to carbon emissions and capture? Meat production is one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gasses in agriculture and much of the world’s sugar is produced on clearcut rainforest land, which captures large portions of carbon. In other words, what is consumed in these countries is directly linked to the high global carbon footprint. So, unless we find systemic solutions to reduce consumption, we will not be able to get to net zero by 2050. [14]
If we look at the global economic sectors and carbon emissions, we find that agriculture and forestry represent 24 percent of emissions, energy use for electricity and heating another 25 percent, industry 21 percent, transportation 14 percent, other energy 10 percent and housing six percent. [15]
A systemic analysis of each sector would come up with systemic solutions, not just quick technological fixes. We would learn that localized agriculture, for example, would dramatically reduce the use of energy in transport; that meat and milk produced by grass fed rather than grain fed cows produces less carbon emissions; and that a primarily plant-based diet would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint as well.
In order to implement such needed changes, we would need new government policies favoring local economies over corporate monopoly economies. We would need new economic restructuring favoring family run farms over corporate farms. We would need a new culinary culture favoring slow, local food over exotic foods from far away, and local meats over beef and eggs from industrial farms in other countries.
In the energy sector, we would need new government policies favoring solar panels on every home, electric vehicles powered by renewable energy, increased public transportation and bike paths, walkable cities, and super-insulated houses built by local materials.
The call for systems change is urgent. That means policy changes based on an ecological and integrated worldview to inform our policies. As Jeremey Lent writes in his book The Web of Meaning, "When scientists, for example, study climate breakdown, a reductionist approach may view the greenhouse effect as a technical problem to be solved through geoengineering, whereas a systems approach recognizes the feedback loops between politics, economics, cultural values and emissions as a nonlinear meshwork of interactions." [16]
To go Beyond Carbon Capture and to change the destructive trajectory we are on, we need to connect the ecological, economic, political, cultural, and scientific dots. As a global community, we have just started to come up with solutions for that challenging task. We are therefore inviting the political, scientific, economic, and environmental communities to work together to come up with more integrated solutions.
We need to look at the meshwork of interactions between these natural and human-made systems in order to effect true systems change. We need to ask more fundamental and integrated questions, so that together we can capture something perhaps not yet entirely imagined: a new integration of values, a new set of economic and political policies aligned with deep ecological sensibilities.
In many places, Indigenous communities are working to restore seaweed species that have been traditional food sources or supported traditional diets.
From kelp farms in Alaska to seaweed-focused community education in Hawai‘i, the projects take many forms.
These Indigenous groups are reemphasizing the ability of marine algae and plants to support food sovereignty, climate resilience, and connections to tradition.
For the uninitiated, the first mouthful of the Hawaiian red algae known as limu kohu (Asparagopsis taxiformis) may be an unpleasant one: intensely iodine-rich and bitter, with all the marine intensity of an oyster but none of its sweetness. O‘ahu resident Malia Heimuli doesn’t have the ‘ono for it, the Hawaiian word for when something tastes good. But she says the older people in her life can’t get enough.
“I’m not used to the taste, but my grandma and mom are like, ‘gimme that any day,’” Heimuli says with a laugh.
There’s a reason for that generational divide, and it’s one that Heimuli knows well. Over the last 50 years, limu kohu, along with many of the 60-plus species of seaweed grouped together in Hawai‘i as limu, became less common on the islands’ shores, the result of changing environmental factors. With less limu available, many among the most recent generation of Native Hawaiians grew up without learning the culinary, medical and spiritual uses of these algae.
But that’s changing, in Hawai‘i and around the world. Heimuli is the coordinator of a community group called Limu Hui — a partnership, or gathering, around limu. Based out of the community environmental nonprofit Kuaʻāina Ulu ‘Auamo (KUA), Limu Hui seeks to both restore the health of Hawai‘i’s limu species, and pass on the ancestral knowledge of limu held by elders to the next generation.
Clusters of pale red limu kohu grow amongst green algae in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument nortwest of Hawai’i. Image by Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).In Hawaii, limu species also have significance outside of serving as food. This lei, from the Bishop Museum in Oahu, was made of limu kala and used in forgiveness ceremonies to resolve family disputes. Image by Wally Gobetz via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Limu Hui’s work reflects a much broader trend: many Indigenous communities are working to restore degraded seaweed species that support traditional diets. (Many of these projects work with algae, including limu and kelp, though some touch on seagrasses, a marine plant.) In doing so, these communities are restoring both ecosystems and these species’ traditional cultural functions, a practice known as biocultural restoration.
“If I were to list goals that various community members have expressed, healing from the harms of colonization is one goal, along with food sovereignty and security,” says Melissa Poe, a social scientist at Washington Sea Grant in Seattle and the coordinator of the Indigenous Aquaculture Collaborative Network. The network helps groups in the Pacific region share information and develop community. It currently includes at least a dozen groups working on some form of seaweed restoration, and Poe says interest is growing among other network members.
Poe says such work not only enables self-determination, but also the “awakening of knowledge” around resource management from an Indigenous framework: one that recognizes “the kinds of inherent responsibilities and kinship that Indigenous, place-based peoples have with their environments.”
These projects take many forms, including education, ecosystem restoration, commercial farming, research, or a combination thereof.
In Haida Gwaii, a chain of lush islands in British Columbia, Canada, it’s education and restoration. Each spring, scuba divers swim along coasts once covered in kelp forests with hammers in hand, out to smash sea urchins.
Two centuries without sea otters, hunted for the fur trade, have left these coasts overrun with the urchins, an otter’s meal of choice. Sea urchins fed voraciously on the holdfasts that keep kelp fixed to the seafloor, decimating Haida Gwaii’s kelp forests. With the kelp’s decline, the Haida people also face the disappearance of many traditional foods, including abalone — which also graze on kelp — and herring spawn on kelp. Herring instinctively lay their eggs on the broad leaves of kelp forests, producing a creamy, crunchy delicacy eaten both raw and cooked.
“The work we’re doing directly relates to food security, food sovereignty, and climate resilience, because kelp forests are essentially all of those things combined,” says Jaasaljuus Yakgujanaas, a shellfish biologist at the Council of the Haida Nation who has been a part of the kelp recovery program since 2018.
Grafton Schikora harvests sugar kelp grown by the Native Conservancy in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Image by Tesia Bobrycki/Native Conservancy.
Beginning in 2017, the Haida Nation teamed up with Parks Canada to conduct a combination of restoration and research over their 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) study site. Project divers remove more than 75% of urchins at a depth of 17 meters (56 feet) or lower, as well as survey the study site for abalone and other species and collect samples to test ecosystem health. The team has seen encouraging results. After urchin removal in 2018, project divers returned the next year to find kelp forest already regrowing in places where there was once little to no growth.
Overgrazed kelp forests become “urchin barrens”; sea urchins there have proliferated so severely that they don’t have sufficient food. The urchins enter a zombie-like state, slowing their metabolism and reabsorbing their reproductive organs. This means they contain no roe, a protein-rich traditional food for many First Nations, and one that has been in short supply for the Haida Nation.
Yet this year, Yakgujanaas says the urchins they removed seemed healthier, with better-quality roe.
It’s a sign the project is moving toward its goal of reestablishing balance: between kelp and urchins, and between urchins and the people who treasure them as a food source. Haida divers now distribute roe to the community when they remove healthy urchins.
As kelp regrows, the Haida Nation hopes to see abalone return, too. Yakgujanaas notes that her elders harvested abalone as a reliable food source, but she has never been able to; during her lifetime, abalone numbers have been too low for a sustainable harvest.
Kelp forms the backbone of healthy ecosystems, providing food, shelter and oxygen. The Haida kelp restoration is therefore led by an Indigenous understanding of interconnectedness: that healthy seaweeds sustain the health of the ecosystem as a whole.
Young bull kelp on a growline in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Image courtesy of Tesia Bobrycki/Native Conservancy.
It’s a theme shared across many Indigenous seaweed projects, regardless of what form they take.
On British Columbia’s Central Coast, the Heiltsuk Nation and scientists from Simon Fraser University piloted research studying whether commercially harvesting feather boa kelp (Egregia menziesii) could be sustainable for both the algae and the ecosystem it supports. They found that, by following traditional Heiltsuk practices of only harvesting part of each individual kelp at a time, it actually grew back more enthusiastically than if left alone.
“People were really excited [about] these results, that if we’re careful about following these partial harvesting rules, it really is and can be sustainable just as Heiltsuk knowledge suggests,” says Hannah Kobluk, a Ph.D. researcher at Simon Fraser who took part in the project. She says their research underlined “the richness that comes from drawing from multiple forms of knowledge, whether it be Indigenous, local, fishermen themselves … it all paints a way richer picture.”
In Alaska, the Cordova-based Native Conservancy has started several pilot programs in kelp farming. The goal is to create a “regenerative kelp economy based on conservation, restoration and mitigation — not another resource extraction job in Alaska,” says founder and president Dune Lankard, a member of the Eyak tribe.
Lankard’s hope is that their kelp farms will not only provide kelp itself — fresh, frozen, and dried, for local consumption and to bring to market — but also create shelter where wild salmon can hide from predators, and surface area where herring can lay their eggs.
The Native Conservancy currently has nine test sites along a more than 160-km (100-mile) stretch in Prince William Sound, where kelp grows affixed to long anchored lines, as well as a test farm that the conservancy seeded with ribbon, sugar and bull kelp (Alaria marginata, Laminaria saccharina and Nereocystis luetkeana) in the fall of 2021.
The goal is to make a trifecta of food source, sellable products, and stable jobs for Alaska’s Indigenous communities. In many, Lankard says, locals choose to move away when they reach adulthood because of the lack of consistent work. That diaspora has exacerbated a disconnect with the ocean and traditional practices.
Tyler Quales monitoring grow lines in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Image courtesy of Tesia Bobrycki/Native Conservancy.
“Native peoples are the original guardians and stewards of their ancestral lands and waterways,” Lankard says. “If we’re able to build an industry that’s based on one of our traditional food sources and ways of life, it adds that cultural aspect, that spirit, and that relationship with the ocean.”
This relationship becomes particularly important when climate change is thrown into the mix. For all of the Indigenous groups Mongabay spoke with, climate change is top of mind, especially the question of how warming waters could harm the very seaweed these groups seek to preserve.
Conversely, seaweed could help mitigate climate change. A 2016 paper estimated that macroalgae sequester 173 million metric tons of carbon every year as they float offshore and eventually sink into the deep sea. Some research also suggests seaweed buffers against ocean acidification, providing oases of safety as the ocean’s pH drops. Yet at the same time, the warmer, more nutrient-poor waters that come with climate change are stressing these species; recent marine heat waves have been particularly devastating for kelp forests.
Even so, there is refuge, and hope, in the traditional knowledge deployed for these projects.
“There have been many millennia of environmental and climate changes in the past; that ancestral knowledge has helped communities survive and thrive to this day,” says Poe. “Sometimes the community members in our network use the phrase, ‘looking to the past to prepare for the future.’”
In Hawai‘i, Limu Hui is breaking new ground as it tests methods of transplanting limu species grown in tanks to the wild ocean. Yet the group’s members emphasized that Limu Hui’s true focus is encouraging relationships with limu itself.
Limu Hui coordinator Wally Ito shows some limu to participants of the organization’s regular limu walks in Hawai‘i, which help locals connect with local seaweed species. Image by Kim Moa/KUA.
“The idea of limu restoration is not so much just limu planting; it’s a pathway for community cohesion,” says Wally Ito, a co-founder of Limu Hui. “To get younger kids out of the house, and get them to touch the limu. Smell the limu. Taste the limu. We have this taste, this ‘ono, of limu. But we cannot pass on that taste to the next generation. They gotta taste it for themselves.”
Miwa Tamanaha, former co-director of KUA and a founding member of Limu Hui, noted that public attention to marine algae is also growing outside of Indigenous communities; the recent explosion of seaweed farming is a prime example. As humanity experiences a collective loss of biodiversity, habitat and community, Tamanaha says this interest “maybe is an indicator of re-centering relationship — what each of our places wisely has to feed us, and what we wisely have to give to our places in turn.”
Main image: Dune Lankard, founder and president of the Native Conservancy, holds sugar kelp. Image by Ayşe Gürsöz/Native Conservancy.
This article was on riginally published on Mongabay.
Many people may not remember the 23rd of June, 1988, or recognize its significance. Many may not have even been alive then. But that was the date when Dr. James Hansen gave his US Senate testimony, where he stated that global warming was here and happening now as a result of human activities. It is widely regarded as the moment the world become aware of climate change. In the intervening 33 years, the science has starkly shown that humanity is altering our climate, which is now entering a dangerous new state.
Despite the clarity of the picture that has emerged from climate scientists, we’ve failed to address the crisis with the urgency it deserves. This is the result of various factors. We could mention the impact of fossil fuel lobbyists who’ve muddied the public’s understanding of the science. We could mention the media who’ve failed to communicate the crisis effectively. We could mention politicians who’ve downplayed or denied that we’re in a climate emergency. These are just some of the issues that have led us to where we are today.
But I’d like to explore a tool at our disposal that can help cut through the noise and disinformation. In doing so, it could help engage a wider audience about the climate crisis. It’s something that’s shaped the attitudes, actions and advances of society for thousands of years; the universal language of storytelling.
Cli-fi comes of age
Cli-fi is a term coined by Dan Bloom to describe the literary sub-genre of climate fiction. Cli-fi attempts to reach out to people in a way that traditional non-fiction and scientific reports simply can’t.
Cli-fi has typically been made up of “Dystopian and pre-/post-apocalyptic worlds of the past, present, or future stricken by a myriad of climate change calamities,” according to Kübra Baysal in Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction. These end-of-the-world stories may serve as a warning of why we should address the climate emergency. But can they inspire change? Investigations into this question are ongoing, but here’s what we know so far.
Research published in the journal Environmental Humanities in 2018, by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, found that readers of cli-fi were more concerned about the climate crisis than non-readers. Cli-fi encouraged readers to think about the ways climate change would impact people and life in general. However, Schneider-Mayerson found that the majority of cli-fi was associated with “intensely negative emotions.”
Apathy is the enemy of action. This means that cli-fi that leads to readers feeling despair, might discourage them from engaging further with the issue. Could this mean that we need different types of stories to inspire change? That may be one solution. While not dismissing the existing cli-fi canon, which has increased awareness and spawned countless conversations, it may be time to add new stories to this potentially world-changing genre.
But why do stories have such an influence over people? How could they help us tackle the most pressing issue humanity has ever faced?
Stories hold immense sway over us. They wrap us in a narrative cocoon and transport us into a new reality, one where we empathize with characters and unwittingly have our beliefs and attitudes shaped.
Stories can also change the world. They have precipitated many important moments in history. For example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe played a role in bringing about the American Civil War, in the fight to end slavery. Dictators including Hitler and Augusto Pinochet were in such fear of the power of books that many were collected and burned, according to Will Storr in The Science of Storytelling. “Transportation changes people,” writes Storr, “and then it changes the world.”
Fiction broadcast on TV can also be a force for change. The American sitcom “All in the Family” produced an episode which showed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in a negative light in October 1974. At the time it had become apparent that CFCs were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, and pressure was mounting for global action. According to an article published by PBS, the aerosol industry attributed the episode of “All in the Family” as that which sparked their decline.
Stories can also alert us about an encroaching menace. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and 1984 by George Orwell warned us about the rise of totalitarian states. These books have now become part of our cultural fabric. But is there any proof behind the power of stories to influence and shape our beliefs and actions?
Jonathan Gottschall writes in The Storytelling Animal that, “Research results have been consistent and robust: fiction does mold our minds. Story – whether delivered through films, books, or video games – teaches us facts about the world; influences our moral logic; and marks us with fears, hopes, and anxieties that alter our behavior, perhaps even our personalities.” So how do stories hold us in their magical sway?
Walter Fisher believes we are creatures of story, or “Homo narrans.” Jonathan Gottschall prefers fiction man, or “Homo fictus.” Evidence suggests that people tend to think in narrative structure, which is defined in a research paper by Brandi S. Morris and colleagues as, “The degree to which a narrative tells a story and contains essential features including an identifiable character, plot (temporal dimension, goal), and setting.”
Narrative structure is coming to be seen as an effective method of science communication. This is because we can engage and lose ourselves in a story, through narrative transportation. We reach this state through empathizing with characters and living vicariously, and also by “being suspended from reality.”
Yet there are plenty of other reasons why stories can reach us in ways that non-fiction simply can’t. Morris and colleagues suggest that stories tend to fit in with our neural maps, which ultimately determine how we interpret and understand the world around us. Loick Roche and John Sadowsky also suggest that stories have an element of universality about them, enabling them to be understood by many people, irrespective of their age or culture.
Our brains are wired to process stories. We communicate in them, we spend some of our free time consuming them through books, audiobooks, gaming, theater, cinema and online streaming platforms. Even when we sleep, our brain continues feeding us stories through our dreams. It’s like we can’t get enough of them.
That’s not to say that non-fiction isn’t important or effective. It certainly is and can be. But sometimes stories can get through to us in ways that facts aren’t able to. “Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations,” says Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. George Monbiot shares this view, writing in Out of the Wreckage that, “A string of facts, however well-attested, has no power to correct or dislodge a powerful story.”
In their 2019 research paper published in Climatic Change, Morris and colleagues carried out three studies exploring whether stories or facts encouraged people to act on the climate crisis. They found that when narratives were presented as stories, they were more effective at encouraging people to take action, compared to narratives of a factual nature.
Should we therefore see more stories in science communication, especially around the climate crisis? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this idea has merit. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that science fiction could be one of the most crucial genres in this century, as it helps convey information about topics as diverse as climate change, bioengineering and AI to a wide audience. He explains that while people may not read the latest research articles, “Movies such as The Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand the most important technological, social and economic developments of our time.”
In TheStorytelling Animal, Gottschall writes that our thinking and opinions on topics as diverse as class, race, ethics, gender and almost any other subject can ultimately be shaped or modified through fiction. Even a single episode of a TV show (as with the hole in the ozone layer) or a short story can influence our thinking, according to Gottschall. “If the research is correct,” he writes, “fiction is one of the primary sculpting forces of individuals and societies.”
If stories have changed society’s views on a range of subjects before, then there’s no reason why climate change should be any different. But in order to inspire change, we first need a new kind of cli-fi story.
Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingslover, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson are just some of the authors who’ve penned cli-fi novels. Yet the cli-fi genre can count its published works in the hundreds, meaning there is clearly scope for a wider range of novels.
“The best cli-fi,” writes Ellen Szabo in Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi, “Seamlessly intertwines literary fabrication and science; it’s a literary collaboration between the disciplines of science and the humanities.” Cli-fi makes climate change personal by living vicariously, says Szabo. This means we need strong and realistic characters. Grounding cli-fi in the present with solutions also matters when we’re trying to inspire the world to immediate action.
What we need therefore is a new wave of cli-fi which encompasses some or all of these ideas. I believe there is one novel that embodies everything that this new wave of cli-fi could be; The Last Bear by Hannah Gold.
The Last Bear is a middle grade novel with wonderful human and animal characters that are the beating heart of one of the most stunning debuts you’ll come across. This book is a cli-fi masterclass, which is set in the present and incorporates real-world science deftly into the story. To say that it’s iconic within the cli-fi genre would be an understatement. That it will become a modern-day classic seems certain. But even more importantly, books like The Last Bear could just change the world. Every author who seeks to bring about climate action can learn from Gold’s masterfully crafted story – this is how we engage, educate and inspire action on the climate crisis.
After the slow progress made at COP26, many people are coming to realize that the time left for meaningful action is steadily diminishing. The history books are being written and all of our names will be recorded against success or failure.
But there is still a glimmer of hope. Perhaps through cli-fi, we can engage previously unreachable parts of society. Perhaps now is the time to embrace the fact that we’re storytelling animals and to communicate in this most universal of languages. Perhaps storytellers will write stories about saving the world, which will end up doing exactly that. We may not be able to get a “happily ever after” at this late stage of the climate crisis, but we owe it to every future generation to at least try.
What do you think of when someone talks about the ‘Good Life’? There are many ideas about what the ‘Good Life’ should look like, most of them involving wealth accumulation.
What if I suggested that a Good Life should no longer revolve around wealth and economic growth, but should be something that enhances and protects the wellbeing of humans as part of a broader community, and that it should also protect the wellbeing of our environment? After all, one cannot really exist without the other. That is the aim of the Latin American conception of the Good Life: Buen Vivir.
Buen Vivir is a complex concept for social and environmental sustainability based on Indigenous worldviews – one that has evolved over time to include ideas from politics, academia and non-Indigenous communities.
It’s about abandoning old ideas of individual happiness backed by an accumulation of wealth and economic growth, towards a life with more intention, a reciprocity with nature and embracing the idea of community.
As an alternative to sustainable development, it addresses the gaps in policy that have led to the type of social and environmental injustices we see today. Policies that are driven by top-down visions of what communities need. These injustices are part of the structural failures that are driving climate change.
You may have heard of other culturally-originated concepts like the Danish Hygge or Lakom, the South African Ubuntu, or the Japanese Ikigai. But what stands Buen Vivir apart from these other cultural concepts is that it is both an aspirational goal that can be used by the likes of governments and policymakers to ensure a more socially and environmentally just order; but on the flip side, it is also a lifestyle driven by the same key principles.
This means that Buen Vivir has both the potential to change policy for more responsive and participatory democracies, but it is also rooted in the attitudes, behaviours and practices of individuals and their communities. Both feed into each other, but ultimately it starts with the people. And that’s the beauty of it.
Buen Vivir’s ability to marry both people’s behaviour with policy is one of the most important parts of the concept, and it is why I have chosen to focus on developing a framework tool that not only helps guide communities for the changes they want to see to meet their own needs, and implement Buen Vivir within their own homes and communities; but also helps guide government institutions when working with communities and their needs to make sure that the developmental goals match the community realities.
The most crucial aspect of Buen Vivir though lies in the way both policymakers and communities change the way we view our relationship with each other and with our earth.
That is where Buen Vivir has the innovative ability to ensure both social and environmental wellbeing – of our communities and our planet. Sustainable communities for a sustainable earth for generations to come. In these challenging times, that is exactly what we should be aiming for.
This article was originally published on Lowimpact.org.
What I mean by system change is system replacement, rather than system tweaking (aka ‘prolonging the agony’). This raises (not begs – please, not begs) three questions:
Is it feasible that the current system might be replaced?
Do we really need to replace this system – can’t we just change our consumption habits a bit, make sure we recycle properly, and rely on governments to do the right thing?
If you agree that the system needs to be replaced, does that make you ‘anti-capitalist’?
To answer the first question: yes, it will be replaced – systems come and go, which is why we’re not living under feudalism, absolute monarchy, the Roman Empire or in hunter-gatherer tribes any more.
So, you can guess my answer to question two. I want to show that system change is not only necessary, but achievable, and that we have to do it quickly. However, when communicating with people about system change, you never know how it’s going to land. It depends on a huge raft of factors – including the social circles that people move in, their upbringing, the newspapers they read, their job, ambitions, social media bubble and inner prejudices. Many people are ready for communication about system change, others aren’t, because it might challenge a lot of the narrative that they’ve held dear for a long time, with the potential to damage their career. I guess that if you’ve started to read an article about system change, I can at least hope that my communication with you is not going to crash-land. At the very least, it might plant a few seeds.
I’m assuming that you understand the dangerous nature of the path we’re on, and that recycling or installing low-energy light bulbs isn’t going to get us off it – not when we have an economic system that’s all about maximising consumption, which is not only irrational, but contradicts all religious teaching. The organisation that I work for (Lowimpact.org) has been promoting and assisting lifestyle change since 2001. Lifestyle change is essential, but not enough. Within the current economic system, lifestyle change without system change is cosmetic – like anti-racism or organic food on the Titanic. Both those things are good in themselves, but on the Titanic, they’d have no long-term effect without turning the steering wheel to avoid the iceberg.
Now on to question 3 – does advocating system change mean anti-capitalism? For me, it depends – but I’m not sure that kind of labelling is useful, as it’s divisive and confusing for most people. Socialists used to bristle when people criticised socialism by pointing at the Soviet Union. ‘But that’s not socialism’ they’d say, quite rightly. ‘It’s a dictatorship. Socialism has to be democratic, or it can’t be socialism, whatever you call it’. Capitalists would have a valid point if they said much the same thing to anyone criticising this system. ‘It’s not capitalism’, they might say. ‘Capitalism is fundamentally about a free market, and we absolutely don’t have a free market. Whatever you call it, if it’s not built around a free market, it’s not capitalism’.
This is why I find it difficult to criticise ‘capitalism’, because although it may be worth criticising as a theory, it seems strange to oppose something that we don’t actually have (and in fact, I don’t think it’s possible to have a system in which power concentrates in the hands of the owners of capital without massive state intervention on behalf of the owners of capital). What we have is some sort of strange bastardisation of capitalism, without the free market, but with an enormous, corporate-friendly state, and annual Davos schmooze-fests (i.e. socialism for the rich). This is what I oppose – what we have now – regardless of what we call it. I’d like to replace what we have now with something built around a non-extractive, free market. If you don’t understand how that’s possible, bear with me.
We don’t have a free market, because in this system (whatever we call it), the state intervenes massively on behalf of multinational corporations. Not ‘accidentally to the advantage of’, but ‘on behalf of’. Corporations have enormous leverage over governments – some would say to the point of ‘corporate capture’ of the political system – and I’d agree with them. They don’t pay the proper amount of tax (but small businesses have to); they get all the subsidies and government contracts; they have politicians on their boards; they get bailed out when they fail, and much, much more.
One morning on Radio 4, I heard several corporate CEOs demanding that:
the government take money from ordinary people,
to give to giant corporations,
so that they can give it to other giant corporations,
for fossil fuels,
for them to burn,
to keep their plants running,
so that they can continue delivering profits to their shareholders.
This is seriously what they were asking for. And they’ll probably get it, because they’re ‘too big to fail’ (this may have happened already – I don’t tend to follow the news too closely). This prevents market entry by smaller, leaner competitors (which is exactly what the giant corporations want), and destroys any notion of a ‘free market’.
Consequently, the corporate sector is hoovering up the entire economy, and establishing monopolies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Über, or cartels like the banks and supermarkets. They suck money out of communities and concentrate it, which damages democracy, as well as communities.
A (truly) free market would allow small businesses, sole traders, community-based enterprises and co-ops to compete with corporations. At the moment, they’re being wiped out. If we can stop the state from intervening, let’s see what kinds of ‘economies of scale‘ the corporate sector really has. The fact that there are still independent shops, small businesses, restaurants and coffee shops, community pubs, farms, craft producers or market stalls left at all in the face of corporate competition shows that people are prepared to support them, even when they’re more expensive. There’s something valuable about them, that people recognise. We’re pushing at an open door with most people.
But how do we kick-start system change? What do we actually do in the world? Certainly not violent overthrow – the idea is absurd and undesirable; and not by voting – which you won’t see as an option if you understand the amount of leverage that the corporate sector has. I believe that we’ll do it by transcending. We build a new infrastructure within this one, by absorbing its resources, around a new exchange medium – a new money system if you like, although that may not be an accurate label. Mutual credit is a tool that can help decentralise the economy, boost small businesses at the expense of multinational corporations, build community and reduce the need for banks. Together with various associated ideas, it can form the basis for a new kind of economy. It’s something that we can unite behind. It should be attractive to both the anti-corporate left and the free-market right – but also to greens (because shorter supply chains are more sustainable), and to libertarians (because it involves a reduction in the role of the state).
Nothing we do to try to move to a sustainable, healthy and democratic society will work as long as we have the current money system. Here’s the key point: the problem is that conventional money has two conflicting functions – it’s an exchange medium and it’s a store of value. In other words, it’s used to buy and sell things, and it’s used to store, hoard, accumulate and become wealthy with. As long as that’s the case, money will gravitate towards stored wealth, because money attracts money and gives access to the political system. This continues until so much money is concentrated, and so little is circulating that the economy crashes – as it has many times – and will continue to do so until those two functions are separated. During crashes, communities are devastated and ordinary people suffer. During booms, nature is destroyed. So there’s never a ‘good’ part of the boom and bust business cycle.
Groups all over the world are building the infrastructure and the technology to decentralise and mutualise the economy, including, crucially, to separate the exchange and store of wealth functions of money. I call this approach ‘Edgeonomics’, because it’s about assembling and connecting this infrastructure ‘from the edges’, in communities, and federating to the global level – rather than trying to change things from the centre. It all works – we only have to use it. I believe that mutual credit is the core of it, the life-blood. It’s a 19th century idea (or rather, a ‘family’ of ideas), whose time has come now that we have the internet, the software to federate from communities to the global level, a growing awareness of what’s happening to nature, and a Covid-lockdown-induced economic slump.
After mutual credit networks are in place, a job will no longer have to be something that you’re ‘given’ by a company that won’t pay you the full value of your work (where would be the profit in that?), and that you’ll be grateful for – even if it involves running around a warehouse all day, unable to talk with your colleagues, and with restricted toilet breaks. A job will be something you create, alone or in combination with equals – that you enjoy, and in which you keep the entire value that you create (not to mention choosing when to go to the toilet).
In American consumer culture there is an apt saying: “Shop, shop until you drop.” Not surprisingly, American household consumption amounts to about 70 percent of Gross National Product (GDP). On average, most countries spend between 50-80 percent of GDP on buying stuff--everything from iPhones to plastic toys, everything from pots and pans to electric tools.
Many consumer goods, especially all those made of plastic, have a Made in China sticker on them. Not surprisingly, as the world’s workshop, China surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth in 2007. But if you analyze China’s per capita environmental footprint based on consumption, it is rather small compared to countries in the EU and North America.
Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Industrial Ecology Programme, says that China produces “a lot of products but they export them. It's different if you put the responsibility for those impacts on the consumer, as opposed to the producer."
When Ivanova and her colleagues looked at the environmental impact consumers in 43 different countries have on the environment, they found that shopping is responsible for more than 60 per cent of the globe's greenhouse gas emissions, and up to 80 per cent of the world's water use.
"We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses," Ivanova says. "But between 60-80 per cent of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this will have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well."
Recent studies published in the Guardian found that “cows, pigs and other animals for food, as well as livestock feed, is responsible for 57% of all food production emissions, with 29% coming from the cultivation of plant-based foods. The rest comes from other uses of land, such as for cotton or rubber. Beef alone accounts for a quarter of emissions produced by raising and growing food.”
Producing beef requires lots of water, which is used in the cultivation of the grain that cows eat. Since cows are rather inefficient in converting grains into the meat, it takes on average about 15,415 liter of water to produce one kilo of beef.
Dairy production also requires large amounts of water. A group of Dutch researchers found that it takes 1050 liters of water to produce one liter of milk compared to only 107 liters to produce one liter of soy milk.
Chocolate, however, which today is hailed as an antioxidant health food, is one of the most water-intensive products consumed. It takes a whopping 17,000 liter to produce one kilo of chocolate. Atul Jain, an environmental scientist at the University of Illinois, said to the Guardian that his vegetarian diet is more benign to the environment and “if people are concerned about climate change, they should seriously consider changing their dietary habits.”
The researchers in Norway also looked at the environmental impacts on a per-capita, country-by-country basis and found that those nations with “the highest consumption have about a 5.5 times higher environmental impact over the world average.”
The United States was by far the worst offender, followed closely by Luxembourg, with 18.5 tonnes CO2 equivalent, and Australia, with 17.7 tonnes CO2 equivalent. For comparison, China's per capita carbon footprint was just 1.8 tonnes CO2 equivalent. Norway, at 10.3 tonnes CO2 equivalent per capita, was three times the global average of 3.4 tonnes CO2 equivalent per capita.
It would certainly be better for the planet, as the two scientists suggest, if people in the United States, Norway and other rich countries would start eating a primarily plant-based diet and dramatically reduce consumption of plastics and fossil fuels. However, is it realistic to expect that individual lifestyle changes alone will have the needed impact on reducing CO2 emissions?
According to the activist organization Friends of the Earth, both individual changes and policy changes are needed. But “peoples’ ability to make the changes needed for a net-zero future are fundamentally dependent on the government shaping the right environment. For example, how can people take the train instead of flying when it is vastly more expensive? We need a frequent flyer levy to redress the balance and investment in lower train fares, as well as ensuring services are reliable and comfortable.”
Governments and corporations are indeed much more powerful in effecting consumer habits than individuals. A recent report released by Greenpeace USA reveals how consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé are driving the expansion of plastic production and threatening the global climate and communities around the world.
The report, The Climate Emergency Unpacked: How Consumer Goods Companies are Fueling Big Oil’s Plastic Expansion, exposes the business links between the world’s largest consumer goods and fossil fuel companies and the overall lack of transparency around emissions from plastic packaging.
An article by Morgan McFall-Johnson in the Insider states the issue even more bluntly: “At this point, personal lifestyle changes will not turn the climate crisis around. A report from the International Energy Agency, which lays out a path to a net-zero-emissions energy system by 2050, estimates that individual behavioral changes would only account for about 4% of the necessary reductions.”
As a culture and as individuals, we need to drop the meat and the online shopping addictions. But these lifestyle changes will not in themselves amount to systemic change on a global level. To believe that is to continue to be fooled by those who pollute and control our economy and consumption habits the most: the consumer goods and oil companies.
For years, these corporations have been telling us that it’s up to us to change and to recycle and to conserve while knowing full well the message was part of a greenwashed ad campaign to keep their profits rising.
To have even a 50% chance of stopping the world's temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to a study published recently, 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground. Hence, individual consumer change is a band aid, not a long-term solution.
So, now that we know the solution—to reduce consumption—how do we achieve it? Reduced consumption and overall degrowth will not only reduce corporate profits—it will literally dismantle the current profit economy. And that is the main reason systemic change is not on any corporate agenda.
The green capitalism or sustainable development they have been practicing for four decades has not reduced consumption at all. Meanwhile, the planet and humanity’s future are caught in a corporate catch-22—doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t. Either through massive crisis or radical policy reforms—most likely both—change is bound to happen. And if we are to not only survive but also to thrive, these changes will have to be both systemic and regenerative, both global and local.
For an increasing number of scientists and ecological economists, the answer to this systemic dilemma is economic degrowth. In the words of economist Jason Hickel: “It is irrational to hope, against the evidence, that our existing economic system will deliver the development outcomes we want while at the same time reversing ecological breakdown. We need to be smarter than that. Degrowth provides an empirically-informed alternative: a pathway to reducing excess resource and energy use while at the same time ensuring flourishing lives for all. Given the stakes of the crisis we face, we should be open to fresh thinking.”
The blessing of reduced consumption through degrowth is that the economy will grow in wellbeing rather than in material production and consumption. The economy will ensure increased employment through reduced working hours, better health care and educational opportunities, and longer vacations. In short, degrowth will increase the wellbeing of both people and planet.
Sources:
Diana Ivanova, Konstantin Stadler, Kjartan Steen-Olsen, Richard Wood, Gibran Vita, Arnold Tukker, Edgar G. Hertwich. Environmental Impact Assessment of Household Consumption. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12371
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
At the COP26 climate summit earlier this month, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari struck an upbeat note on Africa’s plan to build a Great Green Wall. “With all hands on deck and concerted efforts at land restoration by African leaders, I am optimistic that Africa’s ambition of restoring over 100 million hectares [247 million acres] of degraded landscape for productive agriculture is achievable,” Buhari said during a side event.
The numbers, however, are far from encouraging. In the 14 years since the project was launched, only 4 million hectares (10 million acres) have been brought under restoration, which includes everything from planting trees and stabilizing dunes to terracing farmland. That means that less than a decade from now, by 2030, the 11 countries that are part of the initiative expect to restore more than 95 million hectares (235 million acres) of land.
The initial idea for the GGW was bold but simplistic: a band of trees about 8,000 kilometers long and 8 kilometers wide (5,000 miles by 5 miles), stretching across Africa from east to west.
Over the years, the mega project has shifted away from a narrow campaign to “build a wall” meant to check the Sahara Desert’s advance south into the semi-arid Sahel region. It is increasingly presented as a way to resurrect ecosystems, save livelihoods and preserve cultures across the 11 countries that have signed up to it: Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and Senegal.
Buhari’s enthusiasm may have something to do with the flood of new funding announced for the project this year. At COP26 in Glasgow, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledged $1 billion for land restoration with an initial focus on Africa and the U.S. International donors, including the World Bank and countries like France, promised $14.3 billion at January’s One Planet summit in the hope of accelerating progress.
But conflict and climate change are complicating efforts on the ground. Alisher Mirzabaev, an ecological economist at the University of Bonn, who conducted a cost-benefit analysis published in the journal Nature Sustainability earlier this year, pegs the total cost of restoration at $44 billion. “Now, theoretically, we have this big amount of money,” Mirzabaev said of the new funding pledged this year.
He calculates that every dollar invested in the GGW project could return $1.20, accounting for an entire gamut of benefits, including non-marketable services such as preventing erosion, climate regulation, and even spiritual value. However, translating dry economic calculations into real action on the ground is fraught.
Thousands of miles from Glasgow, in Djibouti, climate activist Fihima Mohamed followed COP26 with interest. “We don’t have a big budget; for us, it [land restoration] is happening acre by acre,” Mohamed, who leads the Women Initiative Djibouti, said in a phone interview. Since 2018 the NGO has recovered 12 hectares (30 acres).
According to Mohamed, limited budgets are only one obstacle. She says they also lack of training in farming techniques to cope with uncertain climatic conditions, like persistent drought that has pushed longtime farmers from their lands.
“People cannot afford to farm,” she said. “They are putting their money and getting nothing in return.” Restoration promises some returns.
The women’s group, with more than 100 members, grows vegetables and fruits on the restored lands on the outskirts of the capital, Djibouti City. They sell the produce in the market and share 40% of the earnings with the landowners.
The “wall” won’t be assembled brick by uniform brick. It will have to patch together parcels of the earth, each colored by their unique ecological conditions, social milieus and economic realities. There are some common characteristics. Across the Sahel, about two-thirds of the people depend on agriculture and livestock. The region’s population is growing rapidly — expected to more than double by 2050 — while arable land is shrinking every year. Most of the Sahelian countries are already grappling with food insecurity, and a changing climate is expected to hit the region hard.
Desertification and disruptions in northern Nigeria have fueled conflict between farmers and herders as the area of usable land shrinks. According to the new paper, it makes more economic sense to restore cropland rather than pastures. But what is economically sensible may not be socially acceptable.
“About 50 million people across the Sahel region depend on pastoral livelihoods,” Mirzabaev said. “You cannot just tell them your activity is not economically viable, so you have to give up your land.”
Even if decision-makers and funders agree on what to pursue, the success of projects depend on local communities’ appetite to participate.
Jacob Hochard, an economist at the University of Wyoming who wrote an associated piece to Mirzabaev’s study, said the latter recognizes that “not all benefits from land restoration are created equal.” For example, carbon sequestration rewards that accrue after many years to the global community are not the same as investments in cropland that deliver more immediate benefits for local people, Hochard said.
But local efforts like Mohamed’s in Djibouti will fall short without a clear vision or strategy to scale up, said Chris Reij at the World Resources Institute. “The challenge is to mobilize tens of millions of land users across the Great Green Wall countries to invest their scarce resources in sustainable land management and in particular in on-farm trees,” he said.
This mobilization has to happen even as underlying issues persist: land tenure insecurity, poorly developed markets, and weak access to finance. For restoration gains to stick after projects close and funding cycles end, “the conditions that lead to land degradation initially need to be addressed,” Hochard said.
A changing climate, one of the causes of land degradation, is already taking its toll. Droughts and heat waves are striking regularly and in some places with greater force. “The heat waves have not stopped coming,” Mohamed said. “We have heat waves from May to August. All the crops are drying.”
It is a phenomenon that is likely to bedevil the whole enterprise, impacting everything from carbon storage potential to crop yields. Mirzabaev’s study notes that climate change would reduce the survival chances of tree saplings by half and greatly diminish crops’ profitability.
What is also stymying the Great Green Wall campaign is widespread conflict in the Sahel region. Of the 27.9-million-hectare (68.9-million-acre) area where Mirzabaev and his team say restoration is economically and ecologically viable, 14 million hectares (35 million acres) lie in the orbit of deadly conflict zones.
In northeastern Nigeria, an Islamic insurgency led by the group Boko Haram and fueled in part by the harsh conditions of life, has made accessing these areas difficult.
“The Boko Haram is a very big problem for the implementation of this Great Green Wall,” said Chikaodili Orakwue, a senior researcher specializing in environment and conflict at the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution in Abuja. She described challenges faced by the country’s National Agency for Great Green Wall (NAGGW) in mobilizing staff in the area. “It’s a volatile area. They lost staff to Boko Haram; they are scared.”
In their interactions with Orakwue, community leaders criticized the absence of government support for restoration work. She warned, however, against a top-down approach, saying land restoration would have to go hand in hand with the restoration of livelihoods, for example, by improving access to water sources and providing pastoralists with land for growing fodder crops.
“They know their lands,” Orakwue said. “They are saying, don’t just come and plant trees on our land.”
Citations:
Mirzabaev, A., Sacande, M., Motlagh, F., Shyrokaya, A., & Martucci, A. (2021). Economic efficiency and targeting of the African Great Green Wall. Nature Sustainability. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00801-8
Hochard, J. (2021). Investing wisely in land restoration. Nature Sustainability. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00806-3
Despite the extensive literature on the pressing topic of climate change, there are few books taking a systemic look at the problem. There are also few such books today that include the voices of those that already are most affected by this global menace. The newly released Climate Adaptation: Accounts of Resilience, Self-Sufficiency and Systems Change, edited by Arkbound Foundation, bravely sets out to do just that.
The book does not shy away from looking at the hard facts and the living reality of the challenge we face with climate change. The first part of the book describes the effect of current emissions, the state of our oceans, the impacts on our ecosystems, and our underlying worldviews, cultures, and economic systems.
As aptly stated by the authors, “At present, simply by participating in the current socio-economic system – based on unsustainable extraction, production and consumption – there will always be environmental damage, whether we intend it or not”, and socio-economic collapse is indeed likely to happen.
The book does not downplay the severity of the circumstances, but what makes it stand out is the constructive approach it takes to the problem. The second and third parts of the book gather the voices of more than 20 authors from around the world sharing their views on how we can adapt and gain resilience in the face of this global challenge. Most importantly, there are several voices from the Global South, perspectives that too often are severely under-represented in climate change publications.
Readers are taken on a journey from the mountain villages of Nepal to the drought stricken Lamu County in Kenya, from the islands of the Pacific to other vulnerable groups who are already taking steps to adapt. In Nepal, the Glacier Trust is helping to set up community-led agroforestry, in Vanuatu women are empowering each other to become activists and community leaders forwarding climate adaptation, and in Kenya activists are working together with local communities to manage the water landscapes and minimize human-wildlife conflict. These chapters provide an in-depth insider’s look at these case studies and what we can learn to apply elsewhere.
Other authors urge us to consider the importance and need for a just agroecological transition and for dignified conditions for climate migration. We are also introduced to well thought-out models for how to move towards systemic change, including Carol Manetta’s framework of worker-cooperatives regenerating degraded lands.
As a member of the Systems Change Alliance, I am obviously a bit partial in my preference for the third part of the book: Systemic Change. This section starts out by addressing a much-neglected topic in climate conversations—the importance of the inner-work needed to change our deep-rooted worldviews of disconnection from Nature and from our communities. The old worldviews that have led us to where we stand at this point in time, and which author Karen Scott aptly names “the Great Disconnect”. In most chapters, there is a sense of introspection, thought and visioning (individual or collective) that is needed before transformative action can take place. The pivotal role of environmental education in its different forms is also addressed.
The current economic system is scrutinized at length in this part of the book--as it should. In one of my favorite chapters, Ester Barinaga and her co-authors urge us to question even our most basic view of money as a thing that some have, and others don’t. Community currencies, the commons, the Progressive Utilization Theory, and localization--all these ideas and perspectives get a seat at this packed table of alternatives.
While some chapters are more accessible than others, this book is a diverse collage of voices and lessons that is bound to have something special for anyone interested in exploring the possible futures available to humankind. The book made me deeply reflect and learn, and left me with an uplifting feeling that all is not lost. In the words of the editors: “When we embrace such possibilities, rather than surrendering to hopelessness and the sense of deserved doom, the future is a little bit brighter.”
William E. Rees, in his essay ”A blot on the land“ (Nature421, 898; 2003), uses the ecological-footprint concept to argue that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth has been exceeded because of technological and economic growth, and to counter some economists' claims that the carrying capacity can increase indefinitely.
According to Rees’ formula, we have exceeded our ecological footprint. We now need one and a half planet of resources to sustainably feed ourselves.
The technology and economic growth enthusiasts will argue that new, more sustainable technology will counter any problems caused to the environment. We can grow indefinitely. There is some truth in both outlooks.
We need new technology to overcome the faults of the past. This transition needs to happen without exceeding biological or natural boundaries, without exceeding the ecological footprint. The effect of technology is never neutral, but some technologies are better for the environment than others.
The issue of carrying capacity—how many people a particular area can support indefinitely in dynamic balance with nature—is complex, and I do not think there is a simple formula for how that can be accomplished.
Carrying capacity depends on so many factors: natural resources, climate, latitude, water, nonrenewable and renewable energy, technology, economy, political policies, culture, population size, and so on. It is a dynamic principle, just like sustainability, that will change according to the times.
Take Iceland as an example: the carrying capacity on Iceland is relatively low if calculated in arable land, temperature, latitude etc., but it can increase in sustainable ways with the use of technology and natural resources by growing food in green houses heated by natural hot water springs, which Iceland has plenty of.
This practice is already taking place in Iceland, but it could be scaled up and utilized nearly indefinitely without much damage to the environment. So, technological inventions play a vitally important role in increasing carrying capacity. Or in maintaining a steady-state growth society as advocated by Herman Daly and other economists.
The world’s population increase is similarly dynamic and cannot fit into a simplistic formula as Malthus and others have tried. Therefore, to attempt to create a simple mathematical formula for carrying capacity will not work, either. We will return to economics of today—in the dreamland of mathematical theories. We know where that practice has taken us—down the road to economic inequality, riches for the few and poverty for the many, as well as environmental destruction.
Technology will always invent new ways to utilize the same resources in better and more sustainable ways if sustainability is the goal—hydrogen to fuel cars, for example. The trick here is how to produce enough hydrogen, or something else and better, with renewable energy.
The issue of creating enough sustainable energy is one of humanity’s main challenges right now—how to create enough sustainable energy to fuel a planet with limited resources populated by 7 billion plus people. The next important step is to develop a sustainable economy in which human basic needs are covered and where wealth is distributed more equitable than it is today.
The no-growth movement has made an important point in line with P. R. Sarkar’s idea that there is no real progress on the material level—the best we can hope for is to do the least harm possible to nature, create a steady-state economy that grows, but rather slowly on the material level as compared to today.
The goal of the economy, after all, is to make sure we do not deplete natural resources in a circular economy where human needs are covered and the distribution of wealth is as equal as possible.
Therefore, real economic progress, and the best possible way to maintain carrying capacity, is to increase cultural, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual progress—to develop a sustainable wellbeing economy, or a happiness economy. An economy high on the wellbeing curve but very low on the resource extraction curve.
You log on, and you’re herded into a virtual bar to listen to your boss telling jokes. Meanwhile, a metaverse-first real estate company is selling off overpriced property in a virtual London, and gamers are competing for non-fungible tokens. Welcome to the Zuckerverse — a place nobody asked for but in which we may soon all be spending a lot of time.
Recently, Facebook changed its name to Meta, as part of a broader shift toward the so-called metaverse — a network of interconnected experiences partly accessed through virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) devices. In Zuckerberg’s own words, “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it.” The most recognizable examples of this in action are virtual office meetings with VR goggles, playing games in an expansive online universe, and accessing a digital layer on top of the real world through AR.
As owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the virtual reality firm Oculus, the holding company now known as Meta plans to create an interconnected world in which our work, life, and leisure all take place on its infrastructure — monetizing all aspects of our lives. For now, this is still the stuff of fantasy. Yet it’s also the fantasy of one of the most powerful men in the world — and for this reason, it deserves our attention.
In an influential essay, venture capitalist Matthew Ball writes, “the Metaverse will be a place in which proper empires are invested in and built, and where these richly capitalized businesses can fully own a customer, control APIs/data, unit economics, etc.” Which does sound a little creepy . . .
Meta is hoping that, by building hype around it, others will be encouraged to follow in developing the project. It’s like building a post office and a store and calling it a city. The hope is to get enough companies on board with its project that, soon enough, we will all be using it — whether we like it or not.
The metaverse is no bluff. It would be wrong to see it as a mere stunt concocted to shift attention away from the litany of crises facing the company. Nor is it simply a rebrand to give the firm a fresh coat of paint, in the manner of Philip Morris rebranding as Altria Group in 2003.
Zuckerberg’s company has invested heavily in VR hardware, and it wants to become the dominant player in the headset market. It’s betting that its line of VR headsets and AR glasses will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. There are estimates that the company has already sold five or six million VR headsets at a price of $300, which would total nearly $2 billion. But even this arm of the business isn’t yet making money; it has been reported that, with roughly ten thousand people working on VR devices, the company is losing between $5.4 billion and $6.4 billion in operating costs.
There’s a genuine risk that this could all just flop. Consumers have been slow to adopt VR technology, and in a few years, it might just be Zuckerberg, Facebook communications chief Nick Clegg, and the social media giant’s COO Sheryl Sandberg holding meetings in an otherwise empty metaverse. But Goldman Sachs has predicted that the VR and AR industry could reach a value of $80 billion a year by 2025, with a cumulative annual growth rate of 40 to 80 percent. By such forecasts, at least, the metaverse will be more than just meaningless PR spin to help Meta shift more goggles.
Digital platforms create an environment in which our work, our social life, and our entertainment increasingly take place in digital contexts ready-made for monetization. The underlying idea of the metaverse is to expand the horizon of the appropriation of human life into every aspect of our existence. Meta wants to extend its reach from a mere global social network to become the digital infrastructure of everyday life.
In 2005, Zuckerberg imagined Facebook as “an online directory” that could be used “to look people up and find information about people.” Facebook was essentially a database of people that could be queried for information. But the company has also declared a social mission, which is supposedly all about transparency: Zuckerberg described how “all the added access to information and sharing would inevitably change big-world things.”
Over subsequent years, Facebook was no longer presented as a digital tool but as a way for people to connect, share experiences, and come together. Following the political upheavals of 2016, Zuckerberg started speaking of Facebook in epochal terms as providing the global communication infrastructure for a world-historical process: “This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness, and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism, and nationalism.”
On June 22, 2017, at the first ever Facebook Communities Summit, Zuckerberg announced a change to Facebook’s mission statement: from connecting people to building a global community. His pivot to the metaverse is the next logical step in this project. Back then, Zuckerberg spoke about providing the digital infrastructure of twenty-first-century community life through Facebook groups. This time, Meta wants to get a head start on its rivals in owning the next generation of infrastructure for the embodied internet.
The end goal for Meta is that it is no longer a service you use, but instead, the infrastructure upon which you live.
Like water to fish, Meta wants to become the imperceptible medium that permeates our entire existence. It will no longer be a choice you make but rather the space within which choices are made available to you. In other words, it’s not the company sponsoring the event, it’s the stadium in which it’s held. The idea is that Meta will be a holding company in charge of a thriving ecosystem of interconnected products and services, all seamlessly integrated into a hybrid world able to effortlessly extract profit at every point in the system.
You could play games, download content, and sign up for services, and everything would be automatically deducted from your account. Banking and investment products would be integrated within the metaverse world so that a portion of your salary would be automatically transferred into this world’s currency.
Multiple companies would compete for slices of this world, but there would be an even stronger incentive to establish vertical and horizontal monopolies. Companies would place barriers against interoperable services — and it would be more convenient for customers to remain in one walled garden where everything was transferrable and connected.
The idea that platforms are neutral intermediaries facilitating transactions has always been misleading. But now, even this pretense would be a thing of the past, as metaverse companies would play a more active role in designing the digital architecture of virtual worlds. Even today’s digital platforms are complex social and economic environments that have been developed through decades of research into social psychology. But in these new worlds, tech barons will establish the rules and create vast systems to nudge users toward behavior that is profitable for the company.
he most lucrative businesses under digital capitalism were essentially advertising companies. Apple did still get away with selling high-end consumer products. But Google and Facebook’s surveillance-capitalism business model instead sought to offer people free services in exchange for their data, which would then be analyzed and sold.
Metaverse capitalism will see big tech firms shifting more toward hardware and infrastructure, as owning the framework within which other services can be offered becomes more valuable. This isn’t just about collecting data, it’s about owning the servers and the digital worlds. We have already seen Big Tech starting to spend big on undersea internet cables and data centers to reduce data transportation costs. Alphabet and Amazon have each spent close to $100 billion investing in infrastructure and other fixed-value assets. Increasingly, the idea of tech firms as lean business models following in the footsteps of Nike and other major outsourcing companies is becoming outdated.
A second core change is a diversification of revenue sources and a decentering of the role of data and advertising. In the first quarter of 2021, 97.2 percent of Facebook’s total revenue was generated through its advertising business. The metaverse presents a broader range of revenue streams, from the hardware on which it operates to the games, services, and content within it. Meta can start offering subscription-based content; it can sell virtual property and experiences; and it can charge other companies for access to its world. The data-to-advertising funnel will still exist, but it will be part of a larger portfolio of assets.
Platform companies that have offered a single service will now be more likely to branch out into offering a range of services within a connected world. How the metaverse will be divided up between competing tech companies remains to be seen. It’s hard to imagine that Meta will be willing to let its competitors set up shop in their part of the metaverse or compete with them on equal terms. But others will likely be keen to invest if there are signs that the hardware starts to pay off.
Large investments in VR and AR technology will also create a greater need for precarious and poorly paid “microworkers” to train the algorithms. The engine of the metaverse will be the physical and very real world of exploitative labor — predominantly of workers in the Global South. As Phil Jones has recently argued in Work Without the Worker, the “hidden abode of automation” is actually “a globally dispersed complex of refugees, slum dwellers, and casualties of occupations, compelled through immiseration, or else law, to power the machine learning of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.”
Corporate Overkill
Will the metaverse be built responsibly? Of course not. Rather, it will be built in whichever way appears most profitable to Meta. Any problems that emerge will be dealt with as PR issues along the way while the company prints money at record pace. Who cares about the hand-wringing of a few legislators when you own not only the digital infrastructure of this world but the whole metaverse?
Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” is a world in which users move seamlessly from one corporate-owned environment to another. Facebook’s founder has assured the public that this latest wheeze will be built responsibly and in partnership with others. But in light of the avalanche of evidence of wrongdoing uncovered by whistleblower Frances Haugen, it’s hard to believe that even Zuckerberg’s closest allies believe the spin.
What can we expect to come out of the Glasgow COP meetings? If the pattern established by previous COPs is repeated, not much. Dire statistics will be cited, pleas for action will be heard, earnest pronouncements will be made, non-binding goals will be established – and policymakers will congratulate themselves on having taken steps to address an existential threat.
How well is this process working? A quick look at global GHG emissions since the COP was established more than a quarter century ago does not inspire confidence. The first meeting was in Berlin in 1995, and global CO2 emissions that year were 21.4 Gt. By 2019 they had increased by nearly half, to 31.3 Gt.[1] Atmospheric CO2, needless to say, has steadily risen (see below).
The only real reductions in emissions were not the result of policies agreed upon at COP meetings, they were the product of economic slowdowns – from the financial collapse in 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This highlights a simple truth: the fastest and most reliable way to reduce GHG emissions is to make fundamental changes to the economy. The question is: how can the economy be transformed in ways that actually improve people’s lives – providing the huge environmental benefits we need without enormous social and economic costs?
The answer is simple: economic localization.
Here are five ways localization lowers GHG emissions while actually increasing quality of life for the vast majority:
1. Localization eliminates unnecessary transport
International trade today is no longer about obtaining goods that can’t be produced locally or regionally, nor is it about exchanging surpluses. Instead, it is about maximizing profits within a global economic system that ignores social and environmental costs. One result is that a lot of trade is simply ‘redundant’, with goods sourced from thousands of miles away when an identical product is available next door. This is particularly true in the global food system. Britain, for example, imports and exports 15,000 tons of waffles annually, and exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia; supermarkets on the Citrus Coast of Spain carry imported lemons while local lemons are left to rot on the ground; Canada simultaneously imports and exports greenhouse tomatoes.[2]
In some cases, heavy subsidies for fossil fuels and other resources needed for global trade – combined with the exploitation of abysmally low wages abroad – leads to foods being shipped to the other side of the world just to shave a few cents off the cost of production or to add a few cents to the sales price. The US seafood company Trident is typical: to save on labor costs it ships about 30 million pounds of fish annually to China for filleting, and then ships the fish back to the US for sale.[3] For reasons that should be clear, we refer to this as ‘insane trade.’
Trade in manufactured goods is not as likely to be insane as trade in food, but globalization has increased transport distances in this sector as well. The parts in a typical iPhone, for example, travel a total of 500,000 miles before reaching the end user.[4] Among the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was to reveal how vulnerable to disruption these long supply chains are.
Thanks to corporate deregulation, the volumes, tonnage, and energy footprint of global trade have grown rapidly in recent decades. The total volume of goods and resources traded around the world has increased by a factor of 2.5 during the past 30 years (roughly corresponding to the period of corporate-led globalization).[5] By 2009 the volume transported globally was 32 times greater than it was in 1950.[6]
If globalization is allowed to continue on its current trajectory, the energy required for global trade – and the consequent emissions – will continue to rise. By 2050 trade volumes are expected to increase more than four-fold; average hauling distances will grow by 12%, and CO2 emissions related to global freight transport will increase by 290%.[7]
Putting an end to insane trade is probably the fastest and easiest way to reduce GHG emissions. But despite the clear correlation between long-distance transport and rising GHG emissions, climate negotiators have never considered reducing even insane trade as a climate-stabilizing strategy. In fact, the opposite is true: the commitments made by nations under the Paris climate accords, for example, don’t include emissions from international aviation and shipping,[8] and so no nation has any incentive to reduce them. In other words, the economic benefits of needless transport will continue to be given to the trading corporations, while the costs are shifted to the environment and future generations.[9]
2. Localization promotes sufficiency rather than consumerism
High levels of consumption in the ‘developed’ countries are a major factor in GHG emissions and many other forms of pollution, as well as in resource depletion. Environmental breakdown is telling us that those consumption levels are too high, but the economic model on which the global economy is based requires constant growth. Whenever there is an economic slowdown, in fact, governments typically intervene by lowering interest rates, cutting taxes, or taking other steps to “stimulate consumer spending”.
In the ‘less-developed’ parts of the world it is presumed that a continued push for economic growth will eventually enable standards of living to approach the levels found in Europe and North America. But the developed countries are already using far more than their share of resources, while placing a much greater burden on the Earth’s ability to absorb wastes like greenhouse gases. For the rest of the world to consume and pollute at the same pace would require almost four additional planets.[10] (Actually even more planets would be required: by the time ‘development’ enables people in the global South to reach Northern levels of consumption, those levels will presumably have risen still further.)
One way that economic globalization increases consumption is by imposing a consumer monoculture. Every day, people around the world are bombarded with media images that present the modern, Western consumer lifestyle as the ideal, while implicitly denigrating local traditions and land-based ways of life. As a result, millions of people are abandoning traditional local foods for highly processed junk food,[11] while clothing made of local wool, flax or cotton is giving way to imported designer jeans and polyester. In the process, the use of energy-intensive resources is going up, along with pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
Even in the North, cradle-to-grave advertising and planned obsolescence enable marketers and technological “innovators” to create a never-ending stream of new needs among people who already have more “stuff” than the vast majority of the global population. For the individual, this consumption treadmill ultimately leads nowhere: studies have shown that once basic needs are met, further increments of consumption don’t actually leave people any happier, and in fact have the counterproductive effect of eroding well-being.[12]
If running ever faster on the consumer treadmill ultimately erodes long-term well-being, localization offers the prospect of genuine improvements in quality of life for the vast majority. In healthy local economies, people are deeply connected to both community and the natural world – connections that psychologists recognize as fundamental wellsprings of happiness.[13] Those connections can be made without the material throughputs that consumerism requires, enabling improvements to be made in quality of life at the same time that environmental impacts are reduced – something borne out by empirical studies. For example, a study of an ecovillage in rural Missouri showed that, compared to national US averages, residents produce only 18 percent as much municipal solid waste, drive 10 percent the number of miles, consume 6 percent as much fuel, and use only 23 percent as much water. Despite using far fewer resources, 81 percent of Dancing Rabbit members rate their level of happiness at 7 or above on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being most happy.[14] This finding is confirmed by a survey of the members of almost 200 intentional communities worldwide.[15]
3. Localization turns the food system into a carbon sink
The global food system is a major contributor to climate change, with estimates of the food sector’s contribution to GHG emissions ranging from 19-29 percent.[16] The globalization and industrialization of the food economy is responsible for a large and growing portion of that total. This is because:
• Globalization leads to needless trade in food, described above, and increases the distance between producers and consumers. By shrinking ‘food miles’, localization reduces transport-related emissions.[17]
• The global food economy requires far more processing and packaging than local food systems: in the US for example, more than one-third of the energy used by the food system is used for packaging and processing.[18] A significant proportion of the roughly 170 million tons of plastic packaging produced each year worldwide – most of it intended to be disposed of after a single use – is used in the food industry. [19] When consumers are buying direct from farmers, on the other hand, the need for packaging and processing all but disappears.
• Globalization is structurally linked to agricultural monoculture. Because global marketers need massive amounts of a few globally-traded commodities, it is far more ‘efficient’ to source those foods from a few giant monocultural farms than from hundreds of diversified farms.[20] Monocultures rely heavily on agrochemicals and mechanized equipment – both of which result in significant GHG emissions. They also degrade soil, depleting it of the ability to sequester carbon. Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, enables soil to absorb a large proportion of the excess carbon in the atmosphere. Local food economies, by contrast, are structurally suited to regenerative agriculture practices.[21] That’s because local economies don’t need huge amounts of single commodities, but rather a diversity of foods – which provides an economic incentive for farmers selling locally to diversify their farms. This connection can be clearly seen in those parts of the global South where farmers have been able to resist inroads from industrial agriculture. Most of them produce for their own families, and sometimes for regional or local markets. Their farms are small, highly diversified, and – though the farmers themselves may not describe them this way – are based on regenerative agro-ecological practices.
• Globalization is leading to dietary changesthat exacerbate GHG emissions. The mimicking of Western patterns of consumption mean that global meat consumption is expected to double by 2050,[22] most of it sourced from factory farms that are major contributors to climate change: factory-farmed broiler chickens, for example, produce seven times more GHG emissions than backyard chickens. [23] At the same time, huge supermarket chains have trained Northern consumers to eat out-of-season foods that have to been transported from thousands of miles away. These perishable foods are not only produced on monocultural farms, but many also require refrigeration and air transport, adding to their carbon footprint.
What’s more, globalization has enabled transnational food corporations to spread highly processed, plastic-packaged junk food into parts of the world that previously relied on more nutritious and home-cooked foods – in the process worsening public health, increasing waste, and adding to the energy footprint of food. The global sale of packaged foods jumped more than 90 percent from 2002 to 2012, with 2012 sales topping $2.2 trillion.[24] While the global food system homogenizes diets worldwide, local food systems promote a diversity of food preferences that are attuned to local soils, climates, and cultural traditions.
• The global food system destroys rainforestsand other wild ecosystems. Many of the planet’s carbon-sequestering natural ecosystems are being destroyed to make way for monocultural production for global markets: Brazil, for example, is converting large swaths of the Amazon to soybean production for export to large-scale animal feedlots, while Indonesia’s rainforests are being displaced by palm oil plantations, mostly destined for processed junk food products. As Brazilian activist Camila Moreno points out: “If you really want a mechanism to avoid deforestation, dismantle agribusiness. This is the main driver of deforestation in the entire South”.[25]
• The global food system robs people of the ability to feed themselves. In the global economy, food goes to the highest bidder, rather than the hungriest child. In rural parts of Kenya, for example, nearly 40% of the population lived in poverty in 2016; meanwhile, much of Kenya’s best agricultural land was devoted to growing black tea and cut flowers for export to Europe and North America, rather than feeding hungry people at home.[26] This is not a problem unique to Kenya: a recent study showed that 550 million people in Asia, Africa, and Oceania could be fed from land that has been taken over by foreign governments and corporations – mostly for exported food and biofuel crops. [27] Local food systems, by contrast, focus on feeding local people first, before any surpluses are traded. Much of the food grown in local food systems – especially in the global South – remains outside the formal money economy and therefore adds nothing to GDP or the bottom lines of global agribusinesses. But if the goal is to improve people’s quality of life while reducing GHG emissions, there is no better place to start than by strengthening local food systems.
4. Localization replaces energy-intensive technologies with human labor and skill
Globalization is both scaling up and speeding up the economy – two trends that put a premium on energy-intensive technology while devaluing human labor. Robots are increasingly relied upon to do factory work that was once done by people – a trend that is spreading to every other sector of the economy, including farming.
The mainstream narrative is that all this is happening because of efficiencies of scale. However, these technologies are not more efficient when all the costs are taken into account. Because the price of energy doesn’t include its ecological costs – including greenhouse gas emissions – it becomes artificially cheap to use more and more of it. It has been estimated that the direct and hidden subsidies for fossil fuels alone amount to $10 million per minute.[28] At the same time, governments provide a wide range of subsidies, many of them hidden, for energy-dependent technologies. Tax breaks, tax credits, accelerated depreciation and other subsidies are provided to companies that invest in technology; hiring workers, on the other hand, means paying costly payroll taxes that make human labor artificially expensive.
Because local economies serve much smaller populations than the global economy, they do not justify massive expenditures on robots and other energy-intensive equipment. Instead there is a premium on place-based knowledge and human skill. In the global North the mega-farms of industrial agriculture tend to employ a lot of immigrant labor because the working conditions are poor, or the work is seasonal. In contrast, the diversity of enterprises on a farm mean there is more likely to be year-round work and the continual experimentation and learning characteristic of regenerative agriculture make that work more interesting. What’s more, the location-specific knowledge that small farmers have is one reason their farms are more productive per unit of land, energy, and water than large-scale mechanized monocultures.
5. Localization stems the tide of energy-intensive urbanization.
The consumer culture that globalization promotes is increasingly urban. At first glance, high-density urban living might appear to reduce per capita use of resources. But this is only true when compared with life in the grossly inefficient suburbs, which are themselves a product of urbanization. Compared to more genuinely decentralized towns and villages connected to a surrounding localized economy, urbanization is extremely resource-intensive.
One reason is that virtually every material need of urbanised populations must be brought in from elsewhere, requiring vast energy-intensive infrastructures to do so. For example, almost all the food consumed by city dwellers must be grown for them, typically on giant, chemical and energy intensive farms. All this food must then be brought into the cities on roads purpose-built to accommodate huge trucks. Similarly, providing water involves enormous dams, man-made reservoirs, and aqueducts stretching into distant hills and mountains. Energy production means huge, centralized power plants, coal and uranium mines, along with thousands of miles of transmission lines.
Urbanization is also linked to significant increases in consumerism. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute points out that “the shift to cities is creating waves of new consumers who promise burgeoning markets for businesses.” This may be good for global corporations, but for the environment and the climate it is a disaster. Among other things, the flood of new urbanites will require a near doubling of the current amount of commercial and residential floor space (an area equivalent to the size of Austria) and a 250 percent increase in port infrastructure to meet rising container shipping demand.[29] Most of this construction requires cement, a material with a huge carbon footprint: according to a BBC report, “if the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world, behind China and the US.”[30]
Studies show that even in the global North, urbanization adds to people’s carbon footprint. In Finland, for example, annual GHG emissions by a resident of that country’s biggest city, Helsinki, are almost 40% higher than emissions by rural residents.[31]
Because rural towns and villages are more connected economically to the surrounding landbase, they are places where localization initiatives can take root quickly if they are given government support. By improving the vitality of rural life, localization can help stem the tide of rapid urbanization. This alone would provide enormous opportunities for GHG reduction.
As Local Futures has argued more fully elsewhere,[32] a shift in direction from global to local is not only the most sensible response to climate change, it would simultaneously address the many other social, environmental and economic problems we face: poverty and unemployment, pollution, the erosion of democracy, the loss of cultural and biological diversity, rising levels of senseless violence, fundamentalism, and more.
Nonetheless, the negotiators at previous climate talks have studiously avoided any discussion of economic localization, no doubt at the direction of political leaders back home. Without pressure from below, those government leaders – who are heavily influenced by corporate campaign donations and lobbying – cannot be counted on to take the lead. But if people across the world join forces to apply massive pressure for a shift from global to local, the corporate spin can be reversed, and real solutions to the climate emergency can be pursued.
[5] Giljum, S., Dittrich, M., Lieber, M., and Lutter, S. (2014) ‘Global Patterns of Material Flows and their Socio-Economic and Environmental Implications: A MFA Study on All Countries World-Wide from 1980 to 2009’, Resources 3, 319-339.
[21] Lin et al. (2011) ‘Effects of industrial agriculture on climate change and the mitigation potential of small-scale agro-ecological farms’, CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources 6, No. 020; GRAIN (20) ‘Food, Climate Change and Soils: The Forgotten Link’, in Wake up before it is too late: make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate, UNCTAD 2013 Trade and Environment Report.
[25] Moreno, Camila (2009), interviewed on Democracy Now, 18 December, “Environmental and Indigenous Activists Criticize Proposed Deal to Save Rainforests”, www.democracynow.org/2009/12/18/environmental_and_indigenous_activists_criticize_proposed. Also see https://theecologist.org/2019/sep/27/agriculture-and-deforestation
With COP26 still underway in Glasgow, Scotland, a leaked report from the IPCC (The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states that the only way to avoid climate collapse is to end capitalism’s perpetual economic growth model.
In a recent article co-authored by journalists and climate researchers, with content first published in the Spanish online publication CTXT, Progressive International reports that a “leaked draft of the third part of the upcoming IPCC report establishes that we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid exceeding planetary limits.”
The report also “confirms that… greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must peak in at most four years. The document also acknowledges that there is little chance of further economic growth.”
The explosive growth of capitalism over the past 200 years has been largely powered by fossil fuel companies and their extraction of humanity’s common resources—air, forests, land, and, most importantly, coal, oil and gas. Without these cheap energy resources capitalism would not have been able to inaugurate the industrial revolution and its subsequent wonders of specialization, automation, and labor productivity. There is indeed a strong correlation between energy use and economic growth.
This economic growth, which has brought the Western world a high standard of living, has also come at a great cost. First to the poor, working twelve-hour days in mines and factories during the early days of the industrial revolution, and later in the form of growing economic inequality and financial instability. The environment has also suffered, in the form of pollution, deforestation, biodiversity reduction, and now, climate change.
As a slap in the face of the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, where politicians are by and large leaving it up to voluntary market forces to curb climate change, the IPCC report states: “Some scientists stress that climate change is caused by industrial development, and more specifically, by the nature of social and economic development produced by the nature of capitalist society, which they therefore consider ultimately unsustainable.”
Making COP26 sound more like COP-OUT26, the report furthermore states that, “Current emissions are incompatible with the Paris Agreement and immediate and deep cuts are absolutely mandatory.”
The various international climate summits, and green capitalism in general, has relied on short-sighted market attempts at solving the energy and climate crises. If this continues, we are unlikely to solve these crises anytime soon.
As the original article in CTXT states, “only if we cooperate, if we understand that we share so much, including an atmosphere that doesn’t know what borders are, can we react and leap far enough to avoid the fall.”
No thanks, COP26. The climate crisis is not a crisis to be solved with technological fixes enabled by market sales tactics. Not by innovative billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. The climate crisis is a crisis rooted in a failed culture, in a failed concept of what true progress is all about. Therefore, nothing short of a new worldview based on cooperation and progress measured as inner wellbeing, rather than material growth, is needed to guide us into the future.
However, that worldview must be anchored in a new economic Marshall Plan that can lift humanity out of the current fog of political, economic, and scientific denial. As the IPCC report states, we need to, once and for all, realize that capitalism is unsustainable. Indeed, nothing short of economic systems change can save us now.
We are in a critical climate moment. As discussed in parts I and II of this post we know that we need transformative change. We know we need all actors to play a pivotal role. We know that we need to prioritize knowledge and voices of Indigenous peoples and traditional groups, who have a deep and inherent connection to the earth. We also know that we need political buy-in and multilateral commitments for a crisis that knows no geographical boundaries. Most of all, we know that we need wholesale systemic change – social, political, and economic. Let’s discuss that last point.
As Naomi Klein puts it in her book ‘On Fire’, “debates about climate action remain trapped in a paradigm that equates quality of life with personal prosperity and wealth accumulation.” We know, however, (and by we, I am referring to not just you and I, but politicians from all ideological perspectives, as well as economists and academics) that this perverse view of economics is no longer attainable, sustainable nor desirable. As the number of rich shrink, while simultaneously growing their wealth by billions, the vast mass of people living in poverty snowballs. The current global economic system exploits the planet and its resources for the benefit of very few, while those most disadvantaged will be the worst impacted by climate change.
Moving away from fossil fuels is the bare minimum, but it is not the magic bullet to save the planet from destruction.
Klein argues that in this respect “there is much to learn from Indigenous-led movements” like Buen Vivir, which she describes as a “focus on the right to a good life as opposed to the more-and-more life of ever-escalating consumption and planned obsolescence.”
Phasing out coal, moving away from extractive policies including fossil fuels and biofuels, moving towards a needs-based approach to resource consumption, towards renewables with an emphasis on community-based and small-scale renewable energy transitions will need to be part of the solution. Moving away from fossil fuels is the bare minimum, but it is not the magic bullet to save the planet from destruction. We need to do more. It is not good enough to replace one form of large-scale extraction (fossil fuels) with another just because it is the easier option the lesser of two evils. Non-fossil fuel extraction and exploitation also has negative, irreversible impacts on the planet’s carrying capacity, if not in the short term, in generations to come. Deforestation is one major extractive activity but there are others. So effective solutions start with transforming the global economic model.
Major key adjustments need to be made to the global economic system, and national economies and development policies can begin to immediately reflect a wholescale commitment to striving for rapid and radical emissions reductions, and aiming for Net Zero by 2030. The UN says that countries will have to commit to at least 45 percent emissions reductions by 2030 if we are to have any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. Climate Council of Australia argues that this will need to be more like a 75 percent reduction by 2030, with Net Zero by 2035 based on current risk assessments. However, a new assessment conducted by Breakthrough, the National Centre for Climate Restoration argues that there is no carbon budget for 2030 as we are already overdrawn and that based on past emissions we are already on track to reach 1.5 degrees by 2030. Net Zero by 2050 is too late, yet loose ‘targets’ made by countries like Australia are locking us into climate catastrophe.
Whatever the commitment, to reach Net Zero we need a complete transformation of the global economic system.
Released in a briefing paper earlier this year, Breakthrough argues that we will need to reach Net Zero by 2030 to keep warming below 2 degrees, a fact that has been argued by many climate scientists and advocates including Greta Thunberg. It states, “The world needs to be at zero emissions by 2030 for the 2°C target, based on three assumptions: 1. Mitigation expenditure no more than 3% of GDP; 2. No geoengineering; 3. Climate sensitivity is not low (Lamontagne et al, 2019. Nature Climate Change, 9:290–294).”
Whatever the commitment, to reach Net Zero we need a complete transformation of the global economic system. The CSIRO says, “Reaching Net Zero will require a fundamental reimagining of everything we do. It will require a new energy system, new modes of transport, new fuels, new materials, new modes of financing investments, new ways for industry sectors to interact and new ways of living on a scale – and at a pace we have never come close to achieving before.” But it’s not enough to assume that we can technologically innovate our way out of this. We also need a reimagining of society to transform the way, scale and speed at which we consume. To quote journalist Sarah O’Connor,
“To this new world, let’s not go back to a past that wasn’t working anyway !”
The global capitalist system that rewards competition and the exploitation of nature for the accumulation of individual wealth can no longer be logically and ethically argued as best system for an economy bounded by social injustices and planetary restraints.
In the near future, greater, more radical changes to the global economic system will need to be made. There are many proposals that policymakers and economists can consider, for example: degrowth, the social and solidarity economy, regenerative economy, and a circular society (which not only incorporates a circular economy, but also social and environmental factors including knowledge that impinge just outcomes).
It may be that no one single alternative model will be appropriate to transition markets to Net Zero, instead, key elements of the various significant models can be incorporated into one cohesive response that can be tailored to different contexts, so as not to reinforce the economic growth approach, but to level global equity, respond to fundamental needs and eliminate extreme poverty. With the last factor, it is instrumental to evaluate multidimensional poverty (environmental, wellbeing, social cohesion, health, education, sanitation, etc), not just economic poverty.
The path to Net Zero is not a linear one. It involves all actors – civil, governmental, business and organisations -and it requires rapid, radical systemic change to transform society, industry and politics in a just manner.
In my last post, I looked at why COP26 is important for our climate future. Nonetheless, global efforts will mean nothing if not everyone has a seat at the table. In that respect, the fourth goal of COP26 ‘Working Together’, cannot simply be an empty symbolic gesture or conflated lip service to include marginalised groups in negotiations, it will have to be followed by key historical political commitments to shift the balance of power in climate policy and action. If COP26 becomes another cog in the machine of neoliberal climate diplomacy nothing will change. The first responses must be systemic and structural. All paths forward will rely on wholesale systemic change.
More power to historically excluded groups
The reality is that G20 countries are responsible for 80 percent of all climate emissions. The neoliberal approach to climate change and sustainability has not worked so far. Historic development policies have led the world into this rabbit hole of unequal consequences that have inflamed a climatic response to emissions output, linked to the rise and domination of fossil fuels.
Global international development has been somewhat of a sheep in wolf’s clothing. On the one hand promising to bring every society to the same standards of development of the West, and on the other allowing countries in the Global North to pillage the natural resources of those in the Global South, which has resulted in more economic injustices than letting those societies ‘develop’ on their own terms.
This historic and accepted practice of richer nations raping the earth in poorer nations to augment and continue wealth accumulation in the name of ‘economic growth’ has shown to be a major (if not the worst) culprit in the climate disaster. The extraction, exploitation and exportation of natural resources – not only fossil fuels, but also large-scale water, wood, cement, sand and other natural resources – has hands down been the biggest contributor of climate change according to the science. The intention, however, is linear: take from resource rich, economically poor countries and give to economically rich countries who are resource-intense users. This has to change, but it cannot unless those who have been on the receiving end of its consequences have a privileged seat at the table.
The mainstream notion of Sustainable Development recognises that changes must be made, that we must move away from a fossil fuel economy, but the structures and systems that keep power in place are still rampant. In that respect, if real transformative change is to be achieved post-COP26, it is acceptable to ask: is this the end of Sustainable Development (as we know it)?
We have the potential to find sustainable solutions and transformatively change the way society views its role in nature.
Genuine, transformative and effective solutions will require more voices at the table. This means that the way we have known and practiced ‘development’ around the world will need to change to become more inclusive, more equitable, and consequently less taxing on the environment.
A balance of power towards the groups that have historically been excluded (especially Indigenous, traditional communities, and women) or had their voices ‘white-washed’ in climate negotiations to include more socially and ecologically just approaches or even alternatives to Sustainable ‘Development’ will be an unequivocal factor in finding effective solutions going forward. Strengthening the trust between people and global diplomatic actions can be achieved by this inclusivity, as can maintaining an element of hope.
By decolonising knowledge and approaches to how we interact with the environment, we have the potential to find sustainable solutions and transformatively change the way society views its role in nature from one that has a right to dominate and exploit nature for the satisfaction of human desires, to one that sees its own wellbeing as impacted by the health of the environment and as such seeks to act as a caretaker of environmental rights and wellbeing.
This decolonisation includes centring valuable intelligence from Indigenous peoples, women, and people of colour (who are generally on the margins of knowledge in policy, but who have a historical record of being at the centre of environmental impacts, otherwise called intersectional environmentalism) in policy and decision-making for climate change and environmental management. Indigenous peoples in particular have not only innovation solutions that focus on collective outcomes, but have unique knowledge of the land and how to live in harmony with nature.
The use and exploitation of fossil fuels are a primary driver, that is sure and scientifically proven, but other extractive sectors have a gigantic responsibility in pushing us into a climate emergency. These industries prop up the consumerist society and support throw-away cultures that have a growing disconnect between spontaneous, self-indulgent or convenient whims, the natural source of the product and how it ultimately impacts the earth – think of the dire state of water and food (in)security, and the global impacts of deforestation on air quality, biodiversity and climatic events.
Indigenous peoples in particular know that all interactions with the environment have an equal or greater reaction on humans, and so the capitalist level exploitation of (note: not use of) all natural resources must be curbed significantly. In concepts like Buen Vivir, Indigenous knowledge also interacts and cooperates with other knowledge such as Western technical knowledge to co-create solutions that pursue the same goal.
I will say it again, this inclusivity cannot be a mere symbolic gest. The Indigenous groups who have and will be travelling to Glasgow are expecting to be heard, and to have their concerns and solutions included and highlighted in negotiations. At this point in history, we have more to lose than to gain by continuing down the dominant path to climate action.
More power to let people lead change
People in societies everywhere are bound by their own access to power within political systems that may or may not support community-led processes. Where vital progress will be made is where governments, both national and local, create the structures and systems for allowing communities not only to become involved in decision-making, but also in leading the decisions around their local environments and communities.
While COP26 will be a pivotal moment in climate diplomacy for the future of our planet, it must be accompanied by a decolonisation of knowledge to allow and prioritise other voices and knowledge in solutions going forward.
For many communities this will take not just political will, but educational and advocacy campaigns to get people involved in scenarios where they have traditionally let people in power lead the charge. Still, it starts with political will and systemic change. In frameworks like Buen Vivir this might look like local governments prioritising a cross-section of different community voices to be key decisionmakers, driven by Indigenous knowledge. This can be played out in participatory budgeting models and peoples’ assemblies. The point is people are at the core of climate action and should be prioritised as such.
So, to summarise, while COP26 will be a pivotal moment in climate diplomacy for the future of our planet, it must be accompanied by a decolonisation of knowledge to allow and prioritise other voices and knowledge in solutions going forward. Transformative change will be closer if we do so, but this will also need to be accompanied by a change in the global economic system. Some say it is already underway, other say not anywhere near as radical or as fast as it needs to be. I will discuss this in the final post of this series on COP26.
We are in the lead up to the most pivotal climate conference in history, from which the outcomes have the potential to either send us full throttle towards climate breakdown and biodiversity loss well beyond 2 degrees warming, or provide us with the last exit – one last chance to redeem humanity’s future and limit warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.”
António Guterres
The pressure on our global leaders from civil society to achieve the latter has never been so high. An overwhelming number of people around the world have listened to the climate science and now want those in power to act with urgency and resolve, rather than continue the conflated lip service we have heard from environmental negotiations over the past three decades.
What is COP26 and why is it important ?
The planet has already warmed by 1.1 degree since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the jury is out as to whether the 1.5 goal is still possible. In July this year global surface temperatures were the highest since records began in 1880. The IPCC 6th Assessment Report released in August found that global warming and sea level rise is happening much faster than scientists originally predicted.
Between 2019-21, we have witnessed an unprecedented number of extreme weather events around the globe. Instead of decreasing, CO2 emissions have reached historical levels in May 2021 at 419 parts per million. These figures only make it more crucial that we try everything within the realm of possibility to avert climate catastrophe. There are thus unprecedented expectations of the November conference.
In the lead up to COP26 there have been a number of key climate discussions at a multilateral level. In July, the G20 debated (albeit divisibly) the need for stronger climate action. In August, the UN General Assembly kicked off its 76th session with an assessment of the Sustainable Development Goals.
As host, the UK has mapped out four main goals for COP26, which include :
Securing global net zero by mid-century and keeping warming to below 1.5 degrees by : phasing out coal, preventing deforestation, switching to electric vehicles, and proliferating renewables.
Increasing focus on adaptation to protect communities and habitats.
Mobilising $100 billion of climate finance to developing countries, which has fallen below the previous pledges.
Working together to deliver key commitments by accelerating collaboration and finalising the Paris Rulebook (how countries implement the commitments of the Paris Agreement, namely through Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs).
Thanks to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia is reinforcing its role as the climate villain of COP26 for lack of commitments for robust action. Not only does Australia not have an NDC, missing the 31 July deadline set out in the Paris Agreement ; but Morrison has tried to convince the UK to scale back key climate commitments in the bilateral trade agreement, and suggested he might not attend the November meeting. As it stands, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns that current NDCs will lead to a “catastrophic” rise of 2.7 degrees. This will imminently lead to rapid climate breakdown.
Why COP26 is not everything
The reality is that since global governance on curbing carbon and other atmospheric emissions began all those decades ago, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has not decreased, but increased 40%. While we need strong governance and genuine policy commitments in place on a multilateral scale, we also need national governance that reflects the climate crisis, community-level cooperation to lead effective change on a daily basis, corporate buy-in to make transformation possible through technology and innovation, and organisations to act as mediators between these actors and call out agenda pushing.
The COP26 goal of ‘Working together’ must be a genuine commitment to including a wider range of voices at the table. In that respect, the (im)balance of power that has led climate action to date needs to change. I’ll explore what that might involve in part II.
At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, more than 100 world leaders representing over 85% of the planet's forests have committed to ending deforestation and land degradation by 2030, a British government statement says.
Among the nations taking part are Canada, Russia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of which have large land areas of forest. The US and China will also be party to the agreement.
"With today's unprecedented pledges, we will have a chance to end humanity's long history as nature's conqueror, and instead become its custodian," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.
These are big promises from some of the world’s largest countries and polluters. But will it work? We have seen mighty promises made and broken before in the halfhearted race to stop climate change.
Twelve years ago, at a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, rich nations promised to channel US$100 billion a year to the less wealthy nations by 2020, to help them adapt to climate change and mitigate further rises in temperature.
That promise was broken. Figures for 2020 are not yet in, and those who negotiated the pledge don’t agree on accounting methods, but a report last year for the UNconcluded that “the only realistic scenarios” showed the $100-billion target was out of reach. “We are not there yet,” conceded UN secretary-general António Guterres.
As youth activist Great Thunberg has compellingly emphasized in her highly publicized speeches and interviews—there is a lot of talk about saving the planet but not much action.
A lot of dramatic talk. At the COP26 in Glasgow this week, Antonio Guterres, Boris Johnson and other world leaders did not mince words. The metaphors used were rather dramatic. Johnson described global warming as “a doomsday device” strapped to humanity. Guterres said we are “digging our own graves.”
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, speaking for vulnerable island nations, added moral outrage, warning leaders not to “allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction.” Greta Thunberg would likely agree.
But Thunberg would probably characterize the rest of the speeches, as she has before, as another dose of political blah blah. It is indeed highly unlikely that the COP26 will, despite the dramatic language, create any systemic change in our greed-driven economic system, which is, after all, the main driver of climate change.
Let’s face the facts, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Guterres, and Mr. Biden, there’s been too much talk already and too little will to make substantial change. Let’s face it, we will not stop the conquering of nature unless we redesign the destructive economic system that does all that polluting and plundering for us.
And because of these realizations, there are many experts, writers, and activists who are, like Thunberg, critical of the underlying motivations behind, as well as the proposed outcomes of, the COP26 summit. Here are a few of these somber voices:
“The scientific evidence is clear: growthism makes climate mitigation much more difficult. If we want to have a shot at meeting the Paris climate goals, rich nations need to abandon growth as an objective and adopt post-growth policies." — Jason Hickel, economist
"Targets at COP26 must ensure the transformation of societies and economies in a way that leaves no one behind. Therefore, it is so important that there is space given at COP26 for all voices to be heard.
These voices must include the voices of all, particularly the voices of those from the Global South, climate-vulnerable nations and from marginalised groups or communities." — The Ocean Generation, activist organization
“The main objective of the UK strategy [during the COP26] is to corral countries into “following the lead” of the UK and announce a target of net zero emissions by 2050. But the concept of so-called ‘net zero’ is deeply inequitable and does not meaningfully contribute to the reductions necessary to limit warming to 1.5C.
‘Net zero’ does nothing to shift reliance on extracting and burning fossil fuels. It is an approach that relies on “off-setting” carbon released into the atmosphere rather than keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
‘Net zero’ schemes enable the countries and corporations most responsible for causing the climate crisis to avoid responsibility and their fair-share of effort and reparation, and risks green-washing their business-as-usual approach. Membership of this ‘net zero club’ is being used as a benchmark for whether a country is a ‘leader’.” — War on Want, activist organization
"We can no longer afford to allow the power of corporate polluters to go unchecked. Tackling and addressing climatic conditions isn’t just an ethical, moral, or public health concern — it is a global issue that concerns us all and touches every facet of our lives. If we’re going to preserve life, understanding the depth and seriousness of this is eminent.” —Samantha Garcia, Institute for Policy Studies
“Even though the UN climate talks have never really been accessible, equitable or just, this year is much less inclusive due to COVID-19 vaccination inequality.
This year, many activists from countries hardest hit by climate change are unable to attend the climate talks because of access to vaccines, travel restrictions and travel expenses.
Access to resources is imperative for countries that are least responsible, yet bearing the brunt of the effects of the climate crisis.” — Nicolas Haeringer, from 350.org, a climate activist organization
“We live in a time of unprecedented crisis generated by 200 years of planetary exploitation. This has led us down the path of possible, irreversible climate change, along with biodiversity erosion and extinction of species, all symptoms of ecological destruction caused by the industrial food system.
In the name of solving the climate crisis, large corporations, industries, and lobby groups are now promoting a whole range of techno-fix solutions such as genetically modified crops and gene editing, lab-grown foods, geo-engineering, biofuels, carbon-capture, and carbon credits. These solutions completely disregard nature and its regenerative abilities by attempting to technologically replace the natural processes they have destroyed, while creating new opportunities for the fossil fuel industry to continue polluting.
We now have the choice to go down a different path that acknowledges the central role that biodiversity-based, local, ecological, and regenerative food systems have in building climate resilience through regenerating the planet, our biodiversity, our local communities, our health and our democracy. " — From The Regeneration for Climate Change Conference, with Vandana Shiva and others.
In late 2020, a succession of violent storms slammed into Central America during the worst Atlantic hurricane season on record. The effects were devastating. Flooding and mudslides caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage, killed hundreds of people, and displaced more than half a million more. The storms were part of an ominous trend across the world. Just over a year earlier, two of the biggest cyclones ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere hit Mozambique in what was one of the worst natural disasters suffered by Southern Africa in decades.
Climate change, scientistssay, is likely playing a role in the growing frequency of mega storms like these, and there’s reason to think that more are on the way. For people living in the path of those storms, that means danger, suffering, and pressure to move to safer areas. Some may look to cities further inland, and others may choose — or be forced — to migrate to other countries.
An analysis by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) says that the world isn’t prepared for a rise in that kind of migration, with international agreements set up to protect refugees almost entirely failing to include people fleeing the impacts of climate change. As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reach their highest levels ever, the group says that countries need to establish better systems to take care of people living at the frontier of the crisis sooner rather than later.
“As the planet continues to heat, the number of people displaced by climate impacts will continue to grow,” said Isabella Shraiman, climate campaigner at the EJF. “We urgently need a just and humanitarian international framework to protect the climate refugees of today as well as those of tomorrow.”
Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration released its own long-awaited report on the future of climate-related migration, which it promised to prepare in an executive order signed not long after coming to office earlier this year. The report called for greater investment in aid initiatives meant to help low-income countries prepare for climate-related disasters, and said the U.S. government should create new lines of communication between federal agencies addressing climate migration.
But the report stopped short of recommending new legal protections for people fleeing environmental disasters, instead suggesting that responsibility for any expansion of refugee policy should be led by the U.S. Congress. Advocates say it was a missed opportunity for the Biden administration to take the lead on proposing a new framework itself.
“It’s super comprehensive and does a good job covering a lot of the issues that are weedy and detailed and hard, but what it doesn’t do is move onto the next phase and say, OK, we know all these challenges, but what are the implications for policy?” said Kayly Ober, climate displacement program manager at Refugees International, which convened an expert task force to present recommendations to the Biden administration last summer.
With climate-related disasters expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, tens of millions of people will likely be forced to migrate for reasons as varied as drought, heat waves, resource-related conflict, and sea level rise. Not all will cross a border — according to the World Bank, as many as 143 million people are projected to migrate to another part of their home country because of climate change by 2050.
In addition to the human, cultural, and financial costs of migration at that scale, it could also become yet another stressor on the environment. Studies have shown that sprawling refugee camps can be harmful to biodiversity in the areas where they are established, and the movement of people from rural areas into cities often strains their capacity for waste management and creates more pollution.
Women from India who fled their homes on the island of Sagar in the Indian Sundarbans due to climate-related coastal sea level rises. Image by Jonas Gratzer for Mongabay.
To minimize the burden on countries that already struggle with limited resources — and ensure that displaced people are treated compassionately — the EJF says a new international agreement covering climate migration should be a top priority for global policymakers.
“We need a rights-based system for dignified solutions for people displaced both within and across borders,” Shraiman said.
The politics of creating a new agreement would likely be fraught. Refugee and asylum policies have become a cultural flashpoint in the U.S., EU, and elsewhere in recent years, with elected officials riding anti-immigration sentiment into prominence and power. If the 1951 Refugee Convention were to be renegotiated in order to include people fleeing climate change, those officials could push for it to be narrowed rather than expanded. Any new international standards would also have to wrestle with thorny questions about how to determine whether climate change was the specific cause of someone’s decision to migrate.
“It’s unlikely that we’re going to open the 1951 convention, or even in the U.S. change domestic law about the way we define refugee,” Ober said. “And if we were to do so, that might end up watering down the framework rather than bolstering it.”
Long-standing international law says that to be considered a refugee, a person has to be fleeing persecution on the basis of their “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Environmental catastrophes are not included in that framework, leaving people displaced by climate change largely ineligible for protection under the Refugee Convention.
Early last year, though, the U.N. Human Rights Committee issued a ruling in the case of a man seeking asylum in New Zealand on the basis of rising sea levels in his home country of Kiribati, an island nation in the Central Pacific. The committee didn’t order New Zealand to accept his application, but it said deporting a person to a country where their right to life is threatened by climate-related conditions is illegal under international law. Advocates hope that the ruling is a sign that the world is shifting toward a new paradigm for climate refugees.
“We can’t let climate change lead to people being trapped in misery, and we have to be real and wide-eyed about that, meaning that people may need to move to the EU or U.S., or wherever it is that they’re able to have a more secure and stable environment,” Ober said.
With a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released last week saying that the world is currently on a trajectory for 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit)of warming by 2050, the world’s approach to climate-related migration could be a matter of life or death for millions of people.
“The climate crisis is already here,” Shraiman said, “and global heating is already forcing people to leave their homes.”
One way to avoid — or at least minimize — the risk that new ‘solutions’ will result in catastrophic and widespread unintended consequences is to limit the scale of experimentation. At the local and regional scale, feedback is faster and ecological limits are more immediately identifiable. Furthermore, by focusing on the local and regional scale, we can adapt solutions better to the specific conditions of a particular place. Design that aims to meet basic human needs at the scale of the local community/region also creates systemic redundancies, so that unpredictable changes in one place are less likely to trigger domino effects in other places. In the dogma of neoclassical economics, redundancy is to be avoided as ever larger economics of scale are used to increase the profits of a few to the systemic detriment of many. However, if we aim to create circular economies based on local, renewable, biological resources, redundancy becomes a vital ingredient of vibrant local economies and regional resilience.
The right questions can help to guide the longer-term cultural transformation, enabling us to identify those past solutions that have turned into problems and invite more transformative innovation.
Good solutions and appropriate answers might be informed by global knowledge exchange but they are born out of the unique conditions of a specific place and its specific culture. Getting the questions right makes best practice transferable from region to region, turning ‘best practice’ examples into ‘best process’ methodologies. The right questions can help to guide the longer-term cultural transformation, enabling us to identify those past solutions that have turned into problems and invite more transformative innovation. Most solutions and answers are temporal, but good questions can guide us over the long term. The appropriate guiding questions can help us to assess when past solutions are beginning to turn into present problems as they do not adequately reflect or address the current circumstances any longer.
Creative problem-solving in a regenerative culture is not only about finding the answer to current needs but also about helping us to ask better questions. Ideally such questions help us to learn something about ourselves and about our relationships with the wider context. As we begin to understand the inadequacies of past solutions in the light of a more systemic awareness, we are developing a new social and ecological awareness. Transformative innovation promotes life-long learning for individuals and communities.
Deeper questioning into the underlying real or perceived needs that make us identify and frame the ‘problem’ in the first place might lead us to discover that we are treating symptoms rather than causes.
We need to co-create diverse models for systemic solutions at a local and regional scale. Some of them will inform through their successes and others through their failures. Repetitive failure and experimentation at a small scale can help us to learn faster. As Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM for 42 years, said so aptly: “If you want to succeed, double your rate of failure”. The response time and cycles of transformative innovation can be faster at the local scale. If you want to effectively adapt to and influence economic, social, cultural and environmental change, start with small-scale experiments that give you quick feedback as to what works and what doesn’t. Deeper questioning into the underlying real or perceived needs that make us identify and frame the ‘problem’ in the first place might lead us to discover that we are treating symptoms rather than causes.
Sometimes the feedback from the system in question (for example, your local community) might be that a more effective and transformative solution can only be brought about at the next scale up — the regional scale. We need a new sensitivity regarding which problems to solve at which scale. Maybe we should ask ourselves:
How do we create functional experiments and case studies of the transition towards regenerative cultures at a scale where feedback is rapid enough so we can learn from mistakes before unwanted side-effects lead to catastrophe and systemic collapse?
How do we discern which issues and problems are best solved at which scale, building local and regional resilience through redundancies and self-reliance while nurturing regional and inter-regional collaboration on national and global issues?
We need to value local and regional solutions supported by global collaboration and knowledge exchange. A regenerative human culture will be locally adapted and globally connected.
The solutions we propose at the local, regional, national and global scales have to be interlinked in such a way that they become mutually reinforcing and supporting. Policy and governance needs to enable local and regional problem-solving rather than impede it by generalized regulations that do not adequately reflect the local conditions of a specific ecosystem and culture. Paying close attention to the uniqueness of place and regional culture reveals opportunities for transformative innovation and preservation of biocultural diversity.
All over the world our ancestors evolved unique cultural expressions, informed by a sense of place and a deep reciprocity with the unique ecological, geological and climatic conditions of that particular place. The local and regional scale is not only the scale at which we can act most effectively to preserve biological diversity, it is also the scale at which we can preserve cultural diversity and indigenous, local wisdom as expressions of living in long-term connection with the uniqueness of any given locality.
Much can be learned from such place-based knowledge. At the same time we have to be aware that most local cultures have already undergone a profound transformation and erosion of local tradition and language. We need to value traditional place-based knowledge and culture without falling into the traps of a resurgence of radical regionalism and narrow-minded parochialism. We need to value local and regional solutions supported by global collaboration and knowledge exchange. A regenerative human culture will be locally adapted and globally connected. The future will be glo-cal, enabled by collaborative, peer-to-peer networks and social innovation.
[This sub-chapter is an excerpt from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press in 2016 in English — see reviews here. The book is also available in Brazilian, Portuguese, Spanish editions, and soon in Italian and Slovak.]
Adam Smith’s most famous and most quoted idea is that of the invisible hand--the notion that if you work for your own selfish goals, the result would still be the same as if you worked to serve society as a whole.
In economic terms this means that it is not from the baker’s benevolence that we get our bread and pastries, but rather from the baker’s self-interest in making a profit. “We address ourselves, not to their humanity,” Adam Smith wrote, “but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” [1]
This simple idea was developed by later writers on capitalism as wholesale support for greed and selfishness. But it is questionable that Smith would have agreed. He was first and foremost a moral philosopher, and he used his first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, [2] to prove that human beings are actually good, and generally act according to the dictates of their conscience, what Smith calls “the man in the breast,” even if it goes against one’s own interest.
Furthermore, Smith often took the side of the consumer over the producer, the worker over the factory owner, and was very suspicious of traders and manufacturers, and he claimed that their interests were directly opposite to that of society. These sides of Adam Smith’s thinking are rarely mentioned in capitalist circles, but they would be clear to anyone reading his original work.
As for the famed invisible hand itself, Smith says surprisingly little about it. In fact, it is mentioned only once in Wealth of Nations, and once in Theory of Moral Sentiments. Reading the quote from Theory of Moral Sentiment, one can only marvel at the idealistic simplicity of his ideas:
“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without including it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” [3]
In Wealth of Nations, Smith has this to say about the invisible hand:
“By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”[4]
In 1,700 pages of writing, Smith mentions the invisible hand only twice. He never develops the idea into a consistent theory. He simply left us with these brief observations. So, compared to how little Smith actually wrote about the invisible hand, its importance in modern economic theory has been truly staggering.
The invisible hand is mentioned in almost every textbook of economics, and in all references to Adam Smith and his ideas. Adam Smith’s comments have been proffered as proof that the market, through the invisible hand of some equally invisible power, will automatically bring harmony and equality to society. The influence of this idea for modern economic theory has been enormous and the consequences on real life economics quite unsettling.
One of the problems, according to Norwegian economist Erik Reinert, is that the free-market idealists do not see any difference between the “real economy” and the “financial economy.” Ideally, the financial economy represents the capital that drives the real economy, while the real economy itself consists of a chaotic complexity of production, sales, and innovation of numerous goods and services.[5]
Today’s theories about globalization assume that all the various economic activities in the real economy result in economic harmony, more wealth that can be shared and utilized by everyone as long as the best economic conditions (free trade) and financial and government institutions are in place. But economic reality is not that simple.
To create more economic equality, there is a need to control and to redistribute the real economy with the help of government regulations and by controlling the size and power of corporations and the wealth of the rich. Here are the simple facts: both free- trade, especially between countries of unequal levels of wealth, industrialization, and economic self-interest, create inequality and often economic chaos.
In the 1840s there was a technological revolution based on the steam engine and the use of coal. In the 1990s there was a technological revolution based on the popularity of computers and the internet. Both eras inspired an almost religious faith in the rise of the stock market, and as long as people believed it worked, it did. But when reality set in, it became clear that the cause of real wealth is not speculation but the inventions that create real productivity and trade.
It was the steel industry, the steam engine, and the coal in England in the 1840s and the computer technology revolution in the USA in the 1990s that created the wealth, not the speculations these developments inspired at the stock market. The stock market frenzy in England led to the crash of1844, while the dollar frenzy on Wall Street and the artificial rise in the dot-com stock market values led to the stock market crash in 2001.
Similarly, the Asian economic crisis of 1997 occurred when too much of the investments into Asia, which resulted in the so-called Asian Economic Miracle, had been invested in capital rather than in economic productivity. This caused the Asian economies to amass enormous levels of foreign debt, which they were unable to repay, hence the collapse and the need for a $40 billion IMF bailout. When the market runs ahead of the economics of the real world, which it inevitably ends up doing, we eventually suffer the consequences: the economy comes crashing down.
In each period, the myth of the invisible hand was at the forefront of economics and the result was the same: theoretical stock market speculations eventually leading to stock market crashes. That is, the economic crashes of the 1840s and the Asian crisis of the 1990s, as well as the dot-com crisis of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008, were all caused by the commercial (or speculative) economy’s disconnect from the real economy.
Despite what Adam Smith and the other classical and neo-classical economists claim, left on its own, the market does not regulate the economy. Without institutional structures, governments, and laws, the economy will—due to the forces of self-interest and the myth of the invisible hand—become chaotic and self-destructive.
We can therefore conclude that the two theoretical foundations which underpin capitalism have not stood the test of time. Economic self-interest creates economic inequality, a divide of rich and poor, and the mythic dogma of the invisible hand leads to economic chaos as well as environmental destruction.
As we have seen throughout recent history, unregulated capitalism has not delivered on its promise—plenty for all. Well, it has delivered plenty, but not for everyone, more often only for the few. And, as the planet is facing a highly uncertain future, we also know that the myth of the invisible hand has been one of the main causes of pollution and resource depletion.
“It only requires that we each take control of our own credit and give it to those individuals and businesses that merit it and withhold it from those that do not.” – Thomas Greco
What is mutual credit?
It’s a means of trading, of exchange, that doesn’t require conventional money, doesn’t incur interest and doesn’t involve banks. It’s based on networks of businesses, traders and individuals who get to know and trust each other in a geographical area or business sector. Each member gets an account. They go into a directory so that suppliers and customers can find each other. When a purchase is made, the buyer’s account goes into debit, and the seller’s account goes into the same amount of credit. But these are just numbers in an account – information, not money that can be hoarded. There’s a limit to how far you can go into credit or debit – and that’s basically it.
Mutual credit is not barter. You don’t have to find someone who has what you want and wants what you have – you just get credit or debit in your account. It’s not a swap. You can then use your credits to trade with anyone else in the network.
Mutual credit involves a trusted network of traders; local currencies don’t.
Local currencies are bought and redeemed for conventional, bank-issued money; mutual credit isn’t.
Local currencies can still be hoarded and made scarce; mutual credit can’t – it’s just a means of exchange.
History
Mutual credit has a fine pedigree. Pre-money, villagers everywhere traded with each other in credit – you help fix my roof, I give you meat when I kill an animal; you help me harvest my crop, I help you bring in firewood – and so on. The accounting was done informally, in people’s heads, and no money changed hands.
In the 19th century, William Greene, Lysander Spooner and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon championed mutual credit and mutual banking in the US.
After the Second World War, at the Bretton Woods conference, John Maynard Keynes proposed a mutual credit scheme between nations – the International Clearing Union – but it was rejected.
On the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean, a group of arts graduates launched a mutual credit scheme called Sardex in 2009 – after the financial crash when money was very scarce. However, skills, tools and infrastructure were the same as before the crash, and so Sardex allowed businesses to trade without money. There are now 4000 businesses involved, with trades approaching 50 million euros per year. Here’s an FT article with more information about Sardex.
Grassroots Economics are building mutual credit networks in poor areas of cities in eastern and southern Africa.
What are the benefits of mutual credit?
For businesses
Mutual credit provides a parallel purchasing / accounting system that means businesses don’t have to rely entirely on pounds, dollars etc. This insures them against cashflow problems and wider economic downturns.
Networks of businesses give each other interest-free credit (credit is difficult for small businesses to obtain from banks, and expensive via credit cards).
The network provides new leads / customers for members.
Businesses can pay suppliers without money, and customers can buy from them even if they have no money.
Allows businesses to sell surplus stock / spare capacity.
For communities
Unlike conventional money, mutual credit is not an exchange medium that can be sucked out of communities and accumulated in tax havens.
Builds trusted networks of businesses, which can improve and increase community connections, interactions and trust.
A community with a strong mutual credit network will have more protection against wider economic crashes. Trade can continue even when money is scarce.
A local mutual credit network of committed traders can help start new small businesses, as gaps in the local economy are identified.
Conventional money is scarce; mutual credit is not – it’s available to any network members who want to trade with each other. To paraphrase Alan Watts: to say that it’s not possible to trade because of a lack of money is like saying that it’s not possible to build a house because of a lack of centimetres.
This means that mutual credit enables trade in areas of extreme poverty.
Mutual credit is a means of exchange, but not a store of value – it can’t be accumulated and hoarded by wealthy individuals.
Because there’s no interest to be paid, and no impetus to hoard, there is no ‘growth imperative’ that causes overconsumption and damages nature.
Provides a refreshing alternative to debt-issued, bank-controlled money.
In a well-run mutual credit system, inflation can’t happen.
Mutual credit has no divisive ideology attached. It’s just a practical tool that has multiple benefits, whatever your political position.
It doesn’t require any mining – of precious metals or of digital coins.
What can I do?
The Covid pandemic provided the stimulus to bring together a group of specialists who have formed Mutual Credit Services (MCS) (new website coming soon) with the aim of setting up mutual credit groups (or ‘clubs’). They realised that lockdowns will mean that small businesses may close because of lack of money in their communities, and so the ability to trade without money may be exactly the safety net that can help keep them alive. If you work in a small business or you’re a sole trader, you may be able to join a club, or get together a group of businesses to start one.
Clubs can be in a geographical area – so there could be a club in your town – or they can be clubs of interest, for example in a particular industry, with members in different parts of the country, or even in different countries. The most important thing is that these clubs contain businesses that already trade with each other, or that could switch suppliers and get new customers so that could happen. Active trading loops or circles need to exist, so that popular businesses don’t get stuck at their credit limit with no-one to buy from, or that other businesses end up at their debit limit with no-one to sell to. Trade needs to flow in loops around the community.
MCS are working to build a simple package that business networks can set up quickly and cheaply, but with something new – federatability – i.e. the ability for businesses in a particular club to trade seamlessly with businesses in any other club. As this network of clubs grows, existing mutual credit schemes will be able to join, and it can develop towards a global Credit Commons.
It’s early days, but things are happening. Funding has been secured by a new group called ‘Sustenance’, involving MCS and Food Plymouth to form a club amongst food businesses, including growers, shops, restaurants, charities etc. in Devon; and discussions are also taking place with existing business networks, local authorities and interested individuals around the country, including accountants, who have groups of clients that often trade with each other.
Have a look at some existing or forming (non-federatable) schemes such as the Open Credit Network or Simbi, and if you’re in Wales or the West Midlands, you can contact Celyn or Parity.
If you think you’d like to start a club, the first task is to identify the businesses that will form your group, and ensure that they do at least a small percentage of their trade with each other.
Contact MCS if you’re interested in hosting a club, or if you’d like to volunteer, or if you work for a food business in Devon, and you’d like to know more about the pilot project there.
If you know someone who might be interested, or if you want to help spread the word, please share this information.
This article was originally published on Lowimpact.org
Article by Sohail Inayatullah, Satya Tanner, Roar Bjonnes, Jose Ramos, and Kiran Ahmed
While there is considerable commentary on the current situation in Afghanistan the literature on the futures of the nation is sparse. We seek to address this by developing scenarios on the futures of Afghanistan. The first scenario derives from the work of Pitirim Sorokin and is titled, “the Endless Pendulum.” The second derives from the works of P.R Sarkar and is titled “Money Wins Over Text and Sword.” The third is from the historical narrative of the nation and is titled, “The Pawn that Roars.” The fourth is from the linear and cultural narrative of technological and informational globalization and titled, “Selfies and Amusement Cars.” The final is from a mixture of visions of progressive forces within and outside the Islamic world and is titled, “Localism, Soft Islam, and a Regional Confederation.” It is the most transformative, and we argue provides a vision out of the current abyss.
Our Context
While there is considerable commentary on the current politics in Afghanistan, this short piece focuses on alternative futures. The futures presented are not radical, rather they take a macrohistorical (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1997) – structural – view. There is certainly the danger of reification in this approach but by using different lenses we hope that we have allowed agency in this formulation. As others we have been stunned by the speed of the Taliban victory. We despair at the loss of women’s rights. We despair that Afghanis have been attacked by outsiders in this iteration since the Soviet invasion in 1979. We are surprised that USA and Taliban peace talks did not include the government of Afghanistan. We are despondent by the politics of opium, used by each regime as a weapon against others and the world. Ultimately, while we engage in alternative futures thinking we are transparent with our politics: we hope for a peaceful, inclusive, pluralistic, and prosperous future for the nation, particularly the rights of women, all tribes, and nature. We also write as concerned outsiders, none of us are from the nation. We hope that in the process of governing, the Taliban and/or subsequent governments create such a future
What follows are five futures of Afghanistan for the next thirty to forty years. The first scenario derives from the work of Pitirim Sorokin (1957). The second from the works of P.R Sarkar (1992). The third is from the historical narrative of the Afghanis. The fourth is from the linear and cultural narrative of technological and informational globalization. The final is from a mixture of visions of progressive forces within and outside the Islamic world, inspired by the work of Zia Sardar (Inayatullah and Boxwell, 2002), Johan Galtung (1980), and PROUT Economics (Sarkar, 1992: Inayatullah, 2017). It moves from history as defining to imagination and possibility as leading.
As we think about the future, along with the deep patterns there are numerous uncertainties and contradictions. First, are the role of external players, all seeking to influence the nation. Second, are the internal battles in the nation. This is being framed as the battle between the good and bad Taliban (this is partly about marketing) but equally important are the tensions between Kabul vs the regions; women and men; the Afghani and Pakistan Taliban; Sunni-Shia and Pashtuns, Hazaras and Uzbek and the role of Al-Qaeda and ISIS-K. Third, questions over the nature of the economy, can the nation can move beyond development assistance, terror funding, and poppy production – can new models of economy flourish that localize and are connected to the global economy? Fourth, will the Taliban become softer as they move from a military organization to dealing with the daily protocols of bureaucracy? And will external pressures ensure that they become good global citizens? These uncertainties are touched upon in the futures below, however, the scenarios are not derived through this approach. Rather, we use the grand patterns of change – deep structures – to map out alternative futures.
1. The Endless Pendulum.
In this first scenario, the long pendulum between secular (Kabul, modernist but generally focused on the approval of the West) and religious (rural, command and control, conservative, man over nature and women) continues. It goes in one direction, moves toward the principal of limits, and then returns. This approach is derived from Pitirim Sorokin. He argued that systems reinforce particular views of social reality (truth is ideational or truth is material, with the midpoint of integrated).
This is more than an Afghanistan issue as in the region from Iran to India to Myanmar, the right-wing rule (as well as throughout the Western world). Bangladesh appears to be the exception, so far. In this future, Afghanistan joins other conservative nations in the region. However, a swing is possible with youth and women leading a pluralistic cultural shift, that is, with external powers out, an endogenous development pattern can emerge that integrates the traditional and modern. As well, a swing back to the modernist is also possible if the Taliban cannot create a unity government, and if terrorist groups such as ISIL-K successfully undermine the Taliban (for being not pure enough, too international, and too soft). A swing is also possible given that the Taliban is foundationally in opposition to modern medicine (Guarascio, 2021). However, there are signs now that they are taking COVID-19 public health responses seriously (Kapur, 2021). What happens with the conflict with the Northern Alliance will be telling. On an optimistic note, the brother of the former President of Afghanistan, Hasmat Ghani suggests integration is possible (Latifi, 2021). He writes: ”It is important to bridge divides in Afghan society, which means the Taliban finding a way to accept modern amenities and advancements, and younger Afghans and opponents of the group being able to engage with the Taliban, whom many of them had likely never seen up close until last week.” “When you haven’t been around certain kinds of people, appearances can be deceiving or even frightening,” says Ghani.
This scenario is based on the macrohistorical work of Shrii P.R. Sarkar (Inayatullah, 2002). In Sarkar’s perspective, there are four types of power, with each taking turns establishing regimes of knowing. The workers give way to the warriors who give way to the intellectuals (inclusive and dogmatic) and then to the capitalists. Human history is a narrative of this eternal cycle. In Afghanistan the current phase in the cycle is run by intellectuals (conservative Islam) using warriors – the young Taliban to conquer others through ideas and military power. They use religious ideology and weapons to hold on to power. However, in the interaction with the world economy, to rise, to continue to gain power, they need to embrace capitalism or other historical systems of finance. This next stage is, as in India, the capitalist. To advance their economies they will need to accumulate wealth, play by global financial rules as we see in Qatar and the Emirates. The region retains its traditional warrior tribal structure along with Islam as its ideological framework, but it is capital that really runs the show.
In Afghanistan, the current debate remains ideological i.e., types of Islam and using ideas and weapons to challenge Western models of reality. However, as they become capitalist then they will need to ensure efficiency and productivity, thus, the rights of females and minorities will initially grow to give access to a larger labour market. Governance, predictability of law, and open markets will become far more important. Of course, given that the rest of the world is in an advanced stage of capitalism, Afghanistan could easily become a dumping ground of cheap products i.e., continued peripheralization with the resultant return of the old Taliban. As Ramos adds, hyper-capitalism dismembers traditional culture, so a backlash is inevitable. They will need to learn to regulate markets and police the internet to keep markets palatable to the old guard. Thus, the scenario could lead to a return of the past.
This is the scenario driven by geo-politics. The site of the great game – the endless battles between nations (Expansionist Russia and expansionist USA; Iran (Ghosh, 2021) and India (Kuchay, 2021); and Pakistan’s need for strategic territorial depth to counter India). Thus, Afghanistan is the pawn that roars, playing a role in ending the Soviet Union and certainly playing a role in ending Pax Americana. Is Pakistan next? Pakistan knowing that possibility is doing its best to control what it can. However, in Pakistan’s view, they are the lynchpins. Writes the former ISI director, General Hamid Gil: “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America. There will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.” (Leon, 2021). Afghanistan sensing, indeed, creating palpable danger, uses its narrative as the graveyard of empires to maintain national identity and unity. Challenges to the Taliban come from the usual suspects. However, as Robert Jervis wrote in 1978, “The expansion of [territorial]power usually brings with it an expansion of responsibilities and commitments; to meet them, still greater power is required”. ISIL-K while at one level challenges Taliban power at another level it conveniently creates a good-cop bad-cop backdrop to give them the power they need to be the “least bad” rulers. Patriarchy, militarism, and a hard Islam continues.
4. Selfies And Amusement Cars – The Rise Of The Good Taliban
Following on from viral videos of Taliban men enjoying amusement park rides after taking over Kabul, the good Taliban wins out. Thus, in this future while the Taliban remain deeply conservative i.e., with traditional tribal feudal rules dominant (one amusement park was burned down days after the Taliban played in it – (Baibhawi, 2021), they begin to integrate in surprising ways into the global cultural economy. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, suggests that we need to be innovative, as previous ways of engaging with the Taliban have failed (Associated Press, 2021). However, given the need for vaccinations, the globalization of news, the internet, the youthful demographics, financial capital, and survival based on adaptation, they join a changing world. Their skills at negotiation and influencing others over social media become more important than arms. Trump negotiates a hotel deal as payment for his part in the Doha negotiations. Step by step there are surprising changes. Generational change allows this shift, indeed, suggests Ramos, playfulness and irony create the door for new narratives. Of course, this is premised on a localized flourishing economy outside of opium and developmental assistance. The trillions of dollars from minerals (Horowitz, 2021) create an Islamic socialist state where basic needs are better met, as in Brunei, example. Thus, Afghanistan begins to prosper. The slowly enter the world of international statecraft and step by step open. By 2031, Afghani soap operas are the rage in the region. Amusement parks are rebuilt, a syncretic Islam emerges.
5. Localism, Soft Islam, And A Regional Confederation.
As Galtung (1997-1998) has argued, the battle is not between religions or civilizations but between the hard and soft in every religion/nation. In this future, the progressive soft dimensions of Islam lead and a regional confederation emerges. This reduces costs, develops markets, and is a way to counter the threats from Russia, China, and others. A universal basic income, maxi-mini economic structures, and Islamic cooperative platforms develop.
In this future, the first step is to create a new agricultural economy. Bjonnes writes: “The new Kabul government needs a constructive plan to help the local economy to grow from a poppy economy to an economy growing wool, meat, milk, vegetables, and fruit, all of which the country has an abundance of already.” However, the economy is nested in education, and thus, writes Bjonnes: “The education of girls and boys is critical. This can be done through a decentralized network of schools, so that most can remain in their local areas and be part of a more decentralized economy for the future. This means, according to Bjonnes, that the development of local, national, and global policies are aligned to:
Avoid leakage caused by product imports and extraction of wealth by non-local and international business interests.
Increase the speed of circulation of money between local producers, suppliers, institutions, and the public.
Provide more local jobs through increased local production and services.
Achieve better local economic stability as localities become more self-reliant.
Move from an economy based on corporate greed toward an economy of need, since local economies are much more effective at serving the local needs for housing, education, health care, food, and energy
With a more comprehensive plan, agro-industries can be developed to also export finished products, such as wool clothing, jams, canned and pickled foods, etc. There must also be implementable laws to ensure international corporations do not extract the nation’s mineral deposits for export only. It is the local economy that needs to be the main beneficiary. Ultimately, writes Bjonnes: “The nation’s challenge to create a more localized economy in Afghanistan is formidable, and this cannot take place only from a top-down level, it must grow from the grassroots up and involve support for local culture through a growing sense of cooperation between more self-sufficient regions and a stable nation. Along with the localization of the economy is the localization of knowledge, particularly gendered knowledge. Critical in this reconstruction are the female warriors of Islam, the forgotten Queens as Fatima Mernissi (1991, 1993) has argued. These include the fabled Malalai of Maiwand (Hamza, A, 2019) and latter-day leaders such as Fawzia Koofi, Zarifa Ghafari, or Salima Mazari. This becomes a counter narrative. Jose Ramos imagines this as a Gaia of civilizations, even going so far to see the development of an eco-cultural tourism in the nation in the medium term. Continuing the move way from realism and toward idealism, author Kiran Ahmed moves from geopolitics to imagined futures. She writes: ” Women from Pakistan who feel beleaguered by rising violence and slackness by the state join hands with women in Afghanistan. Access to the Internet and social media make these connections possible. Given the fear of backlash, they decide to co-create productions in the form of children’s stories. These seem innocuous enough, so they stay under the radar. However, their messages overturn the us/them dichotomy by espousing self-hoods that go beyond identities of nationhood, gender, and religion. It results in an expansion of consciousness and identity, towards a neo-humanist orientation that plugs the youth into the broader network of humanity. This narrative gradually gains momentum, creating a niche especially in the new generation of South Asians. States and reactionary forces realise their narrative of divisiveness is no longer ‘sellable’ to the youth and adapt, paving the way for regional cooperation.” As Ramos argues, this is a mode of being beyond the battle of who is the purist. Instead of primordial purity (as we are seeing in the USA and India), it is interconnectedness that is defining.
This last scenario is our preferred. However, we are unable to answer the question of which future will result. And by when. None of us know. The uncertainties – not just the macrohistorical structure – but the outcome of geopolitical battles between the nation and the external world; the religious battles within; the tension between the past and dramatic technological change; and between closed and open futures are far too great. However, the main intent of this essay is to loosen the straitjacket of history and imagine alternative futures. Afghanistan’s future is far from being written in stone or in blood. Agency in creating alternative futures is far more important than daily commentary on current politics.
The Authors
Professor Sohail Inayatullah is the UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies at the Sejahtera Centre for Sustainability and Technology, Malaysia.
Jose Ramos is the Editor of the Journal of Futures Studies, Taiwan
Roar Bjonnes is the co-founder of the Systems Change Alliance, London, UK.
Satya Tanner is a former Squadron Leader of the Royal Australian Airforce. She is both a leadership development consultant and currently works on offshore wind projects in the renewable energy industry in Denmark.
Kiran Ahmed is an Assistant Professor at the Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan
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Albert Einstein supposedly said that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This statement, made a long time before global warming, is acutely relevant today, not only in solving chronic health problems but also in solving systemic economic and environmental problems, including the climate crisis.
Today, innovating scientists and economic policy makers committed to maximizing profit margins promise that we can stop global warming with great inventions coupled with a free market to sell those great inventions. The electric vehicle (EV) is one such great invention. Just think Elon Musk and Tesla.
The reasoning goes something like this: The electric car is good for the environment. Electric batteries will eliminate car pollution, reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, and save the planet from global warming. All we need is enough cobalt and nickel to produce electric car batteries. We even know where we can mine those metals.
At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) between Hawaii and Mexico, lies enough of these minerals to fuel 4.8 billion electric cars. That’s twice as many cars as are driving on the roads today. Producing those cars would create a massive amount of economic growth while saving the environment at the same time.
The trillions of black nuggets that lie three miles deep in the dark, liquid womb of the CCZ contain enough nickel and cobalt to power our cell phones, computers and electric cars into the foreseeable future. That’s the technological and economic story told by the Metals Company, an Australian seabed mining operation with the capacity to vacuum those nuggets off the ocean floor. But not so fast.
“[Because] conservationists say doing so could unleash a cascading effect worse than the current trajectory of climate change,” writes Aryn Baker in Time magazine. Baker quotes Pippa Howard, director of the biodiversity-conservation organization Fauna and Flora International: “[These nodules have] living ecosystems on them. Taking those nodules and then using them to make batteries is like making cement out of coral reefs.”
If mining the ocean is too risky for the environment, what is the solution? We can continue to mine existing sources on land. By most estimates we have enough minerals in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Canada, Bolivia, and the Philippines, to name a few countries with large deposits of cobalt and nickel, to power the electric car revolution. Then there is Afghanistan, of course, with perhaps the largest, untapped deposit of them all.
But producing electric cars using cobalt and nickel-based batteries is not the only solution to our dependency on fossil fuels. We may not need to mine the ocean floor, after all. Electric vehicle (EV) producer Tesla, for example, has said that it plans to eliminate cobalt from its battery production in the next few years.
There are underlying challenges in all these approaches. One major issue is the sole focus on producing more EVs. This approach is an extension of the current growth-economy, which uses well intended environmental concerns to find quick techno-fixes while increasing profit margins for the investors. But as Einstein suggested, that’s using the same old thinking that drove us into this planetary ditch in the first place. So, if there are no quick fixes, then what is the solution?
The main problem, and thus the solution, lies imbedded in our economy, a system that relies on the speculative idea of infinite GNP growth. Growing ourselves out of the fossil fuel problem by producing more EVs is simply repeating the mistakes of the past. “The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we damage the environment,” writes Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in his manifesto, “Degrowth.”
“If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down,” writes Vaclav Smil, Czech-Canadian environmental scientist in “Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.” Economists, he continues, have not understood “the synergistic functioning of civilization and the biosphere,” yet they “maintain a monopoly on supplying their physically impossible narratives of continuing growth that guide decisions made by national governments and companies.”
In an essay written in 1930 entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that growth would finally slow down. By the year 2030, he projected, capital investment and technological progress would enable people to work as little as fifteen hours a week, spending the rest of their time on “non-economic purposes.” As our longing for more stuff faded, he predicted, we would recognize money “for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.”
Keynes was predicting the need for degrowth long before the movement became popular. He envisioned an economy in which people channel human energy into pursuits like arts, culture, leisure, sports and other activities high on the happiness curve but low on the economic growth curve. Today, degrowth economists are arguing that this will also save us from environmental peril. But this transformation has yet to happen.
If the solution to the crisis in transportation mainly lies in degrowth rather than maximum growth in the name of saving the environment, what are we to do? First, we need an interdisciplinary approach that involves better environmental policies, scientific innovations and cultural change, but we also need to fundamentally change the economic system itself.
The reforms Keynes suggested, mainly government regulation of markets, have not been enough to stem the pace of growth nor in reducing environmental destruction. Given the current situation, it is highly unlikely we will achieve Keynes’ degrowth utopia by 2030. We must dig deeper for more systemic solutions, especially economic ones. Green growth capitalism, we are learning, will likely never be green nor equitable enough. We need new policies, new economic designs.
Simply producing more EV vehicles is not a solution—it’s part of the problem. These policy suggestions include and go beyond EV production, focusing on both degrowth designs as well as long term economic systems change:
1 - Technological innovations: As Tesla has promised, new technological inventions can help reduce our dependence on cobalt and nickel for batteries in the future.
2 - Recycling: New and better methods for recycling the existing metals used in computers, cell phones, and cars need to be invented.
3 - Increased public EV transport: The public sector can help in reducing our reliance on private cars by creating an expanded network of public EV busses, trains, and trams.
4 - Increased use of bikes: In urban areas, the government need to invest in bike lanes to increase the ability to use bikes for pleasure rides and as transport to and from work.
5 - Car free cities: Existing cities can be turned into car free areas over time, with green spaces and fast rail systems. New cities must avoid car-congested city planning.
6 - Fast rail systems throughout the country: Instead of building more roads for cars, build more rails for public transport.
7 - Increased renewable energy plants: The energy grid in most industrialized countries is mostly fueled by nonrenewable sources such as coal and gas. Therefore, we also need to dramatically increase the production of energy from wind, solar, wave, geo-thermal, and other renewable sources.
8 - No-growth economics: Overhaul the economic system, starting with its two main premises of economic growth and deregulated markets.
9 - Ecological economics: Advance an economy that values reciprocity and ecology rather than profit and growth.
10 - Decentralized economics: Design an economy rooted in local development and sustainable use of local resources.
11 - Restructured economics: The growth-economy has been unable to balance the needs for environmental sustainability with economic equality. Restructure from a shareholder economy to a stakeholder economy based on three triers: keep private businesses on a small scale, turn corporations into worker-owned businesses, let the government manage infrastructure, such as large renewable energy plants, and safeguard the ecology of the commons.
12 - New measure of progress: Progress needs to be measured not just in terms of improved living standard but primarily in terms of sustainability and wellbeing.
The legendary environmentalist and founder of the Sierra Club, David Brower said, “All inventions are guilty until proven innocent.” Some car companies, and even the World Bank, have started to think along the same lines. In March 2021, “BMW and Volvo joined other businesses in a joint statement to say that they would not buy any metals produced from deep-sea mining before environmental risks are ‘comprehensively studied,’” wrote Aryn Baker in Time Magazine.
While car manufacturers are racing to maximize profit on the exploding EV market, they will ensure a bright future for the electric car, with or without deep sea mining. But the future of the planet will not be so bright unless we start planning, designing, and restructuring private car travel and public transportation in more interdisciplinary ways. Economic degrowth must also be an integral part of the solution. But we also need smarter, greener growth. We need more trains, bikes, recycling and renewable energy plants, as well as car free urban areas. And finally, as Keynes prophesized, we need more free time to enjoy those bike rides and car free cities.
The fact that the language of localism is being increasingly co-opted by authoritarians around the world is itself a sign of localism’s appeal. Left uprooted and adrift by the globalized economy, people are desperate for a sense of connection: to one another, to the living world, to a place and a culture that’s familiar to them. Demagogues from Donald Trump to Marie Le Pen to Jair Bolsonaro have capitalized on this longing and turned it towards nationalistic and bigoted ends.
We cannot eliminate the natural human desire for rootedness. Instead, we need to make a very clear distinction between localism and nationalism.
For most of our time on this planet, we evolved in intergenerational communities, closely bonded to the land, to the plants, to the animals around us. Instead of being dependent on distant, anonymous institutions and businesses, we depended on one another in human-scale structures and institutions. Localism taps into this deep need for community and a sense of place.
Nationalism, on the other hand, destroyed our sense of interdependence with human-scale community and the living environment. Boundaries that ignored natural bioregional and cultural connections were forged by elites to create new artificial identities that promoted centralized power and, in many cases, the war machine.
To restore localized structures, we will need to enact a series of systemic changes to the way the global economy functions. Doing this would reduce or eliminate psychological as well as economic insecurity, and greatly lessen the appeal of authoritarian leaders, who prey on these insecurities and use them to their advantage.
The faux-localism of “us vs. them,” I have found, only emerges after genuinely community-based localism has broken down. It is a pale shadow that can only thrive in the absence of the real thing. I spent decades of my life in Ladakh, India, and witnessed firsthand what happened when the region was opened up to the global economy. The economic base of society veered sharply from self-reliant agriculture to jobs in government and tourism. People were pulled away from decentralized villages into the capital. Buddhists and Muslims who had previously lived in an interdependent economy were now pitted against each other over scarce employment opportunities. At the same time, exposure to the Western consumer culture—mostly through advertising and tourism—led to feelings of cultural and individual inferiority. One of the results of this upheaval was the sudden emergence of violence and tension between Buddhists and Muslims which had never previously existed in Ladakh. Physical dislocation, the breakdown of community, and psychological as well as economic insecurity—all products of economic globalization—bred intolerance. These same factors are now causing similar problems around the world.
Because of this, big-picture activism will be necessary to plant the seeds and tend the shoots of a genuinely liberatory and regenerative localism. We need to raise awareness about the fact that governments are subsidizing and deregulating multinationals, while punishing individuals and place-based businesses within the national arena with heavy taxes and onerous regulations. We need to press for changes in taxes, subsidies, and regulations, in order to shift support from large and global businesses towards those small local and regional businesses that will form the bedrock of the economies of the future. At the same time, grassroots activism will be needed to help reconnect people with the communities from which they have become alienated, and to amplify the voices of indigenous peoples and others who have preserved the knowledge of how to live truly place-based lives.
Theories of Transformation
What I am building toward here is a two-pronged theory of change that I often describe with the words “resistance and renewal.” It is at once “top-down” and “bottom-up.” Resistance to corporate rule at the policy level will need to be coupled with the generation of alternatives from below, to fill the gaps left by the departing old system. This is not about ending global trade or industrial production, but for most of our needs, we will need to shift towards smaller scale and more localized structures: decentralized, community-controlled renewables for energy, revitalized local food systems to feed us, and robust local business environments to employ more people and keep wealth from draining out of our communities.
We can begin this process without national governments on our side. Indeed, it is unlikely that they will jump on this bandwagon before it has already become unstoppable. Instead, we should look to local governments for solidarity. Mayors and local councils are already realizing what higher levels of government have not: that economic and political self-determination go hand in hand. Community rights ordinances, public banks, innovative local food purchasing programs—there are countless models showing how local governments can support local resilience.
The key to integrating these two “prongs” of resistance and renewal lies therefore in building a sense of civic engagement beyond the ballot box. Consumer culture would have us think of ourselves as discrete individuals driven by self-interest, with no allegiance to anything larger than ourselves. But countless initiatives that are rebuilding community connections and deeper relationships to the natural world are already proving effective in reducing depression, anxiety, friction, and violence. And by revitalizing town squares and main streets and reinvigorating the public sphere, local empowerment gives the lie to the message of separation. We must leverage all the tools and passions of local activists, consumers, producers, and local enterprises, to show what is possible when we act in solidarity with our neighbors. We must demonstrate that local economies work, and work well, and then build from there.
Scaling Sideways and Up
The one global problem that looms above all others is, of course, climate change, so it makes sense to ask what the program of economic localization I have just outlined can offer on that front. For one thing, the volume of global trade—which currently accounts for 4% of the world’s carbon emissions and is set to rise to 17% by 2050 under current trade rules—would be curbed in an economically localized world. For another, moving from the industrialized, global food system to more localized, diversified food economies would not only allow soils to sequester carbon rather than eroding into the sea, it would also liberate us from the yoke of multinational corporations and massively reduce our dependence on plastic and fossil fuels. The creation of interdependent, local food economies would also mean that biodiversity—both wild and agricultural—would no longer be sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits. A further benefit is that both the scale and the impact of climate-driven migration would be blunted by the emergence of more resilient local economies across the global North and South. Even in the absence of formalized coordination among the world’s localization movements, the whole would be—and in many places, already is—greater than the sum of its parts.
There are a number of networks of localist movements already in existence, from La Via Campesina and the Global Ecovillage Network to permaculture and the Transition Network. In these alliances, channels of cross-initiative communication are being opened up, not just for the purpose of information-sharing, but also for direct collaboration—and, in some cases, for the hashing-out of differences of opinion regarding future steps. We will have to bear in mind the lessons learned through the processes of engagement within these networks if we wish to scale the localization movement “sideways and up” in any coordinated fashion—for example, to tackle the climate crisis or trade policy at the level of international institutions.
In the meantime, the seeds of our local future continue to be planted every day. My organization, Local Futures, has collected some of the most inspiring and successful examples in our Planet Local library. As the fault lines in the global economy continue to grow, and the desire for genuine human connection becomes ever more keenly felt, these existing initiatives will provide direction as well as inspiration, and stand as a compelling alternative to the faux-localist path of violence, fear, and hate.
In January 2020, I committed to living as locally as possible for one year in my hometown of Mountain View, California, and blog my experiences. I was highly motivated. I felt that our society was drifting toward disaster and that our toxic media environment was speeding that drift. I had developed a mild case of anxiety, something completely new to me. I thought that time spent on local, grassroots action would be a healthy replacement for a heavy online media habit and an antidote for my growing pessimism. I promised to explore living locally on three levels — at the personal, neighborhood, and city-level — and created a laundry list of things to try in each category.
My plans went out the window too. The demands of the pandemic and my interaction with neighbors took things in unexpected yet deeply rewarding directions.
For instance, the Cool Block program spawned multiple, parallel neighborhood projects including a major irrigation system overhaul, regular neighborhood grounds maintenance workdays, a re-negotiated grounds maintenance contract, huge exchanges of goods and ideas facilitated by our new neighborhood Slack channel, and a lot of pandemic-related mutual aid.
I’ve never belonged to such an active neighborhood. The Cool Block program I launched was the catalyst, but most of this activity was led by my neighbors and I just joined in.
Last year changed me, perhaps dramatically. While I’m still digesting it, one feeling stands out. I feel deeply humbled. I feel humbled by learning how much I need to learn to be a good citizen, how much my success depended on my awesome neighbors, by the enormity of the system change we must undertake, by others who know much more about local living, by how much I love and depend on my family, and by how powerfully fate can intervene. Like many, my 2020 was deeply marred by disaster and loss.
What did I learn from such a momentous year? I learned many things. Below are the top 10 lessons learned about local change-making in 2020. Some of these lessons aren’t surprising, but the often painful first-hand experience increased my conviction of long-held hunches.
We have the most power to make change at the local scale, but Americans only spend about 15 minutes per day on public life total. Little change is possible with such a paltry time commitment. This lesson was hammered home because local life was surprisingly demanding. To change anything, you first need to learn the context including often mind-numbing technical detail. For instance, our neighborhood Cool Block climate change program required us to master a lot of information to make the recommended changes. This was reinforced when repairing our community irrigation system and reviewing city government plans for a car-free downtown Mountain View. To engage effectively, I needed to gain a much wider range of knowledge at a much deeper level than I expected. That takes a lot of time, but learning is just the start. Then the actual work begins. After this experience, I estimate that at least 20% of a local population (i.e., a critical mass) needs to spend two hours a day on public life to have a chance at making the needed changes our age of crisis demands.
2. The promise of replacing screen time with public time
You might be asking, where am I going to get two hours a day for public life? Well, if you’re like the average American, you can carve it out of the three hours a day spent on screen time. Why is this important beyond the obvious? Sociologist Robert Putnam’s famous 2000 book, “Bowling Alone,” fingered the prime culprit in what he saw as a dangerous erosion of social capital in America — TV. Now, twenty years later, we’re surrounded by screens and carry one with us 24/7. In fact, our main interface is screens, not each other. We’re now living with the results. Social capital has been shredded negatively impacting nearly all aspects of life. That’s to be expected as social capital is an enabler of all human activity. A well-functioning society is not possible without such things as social connectedness, trust, and reciprocity — the basic components of social capital. Screen time isn’t the only culprit, but reducing it is something each of us can do to reclaim time for public life.
3. Scheduling helped my lifestyle changes stick
Reducing screen time free up a lot of time, but I didn’t know how to organize it at first. I floundered. Cool Block provided some structure, but most of my Cool Block work happened outside of our scheduled meetings. I also started participating in irregularly scheduled neighborhood workdays. This was too chaotic, so I schedule local activities one hour after work and two hours on Saturday mornings. After I did this, my local life manifested in a much more tangible way. It felt like a true lifestyle change. The bonus was that once I routinized my engagement, I began spending even more time on local year stuff and felt less anxious. As my friend Harald Katzmair once told me, ritual makes time habitable.
4. Public life must become central
The changes I made in 2020 got me thinking about how culture shapes our choices. The changes I made weren’t easy. I swam against the tide. It was exhausting. Why was it so hard to live in a different way? I came to see that we need to radically rethink democracy with the goal to make it central to our way of life. Over the last forty years, the U.S. and other powerful countries have centered private enterprise, individualism, consumption, entertainment, and small government. In other words, almost everything but public life. To save ourselves, we need to flip the script and center democracy, participation, mutual aid, rule of law, and the common good in everyday life. We need to make these central to our way of life, not just abstract ideals or occasional side projects. Otherwise, we won’t have the civic muscles to meet the existential crises we face today.
5. Peer support and social infrastructure makes local living easier
While my local year forced me to swim against the tide, everything significant I accomplished was accomplished with others. It takes a village, as they say. This drove home the lesson that if you want to live in a certain way, it’s extremely helpful to be part of a community of practice. Similarly, if you want to center public life, then it helps to belong to a group that enacts that vision in everyday life.
While being part of a community of practice helps, it’s just part of the solution. The Freakonomics podcast episode, “How to Launch a Behavior-Change Revolution,” documents a telling encounter between Daniel Kahneman and a group of psychologists planning society-scale behavior change initiatives. Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in behavioral economics, is invited to advise the group. He bursts everyone’s bubble by saying the best way to change behavior, “…is almost always by controlling the individual’s environment, broadly speaking, by making it easier.” In other words, it’s more effective to create an environment that naturally encourages the behavior than to push people to do it. What’s the point in advocating for change if the environment blocks it? We need more social infrastructure to support more local, civically engaged lives.
6. The ability to live well locally isn’t evenly distributed
It took me a while to realize this, but my choice to go local was privileged. While I faced obstacles, I also had many advantages. My area has a vibrant main street, a good local food system, accessible public transportation, a beautiful library, solid infrastructure, and more. My race and class advantaged me. As another example, I could afford to buy more expensive local food. Bottom line, my choice to go local was a luxury. In other communities, especially BIPOC communities, residents often don’t have that choice. They’re trapped in place by poverty and discrimination. That’s often a life-threatening or potential-stunting reality. We need to make high-quality local living available to everyone to beat wealth inequality, climate change, and other critical challenges. As a start, it’s essential to confront the legacy and reverse the impacts of racist land use and housing policy.
7. Civic life is demanding, but deeply rewarding
Living local full tilt was hard. I often felt overwhelmed. Many times I actually didn’t know what to do. In those cases, managing uncertainty was nearly as taxing as the work itself. It was a messy, exhausting business. Civic life isn’t for the faint of heart or those with little patience or a love of convenience. However, it was deeply satisfying in ways that are central to human well-being. My life gained in purpose and meaning. Participation gave me a greater sense of security and control. I also benefited from increased social connectedness and access to resources. I just felt better about myself and the world. It definitely helped me cope with a year filled with disaster, stress, and loss. However, many of the benefits aren’t immediate. Civic engagement takes a lot of upfront effort but has a big, long-term payoff. Those seeking instant gratification will be greatly disappointed!
8. There’s a huge pent up demand for local action, but it needs to be tapped
If my experience is any guide, then there’s a huge pent up demand for local civic action. I was truly stunned by how active my neighbors became once we set up the Cool Block program and the related Slack channel. The activity literally gushed when the pandemic hit. While some of the activity was pandemic related, most of it wasn’t. I doubt this would’ve happened if there wasn’t a trusted program to catalyze and channel action. Cool Block met the measure. It was a proven program that was sponsored by the city and run by us.
9. Collective action builds hope
I took many small steps with neighbors in 2020. The small steps eventually added up to unexpectedly big changes in our neighborhood. This expanded my sense of possibility, built my confidence, and gave me hope. I went from having a stunted vision of what I could achieve with my neighbors to seeing many exciting possibilities. I had thought that hope was something that you decided to have, that you willed into existence. I now believe it’s something you can deliberately build through collective action. I learned that hope built on the foundation of shared success, no matter the size, is a powerful thing.
10. You protect what you know and love
I feel like a fool that there were so many wondrous things right under my nose that I paid little attention to, especially my neighbors. Thankfully, I got to know them like never before. I also learned more about the land I live on, the species of trees in our neighborhood, countless details about our irrigation system, how much water we use annually, the number of homes in our complex, and more. I also learned about the history, culture, and foodways of our region. It’s a rich (and delicious!) legacy. Many of the things I learned are so basic I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know them before. This suggests to me how drastically I misallocated my attention before 2020. I knew more about global brands, internet memes, and celebrities than my immediate surroundings. This was simply a function of my choice to spend a lot of time online. No surprise, getting to know my hometown led me to become more fond of it. That’s not an unimportant detail as environmentalists have long known that people only protect what they know and love. I hadn’t thought of this as a local social change strategy, but now it’ll be top of mind as I continue working with neighbors to improve the place we share.
This article first appeared in Yes! magazine, June 2021.
I first met Indigenous wisdom keepers as a child. After days of off-road driving to the Gran Sabana in Venezuela, we had arrived at the ancestral lands of the Pemón people, where they still lived. “Go fill up your thermoses with water from the river,” my father said. As I got out of the car with my round, red canteen strapped over my shoulder, I knew that I wanted to be a part of whatever was going on at that river.
This is my first memory of meeting those who treated the river as a respected being. At that time, I didn’t know the mental, emotional, and physical depth of this connection with the river. I didn’t know of their spiritual relationship with Tuwenkaron, the name the Pemón gave to the feminine sort of energy they experienced from the river. I just knew that I felt her too as I drank her exquisite water, and that engaging with her in this way made simple sense to me as a child.
Perhaps it was because in my beautiful home city of Caracas, 700 miles to the northwest, the river was regarded (and tragically still is) as a full-on dump, making me feel like we were living in a house with a sick relative that the adults seemed to be ignoring. And so, since that time, I have wanted to stay close to those who remembered ancestral ways of being in meaningful relationship with the rivers, the mountains, and the forests—people we know as Indigenous wisdom keepers.
Time passed, and I welcomed my daughter into this world and raised her in the ancestral lands of the Ohlone and Coastal Miwok people, now known as the San Francisco Bay Area. Naturally, I wanted to offer her what my parents had given me—an opportunity to be guided first-hand by Native knowledge holders. As a filmmaker, I started to envision a project where I would ask a young Native person if they might share one word from their ancestral language—a word that changed their life and a word they could offer to the next generation as medicine to heal our relationship with the Earth.
The resulting short film, One Word Sawalmem, has won a number of awards and was selected for 40+ festivals in 15 countries. It was screened at the Smithsonian, at UNESCO conferences, at dozens of community and educational events, and is scheduled to be broadcast on PBS. These are seven lessons that I learned and was reminded of through the experience of co-directing the film with Michael “Pom” Preston of the Winnemem Wintu tribe of Mount Shasta, California.
1. WISDOM. Indigenous wisdom is human wisdom, which has been miraculously preserved by Native people.
For thousands of years, as people indigenous to the Earth, we all prioritized a relationship with nature, grounded in kinship, centered around reciprocity, and infused with reverence. However, when faced with the forces that, to this day, threaten to destroy this way of life, Indigenous wisdom keepers have been the ones who continue to preserve this treasure of humanity against unthinkable odds. The people most capable of guiding us through the transition from exploitation to regeneration are the experts who have preserved the lineage of living respectfully with the Earth. By deeply appreciating and enthusiastically supporting the leadership of Indigenous wisdom keepers, we can all get back to remembering a way of life that any child knows is right, a way of life that can take us all into a future beyond our wildest dreams.
2. LAND. Environmental resilience requires Indigenous land to be returned in a significant way.
The treasured Traditional Ecological Knowledge of how to live in good relationship with the Earth is not learned through books. It’s transmitted through first-hand, place-based experiential learning, as Pom’s tribe has done across generations. Just like you wouldn’t be able to swim in the ocean after reading books on how to swim, we cannot give ourselves our best chance for environmental resilience without preserving Indigenous science. This is why U.N. climate scientists have affirmed that giving back the land is one of the most important things we can be doing right now to overcome the climate crisis. Even though Indigenous people now comprise less than 5% of the world’s population, they are protecting 80% of global biodiversity. The more land Native knowledge holders steward, the better off everyone will be.
3. LANGUAGE. Preserving native languages will give us the direction we need for renewal and restoration.
Our film revolves around one word: Sawalmem, roughly meaning “sacred water.” This word is common to many Indigenous languages but is untranslatable to the dominant colonial ones. As the word for “sacred water” has been lost, so has our regard for our relationship with and the overall health of the water. Preserving Indigenous languages is not about preserving thousands of ways of saying “banana.” Preserving the 7,000 Indigenous languages which are now endangered is about rescuing our place-based instructions and understanding for how to survive our current crisis and how to thrive. UNESCO recently declared the entire next decade to be dedicated to Indigenous languages, in acknowledgment of the depth of wisdom held in the untranslatable words of these languages. In these ancient words, we have the opportunity to offer our children the vocabulary of our future.
4. SPIRITUALITY. Remembering life-centered ways calls for spiritual commitment.
Our current environmental crisis is the result of misguided policy, economics, education, and commerce, but at its core, it is a spiritual crisis. As such, it requires us to recognize ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. It means being in relationship with nature, which requires the acknowledgment of the natural world consisting of beings rather than things to be consumed. It means that in all our decisions, we consider the well-being of all humans and the more-than-human world for generations to come. It means rematriation, which Indigenous people around the world are urgently calling for: rendering the Earth sacred again. Spiritual awareness is the often unsung and dismissed form of intelligence, which is meant to complement our rational minds. Spiritual commitment requires humility to learn not only about our animal and plant and mineral neighbors on this Earth, but to learn from them as our elder teachers.
5. FRIENDSHIP. Developing authentic, supportive relationships can’t be rushed.
Any friendship takes time to develop, especially when the pain from countless cumulative injustices is real and raw. Well-meaning people might try to discourage you, as they tried with me, but if you are clear on your intentions, you can go into it prepared to be extra patient, quiet, humble, curious, and open. Expect to make mistakes and be ready to do the work to recover. One day as I unsuccessfully tried to keep a production day “on schedule,” I finally realized that my best bet was simply to turn the cameras off and go see whether anyone needed help in the camp kitchen. Those hours of carrot-peeling and potato-chopping with the community helped me get into a much more fruitful rhythm of friendship-building and did more for “allyship” than any filmmaking skill I could have offered that day.
6. ALIGNMENT. The deeper our relationship with nature, the more fulfilled we are with less.
Nature is our home. More than that, nature is part of us. So by enclosing ourselves indoors (90% of the time, on average, in the U.S.) we experience the painful effects of biological homelessness. We then try to fill that numbing void by overworking, overconsuming, and overmedicating. This in turn fuels the vicious cycle that results in society’s biggest problems, from the environmental crisis, to poverty, to our health emergency, to violence, and beyond. As we restore a nature-centered life, we reverse the negative feedback loop. We experience more regular wonder and awe. We naturally become happier, more deeply satisfied with less, and our actions become more aligned to our well-being and to the Earth’s.
7. HUMANIZATION. Uplifting storytelling is at the core of overcoming invisibility.
In the U.S., Native people are now so underrepresented in education, media, business, and policy that the extreme stereotype they are facing is known as invisibility. Storytelling is at the core of unraveling this dehumanization. But if the stories focus primarily on Indigenous victimhood, they do little to dissipate the stereotypes. We have an opportunity and urgency to tell more stories of Indigenous contributions, especially within a modern-day context. In the film, Pom shares his story of injustice, while at the same time emphasizing his perspective of the spiritual path towards healing—within ourselves, with each other, and with the Earth.
When I first met Pom, I informally shared my film idea with him. His response was simple and calm: “I know my word.” Later he would explain that it was as if he had been expecting me. He had a sense that we were meant to work together. This set the tone for how we would co-direct. Pom had complete authorship and creative control of the film. I offered my filmmaking skills in service of him being able to express himself directly. This model of cooperation is something that can be applied to any other skill area—from architecture, to agriculture, to medicine-making, to river restoration, and fire literacy—to amplify Indigenous voices, so that we can support each other more effectively in building a future that works for all of us, for generations to come.
Ultimately, this friendship with Pom, our collaboration on One Word Sawalmen, and the enthusiastic reception of the film have given me a lived sense of what Chief Caleen Sisk, Pom’s mother and the current Winnemem Wintu tribal chief, likes to say: “We need to get ready for good things coming.”
What effect do natural and other disasters have on the underlying culture of a community? This was the driving question that led to the development of Shareable’s The Response project three years ago.
On the heels of the release of “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” we began thinking more about how the climate crisis (and the increasing barrage of disasters it was exacerbating) would affect the sharing initiatives and policies we outlined in the book — and on shareable.net in general.
Through two seasons of The Response podcast, the publishing of a book, and the production of our first film we’re learning that disasters bring out the best in people (aka pro-social behavior) and that, more often than not, the shared experience of a crisis strengthens community ties in the short and long term. When a disaster occurs, most people experience what Scott Crow refers to as the emergency heart, the thing that drives you towards passion and compassion about the world; the spark that compels you to take action when you see a disaster or when you see the vulnerable people or communities around you being negatively impacted.
And it’s a good thing that this is our natural reaction to a crisis, because all evidence points to the amount and severity of disruptions intensifying over the next few years.
Right now, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, this is more evident than ever. The sheer number of local support groups, mobile health clinics, and rent strike initiatives, that have emerged to fill the needs of communities is incredibly encouraging. The concept of mutual aid has suddenly become mainstream.
Over the course of our work on The Response, we’ve documented stories from Occupy Sandy in NYC, UndocuFund in Northern California, Verificado19S in Mexico City, Centros de Apoyo Mutuos (mutual aid centers) in Puerto Rico, the reimagining of the town of Onagawa in Japan, the fight for justice following the Grenfell Tower fire in London, and so many more.
Here are 20 lessons from The Response that have emerged so far:
1 - Disasters bring out all emotions (and that’s ok).
It is important to assume the best of intentions of others and to give ourselves the freedom to experience a wave of emotions (even long after the physical signs of a crisis have passed).
2 - The depth and breadth of our relationships (social ties) have proven to not only assist relief efforts but often make the difference between life and death.
In Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami or in Chicago during the heatwave in 1995, research has shown that communities with strong social networks have lower fatalities from disasters and bounce back better than those with weak social networks.
3 - Misinformation will always spread faster during times of chaos and confusion, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to stop it from doing so.
4 - Work with what you have.
The majority of the community-led disaster response and recovery efforts we’ve investigated have been incredibly effective using basic tools with very little funding. Look no further than Verificado19S to see what spreadsheets, maps, and a text group can accomplish. This effort also provides a great example of how to combat misinformation (see #3).
5 - What happens on the community level can have a positive influence on official policy both during and after the fact.
Verificado19S is a clear example of this as well. At a certain point in the response to the Pueblo Earthquake, police began contacting Verificado volunteers to find out where they should dispatch resources. After the initial recovery from the earthquake passed, volunteers regrouped to reflect. They compiled their best practices which were then turned into a set of protocols that have been adopted by almost 60 institutions. Listen to this episode of The Response podcast to learn more about Verificado19S.
6 - Disasters provide the space for new unlikely relationships to form.
In the first episode of The Response podcast, we heard an incredible story from NYC after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. After a mutual aid initiative began pumping out flooded basements in the Rockaways neighborhood, one woman’s perception about other people was changed forever: “A month before the storm if I would have seen people looking like you, I wouldn’t have given them directions for the train. But then a month after the storm I’d given you keys to my house,” she said. Listen to this episode of The Response podcast to learn more about Occupy Sandy.
7 - Disasters exacerbate existing inequalities often down race and class lines.
The impact of disasters is often strongly influenced by structural issues that already existed in the affected areas. (see #8)
8 - Those who are undocumented, nomadic, migrants, refugees, or otherwise displaced peoples often don’t receive the support they need.
9 - Disasters are getting worse and more frequent.
Since 1980, there has been an average of six major disasters in the United States every year (causing at least $1 billion in damages annually) according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In recent years that number has shot way up. In 2017 alone, 16 climate-fueled disasters led to thousands of deaths and $300 billion worth of damage. And that’s just in the U.S. That year, the world also experienced record-breaking flooding in Bangladesh, historic cyclones in Mozambique, and deadly landslides in Colombia.
10 - Millions of people are being displaced by climate-fueled disasters every year.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, over 17 million people were displaced by disasters globally in 2018. For context that’s roughly one and a half times the amount of displacements caused by conflicts and violence during the same time period.
11 - Governments are now openly admitting that they don’t have the capacity to save the day (in many cases).
If this wasn’t clear enough already, a report published by FEMA in 2018 acknowledged its inadequate response to Hurricane Maria while basically informing Puerto Ricans to expect very few improvements moving forward. The increased severity and occurrences of natural hazards coupled with a mix of austerity measures and state negligence have brought us to this point. To paraphrase UC Davis professor Keith Taylor, when markets and governments fail, we have us.
12 - Since government agencies can’t be relied upon, they should follow the leadership of community-led responses, whenever possible.
“Nothing for us without us” has been used to communicate the demand that no service or policy should be forced upon traditionally marginalized groups without the members of those groups affected by that policy participating from the beginning. This should also be the case during disasters. Impacted communities have the greatest understanding of what is needed and where it should go.
13 - Those who have experienced disaster will undoubtedly find a new sense of empathy for anyone else who experiences one in the future.
Allen Myers, a community organizer and filmmaker, whose family home was destroyed by the Camp Fire in Paradise California, traveled to Onagawa, Japan in 2019 to learn about how that city rebuilt after a devastating earthquake. Upon meeting community organizers and government officials, “there was this knowing,” he describes. “It was like we knew each other on a deeper level because of the experiences and the decisions that we were having to make. In leaving each conversation, there would just be a moment… and they would either say it or you would see it in their expressions, but you know, [there would be a moment] of support and understanding and saying, ‘you got this. I know it’s a long road ahead of you, but you can do this.’” Listen to this episode of The Response podcast to learn more about Paradise and Onagawa.
14 - The psychological trauma from disasters can last a long time after the physical effects of disasters are less visible.
15 - During and after a crisis, disaster capitalists will promote their self-serving agendas as a necessary step towards recovery while opening up new market opportunities.
The same reasons that make disasters ripe for profiteers to assert their own agendas, also provide a counter opportunity to build/take back public power. Things that never seemed possible before like guaranteed housing, food, and Universal Basic Income all of the sudden become possible. In Onagawa, Japan the residents were able to thoughtfully transform their experience from a catastrophic triple disaster to a once in a thousand-year opportunity. One path forward is through a Just Recovery as articulated by Movement Generation. The five core principles of a Just Recovery offer a path forward towards racial, economic, and environmental justice. These principles are root cause remedies, revolutionary self-governance, rights-based organizing, reparations, and ecological restoration for resilience. Listen to this episode of The Response podcast to learn about how Puerto Ricans are building popular power.
17 - The most effective time to build collective resilience is before a disaster happens in the first place.
Imagine if every community had a resilience hub? A space that was resilient unto itself (with backup power, food, water, shelter, sanitation), served as a regenerative model (utilizing permaculture, soil building, etc.), and actively worked to increase the overall resilience surrounding communities. The best place to start might be to add new resources and services to existing community spaces like schools, places of worship, community gardens, etc. Download a free process guide from Shareable to get started now.
18 - There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.
Much of the secondary harm that occurs as a result of disasters is driven by the fear of how others will react during a crisis. Look no further than the extrajudicial killings of people of color by the police and, mostly white, vigilantes after Hurricane Katrina. We desperately need a new narrative and compelling storytelling in the coverage of disasters in the news.
19 - The best technology we can deploy in the wake of a disaster might just be a kind of social technology.
Closely knit, organized, and empowered communities are more resilient before, during, and after catastrophes. They’re also better equipped to demand the resources they need to not only survive those acute disasters but to rebuild on a more just and sustainable basis.
20 - Disasters bring out the best in people (most of the time).
Look no further than the growing mutual aid movement that has gone mainstream in the past month. Thousands of people have found a new sense of place through working together with others to make sure that the needs of their community are being met during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This list just barely begins to scratch the surface of what we’ve learned from our coverage of disasters. Every story we have heard, every initiative we’ve investigated has revealed new insights into the human condition and the state of the world.
Let us know if there are other insights into disasters that you feel like should be included in this list by sending an email to [email protected] or share your own story of community-led disaster response or collective resilience initiative here.
If you would like to go deeper, check out all of our previous podcast episodes, book, and film. And finally, in the words of two time-traveling philosopher musicians, “be excellent to each other.”
This article originally appeared in Kosmos Journal, Summer 2021
Writing these lines at this point in our human journey has to be an exercise in humility. The theme of this issue is ‘Realigning with Earth Wisdom’. How would a white, middle-aged, academically over-educated male have something to say about that? Given the centuries of violation this particular demographic has enacted upon the community of life, is it even appropriate to accept this invitation?
I write these lines from relative comfort at a time when many are suffering the degenerative effects of the Western narrative of separation that has objectified life, disrespected fellow humans on the basis of gender or ethnicity, and othered nature for centuries. For too long have we disregarded Earth Wisdom as it has been held in custody by our elder brothers and sisters — the indigenous people of Africa, Australia, Asia, the Americas and Europe.
In response to the now strikingly evident destruction and inequality the narrative of separation has wrought, we have seen the interest in regenerative development and regenerative cultures grow rapidly in recent years. It is imperative to highlight that regeneration is an inherent pattern of life itself and that all our distant common ancestors understood life as a regenerative community of which we are members, not masters.
Our species evolved primarily through collaboration and in co-evolving mutuality within the ecosystems we inhabited. For 98% of our common journey as hominids we have lived in reciprocal custodianship within the places and bioregions we called home. From the forests of Colombia and Peru to the Pacific NorthWest and Australia, evidence is mounting that human inhabitants co-created and nurtured these peak ecosystems to higher diversity, abundance and bio-productivity over many millennia.
It is imperative to highlight that regeneration is an inherent pattern of life itself and that all our distant common ancestors understood life as a regenerative community of which we are members, not masters.
We are all indigenous to life as a planetary process. The central lesson of many Earth wisdom traditions is about alignment with life as a process, living in right relationship and letting life’s regenerative patterns flow through us. In this way of being we understand ourselves not as owners but rather as expressions of place. The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. The land and the sea will be there long after we return to the soil as compost for new life.
Aligning with Earth wisdom is about living in right relationship. We are relational beings. Each one of us is unique and a nexus of intimate reciprocity within life’s regenerative community. To align with Earth wisdom we have to not just learn from but as nature. Janine Benyus elegantly distilled the central lesson of biomimicry to one sentence: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.”
Aslife, how do we let Earth wisdom flow through us as we set out to create conditions conducive not just for all of humanity but for all of life?
The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. The land and the sea will be there long after we return to the soil as compost for new life.
Clearly our more recent record as a species seems to suggest we have forgotten the vital significance of this question. The effects of our actions — more truthfully the actions of a relatively small proportion of humanity — have pushed all of humanity into a species level ‘rite of passage’. We are facing the real and present danger of an immature end of our species as part of the current mass extinction event. Will we step into mature membership in the community of life and become a regenerative rather than degenerative presence on Earth in time to manifest a different future?
To co-create a regenerative future based on diverse regenerative cultures as elegant expressions of the bio-cultural uniqueness of the places they inhabit we require changes in doing, being and thinking. We need a new and very ancient worldview. Our organising ideas and culturally dominant narratives have cut the process of life into individuals and species. This way of seeing has predisposed us to focus on competition, scarcity, and mortality.
Today, we can draw on both ancient indigenous wisdom and cutting edge science to understand life as a syntropic force in the universe — creating conditions conducive to life through collaborative abundance. Life is a planetary process! As Gregory Bateson put it in his 1970 essay ‘On form, substance and difference’: “the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.”
Conscious participation in the evolutionary process of life invites us to hold the seeming paradox of existence as simultaneously part and whole. From a relational participatory perspective all being takes place in the polarity between ‘being for oneself’ and ‘being as reciprocal expression of the whole’. We are both at once. As Thích Nhất Hạnh invited us to understand by introducing the word interbeing to the West: “To be is to interbe. You cannot be by yourself alone.”
The Earth Wisdom of the Navajo is Hózhóogo Naasháa Doo or ‘walk in beauty’. Their advice: ‘if you walk into the future walk in beauty’. The way to walk in beauty is to ‘witness the One-in-All and the All-in-One’.
Regeneration is about more than just ‘net positive impact’ or ‘doing good’. It is about evolving the capacity to manifest the unique and irreplaceable gift of every person, community and place in service to the life-regenerating context in which we are all embedded.
Living regeneratively is living as a conscious expression of and participant in the wider nested complexity in which the local, regional and global are dynamically co-present. These nested scales are united through fast and slow cycles of collapse of structures and patterns that no longer serve, transformative innovation, and temporary consolidation of new patterns into a dynamically and constantly transforming whole. As such, regeneration as a process is intimately linked with the evolutionary and developmental impulse of life itself.
Once we learn to understand health and resilience not as static states to ‘bounce back’ to, but as dynamic capacities to transform and express vitality in the face of shifting context, we can also see how working regeneratively is about systemic healing and building resilient communities capable of anticipating and transforming environmental or social change.
Regeneration is about more than just ‘net positive impact’ or ‘doing good’. It is about evolving the capacity to manifest the unique and irreplaceable gift of every person, community and place in service to the life-regenerating context in which we are all embedded.
Life is a regenerative community at nested scales: from the community of organelles that form all nucleated cells, to the ecosystems of human, bacterial and fungal cells that make up the regenerative community you and I are referring to as ‘our body’, to the communities of species that create the functional diversity of abundant and highly bio-productive ecosystems, all the way to the physiology of a living planet with marine and terrestrial ecosystems contributing to a continuously evolving life support system that regulates planetary climate patterns and atmospheric composition to make them conducive to life.
The future potential of the present moment is to come home to our bodies, our communities, our places and bioregions now — not sometime after a long ‘transition’ or a ‘great turning’.
Realigning with Earth’s wisdom is about re-inhabiting this regenerative community more consciously again and humbly returning to our role as healers within that nested regenerative community of life. Our future will change depending on the degree to which each and every one of us manages to re-inhabit this community.
As the poet Gary Snyder suggested in 1976: “Those who envision a possible future planet on which we continue […], and where we live by the green and the sun, have no choice but to bring whatever science, imagination, strength, and political finesse they have to the support of the inhabitory people — natives and peasants of the world. In making common cause with them, we become ‘reinhabitory’.”
Re-inhabitation in the context of the bio-geo-physical reality of the places and bioregions we inhabit is a change in doing and how we relate to the bioregions as we try to meet human needs in ways that regenerate healthy ecosystems functions, thriving communities and vibrant economies — place by place.
Re-inhabitation is also active in the terrain of consciousness, as we learn to re-perceive ourselves as processes of becoming — processes that are in themselves dynamic expressions of the places, communities and ecosystems that bring us forth. As such, to re-inhabit is a change of being. The future potential of the present moment is to come home to our bodies, our communities, our places and bioregions now — not sometime after a long ‘transition’ or a ‘great turning’.
It seems our current theory of change has us stuck in discussing strategies within a problem-solving mindset that predisposes us towards abstraction and the habit of “solving” problems in isolation from each other and from the places where we propose to implement “solutions”.
What if we focused on being differently now? What if we re-perceived who we are and identified more with life as a planetary process of interbeing? What if we aimed for being in right relationship to self, community and life? What if we focused on our individual and collective potential of being and becoming healing and nurturing expressions of place? What if we dropped the dysfunctional habit of trying to solve abstract global problems and scaling-up solutions? What if we focused instead on our potential to create conditions conducive to life in co-evolving mutuality with the places and communities that are the ground of our being?
The slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” has been around for some years now. Only a few decades ago, vibrant local economies were indeed more prevalent: people grew food in their own backyards, local agriculture was thriving, and farmers markets were abundant.
The explosive growth of the global economy has damaged the majority of these local traditions and structures. Humanity is becoming increasingly aware of this fact, but as the knowledge curve about these and other economic and environmental problems has increased, so has the destruction curve caused by the corporate capitalist system.
The worldview of the centralized global economy has been based on the idea of limitless material growth: that nature is a free resource and profit is the primary goal of economic activity. This shallow ideology has led us to the brink of ecological and economic collapse via species extinction, global warming, the energy crisis, and growing economic inequality, to name a few.
The Nordic model is touted by many economists and progressive politicians as a better alternative. But, if we look closer at this relatively equitable welfare economy—with the “happiest countries in the world” according to some rankings—we will discover that it generates one of the world’s highest carbon footprints, and it is heavily dependent on feed imports from Brazil and other countries to feed its domestic pigs and chickens, so it is also not a long-term solution.
In the past four decades, various forms of Green Capitalism have been presented as a solution. This model, however, is just a softer version of business as usual, and is primarily used by the elite to greenwash their image. Sustainable capitalism is an oxymoron and has therefore been ineffective in solving any of the core problems in the global economy.
Since we have inherited a highly dysfunctional global economic system, a full economic-systems change is the only solution. We need to address the failures of capitalism and its ineffective forms head-on by creating decentralized and cooperative local economies and emphasizing local production with local resources to meet local needs, and to build local wealth. Below are nine steps we can take toward building such an economy.
Change the concept of ownership Change ownership from private to collective. We need to replace policies based on private enterprise and accumulation of profit with policies protecting our commons—land, water, energy, as well as the internet. These natural, intellectual, and scientific resources belong to all of humanity, not only to the corporate elite.
Global decentralized economic planning In some places of the world, local production and farmers markets are making a return, but it needs to be more widespread. We can achieve that by integrating global, national and local planning. We need policies for the entire global ecosystem of localized economies rooted in local culture. If using westernized sustainable solutions, planning must be sensitive to the local population’s need, scale and culture.
Limits on wealth accumulation A core problem with capitalism is that there is no limit to what one individual can own. Today a handful of billionaires own as much wealth as half the global population while several billion people can barely feed themselves. A global cap on wealth accumulation is needed, as well as a maximum and minimum income, to balance the global inequality crisis.
Economic structural change towards a post-capitalist economy We need to change the whole structure of economics to live within the constraints of the environment. To best accomplish that, a three-tier economy can evolve: 1. Small-scale private enterprises—such as family farms, bakeries, restaurants, arts, and crafts businesses, etc. 2. Corporations turned into worker-owned cooperatives. 3. Key industries—such as large-scale energy and water plants, infrastructure, public education—to be run by national, regional and local governments and boards on a no-profit, no-loss basis, in order to prevent concentration of wealth, speculation and exploitation of natural resources.
Local economic design changes We need local, national and global policies to be aligned in order to: - Avoid leakage caused by product imports and extraction of wealth by non-local businesses. - Increase the speed of circulation of money between local producers, suppliers, institutions and the public. - Provide more local jobs through increased local production and services. - Achieve better local economic stability as localities become more self-reliant. - Move from an economics of greed towards an economics of need, since local economies are much more effective at serving the local needs for housing, education, health care, food and energy.
Cultural benefits of local economies Economies and cultures are intertwined. Appreciating this is key to creating true “economies of happiness”. The current consumer economy has made us believe that happiness is derived from increased wealth and consumption, but once our basic needs are taken care of, personal wellbeing and cultural activities—such as spending time with family and friends, creating and appreciating art, music, literature—are better measures of progress. These are endeavors creating true, sustainable happiness and wellbeing.
Environmental benefits of a local economy Local economies produce less pollution, less transportation of products, less commuter time, etc. Due to their small scale, local economies also allow communities to live within their means and the local carrying capacity of the environment. People in local communities take better care of the local environment compared to those wishing to utilize it or capitalize on it from the outside.
Economics for local self-sufficiency Production within a local economy is most resilient when it is geared toward local self-sufficiency of food, water and energy. Only when those local needs are met should local resources be exported. Concerning exports, the focus should be on producing and exporting finished products—for example, chocolate rather than cocoa beans—as that will increase fair trade and local wealth.
Policies must extend beyond the local area We need nested and integrated systems change at the regional, national and global levels. The criteria to understand what constitutes a local or bio-regional area should also be outlined: language, culture, geology, resources, topography, economic similarity, and other criteria, can be taken into account. All the policy changes associated with a more localized economy have the welfare of local people in mind. Agricultural, industrial and cooperative policies should be coordinated from the local to the global level. Operating a cooperative economy today is quite challenging due to competition from the corporate economy, and only strong planning and coordination—such as in the cooperative economies of Mondragon, Spain, and Emilia Romagna, Italy—will allow a vibrant cooperative, local economy to emerge and thrive.
Underlying all the points above is the notion that in moving toward local economies, we can integrate the economy with the ecology. All local economic undertakings should be planned as part of a dynamic interrelationship with the local environment.
With this worldview, we can move towards creating truly regenerative local economies through an integrated network of local, national, and global systems change.
Join our online conference, Systems Change through Local Economies, to learn more about the key role that localization plays in creating a just and sustainable future. Speakers include: Roar Bjonnes, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Daniel Christian Wahl, Tom Llewellyn, Alina Siegfried and many more.
We hear a lot about the damaging effect global warming has, and will increasingly have, on the global economy. We are at a crucial environmental tipping point. Many scientists point out that now is the time to act—tomorrow will be too late. But very little has been said about the reverse: that the economy may be the main cause of the tipping point embedded in global warming’s breakdown of global ecosystems.
Certainly, global warming will negatively effect certain resources and thus reduce economic growth—but, ironically, few economists will admit that degrowth may be the only solution to solve climate change.
Growth and Greenhouse Emissions
There is indeed a clear relation between economic growth and greenhouse emissions—both have increased dramatically since the 1960s, the same period neoliberal policies enacted less government regulation and increased mass production of consumer goods. In other words, our increased consumption is clearly linked to an increase in global temperatures and in climate change. According to Climate Watch, the level of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere has risen in close proportion to economic production as measured by GDP. Therefore, slowing the rate of economic growth will be the most effective way of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Profit: The Main Source of Economic Growth
The main engine of the capitalist economy is profit and the main source of profit is economic growth. And the main source of capitalist growth in the past 100 years or so has been fossil fuels, without which we would never have seen the astronomical growth in GDP. And because fossil fuels are a major source of pollutants, there is a direct link between its increased use and greenhouse gasses, plastic trash in the oceans, acid lakes, and the whitening of coral reefs.
The problem is, however, that serious economic systems change is not on anybody’s global policy agenda.
Green capitalism, or sustainable economics, has been the response to this fundamental problem, but after forty years of green capitalism, the planet is only getting hotter and the environment only more polluted. A recent report by scientists has predicted that we are at a global tipping point—the glacial melting has already gone too far. There is no return to “normal” unless we tackle the problem head on by creating radical economic systems change.
Green Capitalism: An Oxymoron
The problem is, however, that serious economic systems change is not on anybody’s global policy agenda. Capitalism, even green capitalism, is only superficially tinkering with the systemic problems we are facing. In the words of environmental economist Herman Daly, “The rapid growth of the last 200 years has occurred because man broke the budget constrain of living on solar income and began to live on geological capital.”
“Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary.”
Jason Hickel
In other words, our economy has looked at the environment as a free and unlimited resource and as a bottomless sink hole in which we can dump our pollutants in. With global warming as the canary in the coal mine, we have suddenly realized that the planetary system is running out of resources and—if we do not radically change the way we look at wealth, use resources, and produce consumer goods—we will all, like the proverbial canary, slowly choke in our own effluent excess. The main cause of that slow but sure extinction process: the economy. By 2020 our economic system was using more than 70% of the resources from nature than she can regenerate. Soon, we will hit a global tipping point of no return. The activists in the Extinction Rebellion movement have dramatically reminded us of that.
Degrowth
Since the current economy is on a collision course toward its own (and our) destruction, and it is based on unlimited profit and growth—what is the solution? Those favoring the current economy think of course that we can grow ourselves out of the problem. Smart green technology will save us, they say. Not so fast, says economist Jason Hickel. He thinks that the only solution is taking a different route, the one taken by nature itself: “Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary.”
P. R. Sarkar, the Indian theorist behind the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout), which advocates for a cooperative economy based on ethical values and ecology, said already in the 1960s that the main problem with capitalism is its “profit motive” and its impulse toward infinite material growth while using resources on a finite planet. Hickel, an influential voice in the Degrowth movement points out this very problematic predicament in capitalism in his most recent book, Less is More: “Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting the ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox.”
Systems Change Beyond Capitalism
So what is the solution to this paradox? Herman Daly suggests a “steady-state” economy in which there is growth, but only within the ecological limits of the planet’s carrying capacity. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economic system advocates an economy that is “regenerative and distributive by design.” While Sarkar promotes an economy that creates “dynamic equilibrium.”
That is how natural systems work—they evolve and grow by thriving within their own natural boundaries.
As we develop the new systems change economy, progress will no longer be measured in material growth, but rather in increased quality of life, in cultural creativity and spiritual advancement. Sarkar also advocates for a dramatic restructuring of the economy itself, so that capitalist enterprises would not be allowed to grow beyond a certain scale and worker-owned coops would be the main driver of the economy. Prout thus offer both redistribution and regeneration by economic design. This kind of a systems change in the economy would allow degrowth, or slow growth, on the material level, but unlimited growth on the cultural and spiritual level.
We could then finally overcome the extraordinary paradox of the capitalist economy that Sarkar, Hickel, Daly, and Raworth have pointed to. By arresting ecological breakdown on a global scale, we can instead create growth that is humane, ecological, creative, regenerative, and redistributive. That would indeed be progress, because that is how natural systems work—they evolve and grow by thriving within their own natural boundaries. If our economy can enable that, then humanity can continuously grow, reinvent, and expand through art, music, culture, science, and spirituality. Now, that kind of dynamic equilibrium economy is a global tipping point worth aspiring to.
Global food insecurity is on the rise. Local food may provide an opportunity to create more resilience in a community.
This article originally appeared in The Ecologist in August, 2020.
Global food insecurity is a relentless issue, and upwards of 820 million people worldwide experience it.
Today, as with the rest of the economy, food is grown and distributed all around the world. Chickens are raised in one country and processed in another, vegetables travel thousands of miles to consumers and dairy products are transported across oceans.
In some ways, this global food market has increased food availability in certain communities. But unfortunately, it has also decreased the resiliency of communities to rely on their own food.
Grown
Global food insecurity is not due to not producing enough food, but rather poor distribution methods. With the number of calories generated by industrial agriculture, there is seemingly no reason anyone would go hungry.
But distribution issues — often exacerbated by social problems like war or poverty — are almost always to blame.
Most individuals rely on food that is grown hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. Most people associate food with a grocery store, not a farm.
A global food system has attempted to and fallen short of addressing global food insecurity. An unnecessary percentage of farmed land is not devoted to food grown for human consumption, and the global food system allows for a significant amount of waste in processing and packaging.
Building more resilient local food systems is key to addressing global food insecurity. Local food systems make communities more resilient, climate adaptive and more sustainable in the long term.
Today, most of the United States population lives in urban areas. Most individuals rely on food that is grown hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. Most people associate food with a grocery store, not a farm.
Innovations
While it is a feat of modern technology and machinery that we can transport and process food over such a long distance, it leaves large populations of people at risk if anything were to disrupt the system.
Transitioning to a more local food system means that communities are more involved in where they get their food, leading to more conscientious, healthy societies.
For example, the COVID-19 pandemic left people anxious about grocery shopping, leading many households to stockpile necessary items. On the other hand, restaurants and other eateries shut down, leaving a huge imbalance between supply and demand.
Viral images of dairy farmers dumping milk and vegetables rotting in fields while people in cities stood in line at food pantries has raised awareness of how susceptible our current food system is to disruption.
Transitioning to a more local food system means that communities are more involved in where they get their food, leading to more conscientious, healthy societies.
Agricultural innovations like hydroponics are reinventing how we grow food and making it much easier to grow fresh produce without much land. This technology is successfully employed in dense urban areas, providing fresh vegetables for local communities.
Extreme
A more localized food economy creates a more resilient community — one that can produce enough calories to withstand system disruptions that may impact larger supply chains. Instead of waiting at the grocery store to stock up, communities can harvest food from their own backyards.
The global economy as we know it relies heavily on fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels, the global economy would not exist. People travel around the world for their jobs, and so do most goods, services and other products.
The global food system relies on farmers who produce grain and soy in the United States to feed livestock in China. In the face of climate change, this system is not built to last.
While global food insecurity has decreased drastically in the last century, scientists predict that numbers will rise significantly in the next couple of decades, primarily due to climate change. Climate change is affecting how farmers grow food, where they can grow it, and what resources are required.
For example, after a couple years of abnormally wet seasons, desert locusts are plaguing the Horn of Africa. Their appearance links to a changing climate, with extreme weather patterns wreaking havoc on the environment.
Shifting to a more local model decreases greenhouse gas emissions, reduces agricultural dependence on fossil fuels and increases the stability of local environments to grow their own food despite changing climates.
Other weather events, such as above-average temperatures and droughts, affect what crops can be grown and whether they are harvestable.
Food production and distribution will need to change in response to climate change. Shifting to a more local model decreases greenhouse gas emissions, reduces agricultural dependence on fossil fuels and increases the stability of local environments to grow their own food despite changing climates.
Global food insecurity threatens millions of people around the world, and the effects of climate change are only expected to make the situation worse. The current global food system relies heavily on fossil fuel usage.
Farmers are no longer growing product to sell to their local communities, but instead distributing it to be sold on the other side of the world. This setup creates an unsustainable system for both the grower and consumer.
Mantra
A local food system doesn't mean growing a few vegetables for the neighborhood. It means completely rethinking how we approach agriculture, our diets and our food's origins.
Transitioning to a more localized food system could be imperative in the next few decades. As communities look for alternative ways to support themselves, many will find new innovations that allow them to be more resilient.
Governments and businesses will shift toward more climate adaptive practices, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making supply chain routes more environmentally friendly.
A local food system doesn't mean growing a few vegetables for the neighborhood. It means completely rethinking how we approach agriculture, our diets and our food's origins. Moving toward a more local food system creates a more resilient, climate adaptive and sustainable community.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it's that where our food comes from matters. People around the world suffer from food insecurity, most often due to distribution issues, not production. Building a food system that supports local producers would create a more sustainable supply chain, especially in the event of climate disaster.
The mantra for the last few decades has been that a more industrialized agricultural system will decrease food insecurity. But so far, conventional methods have only increased the disparity between populations. A more local food system will be necessary for the transition away from fossil fuels and will contribute to a more sustainable economy in the long term.
This review originally appeared in Perspectivist.net
The Corona Chronicles by Ralph Thurm is a book that comes at the right time, inviting us to look at ourselves in the mirror and dare dream bigger. At a truly exceptional moment in history, it is an attempt to bring together his personal experience with developments at global scale. The refreshingly modern book format, based on social media posts over a period of 12 months, succeeds in merging practical considerations from life in lockdown with more existential and philosophical questions. His sharp analysis helps readers understand how poor economic design leads to detrimental consequences for our ecosystems and social communities. At the same time, he proposes pathways out of our current impasse. Among them, he mentions the importance of intergenerational equity, and the role of thresholds and allocations in economics. He adds the probably underestimated, but most central, notion of love, as a major element upon which most of our decisions are based on.
The starting point of the book is our shared global experience of life in lockdown. As a European, he acknowledges the privileged position he has compared to many others living through these tough times. Yet, as someone who has travelled across the world, he also expresses his frustration when hearing from some fellow Westerners how hard the deprivation from what was considered “normal” can be. As he notes, this can certainly be seen as a big lesson in humility for middle to upper class citizens, who were used to freedoms that were withheld for around 95% of the remaining global population. While too many don’t even have running water or toilet paper, we hear people complaining about wearing masks when going to the sterile shopping mall with their new SUV.
“Is it just karma that sees us humans burning down the lungs of the world – clearlyconnected with our Anthropocene behaviour – and now being afflicted witha global pandemic?”
According to the author, the most important lesson from the Covid19 pandemic is that it reconfirms how people and nature are interlinked. After all, the disease was born from deforestation and animal cruelty, and could probably only spread over to humans in a butcher’s market. And when it comes to our response to the Coronavirus, our measures only seem to exacerbate pre-corona problems such as poverty, racial discrimination or unequal access to healthcare. The collateral damage of COVID-19 would be much higher than the actual deaths from the virus itself. To get out of the systemic crises, it would be illusory to think with a vaccine or some pills we can just go back to “normal”. Instead, he suggests us to reflect on how to build real resilience, by lowering our dependency from fragile global supply chains, also for medical goods.
While sustainability seemed to be a promising concept back in the days, the central notions of carrying capacities (thresholds) and our fair share (allocations) seem to have been forgotten.
The economic system is failing us when we need it most
When it comes to our extractivist economic system, Ralph reminds us that the simple rules of householding are in the end what we need to go back to: “don’t eat up your stock, live from the flow, the result of what the stocks are able to deliver for you in a season.” Unfortunately, many incentives today lead to the depletion of our stocks and canalisation of flows into the hands of a very small minority. Clearly, mainstream economics are driving us straight into disaster. Historically, the neoliberal ideology has been most prominently put forward by Friedrich Hayek, whose fervent disciples continue to lobby governments until the present day – with 800 think tanks in the USA alone. Not to mention the many media empires influencing public opinion. The suicidal tendency inherent in today’s economics is illustrated in the book through the famous economist Nordhaus, who believes a global warming of 3,5°-4°C until 2100 would be best for the economy.
So what is it that Ralph Thurm proposes instead? Living at the time of the great acceleration, and degeneration, it is about flattening the curves (emissions, wealth inequality or ill-health to name a few) through whole-systems-design. According to him, we should move from what’s opportune and possible, to what’s necessary for people and our living planet. While sustainability seemed to be a promising concept back in the days, the central notions of carrying capacities (thresholds) and our fair share (allocations) seem to have been forgotten. As a “sustainability veteran”, Ralph provides many insights about what has gone wrong over the last decennies in business and politics, from greenwashing to incrementalism. He invites us to go beyond doing just a bit less harm every year.
In a regenerative and distributive economy, these aspects are actively integrated by design. Next to these framework conditions for regenerative action, it is about innovating in a way that can be replicated in other places, leading to scaling solutions from what works in practice. In this respect, he invites us to re-consider the role of place, by moving from borders (country borders, but also corporate departments) to systemic boundaries, inherent in emergent ecological or social systems. Concretely, that means for instance to drive business development by considering the local boundaries, and needs, that the ecosystem and local population has.
Ralph Thurm’s book is full of inspiring examples and helpful frameworks that can help policy-makers, business people and citizens alike in transforming their economic environment. But probably more importantly, he asks himself what he, as a human being today, wants to leave behind, in case he became one of the COVID-19 casualties. He thereby invites us to consider what our role on this planet is. After all, isn’t it love that we all seek? With this, in the current time, bold question in mind, he dares to propose building a new storyline, one that is hopeful and forward-looking. To be able to do that, he also shares with us a little advice, maybe for those that think it sounds quite nice but don’t know what to do with it: “It’s time we all go on a retreat and come back energised for the ‘New Normal’!
“The Corona Chronicles” is a must-read for all those that want to move to wiser action, beyond empty sustainability promises, fatalism or the illusion of progress.
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams in June, 2021
The atmospheric scientist that led a major year-long Arctic research expedition said Tuesday that the world may have already hit one of the so-called climate "tipping points."
"The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far," said Markus Rex of the Alfred Wegener Institute, reportsAgence France-Presse.
"And one can essentially ask if we haven't already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion," he added.
"If we keep going as we are then the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within a few decades and the world I just described will no longer exist."
"During the Mosaic expedition, the ice in the spring of 2020 receded more quickly than ever before on record," Rex said. "The expansion of the ice was only about half as large in the summer than decades ago and only about half as thick as during the times of [Norwegian explorer Fridtjof] Nansen and his expedition with Fram, a wooden sailboat, almost 130 years ago."
The time remaining to rein in the climate crisis and avert a scenario of an ice-free Arctic in the summer is limited, Rex said.
"It's urgent," he toldDW. "We probably still have a short, brief time window to save the summer Arctic sea ice."
Barring such action, Rex warned of "a cascade of further tipping pints in the climate system that could let our climate drift away from the current state it has."
"I think we still have that window, but we need to act quickly now," he stressed. "We need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases drastically, and we need to do that during the next decade." He also called for a mid-century goal "at the latest" to be climate neutral.
The international, multidisciplinary team Rex led was comprised of hundreds of scientists representing over a dozen countries. The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) team set sail on the German research vessel Polarstern in September of 2019 to gather data from what Rex called "the epicenter of global climate change" and study "areas that are beyond anything we've ever seen before." The team returned in October last year with a trove of data including 1,000 ice samples.
The goal of the MOSAiC expedition was to take the closest look ever at the Arctic as the epicenter of global warming and to gain fundamental insights that are key to better understand global climate change. Hundreds of researchers from 20 countries were involved in this exceptional endeavor. Following in the footsteps of Fridtjof Nansen's ground-breaking expedition with his wooden sailing ship Fram in 1893-1896, the MOSAiC expedition brought a modern research icebreaker close to the north pole for a full year including for the first time in polar winter. The data gathered will be used by scientists around the globe to take climate research to a completely new level.
At a press conference in October when the expedition came to a close, Rex offered a grim assessment of the Arctic.
"This world is threatened," he said, adding that the "ice is dying."
"If we keep going as we are then the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within a few decades and the world I just described will no longer exist."
"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time."
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams, June 2021
As experts and research continue to make the case for overhauling humanity's destructive relationship with nature, La Via Campesina—a global movement of peasants, farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous individuals, migrants, and agricultural workers—echoed that message on Wednesday.
"The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms—not greed and profit—guide the actions of nations and peoples." —Manifesto
The movement, which was founded nearly three decades ago and is made up of scores of groups in over 80 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas that collectively represent millions of people, released an "Anti-Imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment" ahead of global actions planned for Saturday.
"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time," the manifesto declares. "We need to put an end to the domination of capital over life in order to create a world that is just, egalitarian, and vibrant, so that we all can live well and in peace."
Backed by scientific findings on the climate and biodiversity crises, the movement takes aim at "the destructive power of the current stage of capitalism," highlighting how "the unrestrained extraction and exploitation of natural resources for profit by the large corporations, and the logic of the capitalist system, have depleted our planet."
As the manifesto explains, "we are experiencing the worst environmental crisis in the history of humanity," and that it will only get worse absent global intervention:
Climate change is already affecting people's lives all across the world, and this is not the only consequence of the environmental crisis. The world's water is contaminated by plastics and pesticides and the springs are drying up. We are also seeing dramatic rates of extinction of the planet's biodiversity as well as large scale biopiracy—where commercial interests patent naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material imposing limits on how they can be used even in their naturally occurring environments. The soil is being degraded by deforestation and monocropping, and large regions are being completely destroyed by large-scale mining.
"The Covid-19 pandemic is the latest manifestation of this environmental and systemic crisis," the manifesto notes.
Since the ongoing coronavirus outbreak started, public health experts and world leaders have repeatedly called for developing, in the words of famed conservationist Jane Goodall, "a new mindset for our survival" to prevent future pandemics.
However, human exploitation of nature continues, despite the pandemic's significant death toll and economic fallout, and the clear threats of business as usual.
The manifesto—published in English, Spanish, and French—slams imperialists of the Global North, including and especially the United States, for continuing to "attack peripheral countries looking to privatize common goods that the people, the real owners of natural resources, used to take care of in each country."
"It is important also to highlight the nefarious role that military activities play in the destruction of the planet," the manifesto says. "In addition to carrying our constant attacks on the lives of the people themselves, the USA military, with its allies, is one of the biggest contaminators in the world, though its toxic legacy of depleted uranium, and its use of oil, fuel for airplanes, pesticides, and defoliants like Agent Orange and lead."
The movement also blasts transnational companies for advancing a planet-wrecking agricultural model based on monocrops and pesticide use and, more broadly, for increasing "their capacity to exploit common goods, pushing forward in mining projects, deforestation, and the private appropriation of water among other things.
"In addition to carrying our constant attacks on the lives of the people themselves, the USA military, with its allies, is one of the biggest contaminators in the world, though its toxic legacy of depleted uranium, and its use of oil, fuel for airplanes, pesticides, and defoliants like Agent Orange and lead."
"Some corporations, instead of combating the causes of planetary destruction, focus on green capitalism, converting natural resources into commodities and new areas for market speculation, like carbon credits, environmental preservation credits, and other false solutions that will not resolve the social and ecological needs of the people," the movement points out.
"This path will inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity and of nature as we know it," the manifesto says. "It is a project of death, domination, and destruction."
"The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms—not greed and profit—guide the actions of nations and peoples," it asserts.
According to La Via Campesina, "It is a solution focused on agroecological production of food; the democratization of the access to land through agrarian reform; the protection and care of common goods such as water, biodiversity and land; and the transition to an energy model that responds to the real needs of the working class with social and environmental justice, overcoming patriarchy and racism.
People across the globe are planned actions for June 5, World Environment Day, to demand the protection of Mother Earth and the "full implementation" of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), La Via Campesina said Wednesday in a statement about the upcoming #InDefenseOfThePlanet actions.
"We must also urgently unite against the forthcoming corporate-led U.N. Food System Summit," the statement noted, "as it promotes false solutions which will not only worsen the current climate and environmental crisis but will also constitute a serious attack to our rights as peasants, Indigenous communities, women, migrants, and rural communities."
The German-British economist, E. F. Schumacher, was the first modern economist to highlight the need for a green economy. What Adam Smith did for classical economics and Marx did for socialism, Schumacher has done for green capitalism. In his path breaking work published in 1973, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, he presented a thorough critique of material capitalism’s main shortcomings. He also suggested ways to live on a planet of finite resources without going beyond the inherent boundaries of ecology. He suggested we develop a sustainable lifestyle and economy nearly 20 years before the word was made fashionable by the 1987 Brundtland Commission at the United Nations.
Schumacher’s book introduced the term “natural capital,” which emphasized the need to create an economy that does not abstract itself from nature. He pointed out that all our current environmental problems are results of the market economy’s faulty abstractions. He also emphasized how we have interfered with many of the planet’s life support systems—the forests, the oceans, the rivers, and the land. If this trend continued, he claimed, the capacity of our planet to support future generations could no longer be taken for granted. His predictions have unfortunately proven to be quite prophetic.
To avoid these kinds of environmental problems, green economists have, since Schumacher’s time, compellingly argued that we need to account for natural capital. “Today we understand natural capital,” writes green economist Paul Hawken, “as the sum-total of renewable and non-renewable resources, including the ecological systems and services that support life. It is different from conventionally defined capital in that natural capital cannot be produced by human activity.” 1 Most importantly, natural capital, such as fossil fuels, fish, and animals, cannot be replaced by human activity. Once they are lost, they are lost forever.
Today’s green movement argues that the problem with the capitalist system is that it is not rooted in an ecological understanding of how the world works. The very source of the word economics comes from the Greek oikos, which means ‘earth household’. Understood in an ecological context, economics is thus about taking care of the earth as if it is our own household, our own home.
Neither socialist nor capitalist theorists, however, have traditionally seen economics that way. They never asked themselves why those cultures before us, those who disregarded the limits of nature, such as the people on Easter Island, are now gone. Instead, they saw nature as a limitless and free resource. Therefore, both socialism and capitalism, in all their variants, have contributed to the ecological resource and economic systems crisis we are in.
Schumacher did indeed understand this predicament. He pointed out that our ethical and philosophical worldviews have great political and economic consequences and that there are two main reasons for our economic and environmental problems: 1) to build an economy based on an individual’s desire for wealth and 2) to separate economics from ecology. Schumacher was one of the first to provide these revealing insights into our current economic system, which he aptly described as “the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility.” 2
Directly or indirectly inspired and influenced by Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful worldview, American businessman turned environmental activist Paul Hawken wrote the book Natural Capitalism. Likewise, physicist and third-world farm activist Vandana Shiva developed a new vision for rural economies in India. Architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart created the revolutionary cradle-to-cradle industrial design system by copying the way nature works. The European green movements have inspired and founded political parties influencing governments all over the EU. And finally, green economics have become a new standard by showing corporations that profit, people and planet needs to be part of economic planning and accounting. The fundamental question we are facing today, however, is that it appears that green or sustainable capitalism is not enough. The reason for that is that green capitalism is not radical enough. It is still largely based on profit and material growth.
Despite these limitations, green parties have, in the past three decades, sprouted up in most countries of Europe. The first Green Party to achieve national prominence was the German Green Party, famous for their opposition to nuclear power, they were founded in 1980 and have been in coalition governments at state level for some years now. In 2001, they reached an agreement to end reliance on nuclear power in Germany and agreed to remain in coalition and support the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the 2001 Afghan War. This put them at odds with many green activists worldwide. The Swedish Green Party has had up to 25 members in government, while the European Green Party is represented in the EU parliament and supported by 34 green parties from all over Europe. There are also green parties in the United States, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and Lebanon.
Green capitalist systems...all have one thing in common: they are attempts at circumventing, denying, or glossing over the systemic shortcomings of growth-capitalism’s basic principle: to maximize profit for the individual and to increase material growth overall.
The support for green values and sustainable economics has become so ubiquitous in our society that world politicians and corporations such as Wal-Mart, Shell and Exxon have all subscribed to sustainable and green practices in their business literature, and even in some of their business practices. But, as green activist Paul Hawken lamented in his book Blessed Unrest, even with 3 million grass roots organizations struggling to make the world more equal and greener and corporations and politicians promoting green values, the actual, sustainable, green changes we have made are but “drops in a bucket.” Unfortunately, the world is more polluted, more unequal, and more unsustainable than ever.
There are two main reasons for this dire predicament. First, while there are many green parties and people with interest in the environment, there are none that has become the leader of a major country. The second reason is that it seems impossible to reform capitalism so that it becomes a truly “green economy.” The main reasons for that, is that the driving force of the capitalist system is the profit incentive of individuals and companies. The capitalist system is rigged in such a way that the individuals with the most money has the most power. This means that those who put his or her financial interests above everything else, are also those that have the power in a market capitalist economy. By definition, such people will put their short-term financial interest above environmental concerns. Consequently, within free market capitalism the political will for meaningful change towards an ecologically sound industrial policy has so far been minimal at best. Therefore, trying to make capitalism greener and more sustainable is not a practical strategy. As Schumacher pointed out, capitalism is by its very nature neither green nor sustainable.
Still, green politicians continue to urge us to build upon the best of the market economy, but, as noted above, all capitalist reform strategies from John Maynard Keynes to neo-liberalism, from the Scandinavian welfare system to the green capitalist systems, they all have one thing in common: they are attempts at circumventing, denying, or glossing over the systemic shortcomings of growth-capitalism’s basic principle: to maximize profit for the individual and to increase material growth overall. As history has shown, these kinds of reforms enables the multinational corporations to continue with their greenwashed propaganda. Similarly, taxing the corporations only makes them work even harder to find tax loopholes or tax havens to hide their profits.
In spite the popularity of everything green, the corporations are ahead of the game and finding new loopholes to pollute and pay less tax to maximize profit.
While most politicians today support the cause to stop global warming, much too little is being done to actually stop it. The reasons for that is that capitalism is a colossal system embedded in its own self-fulfilling mission to increase profit, at any cost. And unless one fundamentally alters its main premise—to create more profit, to amass more wealth—meaningful ecological reform is not possible. As Schumacher wrote, “the idea of unlimited economic growth, more and more until everybody is saturated with wealth, needs to be seriously questioned on at least two accounts: the availability of basic resources and, alternatively or additionally, the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied.”
Since the publication of Schumacher’s masterpiece Small is Beautiful in 1973, the world has not become any more sustainable or greener, however. In spite the popularity of everything green, the corporations are ahead of the game and finding new loopholes to pollute and pay less tax to maximize profit. Green capitalism is therefore a contradiction in terms, and an unlikely economy to save us from the global crisis we are in.
Since Schumacher’s time, sustainable capitalism and the greens have come up with many praiseworthy policies and inventions, but without fundamentally solving the planet’s resource problems nor the numerous environmental tipping points—such as the climate and the inequality crises—we are facing.
As long as free markets, the banks and the financial system primarily decide the utilization of resources, it is hard to conceive of a move towards a sustainable economy where environmental concerns are properly addressed. Even though there are many lessons to be drawn from a review of the recent shift toward a greener economy, sustainable capitalism shows us no clear and easy path forward in resolving our planet’s many systems crises.
Today, more than ever, we need a small-is-beautiful-economy in the spirit of E. F. Schumacher’s vision. But neither the current green nor sustainable capitalism seems to hold the answer. Rather, we need to go beyond these forms of economics. To save this small and beautiful planet, we need deeper systems change—both economically and environmentally.
1 Paul Hawken, as quoted in E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition, Hartley and Marks, Point Roberts, WA, 1999, page 5
2 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Hartley and Marks, 25 th Anniversary, Point Roberts, WA, 1999
Scientist Johan Rockstrom has become a rock star climate activist. He can be seen all over the internet these days, in TED talks and among world leaders, sharing disturbing predictions backed up by hard scientific data. In the recent Netflix film Breaking Boundaries: The Science of our Planet, Sir David Attenborough focuses on Rockstrom’s “nine tipping points.” These are the boundaries we must not exceed in order to protect the planet against devastating degradation. The trouble is: we have already exceeded five of the nine thresholds.
The film was recently shown to President Joe Biden and the other heads of state at the recent G7 meeting. One can only hope they were shocked and would want to act—decisively. But what will they do? Slap another tax on polluters? Decide to build a few more windmills? Hold a few more meetings with climate scientists?
“Breaking Boundaries tells the story of the most important scientific discovery of our time—that humanity has pushed Earth beyond the boundaries that have kept Earth stable for 10,000 years, since the dawn of civilization,” states the synopsis of the film.
One of the most vivid and shocking revelations in the film is the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral forest, which, according to Attenborough has become a “coral graveyard.” A white coral graveyard, that is. Due to the warming of the oceans, the world’s coral reefs are turning lifeless and white. No more coral, no more aquatic biodiversity, no more fish.
Most climate activists miss the point that there are systemic problems behind these devastating statistics and real-life catastrophes. Systemic problems embedded in failed economic, industrial, and political policies.
But according to Johan Rockstrom, there are solutions. And we do have time to implement them. About ten years’ time, give or take a few. He mentions three in the film: cut greenhouse gases to zero; protect the wetlands, soils, oceans, and forests that protect our impact; change our diet and the way we farm food. Sounds easy enough. But it isn’t, of course.
By repeatedly blaming the problem on humanity, on us as individuals, most climate activists miss the point that there are systemic problems behind these devastating statistics and real-life catastrophes. Systemic problems embedded in failed economic, industrial, and political policies.
Take industrial farming, for example. As we speak, the European dairy industry, which is one of the most heavily subsidized (to the tune of some 64 billion Euros annually), unsustainable, uneconomic, and greenhouse producing farming systems on the planet is now being exported to the rest of the world. Modeling itself on Europe, the Chinese—who never drank cow’s milk before--are now operating some of the most wasteful and largest milk (and pig) farms in the world. Asking people to drink more plant milk is not going to turn this industry around any time soon.
Industrial farming is responsible for a large percentage of greenhouse gasses—perhaps as much as twenty percent. The planet’s farm sector needs a complete overhaul. It needs to be decentralized and localized, large farms must be broken up into smaller farms, production needs to change from meat, egg and dairy production to producing more plant-based food. We need to stop industrial beef and sugar farming on rainforest land. But this can only happen through radical policy changes, through deep systemic changes based on a shift in farm policies. What about massive subsidies going to fruit, nut, herb, and vegetable growers for a change?
There are, according to Yes! Magazine, only 100 corporations responsible for producing most of the green house gasses in the world. These same corporations will continue producing these life-destroying gasses as long as their profit margin will be allowed to rise. Without radical, industrial policy changes, these corporations will continue to pollute. The corporate economy needs a complete overhaul.
The fishing industry continues to be allowed to sweep the ocean floors clean of biological life to maximize profit for a few large fishing fleets to the detriment of the planet’s biodiversity. The solution? To ban these type of fishing practices and set aside 1/3 of the oceans as a no fishing zone for the next 10 years. And that’s just a start. Asking people to eat less fish will certainly not be enough.
Make no mistake about it, Johan Rockstrom’s scientific warnings are very very important. This film should be watched by every politician, economist, and political bureaucrat on the planet. It is that important. And yet, because Mr. Rockstrom is not a politician, nor an economist, nor a policy wonk, it is too much to ask of him to have all the solutions as well.
But wait! We do have most of the solutions, don’t we? I do think that we actually agree on most of the scientific, environmental, industrial, and agricultural changes we need to make. Just look at all the eminent solutions outlined in Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown. If all of them were implemented, we would most likely be able to meet the goals that Rockstrom outlines in the film.
So, why is it not happening? The main reason is that there are not just technological solutions needed. The main problem is that the planet is run and operated by an economic system hellbent on two goals: to maximize growth and profit. This system needs to change. We need a massive overhaul of our economic system. Without regenerative economics, without a decentralized and cooperative economy designed the way nature takes care of this planet, we will not be able to change our course. We will not be able to live within the planet’s natural boundaries.
Kate Raworth’s popular Doughnut economy explains this very well: why we need to live within the doughnuts biological boundaries. What’s missing in this Doughnut is the new regenerative economic system that will enable us to do that.
That’s the first realization I took away from watching this devastatingly dark, must-see film. The second is that in order to achieve this, we need a global Marshall plan—from the local to the global level—to save us from destroying the only planet we have. Nothing more, nothing less. Simply asking “humanity” to cut greenhouse gasses, protect nature, and eat more kale will not cut it.
The following excerpt is from Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Fermentation as Metaphor (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher. Also check out his newest book Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys coming October 2021.
Moldly millet with stereoscope. Photo by Sandor Ellix Katz, Copyright 2020.
These are very scary and uncertain times. The specter of climate change alone calls everything we have known into question: rising temperatures; melting glaciers; rising seas and shifting currents; more extreme weather patterns, with bigger, more dangerous storms, displacing growing numbers of people; less predictable agriculture with resulting crop failures; new vulnerabilities to pests and diseases; and a cascade of effects as yet unrecognized or unimagined.
Mass extinctions are already occurring, and ecological balances are destabilized. Our insatiable appetite for resources not only accelerates climate change but also leads to deeper and more destructive extraction practices. Income inequality grows ever starker as technology and cheaper globalized labor replace workers. Racism and sexism persist in systemic structures, and are spread and exploited by a growing politics of resentment.
The shocking jolt of the COVID-19 pandemic on all social, public, and economic life illustrates just how vulnerable our entire mass society is to disruption. In this case it was a virus that sent shock waves that have been felt everywhere, most acutely in densely populated cities. Sometimes society is disrupted by more localized phenomena, such as wildfires, floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. Not to mention war, going on somewhere always, and in some places for protracted periods.
For all these reasons and more, humanity is desperate for transformation. Our way of life is proving to be unsustainable. We need to reimagine how we live our lives. Now more than ever, we need the bubbling transformative power of fermentation.
I definitely do not wish to suggest that the simple act of fermenting in your kitchen will save the world. I wrote in Wild Fermentation of fermentation as “a form of activism.” I stand by this notion, but not because there is anything inherently political about fermentation.
Kahm yeast with macro lens. Photo by Sandor Ellix Katz, Copyright 2020.
People can be narrow in their focus, and often the reasons people ferment are specific, for example preservation of garden vegetables, or a desire to improve health, or the pursuit of compelling flavors.
The only thing that makes do-it-yourself fermentation radical is context: our contemporary system of food mass production, which is unsustainable in so many ways. Our dominant food system is polluting, resource-depleting, and wasteful, and what it produces is nutritionally diminished, causing widespread disease. Perhaps even more profoundly, it deskills and disempowers people, distancing us from the natural world and making us completely dependent on systems of mass production and distribution—which are fine as long as they function, but are vulnerable to many potential disruptions, from viral pandemics to fuel shortages or price spikes to war and natural disasters. Expanding local and regional food production, and in the process transforming the economy that goes along with it, is the only real food security.
Food and food production are quite profound as we try to shift our relationships to the Earth and to one another. Food can be a means of building and strengthening community. Producing food is a very ethical way to channel one’s energy. You’re doing something productive and creating some sustenance for yourself and other people. Localizing food production stimulates local economies more broadly, by recirculating resources rather than extracting them. Getting involved in food production can also help us feel empowered and more connected to the world around us.
Moldy cornbread with stereoscope. Photo by Sandor Ellix Katz, Copyright 2020.
We must find ways to reorganize our society, to move from being driven by resource extraction toward a dedication to regeneration. I do not mean to sound preachy here. I’m not entirely living what I advocate, so I can be viewed as a hypocrite. I mean, I fly more than almost anyone else I know in my fervor to share fermentation. And in my home life in a rural area, I drive almost everywhere I go. I greatly admire people who live their ethos and entirely eschew planes, or all fossil-fuel-driven transportation, but in my life I have defaulted to the path of mobility, like most.
We, including me, definitely need to slow down our mobility and along with it our expectations of growth. What we need is contraction: each of us leaving a much lighter footprint, with more equitable distribution of resources. We also need to shift from our focus on individualism to more cooperative, collaborative models for working together and mutual aid. I have no grand plan, and in our current corporate-dominated political system I’ve become skeptical of grand plans. But moving in this direction definitely involves getting more people plugged into the earth and life around us, the plants and animals and fungi and even the bacteria. This is what food production forces us to do—to be more tuned into our environment. Certainly this is true of fermentation.
This week the EU celebrates its annual 'Green Week', in which Europe's environmental elite gather to congratulate each other on how green they are.
It's certainly true that the EU claims to be taking the climate crisis seriously, most notably through the European Commission's flagship European Green Deal. Launched in 2019, the deal embraces virtually every policy area. It proposes to make Europe the first continent to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 and the first to deliver a climate law with binding emissions targets.
There's been very little noise in the media about the deal—possibly because anything to do with the EU is seen to be about as dry as a climate-induced dust storm. But anyone who cares about, well, life on planet Earth, would do well to pay attention. Last year openDemocracy launched our 'Spotlight on the European Green Deal' series, to keep the deal under much-needed scrutiny as it's rolled out.
Green technology is at the heart of the European Green Deal. But solar panels and electric car batteries need lithium, cobalt, nickel and other scarce raw materials. These elements are mainly concentrated in regions of the world whose communities are already suffering under a violent extractivism that has roots in colonial plunder.
I won't lie, editing the 'spotlight' at times feels like Orwell and Kafka are having a tea party, and can make you despair that we have any chance of stopping the climate catastrophe. But in doing so I've learnt that the European Green Deal isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Here are six reasons why.
1) It clings to the dogma of economic growth
The US Green New Deal proposed to Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps quiet on the topic of economic growth. It thereby skirts the thorny debate between those committed to 'green growth' and those who argue that growth—the infinite expansion of the economy—is incompatible with a green agenda. After all, economic growth surely isn't an end in itself; what ultimately matters is that we build economies in which everyone can live well within planetary boundaries. Green Deals don't have to come down on one side or another of the growth debate.
That is exactly what the European Green Deal has done, however. It commits to 'a new growth strategy' in which economic growth is decoupled from resource use. To prove this is possible, the Commission claims that between 1990 and 2017 Europe's CO2 emissions decreased by 22% while its economy grew by 58%. What it fails to mention is that over the past two decades, imports from China—which aren't counted towards Europe's emissions figures—quadrupled from €90bn to €420bn.
There is no evidence that absolute decoupling of economic growth from resource use is possible on a global scale in the kind of timeframe we have available. In clinging to growth, the EU is doing what is known in the cryptocurrency trading world as HODLing—holding on for dear life to a product that is crashing in the hope that it will one day recover. It won't.
2) It's built on 'green colonialism'
Green technology is at the heart of the European Green Deal. But solar panels and electric car batteries need lithium, cobalt, nickel and other scarce raw materials. These elements are mainly concentrated in regions of the world whose communities are already suffering under a violent extractivism that has roots in colonial plunder.
The deal talks the talk about moving to 'a circular economy', but while economic growth remains non-negotiable, it is unlikely to walk anywhere. The total value of imports to the EU, including minerals, is three times higher than its total exports.
The European Investment Bank is tipped to drive the financing of the Green Deal, but it doesn't have binding environmental criteria.
"Move to net zero 'inevitably means more mining''' reads a BBC headline from last week. But do we all need to own an electric car? Or can we opt for more communal solutions that drive down the need for mining? There are basic questions to ask about how much extraction we really need, who gets to decide, how extraction is carried out and for whose benefit.
3) It's funding big polluters
The European Investment Bank is tipped to drive the financing of the Green Deal. But the bank doesn't have binding environmental criteria. Neither do the EU's 'cohesion' and 'just transition' funds exclude fossil fuel investments. Poland is one of the biggest recipients of these funds, yet is counting on coal to power its energy needs for decades to come. Instead, the money could go to community-driven solutions to move the region away from fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, when COVID hit, the European Central Bank cranked up its quantitative easing programme, buying government and corporate bonds up to €1,850bn. Corporate beneficiaries of this programme include Repsol, Airbus, BMW, Total Capital, E.ON, and Shell—some of the biggest polluters on the continent.
4) It buys into false solutions
"Hydrogen rocks," said Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission and the beard in charge of the European Green Deal. In theory, hydrogen can be produced in a 'green' way, with the electricity used in the process coming from renewable sources like wind and solar. But in Europe, only 0.1% of hydrogen is made in this way; 90% of it is 'grey', made using fossil fuels like gas.
The move to hydrogen basically means switching from one fossil fuel (oil or coal) to another—gas. The gas industry is touting hydrogen as a 'bridge fuel' playing a key part in the green transition. But a study by Energy Watch showed that a switch from coal to gas could actually increase the greenhouse effect by 40%.
Estimates suggest that €430bn will be needed by 2030 to scale up hydrogen—one-third of which could be public money, going to fossil fuels as part of the 'green' transition. See what I mean about Kafka and Orwell?
5) It's being hijacked by corporate lobbyists
Why have Timmermans and other EU suits embraced hydrogen? The fossil fuel industry spent nearly €60m in 2019 lobbying for hydrogen. Since 2010, the big five fossil fuel companies alone—Shell, BP, Total, ExxonMobil and Chevron—have spent more than €250m lobbying the EU.
The hydrogen stitch up is one result of these efforts. Another is the watering down of the Climate Law, proposed in March last year. Once approved, the law will set legally binding targets for carbon emission reductions. So withered has it become that Greta Thunberg called it a "surrender".
It's not just the energy lobby. Europe's farming lobby has already succeeded in squishing goals for ecological agriculture. And trade lobbyists have managed to get the EU to water down rules on importing palm oil, a major driver of deforestation.
6) It's kneecapped by the Energy Charter Treaty
You may never have heard of this obscure treaty binding 50 countries. But it allows energy corporations to sue governments for policies that might negatively affect their profits—including climate policies. In February this year, energy giant RWE announced it was suing the Netherlands for €1.4bn for planning to phase out coal.
Investigate Europe calculates that the EU, UK and Switzerland could be forced to pay €345bn over climate action in the coming years. The UK, which was the first major country to pass a net zero emissions law, is the most vulnerable to possible lawsuits, with ECT-covered assets worth €141bn.
The European Commission has itself called the treaty 'outdated' and is calling for its modernisation. But scientists and lawmakers from across Europe say the treaty is unreformable—the only feasible way forward is to get out now.
Back in January, we invited photographers to send us images on the theme of Empowering Community through Local Economy, in preparation for our annual conference, which will take place online this September, Systems Change through Local Economies.
Beautiful photos depicting the rich and colourful tapestry of local economies came flooding in from all corners of the globe. From silversmiths in Myanmar to beekeepers in Portugal, from rugmakers in Iran to urban farming in London, the pictures emphasised the abundance and creativity embodied by local economies the world over.
All the eligible photos will be exhibited as part of the September conference, while the winning image will be used to promote the event across our website and social media channels.
From silversmiths in Myanmar to beekeepers in Portugal, from rugmakers in Iran to urban farming in London, the pictures emphasised the abundance and creativity embodied by local economies the world over.
With the high quality of entries, we knew it would be a hard decision to pick the winners, but luckily we had the help of expert guest judge, Kevin Peer, to make the final selection.
Kevin is a former documentary-maker for National Geographic with a media career of over 35 years. His great passions are twofold: first is the making of films that promote wonder, understanding, and an engaged love for humankind and Earth. Second is the teaching of the technical, cognitive, intuitive and creative techniques and processes that are necessary for the making of moving, effective and award-winning documentary films. For Kevin, empowering future generations of inspired and skilled filmmakers is an honor and a calling.
1st Prize: Local Potter Making Traditional Clay Pot, by Avijit Ghosh
Judge's comments: "I loved everything about this image. The composition, which is loaded with context and story without being cluttered; the vibrancy of the colors in the central area and the subtlety of colors everywhere else; the overall feeling of intimacy and nurturance and peacefulness and possibility."
Judge's comments: "This image gifts us with a striking and unique perspective, revealing the utilitarian activity of harvesting as a phenomenon of symmetry and beauty."
Runner-Up: Broad Bean Harvest, by Leyla Emektar
Judge's comments: "This image is a window into a world of tradition, self sustenance, and living in close association with Earth. The composition, the colors, the moment itself have all been rendered with great skill and care."
Honourable Mentions
The following two photos made it onto the short short list.
Weaving Abel, by Anthony Into
Photographer's description: An Ilocano woman is shown weaving an “abel”. Abel is an Ilocano word for the traditional textile of Vigan and the Ilocos Region in the Philippines. The abel cloth is known for being a strong, colorful material. Weavers use a wooden handloom in order to create varied and unique designs.
Water Way, by Pranab Basak
Photographer's description: This picture was captured in the bordering areas of West Bengal. In contrast to many other parts of India, the women here have come forward to uplift their socio-economic status, formed self-help groups, make fishing nets and they are now earning their livelihood by selling the fish they catch at the village markets. They are sending their children to school. This is one of the most remarkable examples of women empowerment that I’ve seen.
Visit the Submissions thread on our forum to see all the entries that came in through our forum. Please note that a small number of entries were submitted via email. While you are there, why not sign up as a member to get involved in discussions and future activities.
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The results of the Post-Growth Challenge are finally here! Back in January, together with Steady State Manchester and The Manchester Meteor, we challenged you to come up with a better way to present the post-growth alternative. We purposely called it a challenge rather than a competition, and as such all participants received a copy of The Viable Economy and Society.
Nevertheless, we did identify the one we liked best. Four raters, two from Steady State Manchester, one from The Meteor and one from Systems Change Alliance, used five criteria:
A) Consistency with a degrowth / post-growth perspective. B) Adequately captures the essence of post-growth thinking, or one or more strands within it. C) Accessibility to a non-specialist audience. D) Economy of expression. E) Usability by ourselves in promoting the post-growth approach – i.e. how likely are we to make use of it?
Inevitably we didn’t agree on everything, but the overall best rated was the ‘zine, Degrowth in Manchester, submitted by Maddy Taylor and Neriya Ben-Dor, which you can read and download here.
Two other entries received honorable mentions, and those were two short videos: one from Lucy Jonas is an introduction to Doughnut Economics, and the other, from Tilman Hartley and colleagues at ICTA, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, looks at a specific challenge for post-growth, that inequality could increase when the economy stops growing. They explain the dilemma very clearly and assure us that there are policy solutions. We await the next instalment! In the meantime, you can watch both videos below:
Video by Lucy Jonas
Video by Tilman Hartley and Co.
Congratulations to the winners, and if you would like to explore some more of the entries, head to this post on SSM's website.
The French corporate giant Veolia plans to dominate the global water market in a $15 billion merger with its main competitor, Suez. Critics warn that this will create a dangerous global monopoly and further erode public control of precious water resources.
"Veolia's plan to dominate public water services all across the globe is becoming a terrifying reality," Mary Grant, the director of Food & Water Watch's Public Water for All campaign, said in a statement according to Common Dreams.
"The merger of the world's largest water corporations will erode any semblance of competition for water privatization deals. This lack of competition will worsen our water affordability crisis, eliminate good union jobs, and open the door to cronyism and corruption."
Common Dreams staff writer Kenny Stancil also reports that according to the international watchdog group Corporate Accountability, both Suez and Veolia "have a long track record of human rights, labor, and environmental abuses" throughout the world.
Lauren DeRusha, water director at Corporate Accountability, said in a statement that "after decades of failed water privatization deals that put profit over people, communities around the globe—from Pittsburgh, U.S. and Osorno, Chile; to Gabon and the halls of the United Nations—have soundly rejected the corporate control of water."
According to Grant, these corporate mergers will keep intensifying the problems associated with water privatization. "Municipalities struggling with budget crises linked to the Covid pandemic may consider selling off their valuable water systems as a short-term response to plug budget gaps," she said. "This would create long-term harm."
Water privatization has been a controversial issue since Britain became the first and only country to sell off its entire water industry in the 1980s. Many of the private water projects by the World Bank’s International Monetary Fund (IFC) have been opposed by coalitions of political and environmental groups amid fears that market water prices would increase way above what the poorest could pay.
As political opposition has increased in the past 20 years, far fewer water projects have been proposed, and many fewer people have been connected to clean water than the World Bank and G8 countries might have expected. According to the IFC, about 768 million people still lack access to clean drinking water, 2.5 billion people are without safe sanitation and roughly 3.5 million people die annually from water-related diseases.
“With anticipated increases in usage of this magnitude and a renewable—but not inexhaustible—common resource, the competition for water will continue to escalate, writes Jim Rieley in The Systems Thinker. “In general,” he writes, “when this kind of competition occurs, it almost guarantees that the common resource will quickly diminish.”
The planet’s increase in droughts due to global warming has already created systemic water crisis conditions in many parts of the world. In many African cities who have been promised but never received private water supplies, water-borne diseases are common due to lack of clean water and sanitation. Increased privatization of strategic water resources will, according to many scientists and environmental activists, continue to erode public access to fresh and clean water if privatization continues.
Water, fresh air, and soil are all lifegiving resources that belongs to all of us. They are part of the commons, and their continued health is vital to our future. The increased profit making and erosion of these precious public resources due to overharvesting was aptly described as the Tragedy of the Commons in an article by ecologist Garret Hardin in 1968.
As long as governments allow corporations to see natural resources as a free lunch in the name of profit, growth, and progress, these mega-mergers will expand, while the commons will shrink. It is time we turn the tide and heed the warning words of ecologist Garret Hardin.
To fully and systematically address the climate/energy crisis, the plan will have to be far broader in scope than what is currently being proposed. And while we need to mobilize society as a whole with a World War II-level of effort, the reality is that there’s never been a challenge like this before.
The idea is infectious. Could a big government jobs and spending program succeed in kicking into gear the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and ultimately save us from catastrophic climate change? The energy transition is currently going way too slowly; it needs money and policy support. And many people would need job retraining in order to work in re-engineered, renewable-powered industrial systems. In the 1930s, the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt helped create jobs while also building critical infrastructure, including rural electrification, roads, bridges, and government buildings. Today, as we confront the requirements to produce energy sustainably; to use it differently in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture; and to reverse the current trend toward increasing economic inequality—in effect, to save and reinvent industrial civilization—the need is arguably much greater.
The public champions of the Green New Deal (GND) in the U.S. include Democratic progressive representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Deb Haaland, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Antonio Delgado. The idea is also supported by writer-activists Naomi Klein and Van Jones; by the Green Parties in the US and Europe; and by the Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Climate Mobilization. The proposals currently circulating in Washington aim to provide 100 percent renewable energy in 10 to 20 years while supporting job retraining and aiding communities impacted by climate change. Some proposals also include a carbon tax (often with a fee-and-dividend structure that would rebate funds to low-income people so they could afford more costly energy services), incentives for green investment, public banks, measures to re-regulate the financial system, and the first steps toward a global Marshall Plan.
My organization, Post Carbon Institute, published one of the earliest Green New Deal proposals back in December 2008 (we called it the “Real New Deal”). At the time, the nation was in the throes of the Global Financial Crisis, and we were hopeful that the incoming Obama administration might be open to some radical thinking. As things turned out, our white paper—some of which seems a bit dated now—was almost completely ignored. Nevertheless, we now have the benefit of ten years of hindsight, and of the opportunity to reflect during that interval on the potentials and drawbacks of a government program aimed to transition the American economy so that it can better survive the 21st century. What follows are some thoughts based on that decade of reflection.
1. The fact that so many years have elapsed makes the job bigger and more desperately needed. Unfortunately, the more deeply we think about the Green New Deal, the more roadblocks we tend to see. As a result of a decade of delay, the energy transition needs to happen even more rapidly now than it did in 2008 if catastrophic climate change is to be averted; and, in the meantime, America’s energy usage has grown. So the job now is both bigger and harder. Thus solutions have to be even more radical, implying more adjustment, effort, and pain. A truly effective Green New Deal was a monumental challenge in 2008; it is likely to be more so now.
2. The political challenges to a Green New Deal were formidable then, and have grown over time. Today’s political scene (certainly in the US, but also in many other countries) is more polarized than it has been for many decades, and increased polarization tends to result in more time spent arguing and backbiting, and less time spent actually solving problems. Right-wing populism is on the rise in many countries around the world, feeding a tendency to blame government technocrats for perceived failures.
If the energy transition picks up steam, there will be winners and losers, and nearly everyone will have to sacrifice and adjust in various, significant ways. If sacrifices are seen to be unfair or unnecessary, blame may be the handiest recourse. Especially if policies are clumsily designed or implemented, the blowback may be swift and brutal (as the French government has learned via the “yellow vests” movement). In the face of all these pitfalls, timidity on the part of politicians seems understandable—even if the consequences of failure to act are ultimately suicidal.
Politics has become a self-reinforcing feedback loop: failure to address problems makes people’s lives miserable; as a result, many people lash out in increasingly extreme ways, feeding polarization and fake populism; then polarization further reduces society’s ability to solve problems. Rinse and repeat.
3. There are financial hurdles to a Green New Deal. From a financial perspective, the two central notions of the Green New Deal are that (1) deficit spending can effectively be used to jumpstart a major industrial shift and provide full employment, and (2) the economic consequences of increased deficit spending can be absorbed or blunted if government acts wisely. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) provides theoretical support for the latter assumption. So far, so good. But there are two hitches.
First: a skewed approach to deficit spending in response to the 2008 global financial crisis has led to a financial policy environment that’s not especially conducive to a Green New Deal. After 2008, deficits ballooned and the Federal Reserve Bank conjured up trillions of dollars via its quantitative easing program. But nearly all of the money created went straight into the financial system, not to the needed energy transition or to provide full employment (as Post Carbon Institute advised in our “Real New Deal” white paper). Unemployment did fall slowly over the years, but only as a temporary side effect of the injection of so much fresh cash into the financial system. A more direct side effect was the inflation of additional bubbles (including a short-lived spike in domestic oil and natural gas production, which has worsened the climate and energy crisis), whose inevitable bursting will create dire conditions in which politicians and financial leaders will call for more central bank heavy lifting and more government deficits. In that context, proposals for using the government’s money creation authority for other grand projects (like making society more fair and sustainable over the long term) may once again be given low priority in the rush to put out financial fires.
Second: you can print money, but you can’t print energy and natural resources; and more of the former without more of the latter causes inflation, which can be managed only up to a point. So, in the real world (that is, our world of finite energy and resources), MMT deficit spending can provide more economic equality, and a better way of managing the monetary system and hence the economy (since taking the power of money creation out of the hands of private banks opens the possibility to do away with bubbles, manias, and financial crashes). But, given the fact that the global economy has already overshot limits to annual drawdown of Earth’s resources, even MMT cannot avert an overall decline in average material standard of living as the century wears on. And that is likely to make a lot of people unhappy and dissatisfied. See “political challenges,” above.
4. The transition has to be systemic. Achieving sustainability requires not just the building and installation of a vast number of solar panels and wind turbines, but also a major redesign of energy-using infrastructure (essentially, a redesign of our transportation, housing, food, and manufacturing systems) and the shift to a shrinking or steady-state economy. We at Post Carbon Institute have had the opportunity to study the requirements for a redesign and replacement of energy-using infrastructure in some detail, as explored in the book Our Renewable Future (co-authored with David Fridley); and also the shift to a shrinking or steady-state economy, as unpacked in my book The End of Growth.
Is there a set of policies that could actually avert climate catastrophe while saving civilization? Yes, at least in principle, but a Green New Deal would be only the first step. Other policies that would also be needed include:
Reforms to financial system, beyond what is envisioned in the Green New Deal proposals offered so far. These might include MMT, as well as reforms long advocated by proponents of degrowth or a steady-state economy, including 100 percent reserve requirements for banks (effectively removing their money-creation powers).
Reforms to economic measures and targets. GDP, which simply measures the amount of money sloshing through the economy annually, is currently our main measure of economic health. But it is a perverse and misleading one. It needs to be supplemented or even replaced with measures that directly track the factors that reliably contribute to the happiness and welfare of families and communities (see chapter 6 of The End of Growth).
Universal basic income or a universal job guarantee. Policy proposals along these lines are being supported by some of the same people who support a Green New Deal, with some analysts arguing the greater efficacy of one over the other. The ideas make sense in the context of the existing economy, but will need rethinking as the days of GDP growth come to an end. Not everything that needs to be done in the course of the energy-economic transition will come with a salary. Rather than continuing to think in terms of jobs, we should think instead of all the possible ways to organize meaningful work while providing for everyone’s basic needs.
Reforms to the political system. Currently our elected representatives seem incapable of grasping the nature of our collective predicament, or of contemplating the truly radical measures required if we are to avert utter and irremediable economic, social, and environmental collapse. One reason for this failure of imagination is the degree to which politics is anchored in money. The beneficiaries of the status quo literally pay lawmakers to keep society headed on its current track to perdition. This can change only if we somehow manage to get money out of politics. Separation of private money and state is as vital as separation of church and state for running a functional democracy.
Changes to the information ecosystem (i.e., social media). A successful transition will require near-unanimity in terms of public awareness of the crises facing us, and of willingness to sacrifice for the good of society as a whole (this is sometimes described as a wartime level of common commitment). Currently social media (and corporate media generally) drive us in the opposite direction—toward tribal allegiance and suspicion of outsiders. Either we will need some different versions of social media that are designed to build solidarity by helping us find common ground with one another, rather than stoking backbiting and division, or we will need to collectively abandon social media. During WWII the government essentially co-opted the entertainment industry for propaganda purposes, an anti-democratic effort which the American people tolerated. Would we tolerate something similar now? Or might state control of media simply help further undermine our already broken democracy? Here is an instance where there are no unambiguously good answers.
An overarching goal of reducing energy and materials consumption, expressed through an integrated suite of practical strategies and tools for achieving that goal while minimizing human misery and social disruption. This is, in effect, a restatement of the items above, but it’s important to keep in mind that they are not scattershot proposals for improving this or that area of human existence, but logical requirements stemming from a central goal—averting irreversible societal and ecological catastrophe resulting from population and consumption overshoot accompanied by worsening pollution dilemmas (primarily, of course, climate change). Policy makers and ordinary people alike will need to start from, and maintain, this integrated framing of issues if the project is to have any hope of success.
So, in sum, a Green New Deal that would fully address the climate/energy crisis would have to be far broader in scope than what is currently being proposed. Ultimately, we will need to mobilize society as a whole with a World War II-level of effort. Again, what’s required is not simply to provide jobs to the un- or underemployed while building large numbers of wind turbines and solar panels; we will all need to live very differently and make some sacrifices. Given the already dangerously high and increasing level of economic inequality in the country, it would make sense to ensure that sacrifices fall mostly on those who are currently well-off, while the benefits of job creation are targeted toward those who are already feeling the pinch.
A Green New Deal is needed. It’s an idea that deserves support from politicians and advocacy organizations. That said, it will be a difficult policy to negotiate in detail and much tougher to pass into law. But, in such a volatile political landscape, almost anything is possible—even a practical version of a Green New Deal that addresses our shared crises with the most equitable rules and institutions we can muster.
Republished with permission of the author.
See Richard Heinberg speak live at our free online Systems Change Summit, Beyond the Great Reset on 15th May, 2021. Register now.
In early 2020, Arkbound Foundation began putting together a landmark publication on climate change for the COP26 Summit in Glasgow. The summit was postponed to November 2021, giving us even more time to prepare!
Climate change is an existential threat to humanity and all other species on Earth. Scientists have been saying this for over a decade: in 2019 the Union of Concerned Scientists (representing more than 11,000 scientists from 156 countries) warned that:
‘Planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.’1
Back in September 2018, the United Nations underscored the same, with Secretary-General Guterres saying:-
“There is no more time to waste. We are careering towards the edge of the abyss […] every day that passes means the world heats up a little more and the cost of our inaction mounts. Every day we fail to act is a day that we step a little closer towards a fate that none of us wants – a fate that will resonate through generations in the damage done to humankind and life on earth.”2
Despite this, for the most part, the world continues on a ‘business as usual trajectory’. Emissions are increasing, with the brief interlude of COVID-19 being nothing more than a temporary and insufficient dip. Time is running out. We cannot afford for the next COP to be like every other before it: one of insufficient promises, often themselves left unfulfilled, as CO2 emissions rocket.
Graph of climate emissions with each COP26 summit marked.
The challenges of truly addressing climate change are interlinked with our socio-economic model. In order to prevent extinction, we need to seek fundamental societal transformation. The era of exploiting one another and the planet itself is drawing to a close – the world simply cannot handle more of the same. In its place, we can look to working examples of different models. From self-sufficient ecological communities, to local currencies and cooperatives, the knowledge and experience of making a transformation already exists!
By drawing together all these accounts into one publication, we hope to set a new course for the forthcoming COP26, where localisation and systems change take precedence. Rather than pursuing minor tweaks and reforms which only serve to keep power structures in place and make little difference to emissions, a new dialogue is needed.
All too often in publications about climate change there is also a lack of representation for people from certain backgrounds – ironically, those most likely to be hardest hit first. Women in the Global South and those from non-white backgrounds are particularly under-represented. Therefore, as part of our project, we have reached out to and engaged a diverse number of people from these backgrounds to ensure their voices are properly heard. We are proud that the book contains more content from women and people of colour than that of any other climate change publication.
We hope to set a new course for the forthcoming COP26, where localisation and systems change take precedence. Rather than pursuing minor tweaks and reforms which only serve to keep power structures in place and make little difference to emissions, a new dialogue is needed.
However, simply publishing a book is not enough to change things. Even though we will be looking to produce videos, podcasts and events, we need on-going engagement, interaction and dialogue to ensure the issues covered get noticed. If you are part of the Systems Change Alliance, or just generally interested in its work, the chances are this project will strongly resonate with you. We welcome you to find out more and get involved, with more details at https://arkbound.ac.uk/cop26-2020-2021-project/
If you ever thought that eating more sea fish is much more sustainable than, let’s say, eating beef, then you ought to think again. If you ever want to know why, then watch Seaspiracy, a shockingly effective expose of the dark secrets of the fishing industry by Ali and Lucy Tabrizi.
The 1 hour and 29 minutes Netflix film covers many topics about the unsustainable fishing industry, including the connection between trawling for fish and the rapid destruction of coral reefs, which are vital to maintaining long term ocean ecology and life in general. The documentary also highlights how microplastics are becoming a near ubiquitous feature of marine life, accumulated in everything from sea plants to crabs to fish and finally consumed at home or in fine restaurants by people like you and me.
Most shocking perhaps is to learn that the oceans are not only polluted by plastic garbage—an estimated new truck load of polymer products every minute—but also by millions of discarded fishing nets. These nets, even more destructive to ocean life than straws and empty coke bottles, amount to about 40 percent of plastic pollution. Responsible for killing countless turtles and fish annually, the nets are also swallowed by whales who often beach themselves and die as a result.
Ali Tabrizi, the narrator of the film, travels to Africa, Asia, Scandinavia, and Southern Europe to document how we are draining the oceans of its resources. The highly profitable exploitation by the fishing industry, including so-called sustainable fishing (which is just the opposite) is so savage that by 2050, it is estimated, there will be more plastic containers on the seven seas than fish.
The film also features scathing commentaries by some of the world’s most eloquent critics of corporate unsustainability, including famed Guardian columnist George Monbiot. The Tabrizis also reveal how leading heads of various environmental organizations are often in cahoots with the fishing industry’s blatant coverups.
If we simply call this mass extinction a human problem, then we let the corporations and the rich profiteers too easily off the hook.
In one scene, “sustainably” farmed fish are ushered into floating cages and eaten alive by lice—a common occurrence in fish farms. In another, “dolphin-safe” labels certified by environmental groups on canned tuna are revealed as coverups. In reality, up to 45 dolphins are dying in the process of fishermen dredging for tuna.
What are the critics saying about the film? The New York Times calls it “A Netflix documentary [that] takes viewers on a voyage around the world rooting out the many causes of ocean life decimation, but its rhetorical methods distract from its revelations.” Decider, meanwhile, said of the film: “Tabrizi pieces together a mostly effective — and sometimes thoroughly disturbing — mosaic portrait of an industry left to its own unscrupulous devices.”
Seaspiracy is not an “objective account” of the fishing industry but rather a piece of “activist journalism” focusing its lens on a particular problem: the rapid extinction of sea creatures due to human gluttony and corporate greed. As author Elisabeth Kolbert has documented, we are in the midst of a Sixth Extinction. And this time it is not due to an asteroid. This time, she writes, the cataclysm is us.
As the film demonstrates, advocating sustainable lifestyle changes with false slogans such as “Buy Sustainable Fish” when that is no longer possible, is to shift the blame to the individual when the real problem is inherent in the corporate capitalist system itself.
However, if we simply call this mass extinction a human problem, then we let the corporations and the rich profiteers too easily off the hook. It is, after all, the corporate capitalist system and its greed that is the real cause behind the growth economy’s fallout: air and water pollution, climate change, mass extinction, top soil loss, inequality and poverty. And that is also what this must-see documentary points out.
As the film demonstrates, advocating sustainable lifestyle changes with false slogans such as “Buy Sustainable Fish” when that is no longer possible, is to shift the blame to the individual when the real problem is inherent in the corporate capitalist system itself.
In order to avoid a Sixth Extinction of species in both the oceans and on land, we need radical, systemic policy changes on a global scale. That is why we need more, not less, activist journalists like those behind this important shock and awe film. We also need reports on possible solutions, systemic changes solutions needed to stop overfishing, and those kinds of solutions are missing in the film.
One tangible such solution comes from another filmmaker, 93-year-old environmental activist Sir David Attenborough. He suggests setting aside one-third of the oceans for 10 years as a no-fishing-zone. That, he says, is enough to restore biodiversity and to greatly improve the oceans absorption of carbon. But we also need to stem the glutenous greed for ever more fish by banning deep-sea trawling. That practice—graphically demonstrated in the film—literally kills everything in its wake, including coral reefs, which are essential to maintaining ocean biodiversity.
Despite humanity facing a Sixth Extinction, there is still hope. In the words of Sir David: “The overriding principle is that nature is our biggest ally and greatest inspiration. We just have to do what nature has always done. Stop simply growing and establish a balance with nature. We must become a part of nature once again. If we can do that, an alternative future comes into view.”
The Roman god Janus is depicted with two faces. As the god of new beginnings and transitions, the month of January was named after him -- he is thought to be simultaneously looking behind at the year that has been, and forward to the year ahead. After the year that was 2020, many of us probably don’t want to be looking back, but rather forwards.
The dualistic mind is binary, subscribing to either/or thinking and categorising things through differentiation, opposition, and comparison.
The faces of Janus are also symbolic of paradox, something that is uncomfortable for many of us. We humans tend to rely a lot on dualistic thinking -- where every this must have a corresponding that. That for every right, there is a corresponding wrong. Good and evil. Black and white. Vegemite and Marmite (that’s for the Kiwis, Aussies and Brits). The dualistic mind is binary, subscribing to either/or thinking and categorising things through differentiation, opposition, and comparison. For every thought, viewpoint, or ideal, there must be an equal and opposite viewpoint or state, and we resist holding two seemingly opposing viewpoints at the same time. We tell those who hold contradictory views to “make up your mind” or “you can’t have it both ways!”
Can’t you though? Have it both ways? Is life really so simple?
I would argue no. Life is full of nuance, complexity, wonder. People are multidimensional. We humans are complex, messy creatures, and we constantly inhabit contradictory views. Sometimes multiple, seemingly opposing things are true at once. Sometimes we just don’t know. But many of us find it hard to accept this. Our desire to belong, and be seen as rational, consistent beings, perhaps along with an aversion to being labelled as flaky or indecisive, means that many of us feel pressured to take a viewpoint on any given issue. We see this all over our social media feeds.
It’s a strange and fascinating phenomenon that millions of us make the daily decision to offer up our precious time to make sure that some stranger on the other side of some other keyboard, somewhere in the world, gets the message that we are right, and they are wrong.
I use the words “us” and “we” very purposefully above, as despite my best intentions to avoid dualistic thinking where it isn’t helpful, I’m certainly guilty of being sucked into a Facebook debate and had my knee-jerk emotions get the better of me. Hell, I did it just yesterday, and I’m reasonably sure most of the people reading this will have done it at least once or twice.
And it’s killing us. It’s dividing the world up into tribes, camps, siloes. Authoritarian leaders know the power of dualistic thinking, which is why we have seen those with such black and white views rising into prominence in recent years. Those who will make decisive decisions and stubbornly stay the course (however destructive that course may be) provide a ray of hope and something to cling to. They provide some stability in a chaotic world. They suggest simple solutions to complex problems.
Becoming more comfortable with paradox can help us start to make sense of the chaos of the world without needing to be attached to simplistic view points.
Dualistic thought is what has allowed the catch cries of “All Lives Matter” and “Not All Men” in response to the Black Lives Matter and #metoo movements. It automatically assumes that if we state that Black lives matter, we mean to infer that other non-Black lives don’t, which of course misses the whole point. Likewise, the existence of kind and caring men who respect women does not negate a culture of patriarchal dominance within our economic systems, workplaces, political spheres, and locker rooms.
The antidote to dualistic thinking, is to make our peace with paradox. To understand that my truth is different from your truth, and that that’s okay.
Provided that we respect each other and don’t use our truth as a basis to harm others or undermine their rights, becoming more comfortable with paradox can help us start to make sense of the chaos of the world without needing to be attached to simplistic view points. We can choose to try to understand the warm data, or understand the spaces in between ourselves and everything else. The world is highly complex and dynamic, ever-changing. The natural world is an infinitely complex tangle of interconnected elements, that influence each other day by day, minute by minute. What is true today may not be true tomorrow. The same is true for all human systems.
If we are to solve systemic issues such as institutionalised racism or the destruction of natural ecosystems, which is built into our very ways of living and surviving on this planet, we need to humble ourselves and open our minds to that which is beyond our current understanding. It has to be okay to sometimes say “I don’t know”. To trust that just because you don’t know, that someone else might have an inkling, a sense, a way forward. To change systems that involve all humans, we need to invite all humans and their myriad perspectives into the conversation, even if we don’t understand them. That starts with resisting the urge to view the world in dualistic terms, and to quietly listen for what might be just around the corner.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy
Some fourteen billion years ago the entire cosmos, what would become the great wheeling galaxies with their trillions of blazing suns, burst into being from a single point, in an unimaginably violent, unfathomably immense explosion of light and energy. Since that “Great Flaring Forth” the universe has been expanding, cooling, and growing in complexity. . . and consciousness. *
This is the most astounding discovery of the last four hundred years of modern science and the foundation of our deepest understanding of reality. It is also the limiting case of credulity. If you can believe this, you can believe just about anything. Yet our best science tells us it is so: that the infinitely ordered complexities of the earth — the delicate beauty of birds, flowers, forests, and oceans; the glories and tragedies of self-conscious humanity — all of this grows out of that single, infinitely mysterious, explosive beginning. The cosmos is not so much a place as it is a continually unfolding event.
Scientific laws and theories generally deal with universal, repeatable, predictable regularities. In contrast, stories capture the meaning of unique events — novelties — transforming over time. Every individual human life is a unique story told in the living. We could say the evolving universe itselfis a story “telling us into existence.” Narrative captures something fundamental about the nature of reality. The story becomes a primordial unit of meaning, connecting the present to the past and all things to one another as they emerge from an original unity. All past cultures and civilizations have had some intuitive sense that humans lived within a larger process — a story whose ultimate origin was the most profound and sacred mystery. Each had a cosmology, a story of origins that formed the foundation of its way of life and guided its economics and politics. The viability of a society depended on the success of its cosmology in attuning human activity to the larger, ultimately unfathomable reality that created and sustained all of life.
The cosmos is not so much a place as it is a continually unfolding event.
Today, the story we tell ourselves about our economics and politics has run its course and is exhausted. Humanity enters the twenty-first century in a state of extraordinary crisis. It is a crisis of planetary dimensions involving every major social and biological system, affecting almost every aspect of our individual lives. The same method of persuasive scientific inference we trust to splice genes and rocket humans to the moon tells us that industrialized humanity is directly responsible for the collapse of ecosystems on every continent. All our oceans are polluted, our fisheries dying, coral reefs bleaching, deserts expanding, and forests shrinking.
Almost half the terrestrial surface of the earth has been transformed by urbanization and agriculture. There is overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is accelerating global warming and climate change, which in 2012 melted the Arctic ice sheet to its smallest expanse in recorded history. Scientists warn that our civilization is forcing a planet-wide tipping point — a transition in our biosphere that is dramatically changing the conditions under which civilization developed and flourished for the past ten thousand years. They tell us we have entered the Anthropocene, a geological epoch marked by the destructive impact of industrialized humanity on the earth. 1
There is a growing awareness that nothing this catastrophic has happened to life on earth since the last great mass extinction, which ended the age of dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.2
Almost as astounding is the fact that most human beings are completely unaware of our situation. In the words of William van Dusen Wishard, we are “sleepwalking through the apocalypse.”3
How has this happened? More than three centuries ago the story driving our politics decisively separated human self-understanding from the experience of the natural universe as sacred. Today the primordial experience of the mystery of our earthly origins has ceased to be a moral force in our lives.
All our dominant institutions, from the global marketplace to the factory model of industrial production, were constructed on the basis of a radically constricted understanding of the place of the human in the cosmos. We urgently need a vision of a new politics and economics that is attuned to our larger reality.
The Personal and the Planetary — A Primal Resonance
I started as an amateur political philosopher simply searching for a way to improve myself and my society. As I confronted the shocking extent of our crisis against the backdrop of the immensities of modern cosmology, the search came to dominate my life. Many times along the way I felt alone, as if swimming against the tide and was forced to question myself, to ask why and how I was searching. Then it occurred to me that in spite of the terrifying prospect of civilizational collapse, and in spite of the personal sacrifices and difficulties, the process of searching had also become a comfort, a way of connecting more deeply with others and with the world. The search had become a kind of psychological and spiritual discipline, a key to my personal growth. It was as if in waking up to the vastness of our outer universe and the chaotic condition of modern humanity, I had also woken up to the inner universe of the human psyche and found an expanse just as limitless, astounding, and full of creative possibility. Bringing the outer and the inner together generated a resonance that healed and inspired me; in doing so, this process revealed itself as the core of a better way to live — a new form of a very old politics.
How has this happened? More than three centuries ago the story driving our politics decisively separated human self-understanding from the experience of the natural universe as sacred.
Once I became more self-conscious about my searching, I saw how its most essential aspects were obvious and simple, but strangely neglected in modern universities and public life. There were four essential, perennial components of the search, which seemed to differentiate out from the nature of consciousness. They were the pursuit of self-knowledge and personal growth; honest, face-to-face discussion that enlarged and qualified personal understandings; communication within small democratic communities of trusted equals; and a collective, cooperative weaving together of a big story — a narrative of meaning — that helped the individual find his or her particular place in the ever-expanding shared big picture.
Today, reflecting on the big picture of scientific cosmology helps us recognize that the searching human being is an organic outgrowth of an evolving earth. At the deepest level, we are an integral part of the biosphere, inseparable from the planet we are currently despoiling. We can see that, in some extraordinary way, our science-informed searching is the earth’s way of knowing itself through the human. Early societies, immersed in an unpolluted wilderness on which they depended absolutely, recognized this resonance between the natural world and human consciousness intuitively and explored it through their shamanic systems of religion and healing. This attunement between inner and outer seemed capable of generating spiritual experiences we commonly call ecstatic or mystical, which have the effect of inspiring and ordering our lives.
When we approach politics from such a perspective, magnificent possibilities open up: of ways of life profoundly “better, truer, and more beautiful” than our sad and frenetic destructiveness. Future Primal offers one such vision by weaving together the various narrative layers of my search, from my personal history to the history of civilization, our species, and indeed the universe itself. The vision draws from other models of politics but differs from them in one fundamental respect: at its center is awareness of the ultimate mystery of our origins, and with it the necessity for an ongoing process of creative searching.
Bringing Soul Back into Politics — the Truth Quest
Our modern use of the word politics has become as thoroughly debased and misunderstood as the practice it is commonly used to describe — seeking and wielding power over others for personal gain. On the scale of public opinion, politicians rank somewhere between prostitutes and used-car salesmen. The whole business of politics is considered as far from its Socratic roots in philosophy and “cultivating virtue” as one can get. To move out of this dead end, we need to retrace our steps to find a new way forward. If we go back two and a half thousand years to classical Greece, we can find the origin of the word politics in the Greek polis — the self-governing, autonomous, democratic city-state — where “politics” simply referred to the affairs of the polis, and as the concern of all, it was regarded as the most ennobling and meaningful of all human activities.
I use the word politics in this original, inclusive sense, to mean the universal human struggle, individually and collectively, to seek and to live the best possible life. Political philosophy can then be reconnected to its original Socratic intention as the search for the ideal of “the good life.” This has two primary aspects: On the one hand, there is what Socrates called “the improvement of one’s soul,” or what we loosely understand as personal growth, since the Greek word for “soul” is psyche, from which we get our psychology. On the other hand, there is the improvement of one’s society. Traditionally, this sort of Socratic knowledge was called wisdom. By contrast, in today’s universities “political philosophy” refers to an obscure subspecialty within the discipline of political science that focuses on the texts of the great philosophers of the past. It has lost its living connection to the primordial questions: “How should I live?” and “How should we all live together?” Part of my purpose is to recover this original search for meaning, what I call “the primal truth quest.” Everything we do — the failure and success of all our politics — depends on our grasp of this quest and the reliability of the understanding it produces.
I use the word politics in this original, inclusive sense, to mean the universal human struggle, individually and collectively, to seek and to live the best possible life
The dangers we face today are compounded by the fact that we have never been more confused or more cynical about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful. We are daily inundated with vast quantities of information but lack the most basic shared understanding of how we should live together. Not only do we lack a shared vision but we are profoundly confused about the way we should search. Science provides only neutral tools.
Religion, when based on strict obedience to the Holy Scriptures, remains blind and closed to the search. If we don’t know how to look, how will we recognize the truth of a vision of a better way? Here is our central failing: We have created a political culture that has eliminated in principle the need for the individual to consider and take responsibility for the good of the whole. We have abandoned the truth quest in public life. Our system is set up so that economic and political decisions are made according to the conviction that if individuals, organizations, and nations follow self-interest, the “invisible hand of the market” will automatically convert selfishness into the best possible outcome for the largest number. This is reinforced by a prevailing intellectual culture of skepticism and scientific materialism, which assumes that “good” and “evil,” and “right” and “wrong” are entirely subjective matters for individual judgment.
This sort of relativism has led to a global economic system that rewards a few individuals with grotesque quantities of wealth, rivaling the GDP of small nations, while a billion people go hungry. Never before has so much power over so many been concentrated in the hands of so few in the service of unashamed self-interest. All the while the collective frantic energy of globalized humanity continues to pollute and plunder the planet.
Our situation embodies a stark paradox. We stand on the edge of great danger and great opportunity, both closer to and yet farther than ever from fulfilling some of the most crucial conditions for an enlightened and liberated humanity. No period in history has had the benefit of the staggering vistas of modern cosmology — of how life evolved out of a planet that 4.5 billion years ago was a ball of molten rock. No previous generation has had such reliable detailed knowledge of the diversity of past human societies.
This sort of relativism has led to a global economic system that rewards a few individuals with grotesque quantities of wealth, rivaling the GDP of small nations, while a billion people go hungry.
This ongoing, exponentially expanding understanding of the human condition is now directly available to masses of ordinary human beings through the miracles of industrialization and electronic communication. The radical democratization of wisdom is a practical possibility for perhaps the first time since hunter-gatherers sat around the campfire every night sharing stories.
Yet emotionally we live in a smaller cosmological space than any previous society. Our daily routine keeps us urbanized and indoors as we go from home to car to office, from health club to shopping mall and back home. Asphalt and concrete bury wilderness, and our city lights blind us to the stars and galaxies. The “liberation technologies” of electronic communication can enlighten and mobilize masses of people, but they are shamelessly captured by commercial culture. The mass media of television, film, and radio are largely controlled by a few corporations who are as disinterested in the truth quest as they are interested is maximizing their profits through entertainment and advertising.
So we endlessly pursue self-interest and wind up feeling alone, meaningless cogs in the machinery of mass society, while congratulating ourselves on being the freest people in history. Globally, contradictions sharpen as we see a rise in murderous fundamentalism and the slow destruction of every traditional culture by consumerism. We are exhausting the resources of our planet and exhausting ourselves in the process. The philosopher Richard Tarnas summed up the paradox well: “The unprecedented outward expansiveness of modernity, its heroic confidence, contrasts starkly with an unprecedented inner impoverishment, uncertainty, alienation and confusion.”4
To find a way forward we need to know where we are and how we got here; we need to ask in the words of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin how the “spectaculum of modernity” became a “global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality.”
“Big History” and the Fourth Revolution
Answering the big questions today requires the perspective of “big history”— the vastly expanded story of human emergence from an evolving earth. From this vantage point, we see that civilization’s 5, 500-year written history is little more than a millionth of the history of the earth, and that the life of the earth is but a small fraction of the life of the universe. 6
Twenty years ago, physicist and philosopher Peter Russell graphically demonstrated the power of big history’s capacity to illuminate our crisis. In his book White Hole in Time, Russell used what has since become an unintentionally ominous image to wake us up to the significance of our present moment in human evolution. 7
He took for his scale what was then the iconic achievement of civilization — the world’s tallest building — the quarter-mile-high, 108-story World Trade Center. Against this, he imaginatively projected the 4.5 billion years of earth’s history. Street level, then, represents the formation of our planet, and the first living cells don’t appear until one-quarter the way up, on the 25th floor (about 3.5 billion years ago); plant life starts halfway up, around the 50th floor. Dinosaurs appear on the 104th floor, and mammals and the great apes arrive on the topmost, 108th floor, of the building. Homo erectus becomes fully upright only a few inches from the ceiling of the top floor. Already, 99.99 percent of the story of evolution has been told, and civilization has not yet begun. One-quarter inch from the ceiling, Homo sapiens replaces Neanderthals, and the first Paleolithic rock paintings appear. Modernity begins at less than the thickness of the coat of paint on the ceiling of the top floor of the quarter-mile-high structure.
Russell’s point is as simple as it is obvious and ignored: this exponential rate of evolutionary change in “informational complexity” is approaching a singularity — a leap into a radically different order of being. 8 Wherever this takeoff point is, and whatever lies on the other side, we are getting there fast. Something dramatically different is about to happen. The apocalyptic possibilities of our moment are reinforced by the fact that we can no longer use Russell’s metaphor without seeing the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing into rubble.
[W]e are on the cusp of a “fourth revolution” in human self-consciousness.
The convergence of these two perspectives — a vastly expanded historical narrative on the one hand, and global destruction on the other — puts extraordinary pressure on our moment. It impels us to consider the possibility that we are poised on the edge of a planetary transformation: of either global catastrophe or some “leap in being” that averts disaster and ushers in something radically novel. [...]
Peter Russell’s curve of accelerating change suggests that we are on the cusp of a “fourth revolution” in human self-consciousness. Thanks to science and critical scholarship, we have a depth of understanding of all three revolutions that no previous generation could have hoped for. We are in a position to recognize the enduring but partial truths of each and to integrate their wisdom in a higher, more-inclusive synthesis. Such an understanding would join together what has been fragmented; it would integrate the earth-based wisdom of primal societies, which sustained humanity for nine-tenths of the time that we have been human, with the achievements of the classical civilizations and the past four hundred years of science and industrial capitalism. It would bring us into a fuller and more creative partnership with the evolving earth community. Such a future primal synthesis ultimately requires rethinking almost everything we do and, in the process, living differently.
Endnotes
*Thanks to Brian Thomas Swimme and Thomas Berry for their inspirational framing of “The Universe Story” and for this more fitting alternative term to “the Big Bang.”
1. Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere,” Nature 486 (June 7, 2012): 52–58, doi:10.1038/nature11018. For the term Anthropocene, see W. Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” AMBIO 40, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2011): 739–61.
2. Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that we are eliminating twenty-four thousand species of living organisms from the face of the earth every year — over seventy species a day. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (New York: Norton, 1992), 280. See also E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: Norton, 2006), 5. A recent report in the Sunday Guardian supports Wilson’s gloomy estimates: Juliette Jowit, “Humans Driving Extinction Faster Than Species Can Evolve,” Sunday Guardian, March 7, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/extinction-species-evolve.
3. William van Dusen Wishard, “Sleepwalking through the Apocalypse: The 9/11 Memorial Address,” sponsored by the C. G. Jung Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 11, 2003.
4. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine, 1991), 421.
5. Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays 1966–1985 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 55.
6. The term big history was first used by David Christian in 1989, somewhat jestingly, to describe a history course beginning with the Big Bang. Since then the discipline has spread slowly, due to the rather obvious difficulties of finding it a home in the modern university. A number of United States colleges teach interdisciplinary courses in big history, and now Fred Spier has been appointed to the first university chair in big history, at the University of Amsterdam. See Cynthia Stokes Brown, “Why Aren’t More People Teaching Big History?,” in The Evolutionary Epic: Science’s Story and Human-ity’s Response, eds. Cheryl Genet et al. (Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press, 2009). See also Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New York: New Press, 2007); David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994).
7. Peter Russell, White Hole in Time (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992), 7–10.
Karl Polanyi, the Hungarian economist, was an intellectual giant of his time and prophetic in his vision of the failure of market economics. Long before it was fashionable to be an environmentalist or critical of the capitalist growth economy, he predicted the market economy’s inherent contradictions and ultimate failure.
Polanyi immigrated to London in 1933, where he started working on his major work, The Great Transformation.1 He completed this monumental work in 1944, while living in Vermont, USA. The book became an instant sensation among academics and intellectuals.
According to Polanyi, the great transformation was the transformation from previous societies—where the market was only a small part of the overall society, and the mechanism of the markets were under social control—into a new world where the market was controlling both nature and society. Polanyi was very critical of Adam Smith and the idea of the market being the central focus of human society in general and the economy in particular. “In spite of the chorus of academic incantations so persistent in the nineteenth century,” he writes, “gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy. Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.” 2
Polanyi argued, in effect, that the economics of laissez-faire was not a natural aspect of human life but was “abstract’ and “planned”, while social and economic protectionism was a natural reaction to the inequality and social dislocation created by the very same market. He acknowledged that the capitalist market had brought “unheard of material wealth”, but this narrow focus was also the market’s inherent problem, or contradiction.
The transition to a free market economy was not, according to Polanyi, spontaneous, but a deliberate act imposed with much effort by governments and needed to be kept in place by government coercion. In fact, there is, according to him, nothing natural with free markets at all as they go against the very fabric of society. His central thesis is that self-regulating markets do not work but are destructive and dangerous. “Our thesis,” he writes, “is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implies a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.” 3
It is impossible, Polanyi maintained, to treat labor as a commodity without affecting the human beings that constitute this very notion of a commodity.
The reason for this is that the market turns nature, people and money into commodities to be traded as if they were goods in a shopping center. The problem is: neither one of them are commodities. In the words of Polanyi: [L]abor, land and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be organized in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolute vital part of the economic system. But labor, land and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them.
In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land and money is entirely fictitious. 4
It is impossible, Polanyi maintained, to treat labor as a commodity without affecting the human beings that constitute this very notion of a commodity. While disposing of the labor power contained in human beings, it would also dispose of the physical, psychological and moral sides as well. As a result, human beings would be removed from protective cultural institutions and would “die as the effect of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.” 5
The effect on nature would be equally grave. Polanyi predicted with prophetic accuracy that treating nature as a commodity would “reduce it to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.” 6
Finally, treating money as a commodity would “periodically liquidate business enterprises, for shortage and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.” 7
These predictions, made in 1944, have come true with a vengeance. Polanyi sums up his conclusion thus: “[N]o society could stand the effects of such a system of rude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.” 8
As a reaction to the social dislocation, society takes steps to protect itself from the ravages of the market. In effect, once the free market attempts to separate itself from the fabric of society, social protectionism is society’s natural response. In the last minute it will always pull back from the brink and reinstitute social controls on the markets before it meets its destruction. These lessons of history are periodically forgotten, and experiments in free trade are reintroduced until the next crash.
Largely ignored and forgotten by mainstream economics, Polanyi’s ideas are gradually being accepted by the economic profession. In the preface to the 2001 edition of Polanyi’s book, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz recognizes that “economic science and economic history have come to recognize the validity of Polanyi’s key contentions.” 9
Economic policy at present, however, is almost in every instance quite contrary to Polanyi’s ideas. Both humans and nature are indeed being treated as commodities in the current market economy. And that fact is one of the main reasons, Polanyi would argue, that we humans have reached a state of near global breakdown, both economically and environmentally.
1 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Beacon Press, 2001, originally published 1946) 2 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 2001, page 43 3 Ibid, p. 3. 4 Ibid, p. 75. 5 Ibid, p. 76. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.
Most of us were raised and educated within the cultural narrative of separation, which engenders scarcity, competition and alienation. We are carrying the habit of seeing the world in this way. Our worldview influences our judgment and behavior. If we are willing to try on another worldview and perspective for size, we can often see connections and opportunities that we were blind to. All perspectives come with a blind-spot, hence we need to learn to value multiple perspectives as well as to question our own.
Avoiding ‘monocultures of the mind’, valuing and nurturing diversity and cooperatively integrating this diversity by living the questions together will enable humanity to act wisely in the face of unpredictable change.
Regenerative cultures will facilitate the healthy personal development of a human being from ego-centric, to socio-centric, to species-centric, to bio-centric, and cosmos-centric perspectives of self. This means paying attention to how our culture and education system shape our worldview and value system . Organising principles and ideas are very powerful. Shifting to a new story of ‘interbeing’ requires us to change the organising ideas that shape our perception. Healthy development is based on a process of transcending and including — rather than opposing and entirely dismissing — previous perspectives and the organising ideas they were based on.
The evolutionary trend of increasing integration of diversity is not a path towards increasing homogeneity but a path towards appropriate participation in complexity that values diversity as a source of creativity and innovation. Avoiding ‘monocultures of the mind’, valuing and nurturing diversity and cooperatively integrating this diversity by living the questions together will enable humanity to act wisely in the face of unpredictable change. We need to encourage life-long learning and personal development through supportive community processes and ongoing dialogue, guided by questions much more than seeking permanent answers and solutions.
There are 250 questions in Designing Regenerative Cultures. They invite people everywhere in their communities into a place and culture-sensitive process of questioning that will help the redesign of the human impact and presence on Earth from being degenerative and exploitative to being regenerative and healing. Mainstream culture is obsessed with quick fix solution and elevator pitch answers that can be ‘rolled out’ or ‘scaled up’ without regard to cultural or biophysical context. Therein lies the root of much unsustainable practice.
Living the questions together is about applying collective intelligence to cultural transformation, co-creating a new story of why humanity is worth sustaining as we embark on regenerating social, ecological and economic health.
Maybe in a constantly changing world — as conscious participants within transforming nested complexity — we would be better off regarding answers and solutions as transitory means to ask better questions, rather than continuing with our habit of seeing questions as impermanent pathways to supposedly permanent solutions. The history of our species shows clearly that more often than not, yesterday’s solutions are the sources of today’s problems.
Living the questions together is about applying collective intelligence to cultural transformation, co-creating a new story of why humanity is worth sustaining as we embark on regenerating social, ecological and economic health. It is a participatory and inclusive process of co-creating a powerfully infectious vision of a thriving future for all of life. Engaging in this process in a place-sourced way that is informed and patterned by the essence of locality and culture enables a gradual process of re-inhabitation and belonging to — as expressions of — place.
Thriving regenerative economies will be focussed primarily on regeneratively meeting human needs within bioregional contexts. To enable people in place to create these everywhere we need global collaboration and solidarity. By cooperating in the spirit of continuous inquiry — living the questions together — we can learn to see our differences as sources of insight rather than conflict along this collective path into an uncertain future.
One useful set of questions to engage your community in the collective inquiry and co-creation of regenerative economies is based on turning John Fullerton’s eight principles of a regenerative economy (2015) into a set of questions that might guide us along the way:
How do we create an economy with its operations based on cooperative relationships (between each other and within the ecosphere)?
How would a regenerative economy nurture the entrepreneurial spirit?
How would a regenerative economy enable empowered participation?
How can we ensure that the economy promotes robust circular flows?
How would we design balancing mechanisms (feedback loops) into the economy?
How can we enrich the interactions in our economy by mimicking “the edge effect” the point where two ecosystems meet and generate increased diversity?
How can we nurture regenerative economic activities that honour place by expressing the culture and ecology of place in their relationship?
What would an economy that views wealth holistically look like?
This article originally appeared in Yes! magazine in September, 2020.
We are witnessing a historical push toward the dismantling of imperialism, the decentralization of power, and the welcoming of non-White, non-European values into conservation.
“Whenever you talk about race relations here in so-called ‘America,’ Indigenous communities [are] always the last ones on the rung,” says Wanbli Wiyan Ka’win (Eagle Feather Woman), also known as Joye Braun, a front-line community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network who fought against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. In defending the land so deeply beloved and cherished by her people, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Braun recounts how actively her community is excluded from environmental work and how she and her colleagues are blatantly silenced, even when working alongside allies. “We’ve had to really fight … to even have a seat at the table,” she says.
The exclusion of Indigenous people and other non-white communities in environmental and conservation work is, unfortunately, nothing new. For centuries, conservation has been driven by Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian belief structures that emphasize a distinct separation of “Man” and “Nature”—an ideology that does not mesh well with many belief structures, including those belonging to Indigenous communities.
Christianity has deep, painful historical associations with the obsession of dominance.
“Christianity has been largely built up around the idea of colonization,” Braun says. Not only do these belief structures hold disproportionate power in environmental legislation, but they hold historical pains for those outside of Western religions. “Christianity was forced down our throats,” Braun says. “Our reservations were divided up: ‘OK this community … you can be Catholic. This community … you’re Lutheran. This community … you’re whatever.’”
Before the onset of such religion through colonialist conquests, the overwhelming consensus throughout the world was that human beings were just a small part of this natural world. Neither detached, nor superior. Of course, this “consensus” was not necessarily expressed in such a way that all groups adhered to the same belief structures. Yet, the underlying environmental ideology remains: Human beings are, to some extent, connected to all other living things on Earth, even the Earth itself. As European imperialism—and along with it, cultural genocide—began to take hold worldwide, so began the spread of the “Man versus Nature” dogma.
Today Braun’s life is just one example of the ideological exclusion of non-European thought as it relates to wildlife and the natural world. Nonsubscribers are barred from participation in the protection of the world and nonhuman lives they hold so dear, which inhibits their environmental stewardship. But around the world, and especially in the United States, we are witnessing a historical push toward the dismantling of imperialism, the decentralization of power, and the welcoming of non-white, non-European values into conservation.
How Modern Conservation Upholds the Superiority of Humans
Christianity has deep, painful historical associations with the obsession of dominance. The same Bible that was used to enforce humans’ domination over nature was also used to force Indigenous peoples to abandon their cultural truths for those more palatable to Europeans. This laid the foundation that continues to separate human life from nature to this day.
As the Bible states in Genesis, “Let [Man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over all the wild animals of the earth.” We see echoes of this passage in the frameworks of many conservation objectives today, with concepts such as “creating” sustainable forests, “managing” wildlife populations, and “preserving” wilderness as a realm separate from that of humans. This reduces our perception of human connectivity to nonhuman life and to distance constituents from the objective recognition of Earth’s intrinsic value.
Experiences rooted in genocide and slavery still inform people’s experience of the outdoors.
Take one of the U.S.’s leading environmental organizations, for example. The National Park Service—a federal organization with well-known racist origins—has a mission statement that almost exclusively highlights the instrumental value of North America’s natural lands: “The National Park Services preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations … to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resources conservation … throughout this country and the world.”
Their mission is painfully anthropocentric, never mind that the very lands it aims to extend were stolen from Indigenous tribes who are now denied access. Missions such as these create a near-impenetrable ideological barrier through which environmentalists of non-Christian cultures cannot pass.
Keeping POC Out of Conservation
These organizational goals exclude other faith (or non-faith) groups and have nurtured a hostile environment that disproportionately affects people of color. Historical experiences function to reinforce these impacts, further preventing people of color from exercising agency in conservation initiatives. For one, white constituents do not live with the same generational trauma that people of color do.
Experiences rooted in genocide and slavery, for example, still inform people’s experience of the outdoors. Black people were forbidden to enter certain spaces owned by the National Park Service and other natural lands because of Jim Crow laws and deeply rooted racism, as pointed out by researchers Rachelle K. Gould and others. Many were lynched in these landscapes as well. Thus, for Black people, experiencing the outdoors was to put one’s life on the line.
Simultaneously, “those in power [imposed] a particular concept of environment,” Gould says, which denied Black people’s experiences in natural habitats. Ideological disparities have likewise discouraged Indigenous agency in land management despite how profoundly they value land and wildlife. In the words of Paula Gunn Allen of the Laguna Pueblo, “The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies… It is not a matter of being ‘close to nature’… The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as our self (or selves).”
Inequality lies even in the evasiveness of definitions. “Google the word, ‘environment’ and see how far you need to scroll to see pictures of people in urban areas,” Pomona College psychologist Adam Pearson says. “What counts as being an ‘environmentalist?’ And what counts as ‘environmentalism?’” The vast majority of Americans believe that people of color do not feel strongly about environmental causes. Black, Latino, Asian, and white respondents in a 2018 survey overwhelmingly associated environmentalism with whiteness and underestimated environmental valuation in their own communities. Some 65% of Latin and 68% of Asian respondents self-identified as “environmentalists,” compared to 50% of white respondents.
What Equal Opportunity Actually Looks Like
The public has long held onto the idea that the socioeconomic inequalities play a large role in a person of color’s individual capacity to care for the environment when in fact, conservation organizations often create unequal socioeconomic barriers. People of color who try to enter professional roles in American conservation often encounter pay rates below the poverty line (and have done so for decades). That requires applicants to have enough accumulated wealth to be able to afford forgoing reasonable pay to “gain experience”—a luxury out of reach for many non-whites because of massive racial wealth disparities that result from long-standing discrimination. Even those who fall in line with the Christian dogma are granted unequal access and compensation. Forty-nine percent of Black Christians, compared to 28% of white Christians, earn less than $30,000 annually, according to the Pew Research Center.
Ideological disparities have also had clear effects on Indigenous agency in land management. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services works to combat “wildlife damage,” the idea that wildlife poses a threat not only to human health, safety, and property, but to natural resources as well. This concept is a stark contrast to many cultures’ environmental values.
Indigenous knowledge can reveal truths not visible with white, Eurocentric approaches to conservation.
How would one expect an Indigenous person, a Buddhist, or a Muslim to feel welcome in such a space? The answer lies not only in dismantling millennia of imperialism, but also in the conscious invitation of non-white, non-European cultures into conservation.
According to Pearson, this requires combating stereotypes of environmentalists and creating enthusiasm for working in traditionally noninclusive spaces. Fulfilling these responsibilities requires taking an honest look at how ideological contrasts actively exclude people of color and perpetuate a negative feedback loop that overrepresents white people in environmental and conservation spaces.
“Inviting people to advise doesn’t mean that they’re gonna listen,” Braun notes when discussing possible methods of increasing diversity in conservation. “I’ve seen that a lot. That’s just them patting themselves on the back.” She says real progress relies on human connection. “When you are facing one another, then you’re forced to deal with things like the prejudices you carry on your back. You’re forced to face the potential of racism. You’re forced to face the economic divides.”
Abandoning Exclusivity for Diverse Community-Based Management
As climate change becomes a mainstream concern, Indigenous knowledge can reveal truths not visible with white, Eurocentric approaches to conservation. Traditional ecological knowledge is central to monitoring and combating climatic change, according to a 2019 study in British Columbia and Alaska. “The region is a bellwether for biodiversity changes in coastal, forest, and montane environments,” the authors write, and “an extremely dynamic and resilient social-ecological system where Indigenous Peoples have been adjusting to changing climate and biodiversity for millennia.”
Nearly 100 Indigenous elders from communities along the Pacific Coast shared with researchers the changes they had observed in coho and sockeye salmon migration patterns and the effects of warming aquatic temperatures with great detail. They had similar observations of the Sitka black-tailed deer, highlighting that their migration patterns had been influenced by fluctuating factors such as rising temperatures and reduced snowfall. Ultimately, the researchers asserted that present environmental governance is far too rigid in its exclusivity of Indigenous knowledge and that “token community visits” must evolve to invite Native environmental observers and managers to share their knowledge to create tangible progress.
While these ideas remain nascent in much of American conservation, other countries provide examples of success. For decades, forests in Benin were exclusively owned and managed by state officials. They were supported (and thus, politically influenced) by major stakeholders including the Fondation Aide á l’Autonomie Tobé, a Swiss non-governmental organization. Though the foundation surely had the best interests of the Benin constituents in mind, their collaboration didn’t represent the public’s values. Those living within the Tobé-Kpobidon forest, for example, did not feel welcome in forest management, which led to unsustainable resource use and degradation of the land.
To establish newfound hope for sustainable forest management and community involvement, a team of researchers, led by Rodrigue Castro Gbedomon implemented a “community forestry approach” in 2016. This methodology aims to “alleviate poverty among forest users, empower them, and improve the condition of the forests.” The idea was that the invitation for community involvement (and thus, agency in management decision-making processes) would nurture a sense of ownership in constituents, encouraging them toward more conservative use of forest resources, thereby creating a more sustainable existence for the forest.
The team consciously invited varying ideals and perspectives into management practices by interviewing elders and community leaders on their perspectives regarding the forest’s health. Stakeholders included nongovernmental organization leaders, and traditional and religious authorities that led and guided the surrounding communities. Divinity priests were invited as well, representing deities revered by the locals, including Ogu (the god of iron), Tchankponon (the god of smallpox), Otchoumare (the god of the rainbow), and Nonon (the god of bees). First Settlers and local hunters were also given authority in this work, serving to extend the network of participation deeply into every facet of the residents surrounding and within the Tobé-Kpobidon forest.
This decentralization of power and integration of diverse belief structures was supported by the foundation, which provided the financial resources and the means for reinforcement of the constituents’ chosen management policies. This included warning signs indicating forest boundaries and guards to manage entry into the area. The foundation also rewarded locals’ involvement with a yearly stipend of 500,000 FCA ($1,000 USD) to further encourage their continued dedication to conservation activities.
This new governance structure yielded phenomenal results. As community access to the forest expanded for medicinal gathering, hunting, beekeeping, and more, the forest’s contribution to the local economy increased to make up more than 25% of the First Settlers’ income. Also, the native flora experienced a “progressive evolution” alongside a healthy, low rate of human agricultural interference. (Cashew plantations, for example, expanded at only 0.4% annually). This community-focused approach continued to have positive effects on the forest in the years after the study.
The Tobé-Kpobidon Forest experimental management approach, along with the extensive foundation of evidence validating Indigenous knowledge, serve as a beacon of hope amid the darkness that looms over non-white, non-European demographics that yearn for a role in conservation initiatives. It demonstrates that the present ideological chasms that keep people of color out of conservation can be defeated and that such cultural victories powerfully serve both humans and the natural landscapes in which we reside.
Amid a horrific human tragedy of sickness and death, much of it taking place in hospitals staffed by brave but overworked and under-equipped doctors and nurses, we are all learning once again what it feels like when economic growth comes to a shuddering stop and the economy goes into reverse—shrinking and consuming itself. Millions have been thrown out of work, untold numbers of businesses shuttered. The St. Louis Federal Reserve estimates that Q2 unemployment could clock in as high as 32.1 percent (for comparison, unemployment at the depths of the Great Depression was 25 percent, and during the Great Recession of 2008-2010 it peaked at 10 percent). Though radical measures must now be adopted to slow the spread of the coronavirus, those measures are having toxic side effects on the economy.
Yet, economic growth was bound to end at some point, with or without the virus. A few moments of critical thought confirm that the exponential expansion of the economy—whose physical processes inevitably entail extracting natural resources and dumping polluting wastes—is destined to reach limits, given the obvious and verifiable fact that we live on a finite planet.
However, we also happen to live in a human social world in which a decades-long spurt of economic and population growth, based on the snowballing exploitation of a finite supply of fossil fuels, has become normalized, so that world leaders have come to agree that growth can and must continue forever. In response to this situation, clear-eyed systems and environmental scientists have, during the past few decades, proposed policies either to transition the global economy away from its near-suicidal requirement for infinite growth, or to cushion the impact when growth limits are finally reached.
At first, this post-growth train of thought was so marginalized by mainstream economists that few educated people were even aware of its existence. In other words, it lay entirely outside the Overton window of acceptable public discourse.
Then, in 2008, the wheels of the financial bus that we were all riding fell off, and there was an opening for discussion about different ways of organizing the economy. During the early recovery period after the global financial crisis, I presented a natural-limits-based view of economics in my book The End of Growth, in which I summarized heterodox policy proposals for getting society on a sustainable track without destroying livelihoods. However, central banks and national governments managed temporarily to bail out the wizards and quants who had precipitated the crisis, restarted the growth machine, and thereby narrowed the Overton window once again.
This sea change in priorities requires entirely different thinking and policies—ones much more closely aligned with heterodox post-growth thinking than with pro-growth economic orthodoxy.
Still, during the decade that followed, a seed of post-growth economic thinking was planted and began to sprout. In Europe, ecological economists and environmental activists organized “degrowth” conferences. The tiny nation of Bhutan, which had been experimenting since the 1970s with Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), tallied up its findings and argued at the United Nations that other countries should likewise aim for widespread social satisfaction rather than growth in monetary exchange. Groups promoting public banking mushroomed across the U.S., and articles about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Universal Basic Income (UBI) appeared in major news outlets; the latter was even promoted by an early contender for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Still, the economic priesthood held tight to its dogma. Although it was patently illogical, the demand for endless growth continued to be defended using tortured reasoning and cherry-picked statistics. We can grow in green ways, the orthodox economists insisted—ways that don’t impact the environment. Well, it’s true that we can use resources more efficiently, we can recycle more, and we can find ways to reduce the toxicity of the wastes we produce. But the fact remains: over time, a growing economy will eventually and inevitably take up more ecological space than one that does not grow. Even the richest man in the world, who made his hundreds of billions of dollars from consumers, came to the conclusion that there are limits to energy and gains in efficiency, and that we face a future on this planet of limits. (He, less surprisingly, came to a different solution than I and other “limits to growthers” would offer, his being that we should harvest the moon and colonize space.)
Now, the coronavirus pandemic has seismically shifted the discussion once again. The Overton window is broken and the wall that held it has caved in. Suddenly the first priority of world leaders is no longer economic growth; instead, it is public safety. Lives must be saved and health care systems salvaged regardless of the short-term hit to profits, employment, and investment returns. This sea change in priorities requires entirely different thinking and policies—ones much more closely aligned with heterodox post-growth thinking than with pro-growth economic orthodoxy.
Here is a quick survey of the post-growth economic policies recently introduced by sustainability theorists, and a brief discussion of how and whether each is relevant to our new pandemic-obsessed moment.
Universal Basic Income
UBI is a government plan for providing all citizens with a given sum of money, regardless of their income or employment status. The purpose is to prevent or reduce poverty and inequality. However, UBI would also be useful in a post-growth scenario. Suppose, for example, that a nation decided to lower its greenhouse gas emissions by restructuring its economy so as to substantially reduce energy usage and material throughput. Eventually, many people could transition from jobs in airlines and other energy-intensive industries to become food producers and small-scale manufacturers within more localized economies (see below). But, over the short run, substantial numbers would be thrown out of work; how to avoid widespread economic hardship and social instability in the interim? Answer: UBI.
The U.S. federal government’s just-passed stimulus plan includes the equivalent of a nascent UBI: It mandates one-time cash payments of $1,200 for each adult and $500 per child. It also sets aside $367 billion to help small businesses and $500 billion for loans to larger industries. (The Fed is meanwhile buying corporate bonds and securities from hedge funds, to the tune of trillions, putting the Treasury on the hook for them.) There is ongoing discussion among policy wonks about longer-term cash payments to individuals; if this indeed happens, the U.S. will be officially experimenting with UBI.
But where’s the money to come from? For the time being, it’s being conjured through a cozy arrangement between Congress and the Federal Reserve: Congress issues debt, which the Fed buys—without requirement for interest payments. This brings us to:
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
MMT says that monetarily sovereign countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada are not limited by tax revenues or borrowing when it comes to federal government spending. They can create as much digital or paper money as they need, and are (or should be) the legal monopoly issuers of their currency. Therefore, they should be able to create and spend as much energy as needed to create full employment.
Over the longer term, the best outcome would be achieved if the current crisis forces economists to think anew about the nature of money itself—what it is, how it is created, and what are is social effects.
I must confess some skepticism with regard to MMT. It’s obvious how it would be useful in a crisis; but, over the longer term, if the money supply is growing faster than energy and materials, the result must be inflation. In fairness, Modern Monetary Theorists have given considerable thought to the problem of inflation, and have come up with ways of limiting it—such as by levying deficit-reducing taxes, during times of full employment, to reduce aggregate demand. Yet, in my experience, most Modern Monetary Theorists follow conventional economists in mistakenly assuming that energy and natural resources are effectively infinite, rather than finite and depleting. By focusing just on employment, they miss the essential basis of all economic productivity.
In any case, a crisis is what we have: Governments and central banks are being forced to resort to a form of MMT because of a sudden, dramatic spike in unemployment. And, over the short term, money printing is an essential economic tonic. However, over the longer term, the best outcome would be achieved if the current crisis forces economists to think anew about the nature of money itself—what it is, how it is created, and what are is social effects. Most economists still think of money as simply a medium of exchange, but it is better understood as storable, quantifiable, and transferrable social power. Renegade economist Steve Keen points out that conventional economic theory does a surprisingly poor job of explaining money and debt. Alternative currency theorists like Thomas Greco do a much better job of it.
Ecological and biophysical economists—the vanguard of post-growth economists—go even further. They start with realistic assessments of finite energy sources and natural resources, then explore how economic systems could fairly harvest and distribute resources without depleting nature’s stores over time. For starters, they propose taxing all financial transactions and requiring banks to hold 100 percent reserves. They also tend to hold to the principle, first propounded by American economist Henry George (1839-1897), that each person should own what he or she creates, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, should belong equally to all humanity.
Public Banks
Today most money is created by private banks through the process of issuing loans. Digital money is called into existence when a loan is granted; when the loan is repaid, that money vanishes. The problem is, interest must be paid on the loan, and the money needed to pay that interest isn’t created when the loan is issued. The borrower must earn or borrow money for interest payments from elsewhere. As long as the overall economy is growing, that’s usually possible. But if the economy isn’t growing, defaults ensue. Lending slows to a dribble, with more money disappearing than is being created. That’s called a deflationary depression, and it’s something to be avoided if possible—though it’s an inevitable feature of debt-based economies in a finite world.
As a solution, why not create government-run public banks that loan money at no interest, at least in the cases of businesses that are operating for the public good? For example, if a state decided that it was in the public interest to promote renewable energy, its state bank could make zero-interest loans to solar installers.
Public banks have a long history, and operate in many nations. In the U.S., the prime example is the Bank of North Dakota, which partners with private banks to loan money to farmers, schools, and small businesses.
The idea of public banks is closely tied to MMT; think of public banks as MMT at the retail level. So far, the pandemic has not provoked wide interest in public banking; but, as the incipient recession deepens and lengthens, expect this to be a subject of increasing discussion.
In 1972, Bhutan’s 16-year-old King Jigme Singye Wangchuck used the phrase “Gross National Happiness” to describe the economy that would serve his country’s Buddhist-influenced culture. The label stuck, and soon the Centre for Bhutan Studies set out to develop a survey instrument to measure the Bhutanese people’s general sense of well-being. That survey instrument measures nine domains:
Time use
Living standards
Good governance
Psychological well-being
Community vitality
Culture
Health
Education
Ecology
Bhutan’s efforts to boost GNH have led to the banning of plastic bags and re-introduction of meditation into schools, as well as a “go-slow” approach toward the standard economic development pathway paved by costly infrastructure projects paid for with huge loans from international banks.
There’s nothing in the recent stimulus package that resembles GNH, but policy makers increasingly could be forced into considering something like it, out of necessity. As people are stuck at home for long periods, some are descending into loneliness and depression brought on by isolation; others are filling their time with art, music, home schooling, and gardening. Leaders will eventually realize they must do something to discourage the former and encourage the latter. They may eventually conclude that gauging their success using GDP is pointless, and that directly measuring safety, health, and life satisfaction makes a lot more sense.
The Sharing Economy
The last time the U.S. suffered through an economic depression, in the 1930s, government economists and leaders of industry responded by creating a new economic paradigm—consumerism. Henceforth American citizens would be termed consumers, whose duty is to buy and discard products at an ever-accelerating rate so as to steadily increase overall employment levels, the size of the economy, returns on investments, and government tax revenues. Two key strategies of consumerism were planned obsolescence, in which products were designed to have limited useful lifetimes, or to soon become aesthetically undesirable in comparison with new versions of the same product; and redundant consumption, in which individuals were encouraged through advertising to prefer owning their own products (such as cars and lawn mowers) rather than sharing them with family members, neighbors, or friends.
Unfortunately, while consumerism succeeded in overcoming the problem of overproduction (which was one of the causes of the Great Depression), it resulted in the steady ramping up of resource consumption. At the same time, it had a negative impact on many people’s psychological health, as they spent more time viewing advertising messages and shopping, and less time engaging with family, friends, and nature.
The idea of the sharing economy took hold around the time of the Great Recession of 2008; it proposed a peer-to-peer (P2P) way of organizing the economy in which the sharing of goods and services is facilitated by community-based online platforms. Many pioneers of the sharing economy were motivated by the ecological ideal of reducing overall consumption levels.
While consumerism succeeded in overcoming the problem of overproduction, it resulted in the steady ramping up of resource consumption. At the same time, it had a negative impact on many people’s psychological health, as they spent more time viewing advertising messages and shopping, and less time engaging with family, friends, and nature.
Unfortunately, however, the sharing economy quickly became equated with the gig economy, and with ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft—which promised to eliminate the perceived need for everyone to own a car, and thereby reduce carbon emissions from transportation. Unfortunately, it turned out that Uber and Lyft generate more carbon emissions than the trips they displace, and aren’t always model employers.
GND proposals circulating in the U.S. prior to the pandemic aimed to provide 100 percent renewable energy in 10 to 20 years while supporting job retraining and aiding communities impacted by climate change. Some proposals also included a carbon tax (often with a fee-and-dividend structure that would rebate funds to low-income people so they could afford more costly energy services), incentives for green investment, public banks, measures to re-regulate the financial system, and the first steps toward a global Marshall Plan.
While GND advocates seldom publicly acknowledge that economic growth is both ephemeral and antithetical to a livable environment, their proposals are nevertheless largely consistent with policy advice post-growth thinkers.
The coronavirus pandemic cuts both ways with regard to climate change. Emissions are down, because businesses are closed and people are staying home. But the transition to renewable energy has slowed to a crawl. If we’re to move to a post-carbon economy, we’ll need massive investment in post-carbon transportation, building heating, manufacturing, and agriculture. President Trump signaled he wanted Congress to appropriate a couple of trillion dollars for infrastructure spending, but what he had in mind were subsidies for existing fossil fuel-dependent industries. MMT notwithstanding, the nation’s money pot is not bottomless. If we are to have a Green New Deal, it must come soon.
Resilience
We have made the world more economically efficient by lengthening supply chains to take advantage of the cheapest labor and raw materials anywhere they exist, and by minimizing inventories with just-in-time supply strategies; but the result has been a withering of resilience—the ability to recover and adapt to a crisis or disruption. Post-growth thinkers tend to agree that the structural unsustainability of modern industrial economies has created a series of crises that are lined up to bite—from climate change to the threat of global pandemics. Therefore, preparing for the post-growth era requires building resilience—particularly at the community level.
Redesigning national economies in the midst of crisis is a challenge perhaps comparable to redesigning an airplane in mid-air, while attempting to make a safe landing. Navigating the end of growth will require courage, new thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to make mistakes.
Suddenly, in this moment of broken supply chains, and shortages of toilet paper, masks, and ventilators, the argument for resilience is easier to make: there are perfectly obvious reasons to shorten supply chains, and establish strategic stockpiles that are distributed locally. Trump’s ham-fisted attempt to renegotiate globalization via tariffs hardly counts as a step in that direction. Unfortunately, because world leaders previously didn’t listen to resilience advocates sooner, we will all be paying a price for some time to come.
Localism
The lengthening of supply chains is the essence of globalization; if this has made us more vulnerable to crisis, then it stands to reason that we should re-localize some of our economic activity.
Post-growth thinkers have been advocating localism for decades. Naturally there are objections and questions: What about xenophobia? What about sharing knowledge and best practices across cultures? What about global cooperation to meet global challenges like climate change? In answer, localists say we needn’t view the recovery of local knowledge, local culture, and local economic vitality as all-or-nothing. Think of it as the rebalancing of a system that has become lopsided and dangerously unstable.
Meanwhile, in nations like the United States, where national leadership during the pandemic is absent or inept, citizens are being forced into thinking and acting more locally. Localism can have either a welcoming or an exclusionary face; it’s up to us to choose. Fortunately, many people so far seem to be choosing to be neighborly.
* * *
The end of growth is painful. We had a foretaste of it in 2008, but the current crisis promises to be much worse. Our leaders are flying blind, just as they were during the Global Financial Crisis over a decade ago. We were unprepared for it, just as we were for the pandemic and the economic carnage that is accompanying it.
However, there are people who have been anticipating a moment like this for decades. If we are willing now to listen and learn from post-growth thinkers, the crisis and its aftermath can be a process of adaptation that leaves us more locally resilient, happier, and more connected.
That’s not to downplay the immensity of the task. Redesigning national economies in the midst of crisis is a challenge perhaps comparable to redesigning an airplane in mid-air, while attempting to make a safe landing. Navigating the end of growth will require courage, new thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to make mistakes. It’s understandable why, during “normal” times, people want to stick with what’s familiar. But we’re no longer in normal times. We are in a moment that requires us to undertake bold changes that have been put off for far too long.
The path to an ecological civilization is paved by reclaiming the commons—our common home, the Earth, and the commons of the Earth family, of which we are a part. Through reclaiming the commons, we can imagine possibility for our common future, and we can sow the seeds of abundance through “commoning.”
In the commons, we care and share—for the Earth and each other. We are conscious of nature’s ecological limits, which ensure her share of the gifts she creates goes back to her to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems. We are aware that all humans have a right to air, water, and food, and we feel responsible for the rights of future generations.
Enclosures of the commons, in contrast, are the root cause of the ecological crisis and the crises of poverty and hunger, dispossession and displacement. Extractivism commodifies for profit what is held in common for the sustenance of all life.
The Commons, Defined
Air is a commons.
We share the air we breathe with all species, including plants and trees. Through photosynthesis, plants convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and give us oxygen. “I can’t breathe” is the cry of the enclosure of the commons of air through the mining and burning of 600 million years’ worth of fossilized carbon.
Water is a commons.
The planet is 70% water. Our bodies are 70% water. Water is the ecological basis of all life, and in the commons, conservation creates abundance. The plastic water bottle is a symbol of the enclosures of the commons—first by privatizing water for extractivism, and then by destroying the land and oceans through the resulting plastic pollution.
Food is a commons.
Food is the currency of life, from the soil food web, to the biodiversity of plants and animals, insects and microbes, to the trillions of organisms in our gut microbiomes. Hunger is a result of the enclosure of the food commons through fossil fuel-based, chemically intensive industrial agriculture.
A History of Enclosure
The enclosure transformation began in earnest in the 16th century. The rich and powerful privateer-landlords, supported by industrialists, merchants, and bankers, had a limitless hunger for profits. Their hunger fueled industrialism as a process of extraction of value from the land and peasants.
Colonialism was the enclosure of the commons on a global scale.
When the British East India Company began its de facto rule of India in the mid-1700s, it enclosed our land and forests, our food and water, even our salt from the sea. Over the course of 200 years, the British extracted an estimated $45 trillion from India through the colonial enclosures of our agrarian economies, pushing tens of millions of peasants into famine and starvation.
“We receive our seeds from nature and our ancestors. We have a duty to save and share them, and hand them over to future generations in their richness, integrity, and diversity.”
Our freedom movement, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, was in fact a movement for reclaiming the commons. When the British established a salt monopoly through the salt laws in 1930, making it illegal for Indians to make salt, Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha—the civil disobedience movement against the salt laws. He walked to the sea with thousands of people and harvested the salt from the sea, saying: Nature gives it for free; we need it for our survival; we will continue to make salt; we will not obey your laws.
Expanding Enclosures
While the enclosures began with the land, in our times, enclosures have expanded to cover lifeforms and biodiversity, our shared knowledge, and even relationships. The commons that are being enclosed today are our seeds and biodiversity, our information, our health and education, our energy, society and community, and the Earth herself.
The chemical industry is enclosing the commons of our seeds and biodiversity through “intellectual property rights.” Led by Monsanto (now Bayer) in the 1980s, our biodiversity was declared “raw material” for the biotechnology industry to create “intellectual property”—to own our seeds through patents, and to collect rents and royalties from the peasants who maintained the seed commons.
Reclaiming the commons of our seeds has been my life’s work since 1987. Inspired by Gandhi, we started the Navdanya movement with a Seed Satyagraha. We declared, “Our seeds, our biodiversity, our indigenous knowledge is our common heritage. We receive our seeds from nature and our ancestors. We have a duty to save and share them, and hand them over to future generations in their richness, integrity, and diversity. Therefore we have a duty to disobey any law that makes it illegal for us to save and share our seeds.”
I worked with our parliament to introduce Article 3(j) into India’s Patent Law in 2005, which recognizes that plants, animals, and seeds are not human inventions, and therefore cannot be patented. Navdanya has since created 150 community seed banks in our movement to reclaim the commons of seed. And our legal challenges to the biopiracy of neem, wheat, and basmati have been important contributions to reclaiming the commons of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.
So, too, with water. When French water and waste management company Suez tried to privatize the Ganga River in 2002, we built a water democracy movement to reclaim the Ganga as our commons. Through a Satyagraha against Coca- Cola in 2001, my sisters in Plachimada, Kerala, shut down the Coca-Cola plant and reclaimed water as a commons.
Ecological civilization is based on the consciousness that we are part of the Earth, not her masters, conquerors, or owners. That we are connected to all life, and that our life is dependent on others—from the air we breathe to the water we drink and the food we eat.
All beings have a right to live; that is why I have participated in preparing the draft “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.” The right to life of all beings is based on interconnectedness. The interconnectedness of life and the rights of Mother Earth, of all beings, including all human beings, is the ecological basis of the commons, and economies based on caring and sharing.
Reclaiming the commons and creating an ecological civilization go hand in hand.
This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine, Februrary 2021.
A society based on natural ecology might seem like a far-off utopia—yet communities everywhere are already creating it.
This article was originally published by Yes! Magazine, in February, 2021.
As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives will strive to focus the administration’s attention on challenges like fixing the broken health care system, grappling with systemic racial inequities, and a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
These are all critically important issues. But here’s the rub: Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet’s life-support systems. That’s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.
Take a moment to peer beyond the day-to-day crises capturing our attention, and you quickly realize that the magnitude of the looming catastrophe makes our current political struggles, by comparison, look like arguing how to stack deck chairs on the Titanic.
Even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, our current growth-oriented economic juggernaut will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats in future decades.
The climate emergency we’re facing is far worse than most people realize. While it was clearly an essential step for the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the collective pledges on greenhouse gas emissions from that agreement are woefully insufficient. They would lead to a dangerous temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius this century—and many nations are failing to make even these targets. We are rapidly approaching—if we haven’t already passed—climate tipping points with reinforcing feedback loops that would lead to an unrecognizable and terrifying world.
Even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, our current growth-oriented economic juggernaut will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats in future decades. As long as government policies emphasize growth in gross domestic product and transnational corporations relentlessly pursue shareholder returns, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe.
We’re rapidly decimating the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, fresh water—even the topsoil we need to grow our crops. We’ve already transgressed four of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity’s safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to triple by 2060, with potentially calamitous consequences. In 2017, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”
In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization.
We need to forge a new era for humanity—one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior. In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization.
A Life-Affirming Civilization
Without human disruption, ecosystems can thrive in rich abundance for millions of years, remaining resilient in the face of adversity. Clearly, there is much to learn from nature’s wisdom about how to organize ourselves. Can we do so before it’s too late?
This is the fundamental idea underlying an ecological civilization: using nature’s own design principles to reimagine the basis of our civilization. Changing our civilization’s operating system to one that naturally leads to life-affirming policies and practices rather than rampant extraction and devastation.
An ecological civilization is both a new and ancient idea. While the notion of structuring human society on an ecological basis might seem radical, Indigenous peoples around the world have organized themselves from time immemorial on life-affirming principles. When Lakota communities, on the land that is now the U.S., invoke Mitakuye Oyasin (“We are all related”) in ceremony, they are referring not just to themselves but to all sentient beings. Buddhist, Taoist, and other philosophical and religious traditions have based much of their spiritual wisdom on the recognition of the deep interconnectedness of all things. And in modern times, a common thread linking progressive movements around the world is the commitment to a society that works for the flourishing of life, rather than against it.
A system’s health depends on differentiation and integration. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as affirmation of different groups—self-defined by ethnicity, gender, or any other delineation. Such as: • Community self-determination • Indigenous rights • Restorative justice • Social equity for LGBTQ communities
Deciphering Nature’s Design Principles
There is a secret formula hidden deep in nature’s intelligence, which catalyzed each of life’s great evolutionary leaps over billions of years and forms the basis of all ecosystems. It’s captured in the simple but profound concept of mutually beneficial symbiosis: a relationship between two parties to which each contributes something the other lacks, and both gain as a result. With such symbiosis, there is no zero-sum game: The contributions of each party create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
In an ecological civilization, relationships between workers and employers, producers and consumers, humans and animals, would thus be based on each party gaining in value rather than one group exploiting the other.
Whenever you go for a walk in the woods, eat a meal, or take a dip in the ocean, you’re experiencing the miracle of nature’s symbiosis. Plants transform sunlight into chemical energy that provides food for other creatures, whose waste then fertilizes the soil the plants rely on. Underground fungal networks contribute essential chemicals to trees in return for nutrients they can’t make for themselves. Pollinators fertilize plants, which produce fruit and seeds that nourish animals as they carry them to new locations. In your own gut, trillions of bacteria receive nutrition from the food you enjoy, while reciprocating by producing enzymes you need for digestion.
In human society, symbiosis translates into foundational principles of fairness and justice, ensuring that the efforts and skills people contribute to society are rewarded equitably. In an ecological civilization, relationships between workers and employers, producers and consumers, humans and animals, would thus be based on each party gaining in value rather than one group exploiting the other.
Because of symbiosis, ecosystems can sustain themselves almost indefinitely. Energy from the sun flows seamlessly to all the constituent parts. The waste of one organism becomes the sustenance of another. Nature produces a continuous flow where nothing is squandered. Likewise, an ecological civilization, in contrast to our current society built on extracting resources and accumulating waste, would comprise a circular economy with efficient reuse of waste products embedded into processes from the outset.
Nature uses a fractal design with similar patterns repeating themselves at different scales. Fractals are everywhere in nature—you see them in the patterns of tree branches, coastlines, cloud formations, and the bronchial system in our lungs. Ecologies are themselves fractal, with the deep principles of self-organized behavior that perpetuate life shared by microscopic cells, organisms, species, ecosystems, and the entire living Earth. This form of organization is known as a holarchy, where each element—from cells on up—is a coherent entity in its own right, while also an integral component of something larger. In a holarchy, the health of the system as a whole requires the flourishing of each part. Each living system is interdependent on the vitality of all the other systems.
Every part of a system is in a harmonious relationship with the entire system. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as competition and cooperation in balance and an equitable distribution of wealth and power. Such as: • Global wealth tax • Multibillionaires proscribed • Abolition of offshore tax havens • Legal support for co-ops and the commons
Based on this crucial precept, an ecological civilization would be designed on the core principle of fractal flourishing: the well-being of each person is fractally related to the health of the larger world. Individual health relies on societal health, which relies in turn on the health of the ecosystem in which it’s embedded. Accordingly, from the ground up, it would foster individual dignity, providing the conditions for everyone to live in safety and self-determination, with universal access to adequate housing, competent health care, and quality education.
In the fractal design of an ecosystem, health arises not through homogeneity, but through each organism contributing to the whole by fulfilling its own unique potential. Correspondingly, an ecological civilization would celebrate diversity, recognizing that its overall health depended on different groups—self-defined by ethnicity, gender, or any other delineation—developing their own unique gifts to the greatest extent possible.
The overriding objective of an ecological civilization would be to create the conditions for all humans to flourish as part of a thriving, living Earth.
In a natural ecology, the type of exponential growth that characterizes our global economy could only occur if other variables were out of balance, and would inevitably lead to the catastrophic collapse of that population. The principle of balance would accordingly be crucial to an ecological civilization. Competition would be balanced by collaboration; disparities in income and wealth would remain within much narrower bands, and would fairly reflect the contributions people make to society. And crucially, growth would become just one part of a natural life cycle, slowing down once it reaches its healthy limits—leading to a steady-state, self-sustaining economy designed for well-being rather than consumption.
Above all, an ecological civilization would be based on the all-encompassing symbiosis between human society and the natural world. Human activity would be organized, not merely to avoid harm to the living Earth, but to actively regenerate and sustain its health.
An Ecological Civilization in Practice
The overriding objective of an ecological civilization would be to create the conditions for all humans to flourish as part of a thriving, living Earth. Currently, the success of political leaders is assessed largely by how much they increase their nation’s GDP, which merely measures the rate at which society transforms nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. A life-affirming society would, instead, emphasize growth in well-being, using measures like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which factors in qualitative components such as volunteer and household work, pollution, and crime.
For more than a century, most economic thinkers have recognized only two domains of economic activity: markets and government. The great political divide between capitalism and communism was structured accordingly, and even today the debate continues along similar lines. An ecological civilization would incorporate government spending and markets, but—as laid out by visionary economist Kate Raworth—would add two critical realms to this framework: households and the commons.
The small reflects the large, and the health of the whole system requires the flourishing of each part. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as individual dignity and self-determination. Such as: • Universal Basic Income • Universal access to housing, health care, education • Cities redesigned for walking • Community interaction • Education for life-fulfillment • Cosmopolitanism
In particular, the commons would become a crucial part of economic activity. Historically, the commons referred to shared land that peasants accessed to graze livestock or grow crops. But more broadly, the commons refers to any source of sustenance and well-being that has not yet been appropriated by the state or private ownership: the air, water, sunshine, as well as human creations like language, cultural traditions, and scientific knowledge. It is virtually ignored in most economic discussion because, like household work, it doesn’t fit into the classic model of the economy. But the global commons belongs to all of us, and in an ecological civilization, it would once again take its rightful place as a major provider of human welfare.
The overwhelming proportion of wealth available to modern humans is the result of the cumulative ingenuity and industriousness of prior generations going back to earliest times. However, as a consequence of centuries of genocide and slavery, systemic racism, extractive capitalism, and exploitation by the Global North, that wealth is highly unevenly distributed. Once we realize the vast benefits of the commons bequeathed to us by our ancestors—along with the egregiously uneven wealth distribution—it transforms our conception of wealth and value. Contrary to the widespread view that an entrepreneur who becomes a billionaire deserves his wealth, the reality is that whatever value he created is a pittance compared to the immense bank of prior knowledge and social practices—the commonwealth—that he took from. An ecological civilization, recognizing this, would fairly reward entrepreneurial activity, but severely curtail the right of anyone to accumulate multiple billions of dollars in wealth, no matter what their accomplishments.
The transnational corporations that currently dominate every aspect of global society would be fundamentally reorganized, and made accountable to the communities they purportedly serve.
Conversely, it is the moral birthright of every human to share in the vast commonwealth bestowed on us. This could effectively be achieved through a program of unconditional monthly cash disbursements to every person on the planet, creating a foundation for the dignity and security required for society’s fractal flourishing. It would also begin to address the moral imperative to remedy the extreme exploitation and injustices visited upon Indigenous and Black communities worldwide—historically and to this day.
Research has shown repeatedly that such programs—known as Universal Basic Income—are remarkably effective in improving quality of life in communities around the world, in both the Global North and South. Programs consistently report reduction in crime, child mortality, malnutrition, truancy, teenage pregnancy, and alcohol consumption, along with increases in health, gender equality, school performance—and even entrepreneurial activity. Work is not something people try to avoid; on the contrary, purposive work is an integral part of human flourishing. Liberated by UBI from the daily necessity to sell their labor for survival, people would reinvest their time in crucial sectors of the economy—in households and commons—that naturally lead to life-affirming activity.
The transnational corporations that currently dominate every aspect of global society would be fundamentally reorganized, and made accountable to the communities they purportedly serve. Corporations above a certain size would only be permitted to operate with charters that required them to optimize social and environmental well-being along with shareholder returns. Currently, these triple bottom line charters are voluntary, and very few large corporations adopt them. If, however, they were compulsory—and strictly enforced by citizen panels comprising representatives of the communities and ecosystems covered in the company’s scope of operations—it would immediately transform the intrinsic character of corporations, causing them to work for the benefit of humanity and the living Earth rather than for their demise.
In place of vast homogenized monocrops of industrial agriculture, food would be grown using principles of regenerative agriculture, leading to greater crop biodiversity, improved water and carbon efficiency, and the virtual elimination of synthetic fertilizer. Manufacturing would be structured around circular material flows, and locally owned cooperatives would become the default organizational structure. Technological innovation would still be encouraged, but would be prized for its effectiveness in enhancing symbiosis between people and with living systems, rather than minting billionaires.
Regenerative and sustainable flourishing into the long-term future. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as economic growth halting once it reaches healthy limits. Such as: • Steady-state economies • A triple bottom line for corporations
Cities would be redesigned on ecological principles, with community gardens on every available piece of land, essential services within a 20-minute walk, and cars banned from city centers. The local community would be the basic building block of society, with face-to-face interaction regaining ascendance as a crucial part of human flourishing. Education would be re-envisioned, its goal transformed from preparing students for the corporate marketplace to cultivating in students the discernment and emotional maturity required to fulfill their life’s purpose as valued members of society.
Cosmopolitanism—an ancient Greek concept meaning “being a citizen of the world”—would be the defining characteristic of a global identity.
Local community life would be enriched by the global reach of the internet. Online networks with scale, such as Facebook, would be turned over to the commons, so that rather than manipulating users to maximize advertising dollars, the internet could become a vehicle for humanity to develop a planetary consciousness. Cosmopolitanism—an ancient Greek concept meaning “being a citizen of the world”—would be the defining characteristic of a global identity. It would celebrate diversity between cultures while recognizing the deep interdependence that binds all people into a single moral community with a shared destiny.
Governance would be transformed with local, regional, and global decisions made at the levels where their effects are felt most (known as subsidiarity). While much decision-making would devolve to lower levels, a stronger global governance would enforce rules on planetwide challenges such as the climate emergency and the sixth great extinction. A Rights of Nature declaration, recognizing the inalienable rights of ecosystems and natural entities to persist and thrive, would put the natural world on the same legal standing as humanity, with personhood given to ecosystems and high-functioning mammals, and the crime of ecocide—the destruction of ecosystems—prosecuted by a court with global jurisdiction.
Daring to Make It Possible
It doesn’t take more than a glance at the daily headlines to realize how far we are from this vision of a society that fosters fractal flourishing. Yet, just like the underground fungal network that nourishes trees in a forest, innumerable pioneering organizations around the world are already laying the groundwork for virtually all the components of a life-affirming civilization.
In the United States, the visionary Climate Justice Alliance has laid out guidelines for a just transition from an extractive to a regenerative economy that incorporates deep democracy with ecological and societal well-being. A network of more than 70 grassroots and frontline movements, the Alliance works collectively for a just transition toward food sovereignty, energy democracy, and ecological regeneration.
Issues at the lowest level affect health at the top. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as grassroots self-autonomy and deep democracy: • Decision-making at the lowest possible levels • Horizontalism • Cooperatives
In Bolivia and Ecuador, traditional ecological principles of buen vivir and sumak kawsay (“good living”) are written into the constitutions. While mechanisms for enforcement still need considerable strengthening, these principles establish a powerful alternative to extractive practices, offering a legal and ethical platform for legislation based on harmony—both with nature, and between humans.
In Europe, large-scale thriving cooperatives, such as the Mondragón Cooperative in Spain, demonstrate that it’s possible for companies to prosper without utilizing a shareholder-based profit model. With roughly a hundred businesses and 80,000 worker-owners producing a wide range of industrial and consumer goods, Mondragón proves that it’s possible to succeed while maintaining a people-focused, shared community of life-affirming values.
Economists, scientists, and policymakers, recognizing the moral bankruptcy of the current economic model, are pooling resources to offer alternative frameworks.
A new ecological worldview is spreading globally throughout cultural and religious institutions, establishing common ground with the heritage of traditional Indigenous knowledge. The core principles of an ecological civilization have already been laid out in the Earth Charter—an ethical framework launched in The Hague in 2000 and endorsed by more than 50,000 organizations and individuals worldwide. In 2015, Pope Francis shook the Catholic establishment by issuing his encyclical, Laudato Si’, a masterpiece of ecological philosophy that demonstrates the deep interconnectedness of all life, and calls for a rejection of the individualist, neoliberal ethic.
Economists, scientists, and policymakers, recognizing the moral bankruptcy of the current economic model, are pooling resources to offer alternative frameworks. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance is an international collaboration of changemakers working to transform our economic system to one that promotes human and ecological well-being. The Global Commons Alliance is similarly developing an international platform for regenerating the Earth’s natural systems. Organizations such as the Next System Project and the Global Citizens Initiative are laying down parameters for the political, economic, and social organization of an ecological civilization, and the P2P Foundation is building a commons-based infrastructure for societal change. Around the world, an international movement of transition towns is transforming communities from the grassroots up by nurturing a caring culture, reimagining ways to meet local needs, and crowdsourcing solutions.
Most importantly, a people’s movement for life-affirming change is spreading globally. Led by young climate activists like Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, Mari Copeny, Xiye Bastida, Isra Hirsi, and others, millions of schoolchildren worldwide are rousing their parents’ generation from its slumber. A month after Extinction Rebellion demonstrators closed down Central London in 2019, the U.K. Parliament announced a “climate emergency,” which has now been declared by nearly 2,000 local and national jurisdictions worldwide, representing more than 12% of the global population. Meanwhile, the Stop Ecocide campaign to establish ecocide as a crime prosecutable under international law is making important strides, gaining serious consideration at the parliamentary level in France and Sweden, with a panel of legal experts convened to draft its definition.
Relationships that work for mutual benefit. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as fairness and justice, regenerative economies, and circular energy flows. Such as: • Measuring well-being instead of GDP • Regenerative agriculture • Permaculture principles • Circular economies and manufacturing processes • Rights of Nature and personhood for nonhumans
When we consider the immensity of the transformation needed, the odds of achieving an ecological civilization might seem daunting—but it’s far from impossible. As our current civilization begins to unravel on account of its internal failings, the strands that kept it tightly wound also get loosened. Every year that we head closer to catastrophe—as greater climate-related disasters rear up, as the outrages of racial and economic injustice become even more egregious, and as life for most people becomes increasingly intolerable—the old narrative loses its hold on the collective consciousness. Waves of young people are looking for a new worldview—one that makes sense of the current unraveling, one that offers them a future they can believe in.
It’s a bold idea to transform the very basis of our civilization to one that’s life-affirming. But when the alternative is unthinkable, a vision of a flourishing future shines a light of hope that can become a self-fulfilling reality. Dare to imagine it. Dare to make it possible by the actions you take, both individually and collectively—and it might just happen sooner than you expect.
We have been taught to live in a competitive, survival-of-the-fittest world. But what if this has been wrong? What if the natural world, and the humans in it, are much more cooperative than competitive?
The idea of the survival of the fittest originated in Darwin’s Origin of Species, and his theory of natural selection. Sure, natural selection does have a role to play in evolution, but it might not be as important as we had previously thought. In fact, some scientists assign it a weight of just 1 out of 10 concerning the evolution of certain processes, such as the evolution of the anatomy of species[i]. Other scientists suggest that evolution should not be considered in terms of species as separate from its environment, but at the level of the system itself (species + environment). Looking at it from this perspective, they maintain, is much simpler and governed by a much smaller set of laws, than analyzing the evolution of elements by themselves[ii].
We can find examples of mutualism and cooperation all over the natural world, from pollinators and plants, to animals and the microbes living in their guts. And in many cases this cooperation is not merely optional, but essential to life itself. Certain plants will not grow in soils where you cannot find a specific type of fungi, since they need to form a relationship with it in order to survive. Lichens are an association between a bacterium and a fungus. They are an organism that is an association of two different life forms, contradictory as the notion may seem. Trees communicate with each other through a network of mycorrhizae, a fungal structure invisible to the naked eye that connects their roots, transporting nourishment, messages and even teachings (yes, plants have cultural transmission and are able to learn from their neighbors)[iii].
And the human species is no exception. We have more bacteria living in our gut than we have cells in our bodies, and they influence our health, our moods and even our behaviors[iv]. Without them, we cannot survive. (Not to mention the fungi that live basically everywhere and the microscopic mites on our skin.) We are not just a single organism; we are a small cosmos of organisms. And like all other species, we are not meant to just compete, but to cooperate harmoniously with those around us.
What is conspicuous about cooperative interactions in the natural world is that they happen in networks. This a very familiar word in the human lexicon, since we network for just about anything: for business, for trade, for information exchange. What can we learn from these well-functioning natural cooperative networks that we can apply to our human ones, so that they are more resilient?
First of all, if we take a look at mycorrhizal networks in old-growth fir forests[v], we find that young saplings are established within the networks of veteran trees. Usually, the larger the trees (and the more resources they have), the more well-connected they are within the forest network. This highlights the importance of large mature trees in the architecture of the network, which have long life-histories of connection. Greater establishment of young saplings have also been shown when they are linked into the mycorrhizal network of larger trees. The lessons to learn from this are quite simple: if you have more resources, share them, and you will help others flourish. Also, we need multigenerational human networks: elders have a lot of wisdom to impart, and if youngsters are connected to them to “absorb” it, they are more likely to thrive.
The forest networks also have what we call small-world properties, meaning that individuals are closely knit together, and that you do not have to go through many to get from any one individual to another. Simple enough as well, right? Do not isolate yourself, if you connect and collaborate with others, you are also more likely to thrive in your community.
Forest network symbiosis is not just an affair between two or more organisms, but a complex assemblage of fungal and plant individuals that spans multiple generations. In them, fungus species form “living links” connecting trees and allowing them to communicate and exchange resources, and benefitting from the exchange as well. In our networks, human connections do not have to be strictly restricted to flows of information or products, they can be other people (facilitators, teachers, networkers), living links that enable effective exchange of any kind between other people or groups.
The Wood Wide Web (adapted from Beiler, K. J. et al. 2010)
Last but not least, these networks are robust to perturbations, but fragile to the targeted removal of the “hubs”, large mature trees. If elders are left out or removed from contributing, the whole ecosystem is more likely to collapse.
So far, we have been looking at relatively simple networks, connecting individuals of a few species only, and belonging to the same forest “group”. Now let’s take it a step further and take a look at networks that involve far larger numbers of species interacting. And at the same time make an analogy with different “species” of organizations trying to cooperate.
There are several types of networks in nature, and they are of two main types: antagonistic (e.g: food webs, parasitism) and mutualistic (e.g: pollination, seed dispersal). A study by Thébault and Fontaine[vi]analyzed several characteristics of both types of networks, focusing on pollination (mutualism) and food webs (antagonism), to find out what made them more persistent and resilient. They found out that the two types of networks behaved quite differently.
While antagonistic networks benefit from being modular (having subgroups that interact heavily amongst themselves and very little with other groups – does that sound familiar?), the cooperative mutualistic networks that we are interested in were strengthened by a nested structure. This means that there are a lot of “specialists” in the network, interacting with subsets of the group that “generalists” interact with. At an organizational level, “generalists” are larger organizations that have several areas and a wide range of action, such as groups focusing on governance and policy, and can interact with many other smaller, grassroots “specialists” focusing on one or two areas of action. How do we ensure the nested structure in a human network? We make sure that there are no local groups that are isolated from the world at large and from larger spheres of power. The smaller grassroots organizations and groups can (and should!) cooperate with each other at a local level, but not without being connected to larger organizations that ensure that they have a voice at a regional, national or global level.
Modularity vs Nestedness (adapted from Palazzi M. J., et al. 2019)[vii]
Another study[viii] provides even more lessons to be learned from nestedness: it not only helps to reduce competition and increase the number of coexisting species, but a nested structure like this is likely to arise by itself, as long as new species enter the community at the places where they have the least competitive load. When a new group wants to cooperate, welcome it in the place where it is most needed, where the skills and value it provides are most lacking, and take the best advantage of the complementarity!
Mutualistic networks tend to have one other characteristic in common, which is related to nestedness: they are asymmetric. There are a few “generalists” and a whole lot of “specialists”[ix]. The generalists interact with each other, but also with the specialists. A lot of grassroots activity is good: but so is getting the word out there about your work and spreading local solutions to the global level—"Think Global, Act Local”.
The final two things that increase persistence and resilience of networks are two very simple ones: high diversity and high connectance. Diversity is self-explanatory, and quite obvious. High connectance means that a high percentage of the possible links are materialized, so also at this level, connect and collaborate as much as you can (within reason), and the benefit for all will be increased.
And here is a bonus lesson: a study by Evans et al.[x] that analyzed the interconnectivity of networks on a British farm reached a very interesting conclusion. Two habitats that were not very representative in terms of area were disproportionately important. This gives us a clue that there may be groups out there with skills and areas of action that still tend to be overlooked at the grassroots and even the governance level (tipping my hat to the ethical technology and governance folks), but whose work others will rely immensely upon to be able to keep the integrity of the network.
But this is not the end of it: stay tuned for the multilayer nature of ecological networks and how to apply its lessons to community organizing!
[i] Lewin, Roger (1993) Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. Phoenix, Orion Books, London
[ii] Lotka, Alfred (1925) The Elements of Physical Biology. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore
[iii] Simmard, S. W. (2018) Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory. In: Memory and Learning in Plants. Springer International Publishing, AG
[iv] Gilbert, S. F., Sapp, J. & Tauber, A. I. (2012). A Symbiotic View Of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals. Quarterly Review Of Biology 87(4): 325-341
[v] Beiler, K. J. et al. (2010) Architecture of the wood-wide web: Rhizopogon spp. genets link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts. New Phytologist 185: 543–553
[vi] Thébault, E. & Fontaine, C. (2010) Stability of Ecological Communities and the Architecture of Mutualistic and Trophic Networks. Science 329: 853-856
[vii] Palazzi, M. J. et al. (2019) Online division of labour: emergent structures in Open Source Software. Scientific Reports 9(1): 1-11
[viii] Bastolla, U. et al. (2009) The architecture of mutualistic networks minimizes competition and increases biodiversity. Nature 458: 1018-1020
[ix] Bacompte, J. & Jordano, P. (2007) Plant-Animal Mutualistic Networks: The Architecture of Biodiversity. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 38: 567–93
[x] Evans, D. M., Pocock, M. O. J. & Memmott, J. (2013) The robustness of a network of ecological networks to habitat loss. Ecology Letters 16(7): 844-852
Originally published in Yes! Magazine, January, 2021
Much has transpired to disrupt the political status quo since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris chose their campaign slogan “Build Back Better.” But the chaos and violence of former President Trump’s final days in office may help to open a deep national dialogue on what “better” means, and what it will require.
We will soon have in place a new administration focused on solving problems rather than creating them. Especially in the wake of recent events, we hope that principled Republican leaders are ready to join principled Democratic leaders in the cause of creating a better world for all.
Humanity faces a potentially terminal crisis of collapsing environmental systems, extreme and growing inequality, failing institutional legitimacy, and disintegration of the basic trust of one another on which the social fabric depends. No individual caused these vast problems, and no individual or group of individuals can solve them alone. We may differ on the details, but we should unite in common recognition of the failure of our existing institutions to address these crises.
Our future depends on finding common cause in creating a world of peace and beauty.
Our future depends on finding common cause in creating a world of peace and beauty; a world in which every person has opportunities to contribute that earn them respect and material sufficiency; a world where families and communities are strong, people support and care for one another, and nature is vibrant.
It is a vision both progressive and conservative. Some call it an Ecological Civilization, the theme of the next print issue of YES! Magazine.
In 2020, Earth issued a wake-up call we could not ignore. COVID-19 disrupted daily life and imposed suffering on billions. The pandemic made it impossible to ignore the injustices of an economic system in which those who do the most essential work are often the least secure and most poorly rewarded.
Herein lie essential lessons. As a society, we massively misallocate our labor and other resources, spending them in ways harmful to both people and Earth. Defenders of the failed system claim the burdens are necessary to create jobs and generate GDP growth, while at the same time they insist that we lack the resources to meet everyone’s basic needs.
The misallocations include, among others:
• Preparations for and the conduct of war.
• Mass production and support facilities for cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes for needless movement of people and goods.
• The labor, technology, and energy consumed in supporting financial speculation that produces no real value.
The urgent unmet needs that require the application of our intellectual and physical labor include, among others:
• Eliminating the causes of war, mass incarceration, and desperate mass migration and reassigning the resources thus freed up.
• Restoring the health of Earth’s lands, waters, and atmosphere, which includes eliminating human sources of Earth’s contamination.
• Restructuring how we live to assure everyone a place to live and reducing the need to move people and material goods.
• Producing the food for nutritious diets for all the world’s people in ways that maintain the health of soils, rivers, and aquifers, and simultaneously sequester carbon.
• Providing care to those who are incapable of self-care, including children and the mentally and physically incapacitated.
• Preparing our children for responsible and fulfilling lives.
• Restructuring political and economic institutions to shift power from profit-maximizing corporations to life-serving communities.
In discussing our options, we too often get sidetracked into a debate between political philosophies—capitalism vs. socialism—that sidesteps the larger issues.
We need a different framework. Our common future depends on serious institutional rethinking and restructuring to localize power and share it on a global scale.
Life, as we now understand it, organizes from the bottom up, not the top down. As living beings who depend on the health of a living Earth, our future depends on learning through our lived experience to do the same.
This deepens the meaning of the motto, “Build Back Better.”
Framing the possible vision and the path to its actualization necessarily begins with a dialogue that transcends traditional political lines, which is largely impossible in the two-party win-or-lose political system now in place.
The human capacity for innovative local adaptation requires the support of radically democratic local, national, and global governance structures supported by worker and community-owned cooperative businesses that meld individual and collective rights and responsibilities in ways that honor the best of conservative and progressive values.
Framing the possible vision and the path to its actualization necessarily begins with a dialogue that transcends traditional political lines, which is largely impossible in the two-party win-or-lose political system now in place.
President Biden presents himself as a facilitator of transpartisan dialogue and cooperation, with Kamala Harris as his well-chosen partner. They are working, however, within a failing system nearly impossible to reform from within. With skill and dedication, they can repair much of the damage of the Trump years and propel us on a better path. But to truly transform the system, the people must lead. Our individual actions, our movements, our cities, and our states need to continue to lead the way with steps far more transformative than is possible at the national level.
To build back better, we must applaud the best steps at global, national, and local levels, while recognizing that the essential transformation is ultimately up to us working together for the good of all.
The concept of buen vivir has gained visibility in Latin America in recent years. Rooted in indigenous worldviews, buen vivir rests on an understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature that is fundamentally at odds with the anthropocentrism of modernity. Gustavo Hernández and Henkjan Laats trace the concept’s rising trajectory and its influence and echos in Europe. While buen vivir’s inclusion in formal bi-regional dialogue and its resonance with local initiatives emerging around Europe are promising, much more can be gained from further knowledge exchange.
In June 2015, an urgent resolution was formally passed in Brussels on the Europe-Latin America position on issues related to climate change.[1] This agreement was the fruit of a joint initiative between civil society and the European Green Party, and was passed just one week before the second Presidential Summit of the European Union and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). The resolution highlights the importance of finding a “new paradigm of human well-being that reconciles the twin challenges of fighting climate change and enhancing equality and social cohesion”. It directly references strengthening bi-regional exchange through the use of concepts such as buen vivir (Spanish for “living well”) and issues related to managing the transition towards resilient, low-carbon societies.
A rising concept
Buen vivir encompasses a set of ideas that question the dominant logic of development. A key aspect is how we interpret and value nature. In several of its incarnations, buen vivir breaks away from the traditional anthropocentric worldview and invites the possibility of constructing an alternative order based on the coexistence of human beings across the spectrum of diversity and in harmony with nature.
The origins of the concept can be traced back to the indigenous communities of South America. However, buen vivir became increasingly prominent in the region in the wake of political debates at the beginning of the 21st century, in particular its inclusion in constitutional discussions in two Andean countries: Ecuador and Bolivia. Alliances between a transnational indigenous movement and other social and governmental actors also contributed to the concept’s growing visibility.
Within just a few years, buen vivir spread rapidly within Latin America and beyond. In the World Social Forum held in Belém, Brazil, in 2009, buen vivir was one of the main topics, with three South American presidents mentioning the concept in their public addresses. In the words of the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, “21st-century socialism has adopted the concept of ‘good living’ or ‘living well’, which derives from the tradition of our native peoples, and means to live with dignity, in harmony with nature, and with respect for all cultures”. Today, several universities and think tanks across Latin America, North America and Europe debate the concept (for example, the Böll Foundation, the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). It has even entered the discussion in Asia in countries such as China and the Philippines.
any approach to the “environmental question” must overcome the binary between human and nature, animate and inanimate, inviting dialogue with other ways of thinking about citizenship
The meaning of buen vivir stems from the indigenous Quechua and Aymara traditions, though variations can also be found in the experience of communities in the South American Amazon and activist movements in Central and North America. The concept has philosophical similarities with Buddhism and Taoism, as well as the South African notion of Ubuntu – “life as mutual support and caring for nature”. Buen vivir is also linked to the creation of a framework for the rights of nature – Ecuador was the first country in the world to recognise the rights of nature at the constitutional level – as well as the European debate on happiness, well-being and the critique of economic growth that even draws on the spiritualities and world views of indigenous communities.
Looking at its many forms and linkages, buen vivir can be understood as both a critique of development understood as infinite economic growth, and a discursive turn that seeks to transcend modernity. Ongoing debates about welfare, quality of life and “the environment” have, according to the Uruguayan ecologist Eduardo Gudynas, taken on new meaning in a “biocentric turn”, what French philosopher Bruno Latour refers to as departure from “environmentalism in crisis”.[2] This turn seeks to break away from the anthropocentric stance of modernity and assign new meaning to the environment by looking beyond the separation of nature and culture to recognise their connectedness. As a result, any approach to the “environmental question” must overcome the binary between human and nature, animate and inanimate, inviting dialogue with other ways of thinking about citizenship, such as from local knowledges.
Tensions between buen vivir and the green economy
After the concept was outlined in the Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions (in 2009 and 2008 respectively)[3], it was almost a decade before buen vivir was integrated into an official document within the context of the European Union’s relationship with Latin America. The Santiago Declaration of the CELAC-EU Summit held in Chile in June 2013 states: “We recognise that planet Earth and its ecosystems are our home and that ‘Mother Earth’ is a common expression in a number of countries and regions and we note that some countries recognise the rights of nature in the context of the promotion of sustainable development”. Although there is no explicit reference to buen vivir in the Santiago Declaration, its formulation and negotiation suggest certain tensions and contradictions between two world views.
The Declaration established the green economy as its dominant concept. Closely tied to the EU’s Europe 2020 strategy (a 10-year economic strategy proposed by the European Commission in 2010), the concept of the green economy was purported to represent a great business opportunity for Europe. In response to challenges to the EU’s advantage as a pioneer in green solutions (notably from China and North America), Europe and Latin America reaffirmed their association under the banner of the Alliance for Sustainable Development.
However, the guiding concept of the green economy did not go entirely uncontested, and on at least two occasions (according to leaked letters to the EU) the Plurinational State of Bolivia sought to amend the wording of the Santiago Declaration to include a mention of limits to growth and to establish the green economy as a source of policymaking options rather than a rigid set of rules.
The concept of buen vivir is gaining ground in Europe, the product of dialogue between ideas that cast a critical eye over development.
Another relatively prominent concept in Europe, the Green New Deal, is inherently conceived as an “investment plan” and emphasises productivity. It can thus be considered a form of green modernisation. This renders any dialogue between buen vivir and the Green New Deal problematic, given that their basic assumptions are fundamentally different. As a concept, buen vivir is intrinsically pluralistic, open to different interpretations and practices; the Green New Deal, on the other hand, is guided by a single logic and the notion of linear progress. However, they do have one crucial thing in common: the intention to question development understood as material accumulation, and the search for better ways to manage resource use.
Announced in 2019, the EU Commission’s European Green Deal upholds yet again the centrality of economic growth, though this is “decoupled from resource use”. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has dubbed the European Green Deal “our new growth strategy”, and the deal has faced criticism from civil society for failing to establish clear or adequate goals for problem areas such as climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion and water pollution. As with the Green New Deal, the Green Deal’s focus on productivity is ultimately not compatible with buen vivir.
Buen vivir in the European debate
Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, almost all the great philosophers have mused about what constitutes a “good life”. What differentiates the notion of the good life from buen vivir, however, is the importance of the relationship with nature. While buen vivir considers human beings to be an integral part of the fabric of Mother Earth or nature, modern philosophy creates a degree of distance through the instrumental rationalism of John Locke and René Descartes which sees nature as a means to achieve human ends. Although philosophers like Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stress the importance of nature for human beings, the instrumental approach permeates modern philosophical ideas of the good life and much of current politics. In modern European philosophy there are, of course, several efforts to depart from this, the most well-known being James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis as described by Bruno Latour. Nevertheless, recent influential philosophical texts on the good life by writers such as Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Simon Blackburn, Robert Skidelsky and Fernando Savater uphold an anthropocentric approach which stands in clear contrast to the biocentric turn posed by buen vivir.
The notion of the good life surfaced in the 2015 parliamentary elections in the UK, described in terms of movements such as home-grown or locally based food, compost-fuelled cars and renewable energy. The term featured in the Conservative Party candidate David Cameron’s electoral campaign championing ideas of vested localism, “big society” and other green-sounding policies to defend cutting back the state. In Germany, trade unions and Chancellor Angela Merkel used the equivalent phrase in German, gutes Leben, to promote an alternative to the deterioration of labour conditions for the working classes. However, at the heart of this version of the good life lies a paradox: on the one hand, the discourse seeks to change the status quo; on the other, it implies a reinvention of unions as social movements but fails to see nature as a partner in human development.[4]
The first formal acknowledgement of buen vivir in Europe came with the approval of the 2015 EuroLat urgent resolution. As well as recognising the importance of including a component of “ancestral knowledge”, the resolution calls for a review of valuable contributions made in other corners of the world, including the concept of buen vivir. However, the resolution has not been implemented in any tangible way and, since 2015, there has been no further mention of buen vivir in the frame of the EU’s formal relationship with Latin America.
The exchange of knowledge between Europe and Latin America could function as a catalyst for the construction of buen vivir, both as a theory and political practice.
At the political level, governments in both Latin America and Europe encounter several obstructions when it comes to understanding and implementing the principles of buen vivir. This can be attributed to the fact that the instrumental relationship between humans and nature is firmly rooted in modern culture. Bruno Latour has noted the challenges facing Europe in this regard, alluding to a “political disorientation” – while the Social Democrats wait for economic growth to resume, the Greens, caught in the clutches of capitalism and losing sight of their own history, are forgetting that “ecology” has less to do with “nature” and more to do with our own sustenance and livelihoods.
Transition movements in Europe
While the process of incorporating buen vivir at governmental level in Europe is proving problematic, at the local-level processes that reflect the concept’s logic are emerging. Recognition of the need for transitions – from food to agriculture and from education to economy – is becoming mainstream in Europe, though it remains to be seen whether at the level of policymaking these processes will keep within the classic paradigms of economic growth and infinite technological “progress”.
Emerging ideas and initiatives that appear to be related to post-developmental notions of buen vivir include, for example, the Dutch city council of Noardeast-Fryslân’s recent granting of special rights to the Wadden Sea and the appointment of an independent governance authority. In July 2020, the Spanish municipality of Los Alcázares, Murcia, recognised the Mar Menor, the largest saltwater lagoon in Europe, as a subject of rights. In Sweden in October 2019, a parliamentary motion was presented by the Green Party to include the rights of Nature in the Constitution.
The focus here is not only on the advancement of Earth-centred law but also on aspects such as the social economy, open knowledge, transition towns, commons, urban agriculture, and cooperative housing, among others. These ideas come out of local transformation projects in sectors like energy, transport, food and social care. They differ from the majority of hegemonic proposals in the sense that they are not mega-discourses operating according to a single logic (as in the discourse of “progress”). The fact that they are open to interpretation and able to adapt easily to external, local factors means that they favour greater intercultural dialogue.
Over the last decade, particularly in the countries most affected by the 2008 economic crisis – such as Greece and Spain – there has been a rise in practical experiences and political proposals related to the concept of buen vivir, such as agroecological farming, the use of local currencies, the promotion of local markets and products, and direct democracy. This comes at a time of high anxiety about the situation of the planet. These initiatives receive political support, particularly in places with a Green local government. In Amsterdam, for example, a good living plan with a commons perspective was proposed by business owners and inhabitants of Czaar Peterstraat, and was positively received by the local community and the city council.
Growing space for alternatives
The concept of buen vivir is gaining ground in Europe, the product of dialogue between ideas that cast a critical eye over development. Yet not all ideas that criticise development are linked to buen vivir, since many remain rooted in an economic growth model. Other notions that cannot claim to be related to buen vivir are the hegemonic mega-discourses centred on social progress, with their limited scope for interpretation. However, emerging experiences in Europe which are connected to buen vivir express an interest in recovering the local and transforming key areas such as food, education, social care, transport, energy production and, more recently, health as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
Despite the fact that the concept of buen vivir has been (directly or indirectly) introduced in official dialogue between the European Union and Latin America, it is overshadowed by the hegemony of a discourse that repeatedly circles back to the conventional sense of modernity with its fixation on economic growth. Perhaps the 2015 urgent resolution was ahead of its time, since the adoption of buen vivir has put practice before the need for theory. The exchange of knowledge between Europe and Latin America could function as a catalyst for the construction of buen vivir, both as a theory and political practice. With this in mind, it is clear to see that the successful local experiences in Europe – where participants see themselves as an integral part of the land rather than its owner – are increasingly seeking to create an alternative “sense of order” based on a reconsidered relationship with nature. With cities like Amsterdam already beginning to discover the concept of buen vivir, it is possible that this trend will start to spread throughout the European Union.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This agreement emerged from the EuroLatin American Parliamentary Assembly (EuroLat), a parliamentary institution of the Bi-Regional Strategic Partnership.
[2] With the suggestive phrase “political ecology has nothing to do with nature”, Bruno Latour argues that mainstream environmental movements (i.e. Green parties in Europe) are doomed to fail so long as they envision political ecology as inextricably tied to the protection and management of nature through conventional political methodologies and policies.
[3] In Bolivia, the same concept is denominated vivir bien.
[4] Unionists do not talk about labour and nature as equally necessary sources of wealth. “Nature and the environment was conceptualised as something that provides quality of life, well-being and health for workers; it was not understood as a partner in the production process”. Räthzel, N. and Uzzell, D. (2011). “Trade Unions and Climate Change: The Jobs versus Environment Dilemma”. Global Environmental Change, 21, pp. 1215–1223.
About the Authors
Gustavo Hernándezis co-director at Cross Cultural Bridges. He is a representative of the Latin American Association of NGOs to the EU and a senior consultant to the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s EU Office.
Henkjan Laatsis a director at Cross Cultural Bridges, a network of activists and experts that facilitates the balanced transfer and exchange of practice, knowledge and values with an emphasis on transfer from the Global South to the Global North.
In Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, biologist and best-selling author Robert Sapolsky explores in depth the questions of why human beings behave as they do, and what we should do with that knowledge to move towards a better world.
Tired of the nature vs nurture debate, the author decided to take on the massive endeavor of tackling the causes of human behavior. What possesses someone to do anything? It turns out that the answer is relative to the time frame in which you analyze any human behavior. In the second before it happens, you should be looking to the nervous system, in the minutes before, to sensory cues from your environment and from your own body, in the hours and days before, to the endocrine system with all its hormones, and so forth. You look backwards to neuron plasticity, brain development, what happened while you were still in the womb, to your genes, your environment, all the way back to the evolutionary history of the human species.
In short, and in the author’s own words: “It’s complicated.” There are so many intervening factors influencing behavior, and with many of them modulating and influencing each other in turn, there are no easy answers. We humans are complicated animals, with the ability for atrocity and savagery but also for outstanding altruism, kindness, and compassion.
The book is full of food for thought and insights that will help shed light on your own behaviors and those of others around you, and maybe even help you become a bit more understanding towards them. For instance, being hungry really does make people grumpy and less charitable, and a real-world example is that judges are far more likely to grant parole to prisoners just after they ate. The frontal cortex, responsible for the willpower to do the right thing, takes metabolic power, and if you are faced with a demanding task on an empty stomach you are less likely to be generous to your fellow humans as you deal with it and for a while afterwards.
Also, your political stance as liberal or conservative is much more likely to be related to your personality traits than to the actual political propositions of your party of choice. If you have a lower threshold for visceral disgust and are more averse to risk (and were more reluctant to playing with new toys as a child), you are more likely to be a conservative adult.
More sensitive issues are also tackled, such as our propensity towards divisiveness. It appears that we have an innate tendency to categorize people into Us vs Them and to favor the former. The divisions can be based on anything, religion, race, gender, or your football team, and we will identify with several Us groups at the same time. But their relative importance can shift quite quickly: show people pictures of human faces and the amygdala (a part of your brain associated with fear and aggression) is more likely to activate when seeing other racial faces. But now ask them to categorize the faces they see according to whether they are likely to enjoy a certain vegetable, and the amygdala no longer activates. As long as we are prompted to see others as individuals and relate to them on a basic level, imagine them grocery shopping just like we do, and our reactivity to them is immediately lowered. When you view people as part of a group, it is much easier to see them as a threat.
It also shows us that you can find the basis for our sense of fairness in the natural world, especially in other primates and even in dogs. Capuchin monkeys will refuse to work for unfair and unequal pay: a monkey will refuse to complete a task for a boring cucumber if he can see his next-door neighbor receive a delicious grape for doing the exact same thing. However, we have exacerbated certain primate characteristics to new heights. Other social primates also have hierarchies, and low-ranking individuals are more stressed and less healthy. In humans, with the invention of socioeconomic status, the status/health relationship is prevalent.
“When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world,” he writes.
Every chapter of the book is backed up by extensive research and the author imparts to us the findings of dozens of scientific studies in such an engaging manner that you won’t even notice that they were originally “boring” and technical research papers. He will also sometimes throw in a footnote just to tell you a joke.
All the while addressing conflict, authority, resistance, morality, empathy, peace, you name it, he covers it all. He even touches upon the sensitive subject of human free will. If you believe in it, you will be laughing nervously at how much sense the author’s argument against it makes. I know I was. However, the most interesting thing about it is that the author, a self-proclaimed atheist, assumes that his choice makes no biological sense, since spirituality and religion are nature’s stress relievers and faith of any kind has been proven to increase our lifespan[i].
Another really good argument that the author does not mention is the gradient of agency we find in living things. If you want to attribute free will (or even an immortal soul) to living beings, at what point in evolutionary history did they arise? Until very recently it was a huge taboo in science to mention emotions and a theory of mind in animals, and it is still controversial to this day. Humans are obviously not the only special snowflakes capable of joy or sadness, we might have more complex ones but again, it is a gradient[ii]. If humans have free will, do chimps, elephants have it? What about a fish? Where do we actually draw the line? If we cannot attribute free will to other animals there is no reason to do it to ourselves. Buddhist philosophies say that all animals have a mind to the same extent that humans do, but relatively recent discoveries prove that trees and plants also communicate, support each other and are capable of learning[iii]. What of trees then? Do they have a mind and free will?
He also mentions that even though deep down he doesn't believe in free will, he is not able to live his everyday life as if he had none. Some of the most influential neurological studies used to defend the absence of free will have been refuted in recent years[iv], but many other discoveries on factors that influence behavior, as the book points out, make it apparent that this question is far from getting a definitive answer.
This book is about the (known) biology behind human behavior. It does not explain everything at the moment, and what we do know is quite complicated, with many intervening factors and a lot of variability. The author thinks, however, it eventually will explain everything, as science advances and new discoveries arise.
But what should we do with all this knowledge that science has given us? How can we use it to make a better world? Can it help us address concrete issues, such as what to do about our justice system? To give you a little hint on the author’s stance: a couple centuries ago, schizophrenia was not recognized as a disease, and people that murdered during schizophrenic fits were considered evil and punishable as such. What will future humans think of our current systems when they look back under the light of future scientific discoveries?
In this brilliant book, Robert Sapolsky not only helps us to understand, empathize and hope but also points out which findings can practically help us move forward towards a more peaceful society. To illustrate that possibility, I will leave you with the words of the author:
“Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your own world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.”
[i] Big Think: Religion Is Nature's Antidepressant - Robert Sapolsky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oldj11NEsc0
[ii] Safina, Carl (2016) Beyond Words, Picador - A great book on animal minds: while less scientific, it draws mostly on the non-peer-reviewable experiences of scientists and conservationists who interact with animals more closely than anyone else on a daily basis
[iii] Simmards, Suzanne W. (2018) Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory. Memory and Learning in Plants, SIGCOMM, Springer
[iv] Gholipour, Bahar (2019) A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked, The Atlantic, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/
Many social activists can relate to the following scenario. They sign up for an intensive training in a beautiful nearby region, with the intention of networking with fellow activists and learning about social change and innovation. The timing is perfect - they feel like they’ve been working alone for years and are struggling to see the impact of their efforts. They sense that what they’ve been doing has a significant impact on the people they touch, but at the same time they feel like a mere drop in the ocean.
They keep seeing the same patterns of behavior and destruction around them, regardless of the enormous amount of energy and creativity they’ve put into their work. The problem just seems too big and intractable.
They think they’ve found the perfect training - one in which they’ll learn about systems thinking and how the tiny efforts of a small group of committed individuals can add up to create massive, exponential change. Linking is a central idea, and the concepts of ‘network’ and ‘network weaving’ are thrown at them throughout the training. They learn about complex systems, emergence, tipping points, and the viral spread of ideas, all while participating in discussions and creative dialogue sessions where a deeper understanding of their peers’ interests and struggles is achieved. They partake in fascinating group dynamics and games meant to challenge certain mental models and an unsustainable amount of post-it notes are consumed in an effort to define goals. As a group, they go through the usual stages of development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning before waving goodbye to their colleagues and facilitators.
In the time following the training, the group stays in touch - those who live close to each other organize meetings and casual get-togethers, while others join via Zoom. Some of the participants even go as far as successfully planning activities together. However, others begin opting out as the pace of life returns and the effect of their time together starts wearing off. It’s hard to meet given everyone’s schedules and other issues arise such as internet connectivity and disagreements on the preferred communication platform.
It’s not long before everyone reverts to the same routine of hunting for the next funding opportunity in order to put food on their tables. The training becomes a fond memory for the activist. They keep in touch with the new friends they’ve made, but the vision of a strong coalition to bring about big systematic change now seems very distant. New relationships were formed and a network was weaved, but they feel that they’re back where they started, focusing on their own work and wondering whether their small efforts will indeed produce any meaningful change amidst the powerful status-quo.
Disrupting the Pattern
If you can relate to this story, you’re not alone. Many activists, change makers, social innovators and civil society leaders have gone through this experience. It is a pattern.
What is the blind spot of social networks? The governance in the networks that fuel social change movements. Despite the recent interest in the shift towards networked strategies for social change, there is still a lot to be explored concerning the questions surrounding decision making and the establishment of network policies together with its collective mission.
A deep and structured conversation about network governance is required and needs to be included in the design process of network initiation. It is an integral part of the responsibility of NGOs who convene networks and should be held and carried out by the funder and donor community worldwide.
Systems Change Networks and Their Governance
In one way or another, most social movements are a form of challenge to established powers. That power can take the form of an oppressive regime, an unfair economic system, or corrupt systemic status quo. The latter is the most difficult to tackle since it does not have a simple hub and spoke structure that can be understood and dismantled piece by piece. Examples of systemic status quo are racism, environmental violence, or protracted civil conflict.
This article addresses the struggles related to shifting systems, particularly the ones that have no linchpin or clear leverage points: no regime to topple, no significant companies to sue, and no peace treaty to negotiate. There may be no clear endgame or road towards it and no clear definition of success or failure, other than a sensible change of the current status quo.
These are the most difficult struggles to pursue for social movements and the networks fueling them as they entail a bitter provocation to the network members. They may be asking themselves:
“Is the way we self-organize to change the status quo not a mere reflection of the status quo itself? Aren't we simply replicating old patterns of working and “fighting” that contain within themselves the seeds that created the current status quo in the first place?”
If taken in earnest, this provocation gives rise to a tension that many social change movements face and fail to overcome. The movement needs to become agile and organized enough to plan and coordinate many different small scale actions across the spectrum of the complex field they are operating in. A network strategy is said to be adopted: instead of a few large scale actions coordinated by a central committee, many diverse and synchronized small scale initiatives are planned. These initiatives are not organized or mandated centrally. Still, they are attuned to a set of shared, high level, mission statements and principles, leaving the details of their execution to the local change agents.
Yet, this mere synchronization requires a form of governance and hierarchy. There are decisions to be made, actions to be taken, people to speak to, and money to spend. But the typical form of governance where a leader is elected by majority vote leads to a network topology that is not suitable for dealing with complex problems. This approach tends to degenerate from the concentration of power and authority held by a few individuals in the network, which is exactly what social movements wanted to avoid in the first place.
The Square and The Tower
In the 2018 book The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power, author Niall Ferguson takes the reader through history’s defining moments by putting in perspective the role that individuals and social networks played in them. The book uses the metaphors of “the square” to symbolize the place where informal, loosely structured social networks end up convening, and “the tower” to represent the formal top-down hierarchical power. The author challenges the somewhat romantic idea that networks or movements spun with the help of modern communications technologies have the ability to replace traditional systems of governance. Although Ferguson’s analysis sounds about right, it is missing the contribution of another geometric shape: the circle.
Governance is a heavily loaded word. It brings about associations with concepts such as government, bureaucracy and power over people. Yet, every system, be it natural, artificial, social, biological or mechanical, needs a form of self-regulation. We call this process of self-regulation “governance”. It is a process by which the system senses the outside environment and adapts its actions in order to fulfill its purpose accordingly.
How to achieve this process of self-regulation while balancing the tension between collective purpose and individual freedom is the value proposition of Sociocracy. Sociocracy has been around since the mid-XIX Century and has the circle as its building block for decisions and sense-making. It’s a system of governance designed around the values of transparency and equivalence but with inspiration from cybernetics (the science of how systems use and exchange information to self-regulate).
In Sociocracy, decision making takes place in a Circle of Shared Power rather than in the Square of the Loudest Voice, or the Tower of Power-Over. It is also aimed at optimizing resource efficiency where decisions are made by consent instead of consensus which usually results in endless debates among network members. By consenting to a decision you are not necessarily agreeing with it, but you’re not objecting to it either; and this, as subtle as it may sound, makes a world of a difference.
Another aspect of Sociocracy which makes it a perfect system of governance for systems change networks, is the way it balances agility with accountability. Working in a complex system requires agility, which involves the ability to pivot on a moment’s notice based on real-time information and significant changes in the local environment. This is incompatible with rigid, heavily bureaucratic and procedural governance systems. But procedures and bureaucracies were invented for a reason. They provide for traceability and accountability. Sociocracy solves this tension by letting power flow to the node of the network which is most impacted and closest to the action. In this case, the power flows to the local change agents acting within a very well defined domain. Those who are most affected by a decision are empowered to make the decision, while at the same time are accountable to the “aim” (domain of action) of their circle members, which is also in support of the aim of the organization.
Transparency, communication and accountability across the organization are accomplished through an interlinking circle structure.
Each circle is connected to the rest of the organization through specific roles that interface with a “general circle” which is then connected to a “mission circle”. In this way, information and feedback flow through the system at all levels of the organization. This forms an organizational structure resembling a set of nested circles that provides a flexible hierarchy where decisions are made at the most local level possible, while maintaining the integrity and alignment of the entire system.
Empowered Networks
The power of isolated local change agents is bounded by their radius of reach, their community, their field, and their organization. When embedded in a systems change network, their power can be leveraged by clever usage of the network effects. Nevertheless, this can only happen if there’s a governance system in place that invites their voices to be heard, incorporates feedback loops, and is well structured yet malleable enough to allow for agile adaptation to the changing, dynamic environment.
Such a system is not straightforward and one shouldn’t expect groups or nascent networks to find a solution for the critical governance tension quickly. Sociocracy is just one example of a system of governance that is more aligned with the requirements of systems change networks.
In addition to fostering connectivity between local change agents and nurturing social spaces for cross-pollination of ideas, funders and donors are missing the opportunity to invest in setting up a governance system which empowers the network to thrive.
This governance system does not need to be perfect. Its effectiveness comes from an agile approach. Look for what solves the immediate problem while supporting your network values and is “good enough for now, safe enough to try” (a principle used in Sociocracy and Agile Methodology).
The year 2020 will be remembered in the history books for many disruptive events. It will also be looked back upon as the year that our civilization’s complexity and interconnectivity became revealed in unprecedented ways. In our role as supporters of social change movements, we are being called to rise to the occasion and earnestly address the blind spot around group governance and power so that we can effectively respond in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.
About the Authors:
Bernadette Wesley is an Organizational Development Consultant and Sociocracy Trainer
Pedro Portela is an independent consultant in the areas of Systems and Complexity Thinking
Short of the air we breathe, water is the most vital component in our life. Unfortunately, there are alarming signs we are running out of this precious liquid. Water scarcity is already looming, and the increasing demands for this “blue gold” in growing bio-fuels and extracting shale oil and gas, will lead to even more competition regarding the use of water.
Priorities will have to be made whether to use water for energy production or for irrigation, for example. Thus, we need to put restrictions on the exploration of unconventional oil and gas reserves, and the growing of bio-fuels. Food and drinking water are a fundamental necessity of life, oil exploration is not.
Most of the world’s water, a total of 97%, in fact, is salty. Of the three percent of water remaining, over two-thirds is trapped in glaciers and polar ice caps. Fresh water is found mostly as groundwater, and only a fraction is available on the surface, 87% of which is found in lakes, 11% in swamps, and 2% in rivers.
It requires 2,000 to 3,000 liters of water to produce enough food to feed a person for one day. If we compare this with the amount of drinking water a person requires, which is only 2 to 4 litres, we use an enormous amount of water just to eat. With the world’s population approaching seven billion people, the daily requirement of fresh water is thus reaching unprecedented proportions.
While fresh water is a renewable resource, global groundwater sources are steadily becoming scarcer. The largest depletions are in Asia and North America, although nobody really knows what the long-term effect on the ecosystem will be.
In 2012, the National Intelligence Council, Director of National Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) jointly prepared the 2012 US Intelligence Community Threat Assessment on Global Water Security. The report concluded:
Between now and 2040, freshwater availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources. Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate energy, posing a risk to global food markets and hobbling economic growth. As a result of demographic and economic development pressures, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems.1
Furthermore, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projects that about 47% of the world's population will be living in areas with severe water stress by the year 2030. Water scarcity was also put on top of the agenda in a recent UN report, urging the UN Security Council to take immediate action.
Water scarcity is not only about the lack of water (quantity) or the lack of access to safe water (quality) but the 'economic scarcity' of water. Water may exist in the ground, but it is time- consuming and expensive to extract it. Hence, as there will be an increasing demand for water combined with limited supplies, the cost and effort to maintain and facilitate access to water will increase. This will demand more power and resources from other sectors and thus multiply the problems.
Privatization was first implemented in some Western countries and then spread to developing countries through World Bank loans and projects. Corporations like GE, Dow Chemical, and Proctor & Gamble are now getting into the ownership, control, and recycling of water. Liberalizing and privatizing water services is a longstanding goal of the European Commission, but it is fiercely opposed by the public and many member states. Gabriella Zanzanaini of the organization, Food and Water Europe, says the ongoing push to privatize “really demonstrates how the Commission has lost touch with reality. Their ideological arguments are not based on substantiated facts and goes to the extreme by ignoring the democratic will of the people.” 3
Water is a vital resource for our survival, and the shortages we are facing will most likely make the access and control of water, along with the struggle to control oil, one of the foremost battleground in the years to come.
Unrestricted Growth vs Degrowth
In his essay “Lumberjacks in Eden”,4 Peter Hall, the fund manager of the Hunter Hall Group, points to the dangers and impossibility of unrestricted growth:
If we maintain our current trajectory of population and economic growth, by the end of our lifetime (and yours), the human footprint will be about two and a half times as heavy as it is today. Food production will need to be twice as high as today to support the 50% increase in population forecast as well as desired increases in standard of living.
However, we neither have the energy nor the water to be able to bring about such enormous growth. Almost all resources on the planet are being strained. Something will soon have to give.
In 1972, a book funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and commissioned by the Club of Rome was published, containing the results of a computer simulation of unrestricted economic and population growth with limited resources. The book, The Limits to Growth, 5 pictured a bleak future for humanity. It envisioned dwindling resources, a collapse in industrial output, increasing death rates and dwindling populations.
In 2004 an attempt was made to see how far the predictions of the original report had come true. The new document was titled Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update6, and concluded:
While the past 30 years has shown some progress, including new technologies, new institutions, and a new awareness of environmental problems, the authors are far more pessimistic than they were in 1972. Humanity has squandered the opportunity to correct our current course over the last 30 years, they conclude, and much must change if the world is to avoid the serious consequences of overshoot in the 21st century.
The 2009 article in Scientific American, “Revisiting the Limits of Growth After Peak Oil”, 7and other more recent publications, have confirmed that the computer model is on track, and that if we do not alter our course dramatically, the global system could collapse somewhere in the middle of this century.
Whatever the accuracy of the specific predictions of the report, the general trend is clear. We are using up resources faster than they are being regenerated, and we are soon going to face a situation where mother nature will impose restraints to our ability to grow. If we learn to accept the reality and adjust, we can make a smooth transition to a more sustainable world. If we do not, but instead keep pushing forward as before until we hit a wall, we are in for a very painful crash.
Presently, the world is mainly run by corporations that influence government policies and set the agenda for the world. Unfortunately, the corporate leaders have a vision forward that is generally limited to their next quarterly profit fix. Important issues, such as the survival of humankind and what kind of world we will leave to our children, is far from their minds. Growth is the corporate mantra. Hence, two things are becoming crystal clear: Water must not be privatized—this precious blue gold belongs to all of us—and we cannot simply grow or invent ourselves out of the problems of water scarcity. It is time we design an economy that can live within its own limits to growth.
1 Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ”Global Water Security,” U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment, February 2, 2012, http://www.fas.org/irp/nic/water.pdf
2 Maude Barlow, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, (The New Press, 2009)
5 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, (New York: New American Library,1972)
6 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004)
With 2020 now behind us and the new year fresh in our hands, it is time to put into practice our New Year’s resolutions. If one of them is to help make the world a better place but you are not sure how, do not despair, there are many heartening examples out there to take inspiration from. Here are five people who have found incredible ways to impact their communities, even the global community, from storytelling to the arts, from technology to worker cooperatives.
Kasha Slavner, Canada – Storytelling, social change
At the age of 16, Kasha Slavner was already deeply disillusioned with mainstream media. She thought there had to be a different narrative for positive things happening around the world. But since she could not find it, she decided to create it herself. She founded the Global Sunrise Project, an organization that creates media to inspire people to make positive change by presenting an alternative narrative of resilience, passion, and hope.
After a crowdfunding campaign, Kasha took a year off high school to travel around the world with her mother and make a documentary film giving voice to the people creating social change in their communities. The heartwarming film “The Sunrise Storyteller” has been widely acclaimed and has won multiple awards. She also tells positive change stories through photography and writing, and she advocates for women’s rights as the youngest member of The Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and The Canadian Council of Young Feminists.
An accomplished innovator from South Sudan, Jaiksana Soro was forced to move to a refugee camp in Uganda in 2016 due to armed conflicts. Arriving there, he saw that most of the communities living in refugee camps still have mindsets shaped by the landscape of war based around tribal agendas. This inspired him to found Platform Africa, an organization using media, education, and technology to help other young refugees to move towards a more equitable, informed and resilient society. He has also created initiatives and programs to raise awareness and develop means to mitigate social media-based hate speech and online incitement of violence.
He wants to make voices against conflict to go viral and plans to run for office in the near future to prove that “what war can do, peace can do better”. In addition to this, he helped develop #ASKotec – a hands-on technical resource and repair kit for community trainers, created for mobile field-use where there is limited access to power and internet connectivity.
Ayakha Melithafa, South Africa – Climate action, just energy transition
Ayakha Melithafa ia a member of both the African Climate Alliance and Project 90 by 2030. She does not think it is ethical to ask kids to skip school to strike for climate, since many parents are struggling and sacrificing so much to pay school fees. However, she has seen first-hand how climate change has caused multiple droughts in recent years.
Ayakha, who was one of 16 young people filing a complaint to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey for their high levels of carbon pollution, says that the poorest people in the world suffer the most from climate change, while contributing the least to it. She therefore wants world leaders to look at this problem globally. Through her participation in the Project 90 by 2030 YouLead initiative, she also helps advocating for transition to a renewable energy future while protecting workers whose positions would be affected by these changes.
Brandon Ballengée, USA – Conservation science, arts
Brandon Ballengée is a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator. He creates artistic pieces inspired by his scientific work that help spread his messages about environmental conservation. As a scientist, his work has focused on cause behind developmental deformities and population declines among amphibians and fish, and on the impact that citizen scientists can play in data collection and the conservation of wildlife.
For his projects, he collaborates with communities of varied age groups, specialists (in art and science) and locals to create transdisciplinary works. To achieve this, he develops participatory science programs aiming to increase understanding and appreciation of nature. During these programs, participants collect important ecological data, becoming citizen scientists and ultimately seeing their efforts turn into actions and installations. His artwork has been exhibited in more that 30 countries around the world and featured in major publications.
Inchang Song, South Korea – Worker co-operatives and networks
Inchang Song is the president and founder of Happy Bridge Worker Cooperative, and the first elected president of the Korean Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Happy Bridge used to be a regular restaurant chain, up until 2012, when it was transformed to a successful worker cooperative just after the General Law on Cooperatives had passed. Before this time, worker co-ops in Korea were restricted to a small number of sectors and required a large number of founding members. The new law made forming cooperatives much easier and more supported by both financial institutions and political leaders.
Together with other founders coming from labour and student activist backgrounds, Inchang Song realized the model could enable their already successful business, and the decision proved right: 5 years after the conversion, Happy Bridge was already the largest co-op in the country. He also established a partnership with Mondragon University and participated in the creation of a research institute so that cooperative members and members of the community can receive training on worker cooperatives. He is today actively engaged in establishing networks of cooperatives both nationally and internationally.
Do you feel inspired to create change but don’t have a specific idea yet? You can always join the Systems Change Alliance as a member and head on to one of our monthly meetups to meet fellow aspiring changemakers and help us come up with new community projects to engage with.
An Ancient Paradigm for Ecological/Social Sustainability
A Call for Urgent Change
On March 15th, 2019, hundreds of thousands of youth from over 100 countries marched to save the planet from dramatic climate change: from melting glaciers, creating rising sea levels that inundate land, to record hurricanes, storms and tornadoes; to unheard of heatwaves, fires and then floods; to drought and desertification causing the death and displacement of millions.
Figure 1
These youth call for an urgent systems change that places a primacy on the biosphere as well as changing an economic system from privileging the wealthiest 1% to being more equitable. In this article, I offer an integrated Neohumanist/Proutist systems change, based on over 10,000 years of anthropological; archeological and historical evidence. Here we must look to the unchanging fabric of our planet: the system of watersheds that cover every ecological niche on the planet (See Figure 1: The Watersheds of Africa). When human societies live in harmony with the watershed, we flourish; when they are ignored, we perish. As you will see, the founder of Neohumanism (a new humanism extended to the living earth and all creation) and Prout (The Progressive Utilization Theory, a progressive economic democracy attuned to ecologies), Prabhat Rainjain Sarkar, can be considered one of the world’s pre-eminent watershed experts and innovators of watershed sustainability. In fact, I believe that every feature, concept and principle of Neohumanism/Prout can be realized through Sarkar’s insights and recommendations for working synergistically with watersheds.
Watersheds: The eternal fabric of planet earth
Figure 2
Watersheds (See figure 2) are fed by high, often glacial mountain chains. As rivers, tributaries, and rivulets flow down lesser mountains and into valleys, we find resplendent forests and mineral-rich soils. Further into the plains we find savannahs, bush and abundant animal life and underground aquifers. As the rivers fan out into deltas, they create nutrient-rich alluvia and then enter the oceans. Coastal estuaries, marshes, and swamps create an amazing dynamic, where the coast is protected from the impact of hurricanes and storms while providing an amazing ecological niche of flora and fauna that has continued to provide a resplendent existence to humanity.
Whether through epic river civilizations—the Yangtze, Tigress and Euphrates, Indo-Gangetic or Nile or smaller systems such as the Mississippi, Thames, Rhine, Amazon, Nairobi or Niger—human beings have co-created and defined their worlds through their watersheds. Your local watershed is all around you. It may well be smaller than these grander watersheds, but it is determined by both the history of culture and land use and the ecological and geological characteristics that surround you. Chances are that you can walk out the door and see parts of the watershed. We are all “People of the Watershed”.
Our Ancient Watershed Legacy
Many ancient indigenous societies defined their cosmos as formed by their watersheds. In Southwest pueblo and Navajo cultures, creation emerged from “Sipapus”: large holes from the mountain tops, and evolution continued to flow down the watersheds. Later societies and civilization defined their territories by the surrounding mountains. Common names for people and places referred to features of the watershed: “He/she born by the lake’s edge”, “The gathering place where water flows across flat rocks”, “A circle of juniper trees”, for example.
Figure 3
Many emergent societies and civilizations were designed in conformity to the flow of water. Villages, settlements, and cities of the early U.S. Southwest were first designed to follow the course of water, through acequias or water dispersal systems both amongst pueblos and later Hispanic cultures. In the Shinto practice of Satoyama in early Japan, fish life and water flow interspersed with housing, transportation, and merged back into ponds and larger lakes (See Figure 3). A similar process was used in Norway, rural China and throughout rural Africa and New Zealand.
A review of the long cycle and evolution of human society has proven time and time again that when following the above dynamics, societies and ecologies are resilient and stable. With ignorance and then conscious destruction of these watershed dynamics, civilizations eventually collapse.
Thousands of archeological research projects around the globe attest to the challenges and solutions cited throughout this article. The common conclusion is that decentralized, self-sufficient, ecologically based societies are more resilient, while urbanized, centralized and hierarchical societies fail.
The Cause of Civilizational Collapse
As societies evolved to greater complexity, many became super-urbanized and hierarchical. This initially helped govern the fields, utilized individual talents, and distributed resources. However, as each aspect of urbanization intensified, collapse was eminent. What occurred in these civilizations is that leadership became more aloof from human need; natural resources were destroyed, and human capacity focused on activity that depleted rather than replenished the economy.
So, it is by no coincidence that the decentralization and community autonomy that emerges after the fall of large unbalanced urban systems is precisely the human return to the laws of the watershed. Land and trees; marshes, plains and agricultural land are replenished. Despite large-scale desertification, massive deforestation, strip-mining and desecration of the world’s river systems, the watershed remains the one great constant in the story of planet earth.
An illustrative example is many Mayan Empires. As the priestly class gained power, much of the labor force, once focused on farming, was redirected to the building of huge temple complexes and the creation of ceremonial objects. Forests were rapidly lost and water resources dried up. In other words, the leaders of society lost their purpose in protecting and facilitating the collective good and balance with the environment and rather focused on their personal fame, wealth, and power. Does that sound familiar?
Civilizations survive when attuned to the Watershed
However, there are other examples that fly in the face of this paradigm. With the Mayan center of Tikal (which lasted over one thousand years), what is seen as a huge city center is actually a huge network of water canals, water cisterns, and distribution centers that reached a network of small villages. What appears to be the huge primary temple complex was actually made of large stone blocks, carved from the bedrock to create this water storage and distribution system. The runoff from these complexes would disperse into marshes, reservoirs, and rivulets. Mayan culture still remains vibrant and resilient based on interdependent networks of autonomous, community-based villages, – and decentralization with self-reliant economies.
At Angkor Wat in the Mekong Delta in Cambodia, the central “Water Temple” was actually an elaborate web of water distribution centers, represented in a network of smaller temples, where water managers and their communities decided how to distribute water, and decision-making was made amongst a huge region of self-reliant villages attuned to the watershed. This great civilization finally collapsed, when the priorities of governance shifted to large scale maritime trade and military conquest; a common theme of empire collapse.
The common adage in these civilizations was to waste not one drop of water. There were ingenious ways to lift and carry water; to disperse water and to preserve and enhance all sources of water.
Principles of the watershed have been desecrated throughout history, through empire-building and conquest, and more recently the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It has really been the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid-eighteenth century that has blinded our attention to the watershed—our eternal legacy on this planet. Because of this, we view history from the lens of the “carpentered” environment that commodifies rather than sustains. Free market capitalism has made these problems extreme and barbaric.
The Current Problem
Analogies to today’s dire urban predicament are evident. Large monument-like buildings utilize 76% of electrical energy in the United States. Inside are many industries that take away, rather than adding to a productive economy. In capitalism, the priests of ceremony and ritual are replaced by the stock market, and financial sector, which more often create the potential for destruction rather than genuine economic development. Added to this are the banking, insurance, and health sectors. Urban health care costs have accelerated through air pollution, high urban stress, lack of exercise, and aloofness from the nurturing natural world. At the same time, while urban environments are disconnected from their rural support regions, they rely on the food production of China and other Asian and third world countries, which quickly become overused.
There is the obscene loss of energy from the global exchange of goods that traverse the globe; clogging shipping lanes and wasting fuel as basic goods are moved back and forth across continental highways. Then there are the escalating long-term consequences from petroleum disasters, both on the sea and on land.
Eighteen of the twenty-five largest urban centers across the world are along the coast. Because of rapidly melting glaciers, these cities are beginning to flood and will be completely flooded by the end of the century. Sweeping fires, leading to massive soil loss and flooding, have created a “climate diaspora” that has reached tens of millions. Multinational corporations are privatizing precious water, leading to millions of the poor to bathe in, cook with, and drink toxic water from toxic industries. Over 7 million people in the world are without sanitary water.
Only seven percent of land in China is considered arable. The human displacement, malnutrition, and unimaginable waste of resources foretells a doom scenario that is frightening. Even worse, this crisis is on a global scale, not just on the scale of one isolated watershed-based civilization that could collapse and recover without impacting others.
A Return to Our Legacy
We must return to the well-proven interventions that evolved over thousands of years, and then apply current technology to these systems. Many Moghul societies created systems of cisterns and water canals that dispersed water over large areas. Small ponds, lakes, dams, and reservoirs preserved fish and plant life, and meant that all people had easy access to clean water. In parched deserts, Muslim societies built desert mechanisms to extract enough water to serve large villages. Many ancient societies were water temple cities.
Sparking a Transformation of Consciousness to Conscious Action
There are many keys to returning our worldview, ethics, and visceral experience of life back to the watershed. Most countries still boast ancient watershed pilgrimages that link ancient cisterns and natural springs together as well as linking modern religion with ancient mythic spirituality. All large rivers have their gods and goddesses and spirit-beings. People in Egypt still beseech the Nile god to assist them in times of social and economic strife. In India there are massive river pilgrimages that introduce the pilgrim to vastly different languages, arts, and agricultural practices that still exist in symbiosis with the watershed.
Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar travelled great lengths of rivers in India, studying the impact of soils on language and how the convergence of rivers impacted culture. He created several model examples of how to return colonized regions of India back to their sustainable beginnings, and then how to link that to a modern future. He wrote extensively on reforestation, water-harvesting techniques and how to develop local, decentralized economies based on natural resources. He devised plans for small reservoirs and ponds and lakes where water plants and fish life converged with creepers and shrubs and then trees and bushes to create a resplendent ecological niche to enhance both natural and human life.
His vision for Eco-communities is for dispersed demonstration hubs where local technology, alternative energy, integrated farming techniques and local industries demonstrate a vibrant economy and ecology that return to harmony with the watershed. Here are living Neohumanist principles that preserve and enhance all life and recognize cultural and language differences, where diverse peoples cooperate across watersheds. Here also, all principles of Prout, from Economic Democracy to decentralized economic planning, to three-tier industries, to the essence of samaja, integrate seamlessly with the watershed.
The reshifting of priorities and urgent changes argued above are already occurring. Along with trial projects, there has been a shifting of consciousness, with many finding renewal and resilience by walking their own watersheds. Now this needs to become the dominant paradigm.
Plans for Action
“People of the Watershed” is a return to the laws of the watershed, brought to life through Neohumanism and Prout. A book is being written; workshops are being held and curriculum is being developed.
If you work in a Neohumanist school or with Prout, here is a quick guide:
Define your local watershed. Draw a simple map.
Describe its current condition and what has caused positive and negative impacts.
Research indigenous use and oral history of the watershed.
Plan a walk through the watershed. Collect samples of flora and fauna as well as of pollution and industrial effluent, and create a watershed scrapbook.
Meet with organizations that work with the local watershed and brainstorm a common activity.
Start utilizing the ideas of Sarkar to design a sustainable watershed. In addition, learn the many Prabhat Samgeets that sing of the magic and wonder of watershed features.
A few years before Pachauri made that statement, the popular British rock band Coldplay made headlines by making an environmentally activist decision to “neutralize” the carbon dioxide emissions generated from the production of its second CD. To do that, the band paid the CarbonNeutral Company (TCNC) about $50,000 to plant ten thousand mango trees near Gudibanda, India.
Since then, rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Dave Matthews Band have followed suit, thus popularizing the act of voluntarily shrinking one’s carbon footprint. This type of carbon-offset is sold by private firms to individuals, corporations and organizations to reduce the impact of their carbon pollution. The other type are mandatory offsets based on the regulations set forth by the Kyoto Protocol, which requires polluting businesses to either purchase additional CO2 credits from another company or invest in new credit offsets. The whole process is overseen by a UN body.
The carbon credit system will serve Wall Street well by using “the earth’s atmosphere as a casino,” but not become an effective way to avert increased global temperatures.
While these attempts at curbing global warming are commendable, they are also fraught with limitations. The voluntary carbon-offset business, which is now driven by the guilt and concerns of many celebrities, including actors Brad Pitt and Jake Gyllenhaal, politician Hilary Clinton, and, of course, green activist and former US vice-president Al Gore, is according to an increasing number of environmentalists distracting us from the real problem: how to stop producing more green house gases in the first place by investing in and using more alternative energy.
More importantly, by creating a more localized and greener economy that requires less transportation, uses more fuel efficient and electric cars, less oil-based fertilizers, and is less dependent on meat and dairy production, since methane from cattle, according to UN reports, is one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gasses, we can more effectively curb the rise in global temperatures.
Environmental writer Heather Rogers’s conclusion is that carbon-offsets so far have had only a small impact on reducing global warming, in part because of the trees planted by volunteers today will only start to reduce CO2 in several decades. More importantly, she thinks the carbon credit system will serve Wall Street well by using “the earth’s atmosphere as a casino,” but not become an effective way to avert increased global temperatures.
While mandatory greenhouse taxes and voluntary efforts are steps in the right direction, it would be much more effective, she argues, if we stopped producing green house gasses in the first place, such as by installing solar water heaters on homes in sunny cities all over the world. This has been done in cities like Bangalore, India, and such efforts can easily be copied in other cities. In other words, we do not need band-aid solutions; we need real economic and environmental changes from the grassroots up.
The Green New Deal has become a key reference point for those seeking a viable economic, social and ecological future. However, most versions are flawed, failing to recognise the problems of rebound, economic colonisation and the power of incumbent corporations. A family of alternatives exists, variously described in terms like 'degrowth', 'post-growth', the 'steady state economy' or 'the simpler way'. But perhaps due to their complexity and their truly radical implications, their proponents have not caught the public eye like the Green Dealers have. What if it were possible to succinctly portray an attractive policy package, that could be almost lifted "off the shelf" for political campaigns and manifestos? Could it be done? Our Post-Growth Challenge has been posed to find out.
What?
A cooperative challenge to find a better way to present the post-growth alternative.
Why?
Over the last two years, various Green New Deals have become very popular. This demonstrates that a set of policy ideas can be effectively communicated by combining them into one positive package.
In contrast, the ideas and proposals of the degrowth, post-growth and steady state economy movements can appear complex, vague, negative and unattractive. Can we overcome that disadvantage by trying to do what the Green Dealers have done and present a Post-Growth Deal? There’s one way to find out – let’s try it!
How?
We invite you to present your Post Growth Policy package.
It needs to be presented in straightforward, concise, easy to understand, and attractive terms, without denying the real difficulties involved in reducing the material and energy throughput of our economies.
This could be done as,
A short policy briefing – of up to 600 words (you can use appendices to go into deeper detail).
Or…
You could present it in graphic terms, as an ‘infographic’, a cartoon or a comic strip, for example.
Or…
You could make a short video (max 5 minutes) to get your ideas over.
Or..
Maybe you’ve an even better idea for how to present it– the choice is yours.
Who?
Anyone who is interested in creating an economy that can sustainably support life on Earth.
We anticipate two classes of entry.
A) Those focussing on a post-growth future in the specific context of Greater Manchester.
And
B) Those with proposals for national or inter-state (European Union, ALBA, Mercosur, UN, etc. etc.) implementation.
When?
Send us your entries by midnight, GMT, Wednesday, 31 March, 2021.
Articles, briefings, stories, or infographics should be sent in the form of an email attachment. They can be wordprocessor documents ( .odt, .doc, .docx), pdf files, or image files (.jpg, .png, ..gif, .svg). Please keep attachments to less than 2 megabytes in size. For anything larger, compress it or send as a file link (e.g. using dropbox, box, spideroak, google).
Videos should be uploaded to a video hosting platform and a link sent to the above email address.
We will acknowledge entries.
Prizes!
“Everybody has won and all must have prizes.”
All participants will receive a printed copy of our pamphlet, “The Viable Economy … and Society”. The entry that we like best in each class will be presented with a tee-shirt with the Steady State Manchester logo1. Wear it at events, or wear it in bed: we don’t mind!
Most important, though will be that we will publicise the best entries, through our various local and international networks.
In addition we might invite the creator of our favourite Greater Manchester entry to jointly nominate a local post-growth organisation for a small grant.
In the title track to Leonard Cohen's 1992 album The Future, the legendary folk singer croons in his raspy baritone: "I've seen the future, baby: It is murder." Cohen is not the only self-proclaimed prophet who has seen the future in recent years, of course.
These days, the blogger Umair Haque writes about the future with a frequency most writers can only dream of. One of the most prolific and popular writers on Medium, as well as one of the world's most influential management thinkers, he has a penchant for predictions.
In feverish, apocalyptic essays, Haque has made it his trademark to forecast our future, too. And it is not only filled with murder and mayhem in the streets.
In one of his hyperbolic headlines, he writes that The Future is Here and It's Made of Apocalypse. One of the reasons we are on a runaway train towards the Apocalypse is because of President Trump. The American president is a fascist, he writes. And the American people, at least those who voted for him, are a bunch of "dumb idiots."
But then there must be "dumb idiots" in Europe, too. The same kind of sheepish fools who, in the 1930s, believed the Nazis when they said that Jews ate Christian children for breakfast.
The same kind of conspiracy nuts who follow QAnon and believe Covid-19 was made in a lab, either in China or in Big Pharma's imagination. The same people who today believe socialists are sucking people's blood with the nocturnal swiftness of vampire bats.
These are the kind of images we hear and conjure up when reading Haque's apocalyptic blogs. We also hear them when reading rightwing conspiracy theorists on social media.
Another reason we are heading towards Apocalypse is global warming, of course. "The planet is burning," Haque writes. "We live in an age of mass extinction. The earth's great ecologies are reaching tipping points, from which there's no return."
But Haque is not just a doomsayer. He also offers solutions, such as wanting to extend our sense of personhood to nature in order to, you guessed it, prevent catastrophe. "If we recognized the earth was our slave — but should be a person—then…. all our systems would have to change," he writes.
"Our economics could no longer be built on the foolish idea of GDP — which counts profits, but not, say, the species going extinct to provide them — and 'stock markets' booming, while life on earth begins to go extinct. We'd need to reinvent our economies wholesale — at a conceptual level, not just with money."
Cohen and Haque have not been alone in predicting doom and gloom in past decades. Right after the stock market crash of 1987, economist Ravi Batra wrote the runaway bestseller The Great Depression of 1990. But the depression never came as he had predicted.
Instead, we got a series of great recessions—in 1991, 2001, 2007, and the Covid-recession of 2020. After each of these economic meltdowns, the elite became richer and everyone else a bit poorer and in deeper debt.
Batra claims that the solution to these roller coaster rides—as well as another Great Depression—is to decrease the wage gap—to tax the rich, break up monopolies like Amazon and Walmart and pay the poor and the middle class a whole lot more. I doubt that Haque would disagree.
Then there is Peter Turchin, the historian who, according to a recent article in The Atlantic "sees the future." To Turchin, America's future is apocalyptic, worse than what most Americans have experienced so far. The near future, he believes, could even lead to another civil war.
In his 2009 book, Secular Cycles, co-authored with Sergey A, Nefedov, Turchin describes four main reasons civilizations collapse. Only one of them refers to leaders like Donald Trump.
These civilizational devastations, which have repeated themselves with some regularity throughout history, takes place when the population override nature's carrying capacity; when the elite gets too rich for its own good, and there aren't enough elite jobs to go around; when the strength of the state weakens, and when the social foundations are shaken.
This is the state we are in at present: we are gobbling up more than a planet and a half in resources; the billionaires and their mega-yachts have never been more plentiful; democracy is eroding, and right-wing populism is back with a vengeance; there's civil unrest and the poor are getting more impoverished, and many of them are voting for right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump.
Trumpism, then, is a counter-elite movement and Steve Bannon, although elite-educated at Harvard Business school, grew up working class. As if fulfilling Turchin's prophecy, he is now recruiting white, blue-collar workers to revolt against the elite he so desperately wants to be part of himself.
It makes sense, but of course, the commoners can also turn into socialist rebels. At present, if it all fell apart, it's hard to say how many would join a Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octavio Cortes movement and how many would opt for a Trumpist counter-revolution.
However, a revitalized Trump movement in 2024 would surely bring us closer to the brink of all-out economic and environmental disaster. A disaster of Haqueish proportions.
But what about a leftist, internationalist movement led by Green New Deal idealists Alexandria Octavio Cortes and Yanus Varoufakis?
In my book, if it became global, that movement would surely be enough of a system change to save us from total environmental collapse. But is that enough in the long term?
Suppose we are to truly thrive and survive—economically, environmentally, culturally, spiritually—for seven more generations. In that case, we can and must do better than merely reforming the system that brought us to the brink of planetary collapse in the first place.
Just consider the fact that the Green New Dealers believe in Modern Monetary Theory. That’s the idea that debt is no problem as long as we use it for the right reasons—for infrastructure, schools, the poor and the environment. But anyone who has contemplated the deep interconnection between ecology and economy, the way H. T. Odum has, would surely agree with him: "In Nature, all debts are paid, and no one is 'too big to fail.'"
The future is already here, baby. We are all living on this small island called Planet Earth. And it will be murder, for all of us, if we think we can buy more time with superficial fixes and short-term strategies. H. T. Odum was right, now is the time for a Real New Deal.
Inspired by the life and work of David Fleming, economist, ecologist, green political campaigner, visionary and writer. The Sequel is a one-hour documentary, made following the publication of Fleming’s great work, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. He was unable to finish the book before his death in 2010, and it was eventually edited and published in full, posthumously, in 2016, by his friend and collaborator, Shaun Chamberlin.
In both his life and his writing, Fleming dared to re-imagine a thriving civilization after the collapse of our current mainstream economies.
Originally trained as an economist, Fleming went on to play a key role in developing alternative narratives to mainstream economics and agriculture. He was among the first to reveal the possibility of peak oil's approach and invented the influential TEQs system, designed to address this and climate change. He was also a pioneer of post-growth economics, and a significant figure in the development of the UK Green Party, and the New Economics Foundation, as well as a Chairman of the Soil Association.
In both his life and writing, Fleming dared to re-imagine a thriving civilization after the collapse of our current mainstream economies and inspired the Transition Towns movement, spearheaded by Rob Hopkins.
In Lean Logic, he emphasised that a shift in culture would be the key element to transforming our societies away from centring around the market economy. Rather than competition and growth, he highlighted the need for togetherness, giving, sharing, trust in one another, and building relationships within communities
It can be overwhelming to imagine or implement change at a global level. This film and Fleming’s work serve as a reminder that, while we acknowledge that systemic change needs to take place, we can have the greatest impact in our own communities. We can make change at a local level – by starting initiatives that combine our skills and passions with genuine local needs.
A post-capitalist reality need not be austere – in fact there can be more abundance and celebration in our lives as we develop flourishing local economies and nurture biodiversity
Featured in the documentary, the repair cafes, pop-up village green, and solidarity clinics, established in Greece following the economic crisis, are small-scale examples of people taking matters into their own hands and choosing new ways of weaving human kindness and wellbeing into the fabric of our societies.
The Transition Town movement is helping people to prepare for a way of life that is sustainable. We need to practise consuming less – the shift to a post-capitalist reality need not be austere – in fact there can be more abundance and celebration in our lives as we develop flourishing local economies and nurture biodiversity – but it requires a shift away from a consumer lifestyle, based on convenience shopping and manipulative advertising from multi-nationals like Amazon and Facebook.
Some of these projects are up and running now. Undoubtedly, more will come later, when the need for alternatives becomes greater. The truth is that when collapse happens we are forced to act. Nothing brings people together and urges them to make change like a crisis. And it may be that, for many, that is what it will take to wake them from the dream that capitalism can ever be sustainable. When it comes to that stage, it is vital to know what other options we have. David Fleming’s work may make a significant contribution to these next chapters of humanity.
The Sequel was directed and produced by Peter Armstrong of Empathy Media. Watch our recent interview with Peter, in which he speaks about his lifetime as a filmmaker and environmental activist.
Building a new world will require first reexamining—and dismantling—the cultural ethos of productivity that creeps into our lives every day.
This article was originally published in Yes! magazine, a nonprofit, independent publisher of solutions journalism.
In 2008, performance artist Pilvi Takala took her seat as a new employee at the company Deloitte, a global consulting firm, and began to stare into space.
When asked by other employees what she was doing, she said, “brain work” or that she was working “on her thesis.” One day she rode the elevator up and down the entire workday. When asked where she was going, she said nowhere. This image of utter inactivity, writes Jenny Odell in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, is what completely “galled” Takala’s coworkers.
In capitalist American culture, productivity is sacrosanct. If somebody says they had a productive day, the implicit assumption is that they had a good day. Descriptions like “non-contributing member of society” and “loiterer” clearly stigmatize those who aren’t considered productive. For Odell, this stigma on unproductivity is a real problem. What we really need is to loiter more, do less—in fact, she seems to say, life on this planet might depend on it.
For years, my work as a journalist has centered on the climate crisis, the displacement of people, and the proliferation of segregating, militarized borders around the world. I’ve seen the ways that the hyperproductivity that drives capitalism helped create these problems.
What we really need is to loiter more, do less—in fact, life on this planet might depend on it.
According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, human industry has pumped more than 400 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide—the approximate equivalent of 1.2 million Empire State Buildings—into the atmosphere since 1751, half of that since the late 1980s. The use of solid and liquid fossil fuels, like oil or coal, produced three-quarters of these emissions.
That Western modern civilization was going to uplift the masses was rarely questioned, even as factories continued to pump out plastic commodities on the backs of the global poor. Now the catastrophic results of elite injustice, corporate lies, and collective thoughtlessness are coming in: the hottest years on record, encroaching seas, destructive floods, devastating wildfires, powerful hurricanes, crop-wilting droughts—and 1 million animal and plant species on the verge of extinction, according to a U.N. report. All of this is displacing people by the millions across the globe.
I remember seeing the production quotas in the workers’ stations in maquiladoras across northern Mexico. Between 2001 and 2004, I visited dozens of such factories as part of the work I did for the binational organization BorderLinks, a nonprofit that arranges educational delegations for universities and churches. Workers, often in windowless rooms with a chemical stench, make suitcases, bank pens, dentures, cotton swabs, and electrical components for rockets and fighter jets. People are “optimized” for productivity in a global economy in which progress is measured by constant growth, more stuff, and more box stores. I’ve seen the paychecks. The approximately $8 a day earned by a line worker is hardly a living wage when the combined cost of a gallon of milk and carton of eggs is more than a half-day’s work.
And every minute counts: If a worker is a minute late in many maquilas, they lose their on-time bonus (their paycheck is docked). If a worker is pregnant, they’re fired. Workers often live in homes first built with discarded wood pallets and cardboard as insulation, structures that are extremely vulnerable to ever worse and more frequent 21st-century storms. And the inequality is as ferocious as the weather. According to Oxfam, a top fashion CEO has to work just four days to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn their whole life.
While there are other outcomes of Western progress and economic productivity, inequality—especially along racial and gender lines—and emissions lead the charge. At the end of 2018, 26 people owned about the same amount of wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest people on planet Earth, according to Oxfam; and emissions reached, yet again, an all-time high. Increasingly militarized political borders reinforce the discrepancies between the haves and the have-nots, the environmentally protected and the environmentally exposed, and those who are White and those who are Black and Brown.
When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, there were 15 border walls. Now there are 70, most constructed since 2001, almost always situated on the boundaries of inequality, between the Global North and the Global South. This isn’t the only world that’s possible. But Odell suggests that imagining something else will require first reexamining—and dismantling—the cultural ethos of productivity that creeps into our lives every day.
By doing nothing, people like Takala are “refusing or subverting an unspoken custom,” Odell writes, revealing “its often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives.” It’s such a simple idea, but it’s entirely radical. The strip malls and big box stores and endless cars coming and going; the constant consumption and ever accelerating emissions; our nervous systems attached to constantly buzzing smartphones; and the cyberscapes that displace landscapes in our imaginations—none of this is inevitable.
Our current model of productivity and capitalism—and profit and segregation—isn’t the only way. It is possible to create something else, but mental space is needed to dream up new possibilities. Doing nothing creates that space, and shifts attention to other ways of living, loving, and working alongside others.
It is possible to create something else, but mental space is needed to dream up new possibilities.
One radical alternative is imagined in a recent study, “The Ecological Limitations of Work”: a less than 10-hour work week. Study author Philipp Frey argues for a dramatically reduced work week for environmental reasons. Work—or “the economic activity that causes GHG emissions”—is at an unsustainable level, requiring a dramatic reduction. This idea raises all kinds of questions. Is there a way to both work less and redistribute wealth more evenly? And what is work, even—is it merely that which contributes to a bloated and catastrophic world economy?
Perhaps our very salvation, and slowing down, is in the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, who wrote, “What is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.”
And what about borders? Near the end of the book, Odell describes the 1872 painting “American Progress” by John Gast. The painting depicts Manifest Destiny, the idea that White people moving west were a civilizing force. In the painting, a blond woman in white robes strides westward, trampling “hundreds of species and thousands of years’ worth of knowledge,” Odell writes. This westward expansion was the origin of U.S. territorial borders. So Odell imagines the opposite of Manifest Destiny. She calls it “Manifest Dismantling.” Manifest Dismantling would purposefully undo the damage of Manifest Destiny by reckoning with productivity’s assault on the living world.
Tearing down a dam, for Odell, would be an example of a creative act of Manifest Dismantling because it would facilitate the return of an ecological landscape. The same could be said about the 70 border walls, or the nearly 700 miles of walls and barriers along the U.S.–Mexico border. Dismantling these would allow people to move without fear. The saguaros and mesquite in the Sonoran Desert would grow back, and pronghorns, jaguars, and gray wolves could travel freely across borders. But it would also open space for a new vision to emerge, of a more equitable way to relate with each other and the living planet.
This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine, a nonprofit, independent publisher of solutions journalism.
Until 15 years ago, residents of the semi-arid Vizianagaram district in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh did not cultivate any millets. For that matter, they did not cultivate any food crops.
“Many people here were disconnected from their fields. They would work in nearby towns as daily-wage labor and depended on the public distribution system for subsidized but nutrient-sparse white rice,” says K. Saraswathi, executive secretary of SABALA, a nonprofit that aims to strengthen community food security via millet farming, describing the scene she encountered when her organization first began working in the district. “A few farmers who were growing rice had lost their entire crop due to the absence of rain. People sorely felt the lack of food and livelihood security.”
Similar narratives are common even today in other parts of the country, where farmers have either stopped farming completely or focus on cash crops such as cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco, leaving them with little nutrition or financial security. Rice and wheat cultivation were heavily promoted during the country’s Green Revolution in the 1960s, when farmers were given incentives for using hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. As a result, the production and consumption of millets in India fell dramatically. But with nearly 60% of the country’s agricultural area under rain-fed (non-irrigated) farming, rice and wheat farmers are overly reliant on weather conditions that are becoming less conducive to farming with climate change.
Vizianagaram district is one of several places in India experiencing the revival of millet cultivation. When SABALA first approached villagers in the district about millet farming back in 2006, the women came forward because they and their children were suffering from anemia, stunted growth, and other disorders caused by the lack of proper nutrition. Today, SABALA works with nearly 2,000 female farmers in the district who are cultivating millets, mainly for their own consumption.
A foxtail millet field in Cheedivalasa Village, Vizianagaram district, India. Photo from SABALA
Janaki Bobbili, a 29-year-old married mother of two, is one of them. She belongs to the marginalized “backward class” community in the Veerabhadrapuram village of the Vizianagaram district. In the past, she felt disadvantaged not only because of her gender but also because she belonged to the lowest tiers of caste and class.
Slowly, though, that feeling began to change after Bobbili attended a meeting organized by SABALA about five years ago, where she was introduced to the nutritive value of millets. Soon after, Bobbili began cultivating millets for her family’s sustenance on a 1-acre plot belonging to her father-in-law. Thanks to millet farming, she has become a leader in a local millet cooperative and says, “I finally have recognition in society.”
The Bounty of Millets
Millets are a family of hardy, nutrient-rich grains in the grass family that have been grown and consumed in the Indian subcontinent since ancient times. Common varieties include pearl, foxtail, finger, barnyard, kodo, and little millet. In the face of climate change, millets are now being increasingly valued for their low water requirements during cultivation and tolerance to temperature increases, as well as for the unprocessed grain’s ability to store well for 20 to 30 years. In India, where more than 70% of rural working women are farmers and will be among the first to suffer the impacts of climatic changes here, millet farming helps them secure nutrition, health, and a more resilient future for themselves and their families.
Millets today, as in the distant past, are cultivated using sustainable agriculture practices such as multi-cropping, with cow or buffalo dung as fertilizer and natural pesticides called “insect-chasers” made from neem and other local medicinal plants. These traditional farming techniques enable a farmer to cultivate 15 to 20 crops in a 1-acre plot. With SABALA’S support, women in Vizianagaram district began growing different kinds of millets, intercropped with vegetables, legumes, pulses, and oil seeds.
“The investment needed to start growing millets is low, but they provide every possible kind of security. Besides food, nutrition, and health security, they also ensure financial, fodder, seed, soil, environment, and cultural security,” Saraswathi says. “Such is the beauty of millets.”
A rangoli, a decorative design made on the ground for festive occasions, featuring a variety of millet, vegetable, and pulse seeds at a biodiversity festival organized by SABALA in Cheedivalasa Village, Vizianagaram district in 2018. Photo from SABALA.
Investing in Community
Bolstered by their success with millet farming, nearly 300 women farmers affiliated with SABALA came together in 2017, contributed 1,000 Indian rupees (about US $15) each, and started a cooperative called Arogya. Arogya is a Sanskrit word meaning “all-around well-being.” The organization now lists nearly 1,000 marginalized female farmers of Vizianagaram district as members, including Bobbili, who is the leader of the group’s production subcommittee.
Arogya buys surplus millets from the female farmers of the district, processes them using efficient machines, and sells the processed grain in the cooperative’s store. The store is located centrally in the district and caters to needs of the local community. Profitable since its first year of operation, Arogya reinvests its profits in training its members to make value-added millet products such as ready-to-eat fried snacks and baked goods as well as pre-made mixes for hot meals, which it also sells in its store. To ensure consistent business, Arogya secures long-term supply contracts from schools and hostels in the district.
During the current pandemic, the cooperative has been actively supporting local relief efforts. “We sold 1 ton of our nutritious finger millet cookies to a nonprofit at a nominal price,” Bobbili says. The local nonprofit then distributed the millet cookies to impoverished children for free, to improve their nutrition and boost their immunity.
Reclaiming Power
“Owning their labor and having the freedom to make decisions are opportunities rarely afforded to these women,” says Shiney Varghese, senior policy analyst at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis, who has visited several millet farming projects in India. “Millet farming is a way for them to grow food crops of their choice for themselves and their families. It enhances their livelihood options, instills confidence in them, and earns them the respect of their family and community.”
Arogya is now an income source both for farmers who sell their surplus millet to the organization as well as those who are involved with making the value-added products. With the extra income, some women have gone on to buy a cow or a buffalo, which provides them with both milk and manure.
“Previously common spaces like temples and public offices were accessible only to men. Now, women come forward and are visible everywhere. They are raising their voices and fighting for their rights,” Saraswathi of SABALA says. “In most of our farmer households, the husband will first consult the wife on important matters.”
Sandhya Rani Garu, a soil scientist at Vizianagaram’s Agricultural Research Station, echoes Saraswathi’s comments. She says, “When I first began working in the district in 2014, the women were so shy they wouldn’t even come out of their houses. Now they travel about 100 kilometers [62 miles] from their villages to participate in our training programs and farmer festivals. They are financially independent and able to support their children’s education.”
Millet farmer, Medapureddy Ramulamma, 61, in her pearl millet field in Cheedivalasa Village, Vizianagaram district. Photo from SABALA.
Challenges Ahead
The revival of millet farming in Vizianagaram district has had its challenges. There was a lack of seed availability in the initial years, resolved in due course by developing a community seed bank. Likewise, the difficulty in grain-processing was addressed when Arogya procured specialized machines for the task.
Still, other obstacles remain. While millet crops don’t attract insects, thanks to the multilayered coating on the grain, birds are known to destroy millet fields. And unlike cash crops or rice and wheat, to date, no insurance is available to cover damage to millet crops. Furthermore, banks have only recently warmed up to providing loans to millet farmers.
“We need more support from the authorities at every step,” Saraswathi says. “The linkages between production, processing, and consumption need to be strengthened.”
Millet farmers across India face similar challenges. Umbrella organizations such as the Millet Network of India support grassroots groups, helping to navigate these challenges and to revive millet farming in their respective locations. MINI now works with 15 partners in eight Indian states. Several women-led non-profits such as Women’s Collective in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu and NEN Nagaland in the northeastern corner of the country are enabling female farmers to achieve food security and climate resilience via millet farming. Another platform, All India Millet Sisters has a membership of more than 10,000 women farmers from all across the country.
The grassroots push for the inclusion of millets in the National Food Security Act of 2013 led to it being added to the portfolio of grains, along with rice and wheat. Per the Act, these grains are to be provided to two-thirds of India’s households at highly subsidized rates via the public distribution system. Despite the inclusion of millets at the national level, its inclusion in state-level public distribution programs has varied across the country. Groups like MINI and AIMS continue to lobby for millets to be part of all public food schemes at the state and district level.
Some state authorities, such as those in Karnataka and Odisha, are driving the millet programs in their respective states. The renewed focus on millet production and consumption aims to help India’s small farmers and their communities become climate-resilient while enhancing agricultural biodiversity.
Varghese, who served on the High Level Panel of Experts of the U.N. Committee on Food Security from 2017 to 2019 says, “Scaling up agroecological efforts through climate resilient approaches like millet farming will go a long way in achieving local food and water security while ending hunger and malnutrition.”
Anne Pinto-Rodrigues is a journalist focusing on social and environmental issues. Her geographic specialty is India, where she was born and raised. Anne has been published in The Guardian, The Telegraph, Ensia, CS Monitor, and several other international publications. She is currently based in the Netherlands, and speaks English and several Indian and European languages. She can be reached at annepintorodrigues.com.
The common myth today is that free trade is good and that protectionism is bad. But it all depends. The prevailing views expressed by the World Trade Organization and others involved in negotiating free trade agreements, is that free trade helps everyone. They will point toward the general increase in world trade and say that free trade creates more jobs globally. The benefits put forth in these agreements, however, are uneven at best.
The industrialized countries benefit greatly from free trade, while poor countries only benefit short term through additional economic activities. In the long run, however, free trade agreements undermine the prosperity of developing countries by outcompeting their industries and technologies.
The underlying theory for free trade is Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. The theory claims to “prove” that everyone benefits by trade if all market players concentrate on what is to their comparative advantage. According to this trade theory, if a country has an inefficient industry, they are better off importing all industrialized goods and concentrating on exporting raw materials, or whatever their present comparative advantage is. This is supposed to help everyone, including the developing country.
If all goods were equally profitable to produce, and resulted in equally high salaries, then the theory would be correct. It would not matter what the country produced, whether computers, shoes or almonds. But if a country is stuck in the production of diminishing returns, such as selling unfinished raw materials from agriculture or mining, that nation can never become prosperous or bring itself out of poverty.
Free trade becomes a tool to entrench the competitive advantage of the countries already ahead, and an impassable obstacle for the countries trying to catch up.
The selling of raw materials will simply not allow that nation to develop high paying industries producing finished goods. Therefore, it is not only what is most profitable today which counts, but also what would be most profitable in the future.
Current trade theory ignores this vitally important fact. It focuses only on the current situation, and often ignores the issue of learning and technological improvement on developing future industries. As individuals, we become good at the things we practice and concentrate on. The same goes for companies and nations.
Instead of dismantling an inefficient industry, it would be better to find ways to make it more efficient until it can compete and produce quality products. The alternative is an economy indefinitely stuck in areas of diminishing returns.
With free trade, however, the door of learning and improving is often closed forever. A budding industry in a developing country has little chance to compete with established industries of advanced nations. Thus these third world industries are quickly wiped out when the doors are opened to foreign competition through the imposition of free trade.
Free trade, therefore, is not always a tool for economic freedom, but rather a straitjacket preventing developing countries to advance their economy and technological development.
Free trade, therefore, becomes a tool to entrench the competitive advantage of the countries already ahead, and an impassable obstacle for the countries trying to catch up. Free trade, therefore, is not always a tool for economic freedom, but rather a straitjacket preventing developing countries to advance their economy and technological development.
The concept of fair trade, as proposed in this article, should not be confused with the activities of Fair Trade International and other organizations, which focus mainly on improving export conditions for agricultural commodities in third world nations. While improving the terms of trade of agricultural products is good and commendable, it cannot substitute for the domestic production of value added agricultural goods, such as cheese, wine, and bakery goods, as well as more technologically advanced industrial goods for export.
For a nation to develop, advanced industries are vitally important. But this takes time, since the skills needed by workers and management must be learned gradually. During this time, the industry must be protected from outside forces, or it will be wiped out. Thus, protectionism for poor countries may be needed before they are able to compete.
Fair trade agreements must make allowance for a country’s right to protect and develop its industry and technology.
Free trade is thus advantageous for a country that is already technologically advanced. Free trade, without any barriers, between two technologically advanced nations will benefit both, and any trade restrictions would be counterproductive. But for less advanced nations, free trade with a more advanced nation, as is most often the case, can be disastrous and permanently prevent any possibility for long term technological and economic growth.
For that reason, fair trade agreements must make allowance for a country’s right to protect and develop its industry and technology. Nations that are currently negotiating free trade agreements should carefully consider the impact on their industry and ability to develop technologically, before signing them.
Those nations who have already signed free trade agreements that are detrimental to their national interests should consider all possible options to get out of them, even the option of unilaterally repudiating them. Naturally, such repudiation should not be done lightly, as it might have severe consequences.
If a trend is created where countries stand up for their rights to develop their own industrial and agricultural base in a more sustainable manner, we will eventually find that the ideological climate in the world will change.
A larger nation with strategic resources has a better chance of getting away with it than a small nation with few resources. If a trend is created, however, where countries stand up for their rights to develop their own industrial and agricultural base in a more sustainable manner, we will eventually find that the ideological climate in the world will change.
Powerful industrial nations have everything to gain and nothing to lose on maintaining and extending free trade, but for poor, developing countries the reality is not so clear cut. It will therefore be difficult to change the trend, but we may start by increasing the awareness that the benefits of free trade largely depend on the advancement of economic and technological development in a country.
Once this fundamental truth is more acknowledged, the rhetoric that free trade helps everyone will be discredited. The arguments for free trade, which rely on the fiction that free trade is best for all nations, will then lose some of their moral force. Once the true face of free trade has been uncovered, it will be easier for individual countries to fight for their economic and environmental rights.
In July the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to be waning in Britain. A cross party group of Members of Parliament, led by the sole Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, wrote a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the term used for the finance minister, often abbreviated to just “Chancellor”) to propose a “post-growth recovery”. The letter made a number of suggestions that are standard ecological economic policy proposals, common in the post-growth, degrowth and steady state networks. In summary, the MPs argued that a green recovery needed to prioritise well-being above economic growth. They congratulated the Chancellor on the enormous expenditure already made to support individuals and businesses when the economy was mostly closed down in the second quarter of 2020, arguing that it shows it is possible to prioritise well-being above economic performance. They also note the phenomenon of “secular stagnation”, that the trend in the rate of GDP growth across advanced economies has been declining since well before before the great financial crash of 2008. They argue for a reorientation away from the pursuit of growth towards what they call the well-being economy.
The parliamentary group that wrote the letter is the All Party Group on the Limits to Growth. It is supported by the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), based at the University of Sussex. Leading advocate of “prosperity without growth”, Tim Jackson is the director of CUSP and advisor to this parliamentary group. The group’s approach is clear on the impossibility of continued growth, drawing, for example, on Jackson’s review of the Meadows et al. Limits to Growth work from the 1970s, which accurately modelled the likely trajectory of the world system under business as usual, emphasising the resource and energy shocks from the rising costs of extraction. As a cross-party group the group has to present its arguments in a way that appeals to those, still working within the ideology and assumptions of the dominant paradigm, who might be open to exploring their limits and alternatives. However, it is still legitimate to ask whether the package of proposals made by the group is adequate to the combined economic, social resource and ecological crises that beset us all. Having done that, I will take a wider perspective on the main policy responses, not just to Covid-19 but to the global conjuncture of multiple crises. One way to do that is to critically examine each of the proposals made in the group’s letter to the Chancellor.
> the adoption of new measures of societal wellbeing to replace the inappropriate reliance on the GDP as a measure of social progress;
Alternative measures could be useful in identifying areas for policy emphasis and needed reform and intervention. However, there are already a variety of measures of societal and community well-being available to government. Fundamentally, it is not the measurement of economic and social outcomes that drives the incessant material expansion of production and consumption. GDP is a social construction, an artificial abstraction that has a material force in defining expansion as a priority. Yet, in itself, it is not what drives its own expansion: to understand what does we have to look elsewhere.
> a commitment to join the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) partnership;
This could have some limited benefits by making an ideological and policy statement of intention and through sharing good practice with other States that are trying to re-orientate their economies towards a well-being agenda. Again, though, it does not address the nub of the problem.
> the full integration of wellbeing measures into central and local government decision-making processes, and in particular into the Treasury Green Book; and
> the development of a Wellbeing Budget which aligns Government spending with the needs of a sustainable and inclusive Wellbeing Economy;
This would be helpful in guiding government spending and policy in a variety of spheres toward the pursuit of community well-being. However, It is questionable as to how transformational this would actually be. Again, as I will argue, this is not where the key determinants of the destruction of communities and ecosystems lies. The proposal is a way of mitigating some of that damage but not a means to ending it.
> the establishment of a formal inquiry into ways in which it may be possible to reduce the ‘growth dependency’ of the UK economy;
This could be interesting insofar as it would bring the many analyses and arguments about the nature of growth and its pursuit more into public discourse. However, its impact would very much depend on the membership of the inquiry team, the evidence it reviewed and the way in which it was then received and acted on by government. The last Labour government commissioned a report from its Sustainable Development Commission into “Prosperity Without Growth”. The report was written by the ecological economist Tim Jackson. It later grew into his influential book of the same title, now in its improved second edition. In the prologue (pp. xxvi-xxix) to that edition, Jackson describes the way the report was received, just at the time the government was hosting a G20 event concerned with the restoration and promotion of GDP growth. The Prime Minister himself was incandescent with anger, the report was sidelined and the Commission that produced it was abolished by the next, Conservative, government in 2010. It was bad timing but it seems unlikely that a government that was explicitly trying to “kick-start growth” would have paid heed to this report. Why should we expect a new inquiry and report to enjoy a different fate?
> a commitment to explore ways and means to extend the Government’s ability to finance social investment through deficit spending or direct money creation;
This is very much a post-Keynesian idea, that the government has great scope for either borrowing or printing money in order to finance needed areas of expenditure. Debate rages on which mechanism to utilise (to simplify, the choice is between borrowing via the printing of bonds, the creation of money, either by the Treasury or by the Central Bank, or by raising the money through taxation). There are two problems with this. Firstly, a massive expansion of expenditure, even on the green economy, puts money into the pockets of citizens. What they then spend it on is not under the government’s control and in an political-economic system that remains substantially the same, this is likely to include high energy goods. In Keynesian terms, the multiplier isn’t selective: it doesn’t care about the climate. Only if these measures are accompanied by things like diminishing energy and materials caps, and progressive, but carbon and materials-orientated taxation, is there any hope of avoiding this problem. Secondly, while the government has a potentially large “fiscal space”, or flexibility to spend without having to immediately recoup the money, ultimately it does have to do so. To argue otherwise is to confuse money with value. And that requirement to realise greater exchange value from the economy is a potent driver of material expansion – which is broadly speaking what GDP growth is. Actually, much of that value capture has an international dimension whereby the labour of people in the fields and factories of the global South is paid at local prices but the products are sold at profit in the global North, at the prices operative there: a massive global capture of value and a driver of continued labour and ecological exploitation worldwide.
> the urgent development of a precautionary ‘post growth’ strategy for the UK.
This proposal gets closer to the heart of the problem. Enshrining the precautionary principle in government strategy cannot come soon enough given the multiple threats to human and ecological well-being. It could potentially go beyond mere recommendations to change the way things are measured, or to increase spending in certain areas. Instead, it could offer a strategic framework for re-orientating towards a viable economy and society. However, that would assume the neutralisation of the interest groups that rely on continued material (and financial) economic expansion. It calls into question the essence of capitalism. So again, while hopeful that this could help shift the dominant paradigm, I am intellectually pessimistic.
The above example of a well-meaning political intervention is, in effect, a microcosm of the present conjuncture. A global pandemic, itself the result of the ever expanding capitalist mode of accumulation, requires a prioritisation of health and well-being. This leads to a massive reduction in economic activity, crudely manifest as work and spending, threatening the livelihoods and well-being of swathes of the population. Mismanagement by governments that have disinvested from public health and welfare, prioritising private capital accumulation, jettisoning the precautionary principle, has exacerbated this crisis. This crisis in the health-economy-wellbeing nexus is situated within a series of wider and deeper crises of planetary and ecological systems, in effect a veritable “pancrisis”, including, 1. carbon pollution – global warming; 2. ecosystem encroachment and edge-convolution1 – biodiversity reduction; 3. resource exhaustion and peak extraction leading to profitability reduction and extraction frontier expansion; 4. and internal contradictions of capitalism – secular stagnation and financial crises. These wider crises have no satisfactory exit within the terms of reference of the current capitalist world system.
There are three main responses to this conjuncture, at least the variety of responses being implemented and imposed can be analysed in terms of these three “ideal types”: inevitably a variety of hybrid forms are apparent in reality.
The first type is an intensification of what has been called the neoliberal capitalist model – a continuation of business as usual.
So when the right wing British government is faced with the need to test for the virus and to trace the contacts of those infected, it gives enormous contracts to the large outsourcing firms such as Serco rather than to the public health teams based in local government that know their communities and understand epidemiology. Faced with a housing crisis, the result of land speculation, the inward investment by footloose capital in the housing stock, and previous waves of privatisation of public housing, it proposes to further reduce the already weak democratic scrutiny of planning decisions, which will mean further cycles of speculative development and capital concentration in land and housing. Internationally this kind of thinking is manifest in the application of market models to carbon reduction and to forests, which in both cases will have the opposite effect, allowing polluters to continue polluting and converting wild and commons ecosystems to commodities). At its most extreme, this orientation can be seen in the current far right Brazilian government responding to the collapse in global commodity prices by facilitating the further conversion of wild landscape to farmland, with disastrous consequences for the global climate, biodiversity and the people who live in and rely on the forests.
The second type involves a return to the Keynesian and social democratic approach of mitigating the tendencies of capitalism without fundamentally challenging it.
The various Green New Deal proposals exemplify this, using government investment to stimulate desired sectors and thereby to restore the process of value creation and hence the revenues of households, firms and government. Similar are neo-Keynesian demands to respond to the Covid crisis, by using the powers of government to borrow and defer repayment indefinitely, or to create money by fiat, and so re-stimulate economic activity. These interventions could be successful, in their own terms, in the short term. But they are doomed to long term failure in a capitalist system that has run out of road for its continual expansion into new markets, new sources of resources, and new reserves of hitherto unexploited labour, while it faces contradictions manifest in the long term decline in profitability, over-production and under-consumption, and the shocks to its supply chains from inexorably rising extraction costs and an inevitable series of ecological and geopolitical shocks. What is more, this model, by failing to problematise the crisis of ever increasing extraction-production-consumption-pollution, instead has no answer to the likelihood that its policy prescriptions will intensify that process rather than mitigate it.
That leaves the third option, that of equitable frugality, variously understood under headings such as the Simpler Way, Degrowth or Post-Development. This is the least popular solution type but the only one that is proportionate to both the scale and nature of the problem.
It tends to be ambiguous, or rather divided, in terms of the orientation of its proponents to the dominant capitalist system, with some voices continuing to think that a benign capitalism is possible (usually confusing the existence of private enterprise in a market for exchange with capitalism as a system of endless and expansive capital accumulation resting on expropriation and exploitation). More pragmatically it suffers from its relative under-development, most obviously in not having an understandable policy package to offer to the political debate. However, there are straws in the wind, with these ideas, once entirely marginal, beginning to enter into mainstream discourse and even appearing, still in hybrid form, in policy prescription and even in some government initiatives. It remains doubtful that they will achieve anything like the scale of popular, let alone elite, acceptance in time to avert the nightmare scenario of simultaneous collapse in multiple ecological, planetary and human provisioning systems. Yet we have to continue to act as if this is a possibility, continuing to work, however hard it may be, for a complete change in political, economic priorities, and more than that, a change of system towards one of necessary but frugal production for human need and no more, coupled with the re-affirmation of the joys of a simpler, slower and cooperative way of living as communities.
Returning to the All Party Group on the Limits to Growth, and practical politics, the task is to promote enactable short-range policies that take us towards a post-growth future. These need to be transformational in effect, setting in motion a set of changes, institutional, ideological and material. It is difficult to identify the best options to start such a sequence in motion, since there are many dimensions of uncertainty, and only a fool can predict the future. However, concepts such as ripple-effects, slow-fuse change, stake-holder analysis, non-reformist reforms, transitional demands, and leverage points, can all help to clarify the terrain for action. The reader can consult a list of potential policy innovations, stratified by governmental level. An example of how to think about the immediate Covid-19 crisis transformationally can be found in this piece by the author.
1Edge-convolution is used here as concise way of referring to the increase in the ecological edge between wild ecosystems and human-dominated ones, which, together with industrial agriculture is the source of new zoonoses (pathogens of animal origin). See Wallace, R. (2020). Dead epidemiologists: On the origins of covid-19. Monthly Review Press.
Say the words ‘Doughnut Economics’ and you may still get a puzzled look. “What on earth has economics got to do with doughnuts?” might be a very reasonable response. But since the birth of the idea of the Doughnut in 2012, by Kate Raworth (then of Oxfam), and the later publication of the book, Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to be a 21st century economist, in 2017, those two words have been gaining increasing recognition and interest, in communities, classrooms, cities, businesses, and even governments around the world as an idea whose time has come to be put into action. And with the founding of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, or DEAL, and the launch of the DEAL Community Platform, the time for action has arrived, and the invitation for you to join is here.
The Doughnut brings together both social and ecological thinking into one core concept, that of meeting the needs of all people, within the means of the living planet.
For those new to Doughnut Economics, the central model is the Doughnut, which brings together both social and ecological thinking into one core concept, that of meeting the needs of all people, within the means of the living planet. It consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation of 12 dimensions, derived from the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life’s essentials; and an ecological ceiling of nine planetary boundaries from earth-system scientists, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot these critical planetary systems. And between these two boundaries lies a doughnut-shaped space that is both ecologically safe and socially just.
The safe and just space of the Doughnut can be thought of as a compass for the 21st century. A compass that calls for a systematic rethink of the tools we’ll need to navigate to this, as yet, uncharted space. Tools that will help to create economies that are fundamentally regenerative and distributive by design. Economies that recognise that people are imaginative, co-operative and caring, that the systems of life are dynamic and complex, and that the economy is deeply embedded within and supported by our relationships with each other and with earth’s life-supporting systems.
A starting point of Doughnut Economics is that 21st century economics is likely to be practiced first and theorised later.
A starting point of Doughnut Economics is that 21st century economics is likely to be practiced first and theorised later. And so, inspired by the spontaneous uptake of these core concepts, Doughnut Economics Action Lab was founded in March 2019 to support and connect the emerging community of changemakers worldwide who are already turning these ideas into irresistible practice.
This is a community that, since the global pandemic, is growing faster than ever, and one of the most exciting qualities of the community is that it is organically emerging from multiple diverse fields of practice, from teachers to policymakers, community organisers to consultants. As such, DEAL is going where the energy is, initially working across five key themes: Communities, Cities & Places, Education & Research, Business & Enterprise and Government & Policy; but with interest extending beyond these clusters, such as in the arts and technology, there’s no knowing how this might look a year from now.
Downscaling the Doughnut to place
Ever since the Doughnut was first published in 2012 people have asked: can we downscale the Doughnut so that we can apply it here – in our town, our region, our country? And over the past eight years there have been many innovative initiatives exploring different approaches to scale, including a region in China, the nations of South Africa, Wales and the UK, and for a comparison of 150 countries. But in April 2020, the City of Amsterdam took the leap and published the first ever City Doughnut, a ‘Public Portrait’ of the global Doughnut downscaled to the city-level. At its centre lies the fundamental question: how can our city be a home to thriving people in a thriving place, while respecting the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet? The result of this inquiry is a holistic four-lens snapshot of the city’s many complex interconnections with the world in which it is embedded.
The creation of the Amsterdam City Doughnut started as and continues to be a process of collaboration. Initiated by a conceptual collaboration between Kate Raworth and biomimicry thinker Janine Benyus, translated into the ‘Public Portrait’ by the Thriving Cities Initiative (C40 Cities, Circle Economy, and DEAL with Biomimicry 3.8), it is now being put into action by city policy makers along with the Amsterdam Donut Coalitie, a network of residents and city-based organisations, in order to shape policy and chart a new path of collective action.
Its publication immediately sparked interest internationally, perhaps because it was a ray of hope in an otherwise dark April 2020. Within a few weeks it had gone on to inspire over 500 expressions of interest globally, at all scales from neighbourhood, to village, town, city, region, and whole nations. Some of these early expressions of interest have already started their own initiatives in downscaling the Doughnut, from Birmingham, Brussels, and Berlin to Copenhagen, Costa Rica, and Curaçao.
People are so often inspired by people like themselves doing something they hadn’t considered or thought was possible.
This explosion of interest has confirmed one of DEAL’s approaches to how change happens: people are so often inspired by people like themselves doing something they hadn’t considered or thought was possible. Mayors are inspired by mayors, teachers by teachers, community organisers by community organisers, neighbourhoods by neighbourhoods, businesses by businesses. When in June, the city council of Copenhagen voted (with a huge majority) to explore the implications of becoming a Doughnut City, they explicitly acknowledged that their decision had been directly inspired by what was happening in Amsterdam.
Whilst downscaling the Doughnut to cities and places has gained widespread attention, there is enormous energy and interest coming from communities and education. At the community scale, Cafe Disruptif’s ‘Doughnut Hack’ in Cornwall dived into creating a local Doughnut to explore the holistic interconnections of the county. In Birmingham, Civic Square are bringing the four-lens thinking to the under-served neighbourhoods of central Birmingham, and in Barking and Dagenham, Participatory City are incorporating Doughnut thinking into the next phase of its Every One Every Day initiative. And within education, more and more teachers – and a few pioneering curriculum writers – are introducing the ideas of Doughnut Economics to students in classrooms around the world in many creative ways.
The Doughnut has drawn interest from a wide spectrum of the business community, too, prompting the question: if the goal is to live in the Doughnut’s safe and just space, what kind of enterprises could be part of making that happen?
At the heart of every business there are five key design traits that profoundly shape what it can be and do in the world: its purpose, governance, networks, ownership, and finance.
Over the past five years, Kate Raworth and more recently the DEAL team, have run workshops for businesses that are ready to explore what it means to be regenerative and distributive by design and so help humanity move into the Doughnut. We playfully call these corporate psychotherapy workshops because we invite businesses to look not just at the design of their products but at the design of the company itself. As described by the corporate analyst Marjorie Kelly, at the heart of every business there are five key design traits that profoundly shape what it can be and do in the world: its purpose, governance, networks, ownership, and finance.
Firstly, what purpose does the company serve? Does it exist mostly to maximise the financial profits it generates, or does it serve a greater living purpose, one that contributes to a thriving world? Purpose is key, but it’s not enough: it must be backed up by the other four traits of enterprise design.
Second, what are the company’s networks? Who are its customers, its suppliers, its allies and partners? Are they aligned with the business’s purpose and values, or are they caught in a business culture that undermines and works against them?
Third, how is the company governed? Who is in the room when decisions are made? What are the incentives given to middle managers, and what metrics are used to assess company and employee performance? Do they focus on short-term financial returns or do they drive for long-term transformative action?
Fourth, who owns the company? Is it owned by an entrepreneur, by its employees, by a founding family, by values-based investors, or by shareholders in the stock market? This is a crucial question because how a business is owned ultimately determines the last – and deepest – design trait.
Fifth, how is the company financed? The source of finance will profoundly shape its character and its expectations. Do the funders demand high and fast financial returns or are they committed to generating social and ecological benefits along with a fair financial return?
Together these five design traits profoundly shape a company’s prospects of doing business in the Doughnut. Many mainstream businesses would have to transform to do the Doughnut: their current design traits, particularly around ownership and finance, pull sharply against their desire for a more progressive purpose. But some enterprises are, as it were, ‘born to do the Doughnut’: they are founded for a living purpose and they choose enterprise as the vehicle to achieve it, so from the outset they intentionally align all five of their design traits to be in service of this end. At DEAL we believe that these enterprises are pioneering the practice of 21st century business, and we aim to amplify their work and share their stories so that they inspire others, too.
Building community: a place to connect, share, and be inspired
Launched in September, the DEAL Community Platform is a place for the emerging community of changemakers worldwide who are turning the ideas of Doughnut Economics into practice.
The platform contains open-access and free-to-use tools and stories created both by the DEAL team and community, to equip and inspire community members – from teachers, facilitators, and activists to policymakers and entrepreneurs – with tools including workshops, lesson plans, things to watch, make, play and explore, and stories of how others are adapting the ideas and principles of Doughnut Economics to their own context.
The platform contains open-access and free-to-use tools and stories created both by the DEAL team and community, to equip and inspire community members.
A key challenge for DEAL is to balance this openness with ensuring integrity in how the concepts of Doughnut Economics are put into practice. This is why we have developed the Doughnut Economics Principles of Practice that we ask are placed at the heart of any initiative that uses the Doughnut. In building community we also promote reciprocity: we share our tools and ask that community members share back their learning and their own innovations, thus amplifying the creativity of the crowd. And we have designed the platform to encourage experiments, adaptation, learning, and feedback.
We hope, over time, that the emerging community will start to manage itself in this spirit. From this perspective the platform, its content, and the community can be thought of as a commons of concepts, knowledge and practice, managing itself around a shared set of principles, responding to issues as they arise and finding ways to stay true to the intention of the work.
We welcome you to join us as we start this journey. Simply visit doughnuteconomics.org and sign up to connect with others, explore what’s on offer, and become part of the community that is turning Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action.
Rob Shorter is communities & art lead for Doughnut Economics Action Lab, working with communities of place and purpose that are drawing on Doughnut Economics to respond to ecological emergency and social inequality.
Carlota Sanz leads the development of DEAL’s strategy. Her corporate experience and passion for regenerative economics contribute to making deal truly future-fit. She also leads deal’s work with business and enterprise.
Originally published in STIR Magazine Issue 31, Autumn 2020. This is an edited transcript of a conversation hosted during Stir to Action’s Playground for the New Economy festival, 1st-3rd September 2020.
How has colonialism, displacement, and migration shaped our land system? How have those histories impacted on land access, ownership, food inequalities, health outcomes, and environmental connection? And what needs to change in the land system to help deliver racial justice?
MW When submitting a recent funding bid on policy and land reform for Shared Assets, the organisation replied to say, “You do realise who the trustees of our foundation are?” As in, land reform is not particularly in their interest as funders. There are these major structural issues that we consistently face and decisions get based on them all the time. Just in the time that we’ve been running Shared Assets – the last eight years or so – the way that we think about land has really changed and has created a range of different agendas. A lot of the work over the last few years that focuses on food systems has begun to centre around land ownership, land use, and the need for a more strategic and open decision around how we use it.
More recently through covid-19 we’ve seen more recognition of land as a social justice issue. Who has access to green space? This has been an important question during lockdown, and it has revealed, if you like, many of the inequalities around our food system: who grows and picks our food, their work conditions, and issues of migrant labour. So suddenly we begin to see land positioned in some of these contexts in a way that we haven’t seen in public discourse in recent years. It’s also become a racial justice issue.
JC There’s a lot of issues around policing that we’ve not necessarily articulated to a great extent, but in terms of the covid-19 laws and in terms of who’s been fined or assessed or prosecuted, it’s been overwhelmingly black and brown people. And, of course, in terms of who requires access to food banks, it’s disproportionately women of colour. We’re looking at a lot of people requiring emergency food aid where we weren’t before. It’s an entrenched problem that is also a racialised issue.
Participants in attendance at the post-Oxford Real Farming Conference 2020 BPoC caucus convened by LION at Willowbrook Farm.
MW Broadly you can look at a lot of the issues with covid-19 as just ripping the cover off a lot of existing inequalities, especially in the way that it hit in the first wave, in terms of the space people were able to access, and the quality of space that they were able to access. As Josina said, [this manifests itself in] the prosecution of people when they’re out using that space, and issues of racism and harassment that people face just for being out in green space, or in their neighbourhoods.
Now we’d like to take a quick tour through British colonial history because I think we can’t talk about land and racial justice without exploring the colonial context that really shaped not only systems in our country but also in countries that were colonised as part of the expansion of the British Empire. This history is based on a new book by Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back. Shrubsole has been looking at who owns the land around us, and 30% is still owned by aristocrats and the gentry. That’s a phenomenal figure really, and it’s even higher in Scotland. Most of that wealth has come from colonial exploitation, which has included things like slave ownership, plantation ownership, or even just benefiting from the flow of raw material that’s built industrial wealth and financed big houses and large estates.
We actually live in a system now, whether we recognise it or not, that is feudal, where an individual has a perceived divine blessing and right to rule over us and the ground beneath our feet.
I think this is exemplified by the fact that the National Trust is just beginning to look at the links to slavery in some of their properties, and possibly a third of them have direct links to slavery in terms of the origins of their wealth. So you can’t ignore the impacts of this in terms of land ownership in this country, and we’ll come on to talk more about this.
We’ve also found out that the Crown and Royal family own about 1.4%, but that’s just their personal land ownership. In fact, the Crown, that’s not Queen Elizabeth II herself, is the world’s primary feudal landowner. She is the legal landowner of 6.6 billion acres – a sixth of the world’s land surface. And this doesn’t really play out in a normal way, where if you have the freehold of a piece of land you have the right to do whatever you want with it – this only comes into play if you die and it becomes ownerless, and then it reverts back to the Crown. But even so I think there’s something really important about conceptions of land and land ownership and the fact that we actually live in a system now, whether we recognise it or not, that is feudal, where an individual has a perceived divine blessing and right to rule over us and the ground beneath our feet. This really impacts and shapes how we respond to land.
We still think of land as property, as inert and something we can own, and maybe we need a whole different relationship with land. What if we related to land as an animate object and had a reciprocal relationship with it?
But what if we were to move beyond current conceptions of ownership? We still think of land as property, as inert and something we can own, and maybe we need a whole different relationship with land. What if we related to land as an animate object and had a reciprocal relationship with it? These are cultural framings and they dictate so much of what we do without us really knowing or thinking about it.
JC That’s something that I’m really enjoying about our work with lion (Land In Our Names), looking at a variation of cultural framings and bringing in spiritual qualities, for instance how indigenous communities frame their relationships to land as symbiotic, aligned, and alive.
MW I think there’s a huge amount to explore in that approach. It’s really important that we break open these sorts of closed ways in which we think about land. Some of the work that we’ve been doing around new land narratives has been to challenge this idea that land is a fixed system and it’s always been that way. It’s not, it’s always changed, but it suits quite a lot of people to think that nothing is ever going to change.
Even British colonialism was not a single system, not all of its rule came from Westminster. There were many different ways in which Britain took ownership of places by force, by proclamation, but they also had quite a lot of independence within that kind of colonial framework to develop their own systems and rules. Many colonies had different two-tier systems of parliament that we might recognise here from the House of Lords and House of Commons but that, as here until 1918, meant that only white men who owned property were able to vote. And I think this highlights again the white patriarchal and classic framings that we’re working with here in terms of power and who gets to exercise power. If you didn’t own land until about a century ago you didn’t have any power to do anything at all. And so land ownership is the source of that wealth and political power as well. The American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said, “When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote,” about the newly independent United States after the War of Independence. But it was still only using the same model that was in use throughout the British Empire – it really didn’t shift it that far.
Indigenous communities frame their relationships to land as symbiotic, aligned, and alive.
There’s a great project looking at the legacies of British slave ownership which is supported through University College London. At the moment they’re looking at Caribbean slave ownership and its links back into the UK, with maps showing the impact of these plantation owners, and the impact that it will have had upon those places and those communities. Land ownership and colonialism and racism have shaped the land system not only here but everywhere that they touched. And tracing back those legacies of slave ownership, they’ve been able to use databases to show when slavery is abolished how much the British taxpayers recompensed these land owners for the loss of their ‘property’. All of it is on public records, so they’re gradually tracing back those payments to their names and addresses. I think that the fact that this is just Caribbean slavery and there are over 5000 addresses there, over 5000 individual people, that begins to shape the landscape in our own country.
I think this is really important as a comparison with the maps of the empire and where migrants have come from to this country. There’s been some big changes but there’s a big overlap for a very good reason – those people were bought and encouraged to come as labour. Though it may have been hundreds of years ago, those events still shape who we are and the places where we are now.
It’s both about the wealth that we’ve already accumulated and owned, the places that have been privatised, the enclosure of the countryside, and the current lack of opportunity. But then it’s also the systemic racism that stems from the view that only property-owning white men should have power.
So that’s our tour through rich colonialism. It’s a history that we all need to know, but that we’re not really taught, and when you start to look at it and you start to look around you can see the physical manifestation of it in our towns and countryside and I think it’s really important that we do identify and acknowledge it, and we don’t just perceive the countryside as being just as it is, as the English countryside, having always been this way.
Josina Calliste is a co-founder of Land In Our Names, aiming to disrupt oppressive land dynamics relating to BPoC communities in Britain.
Mark Walton is a co-founder of Shared Assets, a think and do tank that supports the development of new models of managing land for the common good.
Featured photo courtesy of LION from their post-Oxford Real Farming Conference 2020 BPoC caucus at Willowbrook Farm
Earlier this year, we launched our first Flash Fiction Challenge, and what a year to do it. 2020 will undoubtedly go down in history as a year that shook up the status quo; created stark polarisation and invited us to question our collective future with ever-increasing urgency. The Covid pandemic, racial justice protests and the heightening climate crisis have been some of the global events that have caused us to reflect on the shape of our society and the values and actions that we prioritise as we move forward.
Here at Systems Change Alliance, we don’t want to stay focused on the problems. We want to put our energy into finding and implementing solutions, to transition to a world made up of fair and resilient societies of happy, healthy people living as part of robust ecosystems.
To support this ethic, the Flash Fiction Challenge was based around the idea of visioning a better world beyond the pandemic. Would-be writers were invited to submit a short story that envisioned a brighter future, which integrated some of the essential values of SCA, while still making for a good read with engaging narrative and characters.
It was a challenging proposition and we received many entries from all over the world, which focused on different topics inspire by the central theme.
Meet our Guest Judge
After narrowing the entries down to a short list, we invited writer, Thomas Rain Crowe, to pick the final winners of the Challenge.
Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author of more than thirty books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods); a book of essays and articles titled The End of Eden (Writings of an Environmental Activist); and a collection of place-based poems titled Crack Light. He has been editor of major literary and cultural journals and anthologies and is founder and publisher of New Native Press—a small literary press founded in 1979 . He is and has been on the boards of several environmental conservation organizations in western North Carolina over the last 40 years and has spoken widely to large and small groups on the subject of higher consciousness, sustainability and protection of the planet as a resident of western North Carolina and the Southern Appalachians. He lives in the Tuckasegee watershed and the “Little Canada” community of Jackson County in western North Carolina.
This Year's Winners
First Prize:All Along the Forest's Edge by Tony Dunnell Runners Up:Elysium by Nydia Dara and The Oldest Banyan Tree by Ciena Valenzuela-Peterson
Here is Thomas's feedback on the winning stories:
“All three of the Finalists were excellent pieces of flash fiction and so this was a very hard choice to make. In making my decision, I took into consideration the four competition guidelines as well as the SCA main focuses as highlighted on the website. For instance, In “The Oldest Banyan Tree” I liked the author’s sense of strong feminine human warmth and caring and the social references to capitalism, autocracy, and the rich and inequality. In “Elysium,” the story spoke to my own interests in the sci-fi genre and this story’s style and theme and a glimpse into a possible hopeful post-apocalyptic future. But after multiple readings and copius notes from all three, in the end I had to rely on my emotional reaction to all three, since each in their own way was well-written, original, and pertinent to the SCA focus. That being the case, I selected “All Along The Forest’s Edge” for the following reasons (from my notes):
*...is jubilant, celebrational, hopeful—in seemingly real time and of the moment or near future *well written; characters well-developed and well-spoken *honors indigenous communities *highlighting an important event of international legislation and a global government concerning climate change and endangered species, (including human species), before it was too late—and so a possible inspiration and outcome for us Now. *it touched my emotions, my heart *the author took us there and put us in the room *embodies the major precepts for the competition
While all the finalists had their individual merits, it was “All Along The Forest’s Edge” that captured my heart and helped stoke the flames of my own sense of hope and resiliency for mankind going forward. My congratulations to Mr. Dunnell and to the three Finalists and to all who participated in this timely competition, and to SCA for the work it is doing to reach a balanced and sustainable future. Onward to all." –Thomas Rain Crowe
Read the Winning Stories
First Prize: All Along the Forest's Edge by Tony Dunnell
I thumbed the app on my smartphone. In less than a minute, an autotaxi rolled down Simmons Street to collect me. I stepped inside. The pandemics had stripped economies bare, but the work-from-home revolution had certainly made London easier to get around.
“Saint Anne’s Hospital, please,” I said. “Saint Anne’s Hospital, arrival in seven minutes,” confirmed the taxi’s disembodied voice. My phone rang as I settled in to my seat. It was Etienne. “Have you told him yet? Does he know?” he asked. “Not yet. I’m on my way to the hospital now. I’ll call you when I get there.”
The city slid by as if nothing had happened. School kids and cyclists, dog-walkers and shoppers, some still wearing masks. I looked at my phone, messages still streaming in. First I had to talk to dad.
The autotaxi pulled in to the hospital parking lot and edged up to the white marble façade of Saint Anne’s. I thanked the nonexistent driver (a common habit, apparently), thumbed the payment and got out.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Howe,” said the receptionist in the spotless lobby. “Sir Phillip is in his room. You can go right up.” “Thanks, Clare.” I strode up the stairs to the third floor and tapped on my father’s door. No reply so I walked in. He was asleep in his hospital bed. Orange flowers in a white vase were beginning to wilt on the bedside table.
“Dad?” I touched his hand and his eyes flickered open. “Hello, son,” he said, his smile as bright as ever. He sat up in the bed and readjusted the pillows behind him. “Everything alright? I thought you’d come by this evening.” I took his hand. “We did it, dad. We did it.” His inquiring look suggested he’d forgotten the importance of the day. “The UN just voted on the Forest Edge Initiative. One hundred and ninety-five countries have signed. We did it. It passed. Look.” I took the remote control and turned on the wall-mounted flat screen. A reporter was standing outside the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the white steps behind her full of suited politicians, smiling and shaking hands. “—an historic international accord, whose comprehensive measures will provide an unprecedented level of protection to the world’s tropical forests. Most political analysts agree that the Forest Edge Initiative gained such universal support due to the clear threat posed to the global economy by further pandemics. As the secretary-general reiterated yesterday, the forest edge is the first line of defense against the pandemics that have caused such turmoil in recent years.”
Realization flooded across my father’s face. “Oh, my boy, that’s marvelous,” he said. “And China?” “Yes, dad,” I laughed. “China, Brazil, all of them.” I turned off the TV. “My, my. That calls for a cup of tea.” “Dad, someone wants to talk to you.” I took my laptop from my backpack and pulled a table closer to the bed. I flipped open my laptop on the table and called Etienne on the vidchat. His face appeared, the greenery of the Loreto Research Station behind him. “Sir Phillip!” he said in his thick French accent. “You are looking well.” “Etienne, no need to lie.” My father chuckled. “How are you? Still in Peru?” “Yes, and we have been watching the events in Geneva. A success! Congratulations.” “It’s wonderful news, my friend.” “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.” Etienne moved away from the screen. Tupa came into view, his brown skin wrinkled with smile lines and sun, his dark eyes shining. Two smudges of red achiote stained his weathered cheeks.
“Hola, Señor Phillip,” said Tupa. My father’s eyes widened and he grinned. “Is that you, Tupa?” He leaned forward. “Oh, it is, my dear old friend. How are you?” “I am good, Señor Phillip. We are good. Better now.” “Well,” said my father, “what a treat.” “Señor Phillip, would you like to see my home again?” said Tupa, smiling and gesturing to the dense jungle around him. “How I would my friend. If only I could.”
I pulled the visor headset out of my backpack and placed it on my father’s lap. “Put it on, dad. It’s connected to one of the guardian drones at Loreto Station. Etienne’s going to take you for a ride.” “A ride?” I helped my father put on the headset and adjusted the visor to fit snuggly across his eyes. “It might be disorientating at first, but you’ll get used to it. Etienne will control the flight, but you can look around wherever you like. You can hear, too, so tell me if you need more volume. Ready?” My father gave me an unsteady thumbs-up. “Etienne, take him up.”
“Oh, my,” said my father. A smile broke out across his face. “I’m in the canopy! Look, son.” I laughed, my heart swelled. I knew from experience what he was seeing. Rising through the dark glinting green of the rainforest canopy, the shimmering leaves, the whoops and whistles of colorful birds, the chatter of frogs and insects. His expression turned to wonder as he broke through the canopy into the emergent layer, where the Amazon’s tallest trees rise above the vast sea of green, where giant kapoks stand like ancient watchmen, two hundred feet tall. The morning sun rising in the bright blue sky, dappling the roof of the jungle, the rainforest coming to life. And my father, flying above it all. “Toucans! And down there, look at the river.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Magnificent.” A tear squeezed its way beneath the visor and rolled down my father’s cheek. “Magnificent.”
His mouth rolled with childlike expressions, forming smiles and circles of delight. His head turned one way then another.
Soon the world would share this spectacle, and my father’s dream. The guardian drones in the skies above the Amazon basin, the Congo, the lowlands of Borneo and all the other vital tropical forests of our planet.
“I can see Iquitos in the distance. And tiny fishermen on the river. Hundreds of macaws.”
The whole world would look upon the forests through the drones, a collective witness inspired and steeled by what it saw. And below, indigenous communities would continue their ancient undertaking as the defenders of the forests. But now, men and women like Tupa Tupalima would be acknowledged, protected and empowered, a bulwark against deforestation and the illegal wildlife trade. Pandemics would come, diseases would still find a way to cross species. But the new-found inviolability of the forest edge, and the jungles within its boundaries, would reduce their frequency and voracity. With the eyes of the world watching.
“Coming back in to land, Sir Phillip,” said Etienne. The drone settled. I helped my father remove the headset. “Spectacular,” he said. “Thank you, everyone.” He paused, pensive, and the old fire burned in his eyes, stronger than I’d seen in years. His brow furrowed with the determination of a life’s work. A life nearing its end. “Now, I need to speak with Tupa.” Tupa appeared on the screen. My father leaned in close. “Tupa,” he said, “are you ready?” Tupa reached out his hand, as if touching my father’s face. “Yes, my friend, we are ready.”
As a kid, I travelled to a new universe each night. In my sterile sleep chamber, somewhere above the Milky Way, I flew through the stars on the rocket of Ma’s stories. She told me about better places. There was heaven, Jannah, Eden, and Nirvana. But my favourite of all was Elysium, the fields of plenty: the place where heroes go. It didn’t matter how many times I failed my ethical termination and organism hierarchy exams. It didn’t matter that my great-great grandma wasn’t an Ether, born and bred on our ship. It didn’t matter how many times kids shoved me in the galleys. My mother said I'd be the Heracles of the stars. My mother said I'd make it to Elysium someday.
The air on this planet scratches at my throat. The shuttle’s damaged motor coughs in the distance. We’re in a warehouse, maybe, or a factory – with only metal contraptions, gates, and machines. There's a narrow arm of sunlight from an overhead window, but the stale dancing of dust is the only movement around. I guess I’ve lived my whole damn life to see empty cages. I guess I was kidding myself to believe in stories.
“This where they bred their food?” Marvin runs a suited-up hand along a steel cage, his Oxy-Helmet tucked under his arm. “Wild.” “It’s empty,” I say, running a hand through my sweat-slicked buzzcut. “Why’s it empty?” Marvin shrugs, and continues down the row of tiny cages. His umber brown skin, so rare for an Ether, blends with the darkness. “Ben, take a look at their engineering and you tell me why they didn't last.” "So you think there’s nobody left?” “Control told us not to get our hopes up.”
All six feet of Cap come shuffling through the entry, a struggle in his ballooning space suit. "Protocol still applies," he barks, with an accent as harsh as the bone structure behind his visor. The monitor in his hand beeps. "Could be toxins." "There’s not a soul on this planet,” I say. “We’ll probably die from gamma rays.” Cap shakes his head and fiddles with the monitor. “This is just one area. You said so yourself, Ben, that there’ll be life here somewhere.” “This planet has been uncontactable for years. I was an id-” “Man!" Marvin whispers. "What the hell was that?”
Silence. Then I hear the shuffle, and the prompt click of Cap's GQ7. We all spin to the doorway.
"Hello."
There, in the dim light, is a boy. No more than eight, he wears brown leathers and a utility belt. He clasps his hands in front of him, rocks slightly on his heels. His fingernails are grubby, but the rest of him looks healthy enough.
"Are you the space people?" he says. "Oh my Cosmos.” I want to fall to my knees. There’s life. "I think the council wants you," the boy says, wringing his hands. "I'm not supposa be here. Don't tell 'em where I found you, okay?" "There are others?" I say, moving forward. The boy steps backward into the light outside. His whole face is illuminated. Uptilted eyes with blue irises, dark skin, thin lips; features I’ve never seen on the same face. He looks as alien as they get.
"What is your name, child?" Cap crouches where he is, staring at the boy like you would an extinct species. "Odin," the boy says, his eyes darting towards Cap. “Okay, Odin,” Cap says. "Take us to the people." From around his neck, Odin pulls out some kind of tag, and presses it. We wait.
And then: a spot in the distance. The tiny vehicle travels almost as fast as our shuttles. It's eerily silent, and almost floats across the terrain. "Citizen Travel!" The driver leans out of the wing-like doors as the vehicle comes to a stop outside the building. "Odin! Good to see you, kid." He looks at us, and his face brightens. "Ah. So you're what the radar picked up!" Cap eyes the vehicle wearily. "I promise you," the driver says. "It's safe. A lot’s changed since you people last spoke to us."
Marvin clambers inside before Cap can protest. "Come on, Captain. Ben." Cap sighs. I step inside.
The driver pulls a gear and we fly across the land. The windows slide down and the wind catches in my throat. I see more colours than I know the names of; homes among the mountains, wrapped in nature's greenery; cows and sheep roaming the hills; other children with features unknown to my childhood textbooks; fields of turbines and the nearby sound of crashing water; the smell of freshly-cut grass; rain. These are things I’ve only experienced through simulation, and man, did they not do this justice.
On the steps of a glistening, cone-shaped building, a short woman with a pixie cut assures us it really is fine to remove our suits; undergarments are the norm in summer. There are ceremonial greetings and handshakes. Then they take us through their home.
"You must've had quite the scare," the council woman says over her shoulder, "landing in that district. Thinking you'd run into the apocalypse." "You could say that," Cap says. "You people don’t have the best track record." The woman nods, putting her hands into the pockets of her bright yellow overalls. "Our ancestors made some costly mistakes.” I pause to touch a nearby tree, then pluck a leaf and hold it up to the sun. I squint at the veins. It's the first piece of non-human life I've ever touched. Marvin nudges my side. "What?" I say, then follow his gaze down to where Odin stands, watching us. "You could get a fine if you do that," Odin says. "Oh," I say. "This?" "Yeah. Don't take from nature without a good reason. Section 29. I remember it, 'cause I had a test last week." I let the leaf fall to the ground. "Oh, sorry."
A flurry of colour and sound fills the air down the nearby path. It takes a moment for my eyes to interpret the scene. They're costumes, I think: dragons, tigers and serpents. And music. The kind that makes your hips sway involuntarily. The children sing a chorus of what sounds like three languages.
“Our whole land is free-range,” the council woman calls over the noise, nodding to Cap. “We don’t use those factories anymore.” “And what about decision-making? It’s all in the hands of the council?” “It’s in the hands of the community. Think the Greek Ekklesia. In your records, no?” “I know it,” Cap nods.
They talk for a while, then Cap moves ahead to test the acidity of a nearby waterhole. The woman falls beside me. “You seem overwhelmed. Ben, was it?" I can’t take my eyes from the rolling hills, the thatched houses scattered like mushrooms. “This stuff… just doesn't exist.” “The only reason we are here,” the woman says, “the only reason we have become one with the land and all else that lives here – is because of hope.”
I just stare ahead. A laughing girl runs towards us, chased by an excited lamb. “This is something else,” I say. This is what my mother meant, by those stories. "Welcome to Earth.” The woman laughs, grabbing the girl in her arms.
Runner Up: The Oldest Banyan Tree by Ciena Valenzuela-Peterson
Great Grandmother sat, cradled in the roots of the oldest banyan tree. Her family prepared for the celebration around her; her children shouted directions in playfully scolding tones, her grandchildren collected food from the village garden and cooked rice in big pots, and her great-grandchildren zipped around like bumblebees, dirtying their knees and dress shoes. Three generations she birthed and raised. Great Grandmother smiled faintly and breathed the damp smell of Indonesian summer.
Her youngest great-granddaughter, little Buana, toddled over and nestled under Great Grandmother’s waiting arm, legs tucked into her chest. The two rested, observing the bustle of activity. A firefly floated lazily by. Great Grandmother remembered when they used to be endangered, their numbers dwindling.
“Nenek, are you scared?” Buana asked. Great Grandmother shook her head. Contented with that answer, Buana rested her head back on her bosom. Great Grandmother was a woman of few words, especially in her old age. She had more than her fair share of scars, and she worked hard to prevent her family from inheriting her trauma, wounds from a time before.
“Let’s go for a walk, little one,” Great Grandmother said, her voice hoarse. She began to rise, gripping a bough of the banyan tree, and Buana’s mother rushed over to help her up.
“Are you sure, Nenek?” Buana’s mother asked. Great Grandmother nodded and flapped her hand. She took Buana’s tiny hand between her weathered palms and patted it before walking slowly through the village.
They passed the community kitchen, warm and well-stocked, and the barter hall, where villagers traded and gifted their wares. The village was beautiful, full of greenery and art and smooth roads. Great Grandmother was glad; she remembered a time when no one had the time or the money or the will to invest in their village, before everything changed.
They stopped in front of a very old building. The steel walls were transformed with multicolored murals, and the steps were covered with candles and flowers. The gentle hum of machinery filled the air outside.
“I used to work here, many years ago,” Great Grandmother said. “But, Nenek, nobody works here,” Buana said, puzzled. “Not anymore,” Great Grandmother agreed. “They called it a sweatshop.” She tugged gently on one of Buana’s braids, and Buana wrinkled her nose petulantly. Great Grandmother cleared her throat. She had no tears left to cry for the horrors of the past, but today seemed like the day to remember. “Before they had the robots, people made everything. We worked for twenty hours, sometimes.” Buana gasped. “Twenty hours in one week?” Great Grandmother smiled. “Every day, little one.” Buana squeezed her hand tight, and Great Grandmother squeezed back.
“When people first invented the machines, we were scared. We thought, if robots replaced us, made everything, we’d have nothing. No work, no food.” Buana frowned. “That doesn’t make sense, Nenek. Everyone gets food,” she said, like it was obvious. “You’re right. But before, the powerful, the rich—they kept all the money from the factories and hoarded it. If we worked for many hours every day, they gave us a little, and we could usually buy food. We had no choice.”
“What about Paman?” Buana asked. Buana’s uncle had been paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident years ago. Even after receiving the best public healthcare, he remained paralyzed. It never hindered him; roads and buildings were always wheelchair accessible, virtual workspaces offered him a wealth of opportunities to contribute to worldwide innovation, and the abundant community pool took care of him same as everyone. He lived a happy life.
“In the past, your Paman would have suffered. People who could not work received very little. You had to earn the right to live.” Buana said nothing. She buried her face in Great Grandmother’s linen skirt. Great Grandmother smoothed her hand over Buana’s hair. “But that is not now. Your Paman is happy. We learned.”
Just beyond the factory stood the cemetery gates. Great Grandmother led Buana through the rows of gravestones, their faces tall and smooth. Most of them were from the Sickness. Great Grandmother remembered her friends dropping like the endangered fireflies, lights slowly blinking out, as they were forced to live out their last days laboring in the sweatshops. Now, their ashes mixed with fertile soil to support new life. Dozens of trees created a canopy overhead, many planted by Great Grandmother herself in living memory of those who passed.
At the center of the cemetery, a still pond reflected the afternoon light, surrounded by meditation benches. A statue stood in the middle of the pond. It depicted a woman holding bread with arms outstretched next to the mechanical arm of a robot from the factory. Hundreds of names were engraved at the base of the statue and on the nearby benches, commemorating the revolutionaries.
“People had to fight to make the world the way it is now, little one. To show the world that there is always enough food to go around. That taking care of each other is our sacred duty.”
Buana traced her Nenek’s name on one of the benches and looked back at her in wonder. “Come,” Great Grandmother said, squinting at the setting sun, “Let’s go back now.”
The two were greeted with cheers and energetic music; the celebration began. Colorful paper umbrellas filled the air, and skilled performers started their puppet show, a rich cultural tradition that thrived once again in this post-Sickness renaissance. Basked in the pink glow of the sunset, Great Grandmother chuckled, shooing Buana off to play with the other kids. Buana lingered, squeezing her Nenek’s hand once more. She nodded gently, and the child wandered away.
They adorned her spot in the roots of the oldest banyan tree with pillows and streamers and flowers. She nestled in. Her doting family brought her rice and sweet potato and tofu with chili sauce. Her cup was never empty. Gathered around her tree, a joyful bonfire blazing in the center, the village shared in stories and prayers and raucous laughter.
One by one, each of Great Grandmother’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren approached her tree. They took her hand and wished her a final farewell. Buana was last.
“You’re not scared?” she asked again, tears wetting her round cheeks.
“No, little one. I lived a long life. When you live a life full of value, full of family and nature and art, you don’t need to fear the end. My life is complete. Death is not so scary.”
“I’m scared,” Buana admitted, voice wavering. Great Grandmother took her into her arms. “I will see you again, my baby.”
Great Grandmother stayed in the arms of the banyan tree, long after the bonfire dwindled and the villagers cleaned up and put their children to bed. Buana insisted on sitting by her side. Glowing fireflies blinked in the night. Great Grandmother leaned back against the trunk of the tree, the tree that had witnessed it all. She felt its solid bark cradling her head. With the profound weight of a lifetime, her eyes had long grown heavy and tired. At last, she closed them, at peace.
Honourable Mentions
The following two stories made it onto the shortlist. You can read them on our Community Forum.
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Buen Vivir is both a philosophy and a lived practice that puts Earth at the center of “the Good Life.”
Maria Zambrano* lives in the highlands of Ecuador’s Cotacachi Canton, home to two of the world’s 36 internationally recognized biodiversity hotspots. It is also home to a people fiercely committed to their own social and environmental well-being. Zambrano is an Indigenous Ecuadorian of the Kichwa people. Sitting at a café in Cotacachi, the seamstress is dressed in a black wrap-around skirt and a traditional embroidered white shirt, on which she’s done all the embroidery. The colorful stitching, she explains, is symbolic of her land, depictions of the connection between humans and Pachamama, which she uses to refer to Mother Earth. Pachamama, she says, is at the heart of everything she does.
Zambrano and other Kichwa who inhabit the cloud forest in this mountainous region of the Andes, know that if their environment is destroyed, it will profoundly impact their ability to thrive. And so they are embroiled in an ongoing fight to protect it. Cotacacheños are guided by what they call Buen Vivir in Spanish, or sumak kawsay in the Kichwa language, which loosely translates as “the Good Life.” It is for them both a philosophy and a lived practice.
A direct and critical response to Western ideas of sustainable development, Buen Vivir is about respecting the rights and responsibilities of communities to protect and promote their own social and environmental well-being by driving grassroots change. Cotacacheños have been engaged in resistance against large-scale mining operations in the region for more than three decades in the name of Buen Vivir, because the destructive nature of mining is in conflict with their vision of environmental reciprocity.
Local Indigenous community leader David Torres explains, “Buen Vivir signifies first and foremost protecting our environment, more than anything.” There is a strong sense of connection to each other and the natural environment that is missing from mainstream global political ideas about sustainability and well-being, Torres says. This is especially pertinent now, in the midst of current social and ecological crises. The lessons from this Andean canton can be applied to help transform communities across the globe, at a time where that’s more necessary than ever.
The Reset
We are currently living amid a planetary climate emergency, a global pandemic, uprisings against state violence upon Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples, and a failing economic system the world over. Pandemic lockdowns have forced major lifestyle changes: shifting consumption habits, realizing how deeply connected we are to each other and the environment, and focusing more on the non-material aspects of life for strengthening our well-being. Never before in modern society have we had to redesign our lives with such speed and magnitude: how we live them, how we connect with one another, and what and how we consume.
Buen Vivir represents a combination of respect and reciprocity, community, solidarity and harmony. The idea is far from novel. While it originates in the Indigenous philosophy of sumak kawsay, its current conception goes beyond Indigenous interpretations of community and environment to include progressive politics, contemporary academic research, and the experiences of non-Indigenous communities.
This foundation is supported by three main pillars: The first is social, evoking equity, solidarity, and rights. The second is material, emphasizing the human capacity for work, health, and education, as opposed to the accumulation of wealth. The third is spiritual, referring to the idea of transcendence through nature rather than religion. Buen Vivir is present in the Indigenous communities in the Andes where it originated, and has since been adopted to varying degrees in communities across Latin America.
“For us Indigenous people to have Buen Vivir, Mother Earth has to be in good health.”
In Western capitalist society, we tend to ignore the highly dependent relationship we have with the Earth in favor of continuous economic growth and wealth accumulation. Nature becomes a resource to exploit, instead of a relationship to nurture. In contrast, Buen Vivir centers on the collective well-being of both the environment and community, which can help societies effectively address crises like climate change and future pandemics. For Cotacacheños, this plays out in daily life through the way they approach their role in and responsibility to the natural environment.
Zambrano explains, “For us Indigenous people to have Buen Vivir, Mother Earth has to be in good health.” Zambrano lives in close proximity to mining operations and shares how their massive environmental destruction is disrupting fragile ecosystems: the contamination of land and water as well as deforestation. “Our Pachamama is sick,” she says, and that has direct repercussions on Zambrano’s ability to produce food for her community. Her corn harvests, for example, have been declining in recent years. Pointing to the cascading impacts from mining, Zambrano says, “All of this has changed our climate.”
Part of the problem is that the mining, according to Cotacacheños, creates a divide between society and nature. “We are part of this whole ecosystem,” says local government official Leandro Garcia. “We do not want to exclude ourselves.” It is with that mindset that Cotacachi Canton became the first “ecological canton” in South America, as declared by a municipal ordinance in 2000.
“This idea came from the grassroots,” says Felipe Lopez, the head of a local environmental organization. “We convinced the local government [to declare an ecological canton].” The declaration is an environmental policy born from social mobilization, like the mining resistance in Cotacachi. The goal is to promote environmental awareness among the people who live there, and protect the cultural and environmental wealth of the region by banning any economic activity that contaminates the natural environment—including mining—across the approximately 1,700 square kilometers (650 square miles) of the canton.
There are many intangible things that a government can’t really give you: peace with yourself, peace with communities, peace with your environment.
In honoring this approach, local communities in the canton are creating sustainable economic alternatives like community-based ecotourism, local renewable energy, and small-scale organic and regenerative agriculture that respect the role nature plays in society here. Few other ecological cantons, counties, or cities exist around the world, and definitions vary. But China is fully embracing the concept, and has seen a proliferation of eco-cities and eco-counties since it established a national program in 2003.
In 2008, in a direct challenge to the Western neoliberal agenda, grassroots movements for social and environmental justice resulted in changes to both the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions to include specific references to Buen Vivir. While this was due in large part to mobilization led by Indigenous organizations across Ecuador in their long-standing struggle for sumak kawsay, Cotacacheños say that the politicization of Buen Vivir has become more of an empty slogan than a credit to its original principles.
To counter the commodification of the concept, Cotacacheños have helped build explicit descriptions and practices that can help define what it is (and isn’t). Beyond the Andean philosophical outlook, Buen Vivir has a pragmatic side that is applicable in any cultural context.
Vivir Bien is about the daily actions, decisions, and choices we make for ourselves, our families, and our communities. This may include environmental education, participation in local decision-making, and changing behaviors that hamper Earth’s regenerative capacity.
The philosophy of Buen Vivir is, by definition, utopian—the pursuit of the sublime. It is what many who are searching for alternative approaches to Western-style sustainable development imagine when they think about a world free of social and environmental injustices. But, the path toward that utopia is a nuanced version called Vivir Bien, which means living well, or ally kawsay in Kichwa. Both Buen Vivir and Vivir Bien are based on the same ideas and principles, only the former is aspirational, while the latter is rooted in behavioral change.
Vivir Bien is about the daily actions, decisions, and choices we make for ourselves, our families, and our communities. This may include environmental education, participation in local decision-making, and changing behaviors that hamper Earth’s regenerative capacity. And unlike the universal guidelines and benchmarks that define sustainable development, that action is tailored to local experience and circumstances. Each community has its own unique history, geography, culture, and needs, so its application of Vivir Bien, too, will be unique. David Sanchez, an Indigenous community leader, says, for example, that his community in the foothills of Cotacachi has been undertaking reforestation of the land previously cleared by the Ecuadorian government.
While aspects of the philosophy are critical of Western systems and norms, many Western communities already incorporate some principles of Vivir Bien. In recent years, in Western countries we have seen an orientation toward communal well-being through greater involvement in community centers, community activities and gardens, and neighborhood assistance programs. Fostering a cultural sharing such as a language exchange and community multicultural events not only strengthens solidarity, but also helps build community capacity.
So, too, with politics. Participation in public decision-making is as much a right as a responsibility, and a truly participatory democracy is vital to creating real change, like the Cotacachi Ecological Canton Ordinance.
Reducing the use of fossil fuels and using natural resources on an as-needed basis have powerful positive impacts. Focusing on economic activities that work within the limits of the environment results in a “degrowth” of socially and environmentally damaging sectors of the economy. Shifting toward a conscious consumerism through a Social and Solidarity Economy (made up of local small businesses, cooperatives, associations, and fair trade groups), moves us away from global market capitalism.
Such behavioral changes in daily life are a demonstration of the possibility of achieving social and environmental well-being within the confines of a Western capitalist society, rather than an attack against it.
Re-evaluating Needs
In these times of social and ecological crisis, we have had to re-evaluate what it is we really need for well-being to flourish. It involves dismantling Western ideals of well-being and their entanglement with economic growth and consumption. As Lopez says, “Economic wealth is just one type of wealth, and it’s not the most important wealth for achieving Buen Vivir. Social wealth is very important, [as is] cultural and environmental wealth.” It’s about how we value things.
Buen Vivir focuses on holistic factors to understand a community’s needs, such as family, good health, a healthy environment, leisure time, community, equity, solidarity, identity, and respect. Connection with others is a big part of meeting these needs. Communities in the Ecuadorian Andes participate in communal work and knowledge sharing—called minga in Kichwa—to help address the needs of all, including the environment. The Citizens’ Minga for Environmental Education, for example, brings together 30 residents including community leaders and members, and council members to manage their local environment and address issues like water quality and biodiversity conservation at the community level.
“Economic wealth is just one type of wealth, and it’s not the most important wealth for achieving Buen Vivir. Social wealth is very important, [as is] cultural and environmental wealth.” It’s about how we value things.
“Minga work and democratic living teaches us that we live by doing things for others,” Garcia says, contrasting it with our increasingly urbanizing world and big cities, where familiarity and mutual aid are often absent today. “The theme of solidarity is being lost.”
The year 2020 has highlighted that we have undervalued the critical, yet nonmaterial, needs of humanity that Buen Vivir emphasizes. As Lopez explains, “There are many intangible things that a government can’t really give you: peace with yourself, peace with communities, peace with your environment.” He says, “If you’re living this idea of Buen Vivir, you’re aware that your actions will disturb that [sense of peace, so] you’re much less likely to take what you don’t need.”
We are at a critical crossroads in society. Buen Vivir offers an opportunity to nurture our relationships with family, friends, our communities, and the natural world through a communal and nature-oriented mindset. On a practical level, it helps us evaluate what really matters through daily actions and choices that consider the impacts on both the environment and those around us.
“People say, ‘Yes, I’m very happy,’ but that could change tomorrow,” Lopez says. “If the underlying spiritual and social and psychological bases are not strong enough, they’ll change.”
*This story is based on a research project of a political nature. Therefore, pseudonyms are used to protect the participants’ identities. Interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated into English. People shown in these images were not a part of the research.
Dr. Natasha Chassagne is a writer and researcher on sustainability and wellbeing issues. She is also an Adjunct Research Fellow at Swinburne University, Australia, and is currently writing a book titled 'Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Ecuador', to be published by Routledge in November 2020. Natasha recently completed a PhD investigating Buen Vivir as an Alternative to Sustainable Development at Swinburne University's Centre for Social Impact.
This article was originally published in Yes! Magazine, a nonprofit, independent publisher of solutions journalism.
The whole-systems understanding of the world acknowledges that a whole is always more than the simple sum of its parts, paying attention to the diversity of elements, the quality of interactions and relationships, and the dynamic patterns of behaviour that often lead to unpredictable and surprising innovations and adaptations.
Many of the interrelated problems we face, as change agents in the transition towards a more sustainable human presence on Earth, have their root cause in a way of thinking that has not paid enough attention to whole systems and their dynamic interconnectedness, dynamic relationships and context.
Experts and specialists are important contributors to most sustainability projects, but we also need integrators and generalists who can help to put the contribution of each discipline into systemic relationships and help to contextualize the contributions made by the specialists.
Whole-systems thinking has to be a transdisciplinary activity that maps and integrates relationships, flows and perspectives into a dynamic understanding of the structures and processes that drive how the system behaves. Experts and specialists are important contributors to most sustainability projects, but we also need integrators and generalists who can help to put the contribution of each discipline into systemic relationships and help to contextualize the contributions made by the specialists. Too often we employ limited progress indicators or inadequate measures of success based on the dominance of a particular discipline or perspective.
One way to define the word ‘system’ is as a set of interconnected elements that together form a coherent pattern we can refer to as a ‘whole’. Such a system exhibits properties of the whole that emerge out of the interactions and relationships of the individual elements. This systems definition could be applied to a molecule, a cell, a human being, a community or the planet. In many ways a system is less a ‘thing’ than a pattern of relationships and interactions — a pattern of organization of constituting elements. The Greek root of the word system is ‘synhistanai’ and literally means ‘to place together’.
We can reduce the world to a whole just as easily as we can reduce it to a collection of parts.
Systems thinking and systemic intervention is a possible antidote to the unintended and dangerous side-effects of centuries of focusing only on reductionist and quantitative analysis informed by the narrative of separation. Yet, it is important to maintain the awareness that the systems view itself is also just another map that, as Alfred Korzybski put it, should not be confused with the territory. We can reduce the world to a whole just as easily as we can reduce it to a collection of parts. Neither the whole nor parts are primary; they come into being through the dynamic processes that define their identity through relationships and networks of interactions.
One of the most important questions in any systemic approach is to ask ‘what is the system in question’. In doing so we define boundaries that provide us with the necessary ‘enabling constraints’ to make sense of a situation. Yet, these boundaries are themselves a way of seeing that make a distinction between the system in question and its environment. We should regard the boundaries that delineate one system from another as places of connection and exchange rather than barriers that separate or isolate.
Whole-systems thinking invites us to see complex issues from multiple perspectives, to suspend our judgement by questioning our own assumptions, and to honour insights from different disciplines and different ways of knowing.
In more general terms, whole-systems thinking invites us to see complex issues from multiple perspectives, to suspend our judgement by questioning our own assumptions, and to honour insights from different disciplines and different ways of knowing. Thinking in this way helps us to pay attention to the fertile ground of synergistic, whole-systems solutions. It can help us to more clearly see the opportunities in the multiple converging crises around us.
Whole-systems thinking stops us from seeing ecological, economic and social constraints as irreconcilable challenges. It invites us not to view different stakeholder perspectives in a competitive, win-lose frame of mind, and encourages us to explore win-win-win solutions that improve the overall health and sustainability of the system as a whole.
Whole-systems thinking is living systems thinking. I believe that a systemic understanding of processes by which life continuously regenerates conditions conducive to life offers a pathway to creating regenerative businesses and organizations within a regenerative economy as enabling factors of a regenerative culture. We will explore many examples in subsequent chapters. Here are some questions to contemplate when dealing with systems:
What is the system in question and how are we defining what belongs to the system and what does not?
What is the wider context that the system in question operates in?
What are the key agents whose interactions and relationships define the system structure and drive the system’s behaviour?
How is our perspective of the system in question shaped by our worldview and value system?
What are the key ‘emergent properties’ of the system that could not have been predicted by simply looking at the individual ‘parts’ of the system?
How does our participation in the system and our way of describing it affect what we are observing?
Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration
“Free markets will save the world.” We have heard that slogan for many years now. Yet free markets have not saved the world. To the contrary, finance crises, climate change, growing inequality and wars fought over oil and other resources, modern economics has created serious environmental and economic problems.
For many economists, politicians and business owners, the solution to our world’s economic problems is just around the corner. While the planet is getting smaller, more crowded, and more polluted, the slogan from many adherents of capitalism is currently this: free markets coupled with energy and resource efficiency will save the world from bankruptcy and environmental disaster.
They envision a brave new world of green efficiency and innovation in which China, India and the rest of the developing and underdeveloped world will soon catch up to the environmental and economic advancements of the rich countries in the North.[i] Some environmentalists, such as the Bright Green movement founded by Alex Steffen, also adhere to the view that this form of sustainable capitalism is the solution. Steffen has argued that a new world beyond oil dependency, pollution and poverty will soon create a sustainable planet of plenty for all.
New innovations in technology is important, but overall, to think that mainly technological innovations can save us is likely wishful thinking.
This vision has been adopted in Scandinavian economics, for example, as well as in many corporations worldwide who see themselves as “bright green.” In contrast, the degrowth movement argues that we cannot just spend and invent us out of our economic and environmental problems, we have to also reduce material consumption.
New innovations in technology is important, but overall, to think that mainly technological innovations can save us is likely wishful thinking. The problems of neo-liberal capitalism are inherent in the system itself, and we cannot solve a problem using the same system that created the problem in the first place. The environmental crisis, the increased income gaps, the reduced aggregate demand, and the staggering mountains of debt are not issues we can simply wish away. Unless these problems are quickly brought under control, the economy will not survive.
What is the economic rationale for an economy based on sustained high level of debts, huge corporations with almost monopolistic powers, big income disparities, and low purchasing capacity for the people? Is this truly the market economy envisioned by Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes?
The answer is no. Neither classical economists nor the Keynesian school of economics support the present policies. Indeed, it can be argued that the present market system is detached from any association it once had with its theoretical roots. Instead, the market has become a system based on greed and political expediency. It is a financial system run amok. In order to explore this rather bold assertion, let us take a brief look at recent economic theory.
Adam Smith’s Ideas
When Adam Smith’s economic liberalism emerged in the 18th century, it was a democratic alternative to the dictatorial rule of kings and their mercantile economy based on strong states bent on hoarding wealth and increasing their exports. In contrast, Smith’s economic model proposed that individual self-interest also benefits society. A baker will rise at 5 AM, argued Smith, to earn more money for himself, not out of altruism to serve others. This selfish act benefits society, he further argued, by encouraging private enterprise, trade, market growth, specialization, increased production, efficiency, and finally greater wealth—for all.
Market capitalism, as we experience it today, has radically changed, from its idealistic and theoretical roots in a small-scale industrial and agrarian economy, to a centralized and monopolized global economy. Capitalism’s current neo-liberal model has indeed little in common with the free market economy once presented by Adam Smith. His idea of an “invisible hand” regulating the economy and creating affluence for the few and plenty for everybody else has yet to become a reality.
Adam Smith frequently spoke up in support of the workers and the consumers against the traders and manufacturers (...) he opposed corporations and monopolies, and he warned against political lobbying by business interests.
But there is more to Adam Smith’s ideas than the metaphors of the baker and the invisible hand. Adam Smith frequently spoke up in support of the workers and the consumers against the traders and manufacturers. He claimed, for example, that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the interest of the producers ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.“[ii] Furthermore, he opposed corporations[iii] and monopolies[iv], and he warned against political lobbying by business interests.[v] He specifically advised law makers that any suggestion originating from traders and manufacturers must “…never be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same as the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and oppress the public, and accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” [vi]
John Maynard Keynes
Based on the ideas of Adam Smith, free markets gradually developed throughout the Western World in the 19th century. During that time, there was, among many economists, a fatalistic belief that markets, if left by themselves would somehow always correct themselves for the greatest benefit of all. But there was also widespread opposition to these market capitalist ideas among striking workers and leftist movements in both Europe and the United States. Then, the Great Depression of 1929 created shock waves in the capitalist world, and any illusions anyone had about the self-regulating mechanism of the markets were quickly dispelled.
Keynes claimed that in times of economic downturn, governments must borrow money and spend it, and in boom times that it should save up money.
In 1936, Maynard Keynes published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money[vii] , which turned old school economics on its head. His book introduced a radical overhaul of economic theory, and it suggested that governments have to be actively involved in managing the economy in order to ensure its stability. More specifically, Keynes claimed that in times of economic downturn, governments must borrow money and spend it, and in boom times that it should save up money. The government could thus balance its budget over the course of the business cycle.
From the 1970s, (...) governments tended to borrow money, both during recessions as well as during booms (...) this trend has resulted in unsustainable debt levels all over the world.
From the 1970s, in order to make up for the lowered purchasing capacity of the common citizen, governments tended to borrow money, both during recessions as well as during booms. This was not Keynesian policy, and not surprisingly, this trend has resulted in unsustainable debt levels all over the world.
Truman and Bretton Woods
In 1949, only four years after the Second World War, President Harry Truman outlined an ambitious development program and foreign policy that would set the tone for global development and the growth of liberal economic policies for many years to come. In his inaugural speech, he emphasized that capitalist development equal material progress, and while some countries, such as the US, were developed, others were developing, and yet many more countries were underdeveloped.
Through economic development and aid to these struggling nations, Truman declared that global poverty would be solved.
Through economic development and aid to these struggling nations, Truman declared that global poverty would be solved. Over the next decades, these and similar ideas gradually led to the formation of lending and development institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, and GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which later developed into the World Trade Organization. In retrospect, these institutions have, at best, a mixed track record. Instead of being a tool for developing poor nations, they have often been more concerned with the profit interests of international banks and creditor nations.[viii] Thus poor nations have remained poor and rich nations have remained rich.
Friedman, Reagan and Supply Side Economics
The historical photo of a handshake between Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman and President Ronald Reagan in the early 80s symbolizes an important economic policy change in the Western World: the shift from the mixed economy of Keynesian liberalism and high taxes for the rich toward a neo-liberal economy of market deregulation and reduced taxes.
The neo-liberal agenda (...) promoted a free market economy with the least amount of political intervention.
The neo-liberal agenda, inspired by economists and thinkers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand promoted a free market economy with the least amount of political intervention. From Iceland to Spain, from Europe to North America, advisors from neo-liberal think-tanks set a new economic agenda. Thirty years after that historical handshake, the Western World experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. Obviously, the lessons learned during that last depression had been forgotten, and so humanity was destined to make the same mistakes all over again.
The Next Economy
The next economy needs to do a better job at balancing the economy and greening the planet.
Through the ubiquitous nature of the global neoliberal agenda, which also has been adopted in the EU as well, we have seen increased inequality and environmental destruction on a global scale. People are experiencing more personal debt and the environment is suffering due to our insatiable consumption and growth trends. We are overutilizing resources and trashing the oceans in plastic waste. Thus, we are in growing need of economic systems change. The next economy needs to do a better job at balancing the economy and greening the planet. We need to adopt both degrowth mechanisms and bright green technologies. That would truly be a way to grow a bright green economy.
[i] Moody, James Bradfield and Nogrady, Bianca, The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource Limited World, ReadHowYouWant, 2010
[ii] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (University of Chicago Press, 1976. Original published in 1776.), Book 2, p279
The desire for systems change seems to be growing. The recognition of some deep transformation and change seems to be bubbling under the surface in many different areas. However, the common language of systems change still seems to be lacking in the mainstream. It is safe to say the idea of systems change has not yet made it into the mainstream, except in very niche areas. One of them has been the environmental sustainability movement, which has been talking about the need for systems change for decades now.
The sustainability story is just one step on the road to embracing the ideas and need for systems change.
As the narrative around sustainability has become mainstream there is increasing understanding that the sustainability story is just one step on the road to embracing the ideas and need for systems change. I recently asked Sally Uren of Forum for the Future about this, during our interview at Si London conference, she confirmed some of my thinking when she replied:
“In 20 years sustainability has gone from the fringes, it wasn’t even a word that people recognized, to everyone’s talking about it, but in a very different way. So the question that I have is, how do we build on that increase awareness and say, yeah, that was okay but it’s not good enough. And actually the field, the practice of systems change, when you bring it into sustainability challenges, offers us a huge opportunity to really up our ambition and to properly design for transformational change… the next wave is designing for catalytic transformational change.”
"The next wave is designing for catalytic transformational change.”
Sally Uren, Forum for the Future
So, what is wrong with the traditional story that has brought the term sustainability such prominence today? Here’s my take. The traditional argument around sustainability hinges around the idea of a finite planet and sounds something like this: The population will increase in the coming years – up to 10 billion people – which will require up to 50% more food, 50% more energy, 30% more water, while, at the same time we are running out of resources, groundwater, fish and wildlife, etc. We are taking from a stock of resources that are required to sustain future generations, thus unsustainable, and we need to change by producing less pollution, CO2, using less water and materials, etc. generally conserving what we have.
I don’t want to deny any of this – it is apparent that physical resources are finite on this planet and the logic is very strong and appealing – but, to be honest, I always felt a bit uncomfortable with this argument and, recently, I think I figured out why. It is a very static, conservative and zero-sum way of looking at the world that fits too easily into the existing paradigm and preserves existing structures. The underlying statement is that everything is fine here as long as we can just consume less.
One of the main problems with this static view is the idea that “If we all just do our little bit,” to use less, pollute less and conserve more then all those little bits will add up to a solution and everything will be fine.
One of the main problems with this static view is the idea that “If we all just do our little bit,” to use less, pollute less and conserve more then all those little bits will add up to a solution and everything will be fine. This diverts attention from system structure and the need to change it. We talk about the minimization of consumption and impact, but not about how to restructure the economy in order to use less. Every company tries to reduce CO2 emissions, but they don’t look at the structure of the industry they are in.
In other words, what we are saying is that we can all just go on in our boxes and make incremental improvements and that will get us to where we want to go. However, no amount of summing up of parts or optimizing of boxes will give us a quantum leap. Ultimately the traditional narrative of sustainability is based upon the same old logic of resistance rather than making the deep systems structural changes that are needed to adapt.
To really work towards a more sustainable world, the sustainability narrative needs to be an intro to systems change; that conservation is just a starting point when what is really needed is an appreciation for systems structure and the need to adapt and evolve them. Those structural changes may take many forms but primarily it is the shift from the centralized systems of the industrial model to a decentralized model more relevant to a connected world.
Centralization creates boundaries around domains and organizations resulting in a hugely fractured system.
We all talk of collaboration but, in reality, the systems and structures we have created systematically resist that. We have built linear systems that travel vertically and inhibit cross-domain collaboration. In this respect, what really matters is transaction cost across boundaries. If those are too high – as they are – then people are incentivized to stay within their existing structures and try to solve the problem there, which simply does not work when dealing with the highly complex sustainability challenges of today.
Centralization creates boundaries around domains and organizations resulting in a hugely fractured system. This makes transactions across boundaries costly , time-consuming and inefficient. Yet we go on trying to tackle the problem from within these boxes. What is really needed is to build networks that incentivize coordinated activity around the problem between a diversity of actors rather than incentives for each organization to do its little bit and think that somehow those little bits are going to sum up without actually changing the structure of the system.When we talk about systems change, it is this key structural dynamic that needs to change. Technology plays a key role, as we have no way of doing large-scale decentralization without information networks.
This is why I like the narrative of systems change because it starts with a clear assertion that the structure of the system has to change. I think the first generation narrative around sustainability – that is now mainstream – was fine, but it has to evolve if it is going to stay relevant and not become greenwashing to prevent real systems change.
Joss Colchester works at Systems Innovation to help people and organizations understand and use the ideas from complexity theory and systems thinking to better model, analyze and design complex systems towards enabling systems-level change.
In Nature, all debts are paid and no one is too big to fail.
H. T. Odum
While financial debts are human-made problems that can be managed with solution-oriented policies, natural resources have external limits placed on us by the natural environment. Indeed, many of the resources we have been taking for granted—such as oil, fish, minerals and fresh water—are becoming scarce, at least in proportion to the rate of their exploitation.
Neither classical, neo-classical, Keynesian, nor Marxist economic theory has historically taken these vitally important facts into consideration. The cost of natural resources has in theory been considered equal to the cost of extracting them, and they are generally not considered to have any intrinsic value of their own.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the 'unlimited existence' of our natural resources has been taken for granted, or if scarce, it has been assumed the market will find a ready alternative for them.
Modern economics does not even acknowledge the necessity of raw material and energy, but wraps these factors into ‘capital,’ with the assumption that any type of capital at all times can be converted into materials and energy.
The commonly used Cob-Douglas production function essentially implies that Production = Labour x Capital x total factor productivity.
Mathematically, this entails that all capital inputs can be used interchangeably and can be substituted, which in theory would mean that production would be a process that could function without raw material and energy, as long as we have money!
General economic theory hence assumes that nature exists outside of – and is of less importance to the economy. A representation of this formula could look like the following figure:[i]
The entire financial system is thus nothing but a mental abstraction and cannot replace or be a substitute for the real economy, real natural resources or real sources of energy. Without natural resources, no economic activity, and no life, can be sustained.
In recent years there have been attempts by modern economics to incorporate nature into economics, by calculating the cost of nature as externalities, etc. Such thinking would produce the following graph:
This formula, however, is also not representative of the real interaction between nature and the economy. In reality, the economy is an outgrowth of Nature; a small, integral part of the global eco-sphere. A representation of a more eco-centered economy would thus look as follows:
Our Ecological Credit Crunch
The world is heading for an "ecological credit crunch" far worse than the current Covid-19 crisis and, with it, the evolving economic crisis. We humans are over-using the natural resources of the planet. The Living Planet report[ii] calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year.
This results in deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, as well as dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. According to the report's authors, led by the conservation group, WWF International, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, we are running up an ecological debt of $4 trillion to $4.5 trillion each year.
The report also calculated the economic value of services provided by ecosystems destroyed annually, such as diminished rainfall for crops or reduced flood protection. The report concludes that by the year 2030, we will need two planets to sustain our consumption. Unfortunately, we have only one.
"The recent downturn in the global economy is a stark reminder of the consequences of living beyond our means," says James Leape, WWF International's director general. "But the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological credit crunch."[iii]
In an article in Scientific American titled “Forget Peak Oil, We’re at Peak Everything”, the journal claims that apart from oil, we are running out of forests for paper production; the demand for water is 40% higher than sustainable levels; and fish levels in the seas are dropping due to overfishing.
Minerals are also starting to be in short supply. In his book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources[iv], Michael T. Klare concludes that global shortages are forcing us to look for resources in more and more difficult places, at an increased cost.
Shortages of nonrenewable resources, such as oil and minerals, silver, zinc, antimony, indium, hafnium, terbium, platinum, gallium and many other rare, but exceedingly important resources, forces us to search under the sea, in the Arctic regions, and in other inhospitable places.
While doing so, the cost of extraction increases, and we are increasingly running into diminishing returns by having to spend more and more resources to get the same amount of oil, gas, and minerals as before.
At the same time, we are damaging the ecosystem, which is providing us with a complex array of services needed to sustain life. Therefore, while we are desperately trying to delay the time when these resources finally will run out, we are damaging the very foundation of our existence by thinking that we don’t have to pay our debts to nature. But that time has already arrived. For as the great ecologist H. T. Odum said, in nature all debts are paid. So, it is time for us to pay up. It is time for economic systems change.
[i] The idea for the illustrations are taken from Charles A. S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy (Springer, New York, 2012)
When it comes to ecological impact, we know that the richer you are, the more damage you do. This pattern is evident across a wide range of indicators. Take carbon dioxide emissions, for example – the main gas that causes global warming. The richest 10% of the world’s population is responsible for more than half the world’s total carbon emissions since 1990. That’s a staggering figure. A small portion of humanity is consuming the atmosphere that we all rely on. And things become even more lopsided as we climb the income ladder. The richest 1% emit one hundred times more than people in the poorest half of the human population.
Why is this? According to recent research published by scientists at the University of Leeds, it’s not only that rich people consume more stuff than everybody else, but also because the stuff they consume is more energy-intensive: huge houses, big cars, private jets, business-class flights, long-distance holidays, luxury imports and so on. And it’s not only their consumption that matters – it’s also their investments. When the rich have more money than they can possibly spend, which is virtually always the case, they tend to invest the excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive, like fossil fuels and mining.
Knowing how income correlates with ecological breakdown should make us think twice about how our culture idolises rich people. There is nothing worth celebrating about their excesses. In an era of ecological breakdown, excess is literally deadly.
Inequality is also destructive in subtler ways. Sociologists have found that inequality generates status anxiety. It makes people feel that what they have is inadequate. It creates constant pressure for people to earn and buy more – not because they actually need it, but because they want to approximate the consumption habits of richer people just to feel that they have some modicum of dignity.
A team of researchers at the University of Warwick found that people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more egalitarian societies. And it’s never enough: we keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it doesn’t work because the benchmark is pushed perpetually out of reach. This treadmill of anxiety-induced consumption generates extraordinary ecological damage.
Who benefits from growth?
But there’s another issue that we need to pay attention to here, and it has to do with how our economy works. We live in an economy that is organised around perpetual expansion, or “growth”, which we measure in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Read my article ‘Outgrowing growth: why quality of life, not GDP, should be our measure of success’ GDP has to grow exponentially just so the system can stay afloat. This might be fine if GDP was just plucked out of thin air, but it’s not. On the contrary, it is tightly coupled to ecological impact; the more we grow the economy, the more pressure we put on planetary boundaries.
One of the ways that scientists track this relationship is by looking at an indicator called Material Footprint, which tallies up all the material stuff that nations extract and consume each year – everything from plastic to fish, timber to metal – all of which has an impact on living ecosystems. When we plot Material Footprint over time, we see that it rises steadily in lockstep with GDP.
This puts us in a bit of a bind. We know that GDP growth is driving ecological breakdown; indeed, the data on this is so clear that scientists are now calling for governments to abandon growth as an economic objective. But for decades, we’ve been told that we need more growth in order to improve people’s lives. How are we supposed to reconcile these two?
The data on this is so clear that scientists are now calling for governments to abandon growth as an economic objective.
The first step is to recognise that, when it comes to human wellbeing, it’s not growth that matters – it’s how income and resources are distributed. And right now they are distributed very, very unequally. The richest 1% alone capture $19tn in income every year, which represents nearly a quarter of global GDP. That adds up to more than the GDP of 169 countries combined – a list that includes Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, all of the Middle East and the entire continent of Africa. The rich lay claim to an almost unimaginable share of the income from global GDP growth.
And in case you think that the rest of the GDP is distributed more evenly, it’s not. The richest 5% (whose average income is $100,000 per year) capture no less than 46% of global income. In other words, half of all our economic activity – all the mines, all the factories, all the power stations, all the shipping, and all of the ecological impact that’s associated with these things – is done to make rich people richer. The next time someone tells you that we need economic growth in order to improve people’s lives, it’s worth remembering whose lives are really being improved.
Once we grasp this fact, it becomes clear that growth is an inefficient and ecologically destructive way of achieving our social goals. We don’t need more growth – at least, not in rich countries. What we need is a fairer distribution of income. By sharing what we already have more fairly, we can improve people’s lives without needing to plunder the Earth for more.
We don’t need more growth – at least, not in rich countries. What we need is a fairer distribution of income.
Over and over again, the evidence points to the fact that billionaires – and millionaires, for that matter – are incompatible with planetary boundaries. If we want to live on a safe and habitable planet, we need to do something about inequality. This argument might sound radical, but it is widely shared among researchers who study this issue. The French economist, Thomas Piketty, one of the world’s leading experts on inequality and climate, doesn’t mince his words: “A drastic reduction in the purchasing power of the richest would in itself have a substantial impact on the reduction of emissions at global level.”
So what do we do?
One approach would be to introduce a cap on wage ratios – what some have called a maximum wage policy. Sam Pizzigati, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, argues that we should cap the after-tax wage ratio at 10 to one.
This is an elegant solution that would immediately distribute income more fairly, and it’s not unheard of.
Mondragon, for instance – a huge workers’ co-operative in Spain – has rules stating that executive salaries cannot be more than six times higher than what the lowest- paid employee receives in the same enterprise. This could be done on a national scale, too, by saying that incomes higher than a given multiple of the national minimum wage would face a 100% tax.
Once we realise that excessive income destroys the ecology on which our civilisation depends, we can choose to limit that too
Policies like this make intuitive sense to people. A 2017 poll found that a majority of the British public are in favour of a maximum wage policy.
After all, we choose to limit all sorts of things that are dangerous in excess. We limit how fast you can drive your car on public roads, how much alcohol you can drink before driving, how much sugar can be in children’s breakfast cereals. We limit smoking in public spaces, addictive substances and weapons sales. Once we realise that excessive income destroys the ecology on which our civilisation depends, we can choose to limit that too.
What’s exciting about this approach is that it has a direct positive impact on human well-being and on the living world. As societies become more egalitarian, people become happier, less anxious and more content with their lives. They develop a greater sense of solidarity with their neighbours and peers, which means they feel less pressure to pursue ever-higher incomes and more glamorous status goods. Equality helps liberate people from the rat race of perpetual consumerism. This is why researchers find that more egalitarian societies tend to have significantly less ecological impact.
Take Denmark, for example. Consumer studies show that, because Denmark is more equal than most other high-income countries, people buy fewer clothes – and keep them for longer – than their counterparts elsewhere. And firms spend less money on advertising, because people just aren’t as interested in unnecessary luxury purchases.
The bottom 50%, by contrast, have almost nothing: only 0.4%. On a global level, it’s worse still: the richest 1% own around half of all the wealth in the world.
The problem with this kind of inequality is that rich people become rentiers. Because they accumulate money and assets far beyond what they could ever use, they rent it out to others who don’t have these things – be it in the form of properties, patent licences, loans, whatever. The income they get from this is called "passive income", because it accrues automatically to people who hold assets without any labour on their part. But from the perspective of everyone else it is anything but passive: people have to scramble to work, produce and earn beyond what they would otherwise need – which creates additional ecological impact – simply in order to pay rents and debts to people living in wealth.
People have to scramble to work, produce and earn beyond what they would otherwise need – which creates additional ecological impact – simply to pay rents and debts to people living in wealth
And just like serfdom, it has serious consequences for our living world. Serfdom was an ecological disaster because lords forced peasants to extract more from the land than they otherwise needed – all in order to pay tribute. During the feudal period in Europe, this led to a progressive degradation of forests and soils. When societies are unbalanced, ecologies become unbalanced too. Something similar is happening today: all of us who owe rents and debts are under tremendous pressure to find ways to pay tribute to people with wealth.
One way to solve this problem is with a wealth tax – an idea that is presently gaining a lot of steam. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have proposed a 10% annual marginal tax on wealth holdings over $1 billion.
This would push the richest to sell some of their assets, thus distributing wealth more fairly and cutting rent-seeking behaviour. The upshot is that the rich would lose their power to force us to extract and produce more than we need, and as a result, remove pressure from the living world.
Progressive taxation has another ecological benefit: it generates revenues that can be invested in universal public services, like healthcare, education, transportation, affordable housing and so on. This is important, because expanding universal services is the single most powerful way to deliver high levels of well-being for all without needing to pursue high levels of GDP.
The danger of inequality
Given the severity of our ecological crisis, perhaps we should be more ambitious than what Saez and Zucman propose. After all, nobody "deserves" extreme wealth. It’s not earned, it’s extracted – from underpaid workers, from nature, from monopoly power, from political capture and so on. We should have a democratic conversation about this: at what point does hoarding become not only socially unnecessary, but actively destructive? $100m? $10m? $5m?
'If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from? It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours, which they do not receive.'
John Stuart Mill
The ecological crisis – and the science of planetary boundaries – focuses our attention on one simple, undeniable fact: that we live on a finite planet, and if we are going to survive the 21st century, then we need to learn to live on it together. Toward this end, we can take lessons from our ancestors. Anthropologists tell us that, for most of human history, most people lived in societies that were actively and intentionally egalitarian. They saw this as an adaptive technology. If you want to survive and thrive within any given ecosystem, you quickly realise that inequality is dangerous, and you take special precautions to guard against it. That’s the kind of thinking we need.
There is an extraordinary opening for this right now. The Covid-19 crisis has revealed the dangers of having an economy that’s out of balance with human need and the living world. People are ready for something different.
Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He serves on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report 2020, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, and on the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.
Of all the crises facing the world today, the one with the potential for having the most profound impact on human life is the environmental crisis. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 as well as the economic crisis we are experiencing now during the Covid-19 epidemic, are mainly human and not natural catastrophes.
By employing the most appropriate human interventions, we can certainly resolve such crises, including the global inequality crisis. Through economic reform and restructuring, as well as technological innovation, production and wealth can increase and be redistributed, and poor, destitute areas can become affluent within a short time.
History witnessed how rapidly the European and Japanese economies rebounded after WWII. So, yes, an economy in crisis can, if proper means are applied, be restored rather quickly, but it is not so easy when faced with an environmental crisis. Especially not if we run out of certain irreplaceable, natural resources.
Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria and 23 other industrialized countries are importing more than half the water they consume when buying goods from developing countries.
We are currently experiencing a very grave resource crisis, an ecological “credit crunch” caused by our overuse of the world’s natural elements. And for the future of humanity, this is a far more serious problem than any financial crisis. Yet most people living in industrialized countries are oblivious to the fact that we are living beyond our means.
Most are unaware, for example, that Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria and 23 other industrialized countries are, in effect, importing more than half the water they consume when buying goods such as cotton, rice, wheat, and so on from developing countries.
“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless we change course that number will grow very fast— by 2030, even two planets will not be enough,” writes Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International in his organization’s 2012 Living Planet Report. [1]
The report concludes that if the average citizen on planet earth lived like a citizen of the USA, four planets would be required to produce enough resources. Since the average citizen of China, with nearly one-sixth of the earth’s population will, according to Chinese planners, shortly consume as much as an American citizen, we may soon run out of many resources, especially fresh water, which is already scarce in many parts of the world.
That is, unless we from now on make dramatic changes in the way we produce, use, and reuse goods which nature “freely” provides.
In order to understand the magnitude of this looming crisis, we need to have a better understanding of what nature actually takes care of for humankind.
Shortages of oil and other energy resources would have an enormous impact on our lives. However, the non-renewable resources we may run out of in the near future, such as hydrocarbons from crude oil and rare minerals used in the high-tech industry, are resources nature itself is not very dependent on.
Sure, a lack of these resources may destroy civilisation as we know it, and reduce the number of people the world can support, but the very functioning of the earth as a living, breathing eco-system will not be affected. With time, we must and we will invent new and more effective renewable sources of energy and find other ways to develop sophisticated technology to support our energy needs.
Further, there are aspects of the environmental crisis far greater than our dependency on non-renewable sources of energy, such as oil and coal. If our dependency on nature’s services from air, water, soil and forests are threatened on a global scale, or if global warming reaches catastrophic levels, there is no technological, economic or political solution available to counter these effects.
We cannot simply reinvent what nature has provided for us for hundreds of thousands of years. Together with the plants and the animals, we are ecological creatures, and in order to understand the magnitude of this looming crisis, we need to have a better understanding of what nature actually takes care of for humankind. We need to better understand our relationship to nature and, most importantly, the relationship between economy and the ecology of the biosphere.
Human beings, like all other creatures, are completely dependent on the gifts provided by nature. A report issued in 1997 by a team of biologists and economists put the ‘business services’ provided by the global ecosystem, through free pollination of crops, the recycling of nutrients by the oceans, etc. to $33 trillion, at that time twice the global GDP.[2]
It is not clear exactly what the commonly used definition of ‘business services’ is, but regardless of what services were included in the report, it certainly did not include the total value of services provided to us by nature, which also includes how its beauty positively affects our health and wellbeing.
Yes, what is the value of a family picnic in the grass under the trees; what is the value of fresh water in a creek—to the fish, the frogs, and to human beings who relax by its banks? What is the real value nature provide us when we grow a vegetable crop in the backyard?
It is not possible to make up an economic formula or accurate price tag on neither nature’s partial nor its total value.
The many ways nature contributes to our life and wellbeing is, to say the least, priceless. We do not have any other means than nature’s to bind solar energy with carbon dioxide and water to produce organic compounds. We are totally dependent on nature to accomplish this vitally important undertaking.
Since we cannot replicate the enormous economic and aesthetic contributions made by nature, its services are invaluable to us. It is not possible to make up an economic formula or accurate price tag on neither nature’s partial nor its total value.
The great power source that fuels the works of nature is the sun. Without this source of energy, the Earth would be incapable of sustaining life. The scale of our own attempts to harvest solar energy directly, in terms of solar cells and passive solar houses, is miniscule compared to the amount of solar energy harnessed by nature through photosynthesis, water cycles, etc. Indeed, it is almost negligible in comparison.
Therefore, we must learn to more efficiently harness the energy directly or indirectly provided by the sun, including the use of wind, wave, and geo-thermal energy, so that we can continue to sustain life long into the foreseeable future on this green planet of ours. Hence, the value of the sun’s energy and its many complex functions in nature is beyond comparison, beyond any finite value in pounds or in dollars.
In the current market economy natural capital is seen as free, or largely undervalued, and thus used up at an alarming rate.
At the end of the day, all we human beings can do is to find various ways to utilize the services nature already provide us. This observation is quite different from the labor theory of value, emphasized by both Karl Marx and Adam Smith, which stipulates that all economic value derives from human labor.
Far from it, it is nature that provides the underlying and lasting value for all wealth utilized by human society. All the technological inventions, capital investments, production hours, and infrastructure involved in creating a product is but a small part of the total capital we are using.
The total capital provided by nature in the form of land, raw materials, water, sun, air and space is by far the largest of all forms of capital, but unfortunately in the current market economy natural capital is seen as free, or largely undervalued, and thus used up at an alarming rate.
To remedy this predicament, scientists have made various attempts to put a price tag on nature’s services. In 2011, The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK announced the findings of a national ecosystem assessment, a project involving 500 experts, who had established "the true value of nature … for the very first time".
Some of the services provided by UKs ecosystems "may in fact be infinite in value".
The report further stated that this exercise was "theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavor.” Some of the services provided by UKs ecosystems, it pointed out, "may in fact be infinite in value". [3]
It is clear that even the work that is attributed to human beings and accounted for in the world’s GDP is indirectly made possible by the aid of nature. Human beings cannot exist in the absence of nature, but nature can easily exist without human beings.
Given the enormous contribution nature provides, the current degradation of the natural systems that provide us with free services is a virtual threat to our very survival. If nature stops, or even reduces its provisions of beneficial, natural services, it will have drastic and immediate effects on our life. In a worst case scenario, humanity’s very survival may be threatened beyond repair.
In 2005, the United Nations Environmental Project, (UNEP), published the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.[4] The report, authored by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries, concluded that two-thirds of the natural machinery providing free services to humanity has been damaged by human activities. The report states that, "Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted."
Economists, however, have taken nature for granted virtually since the beginning of the profession. Economists do not generally calculate the value of the free services provided by nature. Naturally, regardless of how large the contribution is, nature’s capital will not show up as a minus in the accounting books.
Just for the sake of illustration, let us say that the real value created by nature in the form of a forest is 100, and the value contributed by the cutting of the forest and using the trees is 10. If we include the value created by the forest, we would immediately see that cutting the forest would be a losing proposition, as we would lose 100 to gain 10.
If we ignore the contribution by the forest provided by nature, then we would gain 10 by cutting it down and lose nothing. That means, due to our flawed accounting methods, we have drawn the conclusion that it will add more value to cut down the forest. Indeed, we have concluded that nature’s main value is its monetary contribution. Naturally, the 100 contributed by nature may not accrue to an individual company, whereas the 10 gained from cutting down the forest will go into the profit of individuals. Hence, from the view of the company, cutting down the forest is better, even if it would make a loss for the world. And this is exactly the way the market economy has conducted its business so far—by completely disregarding the value of nature.
Only when we learn to calculate the real value of the contributions of nature, and we start to take this value into account in our planning, can we hope to save our habitat from destruction. Insights such as these are already gaining traction among some business leaders and economists.
At the World Forum on Natural Capital, business and sustainability leaders come together to do just that—to discuss “how the value of natural assets like clean air, clean water, forests and other natural assets is factored into business decision-making and countries’ systems of national accounting.” [5]
Moreover, ecological economists, such as Herman Daly and Paul Hawken see economics as a subsystem of the ecosystem, and they emphasize the need to preserve natural capital.
Environmental columnist for the Guardian, George Monbiot, writes that “Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments.“ His point? We should protect nature regardless of whether or not it makes financial sense in the short run. Because, in order to survive and thrive, we not only depend on nature as a source of energy and food, we also need nature for recreation and inspiration. And these latter provisions—as anyone who has enjoyed a hike in the wilderness; or gone for a swim in a pristine lake knows—they are priceless.
[1] Living Planet Report, 2012, produced by The WWF International and other organizations.
Why systems change needs to start with culture change
There’s a scene in the HBO show Silicon Valley that parodies a large-scale tech conference. As each guy (and it’s always a guy) takes to the stage to present their latest tech solution, they all weave into their speech how they are “making the world a better place” through a variety of obscure high-tech products and software services. As with any half-decent parody, the meme is firmly grounded in reality, with the frame of changing the world being hugely popular in the real Silicon Valley and beyond. Leaving aside the irony that many Silicon Valley tech companies are doing little beyond finding ways to make life marginally more streamlined or entertaining for a privileged few, the pursuit of purpose within business is gaining significant traction.
The rise of social enterprise and impact entrepreneurship presents those who want to create change with the opportunity to embed social or environmental change at the very core of their company. In the UK alone, social enterprise contributed￡60 billion to the economy in 2019 representing a little over 2% of GDP. Within large companies, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) provides an avenue for companies to engage in fair trade, ethical employment practices, philanthropic activities, and charitable work. Third party accreditation systems such B Corporations provide assurance to customers that companies are meeting certain environmental and social performance criteria. Some countries have put in place legal structures that provide companies with a mandate to measure progress and impact against a wider set of indicators than purely shareholder profit.
These mechanisms are a good starting point, but represent only one level of systems change — that is on the explicit, structural level. By and large, these models leave the underlying root causes of many of our systemic problems unchallenged. That’s not to say that they are not an important piece of the puzzle, but to date they have received a disproportionate share of the funding, attention, and brain power that is required to create lasting solutions to systemic problems.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, there has been a workplace trend towards specialisation in one particular area of knowledge. There is a distinct economic advantage for those who know more about one single area of focus than their competitors. This has been a great boon for productivity, but it has split the world up into silos. With a deep knowledge of only one part of an interconnected system, we start to to view the world as a collection of distinct and discrete elements which can be manipulated with little or no effect on the others.
This is of course, the polar opposite to the way that the natural world operates. The world is built up of intricate systems. Natural systems and human-built systems, physical systems and psychological systems. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and everything exists in the context of everything else. It seems an obvious thing to point out, but when it comes to the work of solving challenges that affect humans, other life, and the planet which we call home, we are not that great at recognising the system within which a challenge exists. We do not properly diagnose the issue to understand the scope of the problem. We treat the symptoms, not the cause. In our rush towards developing solutions for the myriad problems that we face, our lack of appreciation for the wider systems within which a problem exists can lead to ineffectual solutions at best, or actually exacerbating harm at worst.
Complex social, environmental and economic problems such as climate change, rising inequality, racism, political polarisation, and the destruction of our home planet haven’t arisen in a vacuum. Yet too often, we treat them as if they have, failing to recognise the multitude of factors at play, the many stakeholders involved, the histories and biases that they bring, and interconnections between all the moving parts of a big, messy, tangle of a system. These are the factors that are seldom taken into consideration when a bright, young entrepreneur suggests that their singular product or idea is going to change the world.
In their recent report, The Water of Systems Change, consulting company FSG neatly summarise six conditions of systems change, as outlined in the diagram below:
A great deal of effort has been made by organisations, companies, governments and philanthropic foundations to address the structural changes on the top row of the inverted triangle. This is the level at which social enterprise, B Corps and CSR are operating. Likewise, when philanthropic funds are directed towards creating positive change in the world, they are often directed at developing policies and practices that better support people and the environment. These are of course, where we see the most tangible and immediate results. You buy a pair of Toms shoes, and know that a pair is being given to a child in need. It’s simple. Obvious. You as the consumer know the fruits of your labour, immediately. On the other side of the exchange, the company can present their impact with a neat, objective metric in their end of year reporting, keeping funders and shareholders happy.
What is less tangible to see in practice are the changes on the lower two levels of the triangle. Changes in social dynamics in our workplaces, communities, and societies are much harder to measure and report on, as are modes of thought. Many organisations and individuals who wish to create and support change fail to see these elements as relevant to them and their organisation. Consequently the work of relational change and transformational change have largely gone neglected — which is why despite many well intentioned efforts at transforming our lives and economies to be more just, equitable and sustainable, we are failing to make headway on our most complex global problems.
We give free shoes to poor children in foreign countries, without questioning how our unbalanced economic structures, climate-altering consumption habits, and narratives of western supremacy have contributed to those children being in need in the first place. It is akin to sucking on cough drops to treat our lung cancer.
That’s not to say that these models don’t have an impact — they certainly do. But in the grand scheme of the complex challenges the world is facing, the impacts are superficial.
Strategic storytelling and narrative work are a key tool to start truly shifting the needle towards relational and transformational change. The alarming rise of populism and political polarity across a number of countries in the last few years is both a symptom and cause of people with different viewpoints not talking to or understanding each other. We simply do not know each other’s stories. The stories we read and see on the news are painted with the bias of whoever is telling them. We are increasingly living within bubbles of people who think like us. Social media algorithms have played a huge part in shaping these bubbles, which are a perfect example of how power structures come into play. Facebook has become so large and all powerful, that it is literally changing the social fabric of our societies and the functioning of our democracies. It’s a rare instance of an online tech product actually changing the world, and in a way that is increasingly to the detriment of happy, healthy lives.
Facebook is literally changing the world. This guy, not so much.
For true and lasting systems change at the relational level, we need to develop solutions in equal partnership with all actors, stakeholders and those most affected by a problem. The Collective Impact model of systems change is one useful tool, that brings together diverse groups and individuals to get buy-in to a shared common agenda and systems of measurement. By meeting regularly, engaging in mutually reinforcing activities, staying in constant communication, stories and experiences of those operating one part of a complex system can be shared with others in an adjacent part of the system. If we use the example of lifting inner-city communities out of poverty, then we might have social workers, healthcare workers, municipal planners, religious and community leaders, teachers, nutritionists, local business owners, employers, sports leaders, artists, transport workers and local residents around the table, to name a few. Each will have different stories of how they see change unfolding in their community. The key is for them to all be talking to each other.
The mental modes that sit on the bottom of the triangle are the deeply held beliefs and assumptions that influence the ways that we think, speak, and behave. These drivers of transformational change are the narratives underpinning our lives and societies, they are the taken-for-granted ideas that inform “the way things are”. These are the most difficult to change as many of our dominant societal narratives are largely subconscious and ubiquitous. They are collective stories that we have inherited by virtue of simply existing within a certain cultural context, and that we subtly reinforce through our daily actions, words, and behaviours.
Collectively held narratives are the foundations of culture. Social psychology has long told us that the human brain responds to story, framing and narrative far more readily than we respond to facts, figures and reasoned arguments.
On a rational level, we know from the numbers that climate change is a real threat to our livelihoods, our future food supply, our freshwater resources, global geopolitical stability, and the natural systems that enable life on Earth. But appeals to our head are useless, when we are currently battling a predominant narrative within our western culture that implicitly says it’s okay and quite normal to use the gifts of nature as our own personal “resources” regardless of the dire consequences, and exploit marginalised people and their environments in far off lands in order to have cheap goods. This is the narrative of modern capitalism, the mental model that underpins our economies. The sense of our personal inability to make a dent in this deep, pervasive narrative results in feelings of anger, despair, grief, guilt and feelings of inertia.
But the good news is that we do know how we might actually create lasting systems change that addresses the root causes of our problems. We need to combine the obvious and tangible impacts of green businesses, social enterprise, and progressive social and environmental policy with several other other strategies:
The adoption of models of change that encourage cooperation, communication and understanding between diverse stakeholders who may have vastly different interests and points of view
The transparent acknowledgement of skewed power dynamics within our organisations, governments, and communities, whether formal or informal, and dismantling of those power dynamics through better models of decision-making, leadership and relationship building. It is key that power imbalances are removed without the redirection of those imbalances towards new groups or individuals. It does no good for a new group of society to take on new power and agency, only to pass on their former oppression to somebody else.
The deep and unapologetic questioning of the narratives that underpin our lives, combined with the curious and non-judgemental examination of how they are or aren’t serving us. The first step is awareness. From there, we can work towards developing new societal narratives that better work for people and the planet.
These changes will not happen overnight, and because they are much harder to measure than the structural shifts that support systems change, a great deal of patience, faith and trust is required. These changes represent the deeply personal work of examining how we relate to one another and the very essence of how we think. But we don’t always have to do this work alone. The collective awakening that many people around the world have had this year as we’ve experienced a global pandemic, can serve as a catalyst for change. Already, we are questioning many of the underlying narratives upon which our lives, our countries, and our global economy is built.
It is hard work, but ultimately necessary. Without these deep transformational and relational changes, our efforts to create lasting change through policy, philanthropy, charitable work, conscious business, or the next big “world-changing” technology, are little more than an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Alina Siegfried is a storyteller, narrative strategist, spoken word artist and systems change advocate based in Wellington, New Zealand. She is passionate about the use of personal stories and narrative to shift culture towards a more regenerative, equitable and just world. Alina is currently writing her first book which is an inspirational memoir on the use of storytelling and narrative to support systems change. You can learn more on her website and sign up here for book updates. This article originally appeared on Medium.
As a consultant on monetary policy, I spent much of my career questioning bankers about the authenticity of their balance sheets. Tell me, how do you justify the value of this asset? Why do you say these reserves are worth what you claim because — look, here’s evidence to the contrary!
The thing that alarmed me most in these eyeball-to-eyeball discussions was this: the social demand for commodities is regularly claimed by banks as having a direct link with the ecological supply of resources which are extracted, produced and sold as commodities. It bothers me that the ecological debt of civilization continues to mount, yet no one is actually keeping track of it — certainly not through the reserve assets itemized by banks in their portfolios.
Consider how strange this is: the demand for goods measured by price is being used as a proxy for the relative accessibility of non-renewable resources — yet the increasing scarcity of things like fossil fuels isn’t showing up at the gas pump. Same for water and rare minerals, which are not being valued according to their declining accessibility. Nor is it showing up in the balance sheets of banks, stock trading companies and insurance companies.
Why is supply and demand, which is widely celebrated as a natural principle of economic balance, unable to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain?
I began to see this as a gigantic problem of misallocation within our economic system, which is far deeper than sustainable accounting or reporting. The greater challenge is to reconceive and readjust the modern system of economic valuation, in particular, the economists’ idea that it’s based on a kind of universal equilibrium. So, let’s start by asking, why is supply and demand, which is widely celebrated as a natural principle of economic balance, unable to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain, or to ensure that they are allocated to meet the needs of the population living in that environment?
In both classical and Keynesian economics, the balance between the supply of a quantity of a good or service and the demand for it is determined by the price of this quantity. What is counted, on the supply side of the equation, are the production costs, which include labor, capital, energy and materials, the expectations of future prices and suppliers, and the technology and technological advances that are used in production. Production costs are determined by the relative availability or scarcity of the amount of material and energy resources which comprises these products. Yet there is no consideration of an ecological dimension. Even the rate at which people and their organizations may harvest or use a particular resource within its regenerative capacity is viewed as the production of an economic yield, not an ecological yield.
Conversely, the demand-side measures consumer income, tastes and preferences, prices of related goods and services, expectations about future prices and incomes, and the number of potential consumers. Rather than reflecting actual human need, demand is a measure of individual consumption at the point of sale. Only the price at which a person is willing to pay for something is reflected in demand, reflecting how much cash or credit a person has. What’s not measured is the individual’s accessibility to air, water, food, health, safety, shelter, security, love, belonging or inclusion — no subjective expression of need, and no social or ecological dimension.
What’s not measured is the individual’s accessibility to air, water, food, health, safety, shelter, security, love, belonging or inclusion.
This framework for market equilibrium is also applied on a broader scale. Just as the supply-demand formula is based on a functional connection between producers and consumers in microeconomics, the supply-demand ledger is used in macroeconomics to express the transactional relationship between lenders and borrowers. A familiar example is the application of the supply-and-demand system to aggregate supply and aggregate demand in finance and banking. Here, the equilibrium between the money supply and the demand for money are expressed through an interest rate, which represents the price that is charged for money.
Once again, this is a measure of a certain kind of balance within the marketplace, but not in the broader relationship between ecology and the population. So, banks routinely have ecologically unsustainable values in their reserves, yet this is never called into question in a system which establishes equilibrium through supply and demand. When all that is accounted in the standard supply-demand equation is the price of a particular resource or good, or an interest rate which represents the price of money, neither the resource preservation and replenishment rates or the human need for the resource are measured at all.
Adding to the problem: this misalignment of value has encouraged supply-and-demand to become deeply politicized. On the one hand, classical and neo-classical economists say that ‘supply creates its own demand’. This encourages policies of greater investment and production through individual initiative and less government intervention in the economy, while rationalizing endless resource extraction, production and growth.
On the other hand, Keynesian economists say that boosting wages and purchasing power generates effective demand. This encourages policies of shared investment and production through a government’s intervention in the economy, but entirely ignores the destructive competition which this creates between available resources and the needs of a population for those resources. Here, Keynesian economics is no different from classical economics: both assume that meeting human needs is dependent on extractive production, expanding population, continuous demand, personal income, rising consumption and the infinite bounty of the environment.
Neither of these approaches to supply and demand reflect the constraints to the productive capacity of Earth’s resource base.
Neither choice is correct because the market equation misrepresents reality. Neither of these approaches to supply and demand —in which the quantity demanded by consumers or borrowers is directly balanced by the quantity that firms or banks wish to supply — reflect the constraints to the productive capacity of Earth’s resource base and the maximum size of a population which can be maintained indefinitely within an area.
As a result, planetary civilization has reached the point where these economic proxies for ecological balance have created an enormous misalignment. Human population is using resources food, water, energy and rare minerals faster than Nature can replenish them to meet human needs.
Our epistemology, our ideology and our accounting systems are to blame for this massive market failure. First, we must stop conceiving of the connection between resources and human needs as a ‘supply chain’. Instead, let’s reconsider the relationship of ecology with population.
The threshold of available resources and the allocations of those resources to meet the needs of a population are actually opposing forces which continuously counteract one another. This same dynamic principle exists between every species and its environment: natural organisms react to changes in their ecosystem and make adjustments to survive. Instead of supply creating its own demand, or demand being dependent on a personal income, the demonstration of need creates its own supply and is automatically met. This is how it works in nature and and in the biology of the human body; this is also how it must work in human society.
The needs of a population for its resource support systems must be given a new empirical basis in policy. This begins with a little reorientation. What is presently on the supply-side as the extraction and production of resources is redefined as the self-organization of resources within the limits of the planet to sustainably regenerate those resources. And what is now on the demand side as a measure of income or purchasing capacity is redefined as the self-sufficiency of people in meeting their needs through their use of these resources.
When supply becomes an ecological value and demand becomes a value of human need, the new dynamics of society as a living system begins.
When supply becomes an ecological value and demand becomes a value of human need, ’build it and they will come’ is transformed into ‘demonstrate the need, and it will be met’ and the new dynamics of society as a living system begins.
Now, instead of a crude approximation for economic equilibrium, we have an actual measure of the cooperative activities of people using resources to meet their needs — the balance which an ecology can optimally 'carry' or sustain to meet the needs of its people.
This is biophysical economics — measuring the replenishment of both renewable and non-renewable resources and enabling society to manage them to sustain their yield for the human population. With this integrated accounting, we’ll generate an entirely new expression of sustainability, living and working together within the metabolism of society.
James B. Quilligan is a political economist and the Managing Director of Economic Democracy Advocates. He is a member of Systems Change Alliance’s advisory board and has been an economic advisor to countless heads of state, including Chancellor of Germany, Willy Brandt, and Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme.
Spoken word: Warm, funny, stark, harsh and flowing. Performers speaking truths that we shun as taboo. Words and images that roll together and bring a tear to your eye, a lump to your throat.
A potent platform that pulls back the curtains to look at inconvenient truths and explore possible solutions; ways forward; gifts of hope.
Searching for spoken word poetry on YouTube is like opening a Pandora’s box. Be ready to hear some of the most raw and real performance art out there. Often addressing touchy topics such as social justice, racism, and gender, with uncensored tongues, this art form is not about being pretty or comfortable.
In his poem, ‘A poet’s plea to save our planet’, spoken word artist, In-Q, assesses the ecological crisis and contemplates the shift that we might achieve if we change the language that we use around our relationship to the planet.
In-Q, or In-Question, is a Californian poet and songwriter who is said to have brought poetry to pop culture. He describes his poetry as a reflection of his own experiences and life lessons.
Alina Siegfried, whose article recently featured here, is a writer and performance poet aka Ali Jacs. Her thought-provoking work weaves ancient storytelling and poetry to address modern-day social, ecological and economic challenges.
This poem, Humanity Stands, is an invitation to step onto the precipice and take a leap into the future that humanity can carve. A glimpse towards what is possible if we, collectively, make the necessary choices for a brighter, cooperative, just future for ourselves, as part of a flourishing natural world.
I will soon be chatting with Alina about her creative work and its potential as a tool for systems change. Stay tuned to our website and social media feeds for more info on the upcoming interview.
When I started delving into the world of youth slam poetry, such as the international Brave New Voices Festival, hosted in the US, I was blown away by the power unleashed through the voices of young people from around the world. Here is an example of the moving ferocity of a group performance.
Also hailing from Aotearoa, Ngā Hinepūkōrero are a group of four young Māori women (three of whom appear in this video) who use spoken word poetry to bring light to the social realities that their people face.
In this piece, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, they speak to the shattering history of the indigenous Maori community and the loss and revival of their native language.
Like its ancestor, oral storytelling, spoken word poetry is striking in its simplicity. Nothing more is needed other than the speaker and the voice. Through meaning and tone, it speaks in an unequivocal language that is not just understood by the mind, but felt by the ancient heart of the listener.
There are so many more poets and their words to discover that I am sure we will be revisiting this medium with more posts and events.
If you are a performance poet tackling systems change topics, we want to hear from you. Share you work on our Community Forum or get in touch at [email protected].
As we around the world begin to slowly emerge from whatever form of COVID-19 lockdown we have been inhabiting for the past few months, and start to re-integrate into “normal life”, it is increasingly clear to many of us that nothing will ever be normal again.
We’ve all been forced into the things we thought were impossible, and captured a glimpse of what a new story of our world might look like.
So many of our old narratives that underpin the excuses we give ourselves for not implementing change have fallen away.
Halt global air travel to see what sort of reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions might be possible? — Impossible!
Cut out the daily commute, allow employees to work at home, and trust that they will do their best to work? — Impossible!
Take the cars off our streets to see if the birds and other wildlife might return to our cities? — Impossible!
And now we find that all those wild, out-there ideas of how we can lessen our impact on this planet, lead less busy lives, and spend more time with our families have been thrust upon us in a grand, global experiment. As the stories of our daily lives have been re-written, we’ve noticed a few things along the way:
Parents of young children aside (bless us all), employees who had the luxury of taking their jobs online and working from home did quite well after the initial shock, with many reluctant to return to the office.
Birdlife did indeed return to the cities and coyotes were seen wandering the streets of San Francisco.
But as we begin to come back to our daily routines, how much are we slipping into old patterns? How committed are we to living into a new story that we’ve caught a brief glimpse of? Do we even notice or recognise that we are either perpetuating old stories and narratives every day or re-writing new ones, with everything that we do?
Storyteller and mythologist Martin Shaw suggests that we have “lost the fundamental house-making skills for how to welcome a story”:
“I think we are losing the capacity to behold them. We see them for sure — our eyes swiftly scan the glow of the computer screen for the bones of the tale, we audition them for whatever contemporary polemic is forefront in our minds, and then we impatiently move on. It is not hard then to suggest that we are fundamentally askew in our approach: we are simply not up to the intelligence of what the story is offering. Our so-called sophistication has our sensual intelligence in a head-lock and is literally squeezing the life out of it.”
Martin Shaw
The bit that caught my attention in this passage is how we audition the stories we read for whatever polemic is at the forefront of our minds and then impatiently move on. How often do we scan stories online to see if they are in line with what we already believe? If we find they resonate with the narratives of our lives, we read on. If they come from a completely different point of view and we disagree, chances are that we will close the tab. Chances are, indeed, that we will never have opened that tab in the first place. There are after all, so many tabs to open. So many stories to read.
What Shaw is suggesting here is that in our fast paced, modern world, we have lost the capacity to deeply listen and really invite a story in. Once the revered system by which we communicated the most vital information with each other, story has lost its place and meaning. We pick and choose bits of it, look for the facts, decide which things we like and discard the rest. We shape the stories to fit our pre-existing beliefs and to play nicely with the ones that we already hold in our heads.
In the book that I’m currently writing, I’m exploring how the role of story and narrative can support systems change across a number of spheres. I’m finding that while some of the frames that we hold into which we slot the stories we come across are very hard to shift, baked into our neural circuitry, others are more fluid and can be oriented towards positive systems change if we stick to grounding our stories in our values.
While the coronavirus crisis has brought out much of the darker side of human nature, we have seen so many stories of solidarity, unity, compassion and kindness as mutual aid groups have cropped up to help elderly neighbours with grocery and medicine deliveries, underground networks mobilised to provide face masks for healthcare workers, and people organised childcare for essential workers.
So with a glimpse of a new version of how the world could be, what will we do with these new stories that have been shown to us so fleetingly?
American is erupting in riots following the killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, as people are no longer willing to let the underlying narrative of white supremacy stand. People are concerned about sweeping privacy reforms and the acceleration of location tracking that is being included as part of the COVID response. While it may be a necessary evil at this point, we need to be vigilant about data sovereignty and how long these measures extend, as Naomi Klein’s book and documentary “The Shock Doctrine” suggests that these are legitimate fears, with many neoliberal policies being pushed through following times of disaster.
Providing a counter view and a more uplifting and inspirational read in these times, Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell” is more fitting for where we want to go. Through telling the stories of the aftermath of five different disasters across the span of 100 years and three countries, she highlights how disasters can bring out the best in human cooperation and unity, providing “a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become.”
My suspicion is that to be truly ready to embrace a new story of humanity, we need to start listening to each other’s stories — really listening. Listening with the express intention of understanding, rather than waiting patiently for our turn to refute a point or to present an alternative view. Without trying to make what the other person is saying fit the narrative that you already hold inside your head.
How else are we going to reconcile our individual stories to build a cohesive narrative of how to move forward together in a way that unites our global society? Tell me a story.
Alina Siegfried is a storyteller, narrative strategist, spoken word artist and systems change advocate based in Wellington, New Zealand. She is passionate about the use of personal stories and narrative to shift culture towards a more regenerative, equitable and just world. Alina is currently writing her first book which is an inspirational memoir on the use of storytelling and narrative to support systems change. You can learn more on her website and sign up here for book updates. This article originally appeared on Medium.
Excerpt from the ‘Social Dimension’ of Gaia Education’s online course in ‘Design for Sustainability’
A growing number of people are recognizing that in order to secure the clean air, water and food that we need to healthfully survive, we have to become guardians of the places where we live. People sense the loss in not knowing our neighbours and natural surroundings, and are discovering that the best way to take care of ourselves and to get to know our neighbours, is to protect and restore our region.
First Continental Bioregional Congress
Building community is one of the most crucial tasks that every group, every intentional or local community should undertake to enable the collective being that animates it to express itself with all its power in a rich and transforming vision. The question now is: where does the community process end?
Does it end with our own group and from there we confront other groups and compete with them for resources, knowledge, or an even more dominant position in the market, in the society, and in the world? Certainly not!
While many early ecovillage projects saw themselves as ‘lifeboats’ of a civilizational shipwreck, almost all of them have understood how impossible this scenario would be. Either we create sustainable, thriving, and regenerative future for all, where nobody is left behind, or we will not succeed as a species in the planetary era.
Most mature ecovillages in many parts of the world have over the last two decades developed extensive outreach projects to their local regions, have learned to speak the language and build partnerships with their regional and national governments and through the Global Ecovillage Network have even become a consultative influence as an NGO reporting into and supporting the United Nations process.
Jonathan Dawson, former president of GEN, has offered a new metaphor for ecovillages, from lifeboats to “yogurt culture”, transforming the milk or their regions into nutritious yogurt. Another way of expressing this is ecovillage and sustainable community culture spreads like a health-generating virus. Regenerative culture change initiatives spread infectious health.
It is impossible to create or sustain a ‘sustainable community’ in isolation. Many of the synergies and win-win design solutions that define regenerative cultures can only happen at the regional scale. So we need to start with sustainable communities but the process begins and does not end there.
Eventually when our group is formed and effective in its collaboration we need to expand our community vision beyond our own group, seeking ways to connect with other groups in our regional and/or global networks — including those groups that are usually under-represented like minority groups or non-human species.
We need to expand our spatial horizons from the local, to the regional and to the global and weave the networks of collaboration. Our work will also deepen by expanding our temporal horizons to those that have come before us (our ancestors and traditional wisdom cultures) who have left a lasting mark in a variety of small things that enrich our current lives and who’s traditional wisdom might hold part of the key to a regenerative and thriving future. In becoming conscious of who we are working for, less for ourselves and more for the future yet unborn generations we are reconnecting with the ancient wisdom of how to live wisely on this Earth.
Every group project that wants to be really sustainable, and strives to strengthen with its vision the Web of Life, should consider these two important dimensions of sustainability:
A horizontal dimension where we create living networks with other groups, other projects, and other communities in our local, regional, and/or global environment; and
A vertical dimension where we acknowledge our vital connection with history, with all living beings that were here before us, and with all living beings that will be here after us.
In the design framework that supports Gaia Education’s approach to design for sustainability we call this awareness and conscious co-creation across multiple spatial scales (local, regional, global) and temporal scales (the distant past, the present, and the future) scale-linking design.
While we are engaging in sustainable community design to take a stance and offer practical solutions in the transition towards a sustainable human presence on Earth — creating a sustainable world for all — many of the patterns and processes we need to create in the transition towards increased resilience and sustainability cannot be created at the scale of a small human community of a few dozen or a few hundred people, they will require collaboration between such communities to create these patterns at the scale of their local bioregions.
Just like the ecovillage culture has changed its metaphor from ‘life-boats’ to transformative ‘yogurt culture’, most sustainable community and ecovillage initiatives have understood that to chase the dream of complete and isolated ‘self-sufficiency’ — that was so popular among the hippies of the 1970s — is a mistaken and impossible goal. In many ways this goal goes hand in hand with the story of separation and ‘life-boat’ thinking.
As we step into the cultural narrative of the story of interbeing and recognize our regional, national and global interdependence, we are learning to design and build scale-linked structures of increased local and regional ‘self-reliance’ aiming to meet basic needs within thriving regional economies that are elegantly adapted to the bio-cultural opportunities and challenges of our particular region.
A sustainable human civilization will emerge from the collaboration of diverse and regionally adapted regenerative cultures. These cultures will have a certain level of regional self-reliance with regard to basic needs like food, energy, education, health care and material goods. Their material cultures will be primarily but not exclusively based on regional production for regional consumption enabled by renewable-energy driven, circular economies that use regenerative regional bio-productivity rather than fossil materials and fuels as their resource base.
Life is structured as networks within networks linking across scales. Likewise a sustainable human presence on Earth will emerge from collaborative networks of communities within bioregional, national and global networks of collaboration.
In the past few decades, globalization and corporate capitalism have wreaked havoc on both the economy and the environment in many areas of the planet. As a countermeasure, many individuals and organizations work towards developing a more localized economy, be it a regional development plan based on coops, such as Mondragon, as buy local campaign with farmers markets in a small city, or as an eco-village project.
Indeed, there is a lot of talk about developing bioregional economies and self-sufficiency these days. So, what are some of the elemental features we need to include in planning such bioregional futures?
Firstly, self-sufficiency on a national or regional level cannot develop on its own, it needs to be part of a larger, integrated and decentralized economy.
Secondly, the term self-sufficient economic area does not imply isolation and inefficiency, such as in the case of the North Korean Juche Idea, developed by the late Kim Il-Sung as a form of political and economic self-reliance, a battered system which has both impoverished and isolated the country.
On the contrary, a self-sufficient economy means that economic activities within or across the borders of a country are maximized and well balanced. Furthermore, that exchange of goods and services between various regions take place in mutually beneficial ways, without draining wealth from either region.
A self-sufficient economic zone is an area with sufficient factors in common to create economic self-sufficiency and self-reliance. These factors are of two categories: economic and cultural. Among the economic factors are economic viability, common economic problems, natural resources to make the zone self-sufficient, etc.
Self-sufficient economy means that economic activities within or across the borders of a country are maximized and well-balanced.
Among the psychological and cultural factors are linguistic and cultural similarities. The common economic factors are necessary to ensure that the economic zone is viable, and the cultural factors are necessary to ensure that there are sufficient unifying sentiments among the people to work unitedly towards a common goal.
In a self-sufficient economic zone, it is imperative both the cultural heritage and the productive resources are under the control of local people so that corporations like Walmart or McDonald’s, for example, do not have free license to set up shop and compete with local stores and restaurants.
It is also important that the local language is encouraged, and that all economic decisions are administered by the people living in the area. Another vital objective of an economic zone is full employment for the people, and that the local population are given priority in this regard.
What About Immigration?
Since the movement of people will not be restricted, people from outside the local area will be free to move in, as long as they choose to settle in the area and become part of its culture and economy. In general, migrant workers and illegal immigration are a sign of an imbalanced economy, often the result of free trade agreements between rich and less developed regions or countries. NAFTA, for example, the free trade agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada, devastated the Mexican small farm economy and resulted in millions of poor Mexicans migrating illegally to the US.
The criteria for who will be part of an economic zone is not based on ethnicity, but rather whether people have merged their individual interests with the interests of the economic zone they live and work in.
While a common language and a common culture bring people together, it is essential that humanist and color-blind sentiments prevail, so that discrimination based on color, language, ethnicity, or other narrow sentiments does not arise. Thus, the criteria for who will be part of an economic zone is not based on ethnicity, but rather whether people have merged their individual interests with the interests of the economic zone they live and work in.
Reducing Drainage of Wealth and Resources
A common problem all over the world today is that resources are drained from poor to rich areas. Therefore, drainage of wealth from one economic zone to other economic zones will have to be checked. In particular, the repatriation of profits from one zone to another should be tightly controlled. In this way, profits made in one region can be ploughed back into the same area—which is an important feature of developing more economic democracy—that local people are able to control their own local economy and resources.
Economic zones of this nature can develop areas that otherwise would be considered “uneconomic” or “inefficient.” Even if some zones initially are much less efficient than others, it is still more beneficial for society as a whole to ensure that economic activity is encouraged rather than if less developed areas are simply put out of business through free trade and global competition.
Free or Fair Trade?
In many places, natural and human resources are extremely underutilized because they are not sufficiently effective in competing with the highest producing areas of the world. As a consequence, large human and natural potentials are left untapped. From both a global and local perspective it is not efficient and balanced when only the high producing areas are developed, and the less developed regions are kept impoverished. It is much better for both the economy, society and the environment to maximize the potentials of all regions of the world; to make them all sustainable and self-sufficient.
In free trading zones the strongest producers and nations take advantage of the weaker ones, thereby creating higher profits in some places, reducing the welfare of people in some places while other areas become rich. This is evidenced in large economic systems, such as in the EU, which is engaged in EU-centric trade deals with poor countries, as well as in national economies, such as when corporations like Walmart wipe out the local retail competition.
Economically struggling nations can be allowed to compete with stronger nations by introducing customs barriers and tariffs. Such protectionism is an important and effective system to improve slow economies. In fact, that is how the rich nations themselves got rich. Due to current free trade deals favoring the already powerful, protections for the weak are often absent in the world economy. Therefore, we need fair trade, not the kind of “free trade” we have today.
While centralization is efficient in certain ways, such as in maximizing output with the least manpower, a centralized economy is very inefficient in other ways, as it often leaves vast areas undeveloped and many people underpaid or unemployed. The development of local sources of energy, water and agriculture is also important, whenever this is possible. Economic and cultural independence is augmented by energy, water and food independence.
Centralization vs Decentralization
Even if a region is currently undeveloped, and it would be easier for people to move to richer, more populous, urban areas, or easier for them to sell their local raw materials to the industrial areas, such a strategy will leave the area undeveloped and poor, its many human, economic, environmental and cultural potentials largely unsustainable.
Only when an area’s potentials are fully developed, and we have a balanced mix of sustainable, economic activities, will the area prosper. In the beginning, it is of course costly to industrialize an undeveloped area, but in the long run, it is the best and most sustainable way to spread sustainable development broadly. As the economy develops and communication improves, economic zones will, over time, grow and merge into larger areas.
In this prescient article written by a world renowned futurist in 2017, the election of Trump as US President is seen through the macrohistoric lens of the great thinkers of history: Sorokin, Sarkar, Khaldun, Spengler and Galtung. Is this the end of 500 years of capitalist domination and expansion? Is Trump presiding over the fall of the US empire? And is this therefore the beginning of a new era in which the pendulum shifts toward a more humane and more sustainable world? Read on and find out.
In the heady times of the late 1960s and early 1970s, many were certain that by 2020, the world would be dramatically different.
In Changing Images of Man, the landmark study by Joseph Campbell, Oliver Markley and Willis Harmon (1982), they noticed a marked shift in the image of what it meant to be human. This image, they argued, was leading, with reality soon or eventually to catch up. Wrote Campbell, Markley and Harmon, "When images 'lead' social development they are anticipatory, and provide direction for social change. When images are in this relation to society, they exert what Polak (1973) has termed a 'magnetic pull' toward the future (Polak, 1973). By their attractiveness and meaning they reinforce each movement which takes the society toward them, and thus they influence the social decisions which will bring them to realization" (Campbell et. al, 1982). The emerging image of the future, they argued was focused on: ecology and sustainability; gender equity and partnership; spirituality; a transformed post-material economic system that was focused on persons, nature, purpose as well as prosperity, a quadruple bottom line if you will. As well, as humans went to the space, they saw the Earth without national boundaries, without religious boundaries - environment became primary (Connor, 2009). Imagine, John Lennon suggested, " there's no countries ... no religion too ... no possession." (Lennon, n.d). We were to move from materialistic man focused on work and the factory to the self-realized human, living for the greater good.
Demographer Paul Ray shared this perspective, arguing that the data was supporting, the rise of new demographic group, which he called the cultural creatives.
There has been a third force growing in society, unnoticed in the bitter rhetoric about declining values. The appearance of the “cultural creatives” is about healing the old splits: between inner and outer, spiritual and material, individual and society. The possibility of a new culture centers on reintegration of what has been fragmented by modernism: self-integration and authenticity; integration with community and connection with others around the globe, not just at home; connection with nature and learning to integrate ecology and economy; and a synthesis of diverse views and traditions, including the philosophies of East and West.
(Hurley, 1999)
For Ray and others, this new demographic group is neither traditional (rural, patriarchy, church based) nor modernist (individual autonomy plus financial gain). This group supports the changing image of what it means to be human identified by Campbell, Markley and Harmon decades ago. They have moved from 4% of the population to possibly, as Tibbs argues, to over 50% in the mid 2020s (Tibbs, 2011). While the desired values/futures of environment, social inclusion,spirituality, and corporate social responsibility are critical, the most important explanatory variable was gender. In the words of Ray, "the cultural creatives phenomenon... to a very large extent, is about women’s values and concerns coming forth into the public domain for the first time in history (Ray, 2002). The recent global women's march is certainly an indicator of this demographic shift (Sloban, 2017).
The broader argument made by these thinkers (and many others, such as Hazel Henderson (Waghorn, 2013), Riane Eisler (Eisler, 2007), Roar Bjonnes (Bjonnes & Hargreaves, 2016) and others associated with the New Age Movement is that leading sectors of society imagine and wish to create a world based on: (1) Ecological sustainability, moving from man over nature to humans with nature; (2) Gender cooperation and partnership, moving away from patriarchy; (3) Glocal governance (global and local simultaneously) moving away from the nation-state as defining; (4) Social inclusion, continuing the long progress of human and nature rights; and (5) Spiritual practice and inclusion i.e. moving away from religion as exclusion.
But alongside this changing image, there has been realist politics. While some commentators such as Boulding (Morrrison, 2005) and Milojevic (2005) have imagined a gentler world, cold and hot wars have continued. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created yet another proxy war with the USA funding Afghani and Pakistani freedom fighters. The "marriage" of Reagan and General Zia led to the birth of the Taliban and the sibling Al-Qaeda. This process allowed extremists to flourish and destroy secular and progressive society in Pakistan. Eventually, through the war in Iraq, another sibling was created - Daesh. And with the weaponization of refugees through the "evil" genius of Putin and Assad - creating conditions to force them out of Syria - the proxy war has now entered Europe. The response from Europe has been tempered, but still the rise of the right - with May in England, Orban in Hungary, and others, such as Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders in Holland- creates the possibility of the disintegration of the European Union. The future no longer looks so rosy.
And then steps in Trump.
How to read him and the oncoming futures? Certainly, if anyone is happy about the current state of affairs, then we should remember Francis Fukayama and Osama Bin Laden. One imagined a clash of civilization and the other laboured to create the clash - their vision is now our reality. Indeed, we are in the middle of - in evolutionary terms (to paraphrase the late Dr. Chaudry Inayatullah)[i] not a clash of civilizations, but a lack of civilization.
Was the Trump victory because the cultural creatives did not vote? Was it his ability to suggest to the unemployed that if they voted for him, they too could become wealthy and famous? Was it his ability to champion of the great wall before the forces of social inclusion - the demographic shift in the USA - could empower (Cohn & Caumont, 2016)?i.e. to hold up the last white male standing? Was it his ability to speak in a world of alternative facts? (Rutenberg, 2017). Was it the framing of Clinton as the crooked, untrustworthy female - the witch - and the FBI as the collective saviour? Causation is certainly complex. We explore the emergence and futures of Trump and populism through the lenses of epistemology and macrohistory.
Epistemology
Reading number one is epistemological.
In the pre-modern, words were ontologically real, i.e. they did not describe reality, they were reality, and thus the religious become deeply upset when their text is attacked because they feel they are attacked - the body of the collective is harmed.
In contrast, in the modern, words describe reality, and thus we seek to find reality based on evidence and counter-evidence. Words and reality have rules. Following those rules leads to greater efficacy. Facts still matter even if they change over long periods of time (or new theories reinterpret the data). Poststructuralists and many others sought to challenge not facts per se but the context of facts, that the facts discovered were based on already decided paradigms (paraphrasing, Heidegger), that they were historical and contextual. And thus the need not to dismiss facts, but as critical theorist Michael Shapiro, using Foucault has argued, the need to focus on the price or the costs of reality claims (Shapiro, 1992). Each reality claim leads to a particular future.
The Causal layered analysis approach has argued that facts are real, but contextualized by systems nested in worldviews and deep narratives (Inayatullah & Milojevic, 2015). Social change works by maximizing the ability to work at many levels. It is facts plus narrative. Trump et al, seeing an opening within the world of the multiple, have decided not to negotiate reality by deeper understandings of the other, but strategically focus on words that gain real power. In themselves, facts are not real, only power over others is. Thus the recent debate over the numbers attending his inauguration. Instead of accepting the low numbers, they claim that the inauguration was the largest in history, in any nation. The Trump team offers alternative facts. They throw out the baby with the bath water, using poor epistemology to leave an ontological future in disarray.
Moving to deep structure, the grand thinker Pitirim Sorokin (Sorokin, 1957) spoke of this. While ideational systems focus on meaning/purpose based on spiritual knowledge claims, sensate systems focus on fidelity to the empirical, and mixed systems used both, there was a fourth alternative. In this alternative, no one agrees on anything since facts are no longer relevant, everyone lives in their own self-referential or worse (tribal reality). However, Sorokin brilliantly concludes, this fourth alternative has only one implication- the end of society, since we cannot agree on anything. Disintegration ensures.
And thus, in that chaos, there is a will to power. Concluding this section, it is Trump's ability to bend reality - as he learned on Reality Television - that makes him the President of the USA. Power becomes primary. Any reason to gain it suffices, since he himself holds the greatest good.
Macrohistory
Reading number two is macrohistorical. Macrohistorians such as Ibn Khaldun, Pitirim Sorokin, P.R. Sarkar and Johan Galtung suggest we do not become easily swayed by current events. There are deeper patterns at play.
For Khaldun the deeper pattern is the decline. While he wrote in the 14th century, we can easily use his analysis to to understand the futures of the USA, the decline of Pax Americana, just as the Soviet Union qua communism disappeared so will the USA. This does not mean that the United States will not have economic and military power, but that legitimacy will decline, the image of the future will no longer be of the American male as central in the global imagination of hierarchy and power. Moreover, attempts to make America great again will only worsen the decline since the external world has changed and the narrative is no longer functional. Once the cyclical decline has set in, a certain inevitability results. As Johan Galtung has argued, the contradictions are too many and too strong (for example, between the financial and the real economy; between the USA and the rest of the world (Galtung, 2009). The narrative of American exceptionalism, of "frontier:, of endless growth ensures that the Titanic cannot change its course. And when there are moments of grandeur, Khaldun appropriately responds.
Unity has often disappeared (when the empire has grown senile) and pomp has taken the place it occupied in the souls of men... At the end of an empire, there often also appears some (show of) power that gives the impression that the senility of the dynasty has been made to disappear. It lights up brilliantly just before it is extinguished, like a burning wick the flame of which leaps up brilliantly a moment before it goes out, giving the impression it is just starting to burn, when in fact it is going out.
Ibn Khaldun, 1958, Galtung & Inayatullah, 1997
Thus, one macrohistorical explanation of Trump is that he is the predictable indicator of late decline, the Spenglerian decline of the West. Remembering Spengler here, the indicator of decline is that "money emerges victorious over ... values “ (Etzioni & Etzioni-Halevy, 1964, 22). At the beginning, democracy is controlled by the intellect, soon however, money buys votes. Money and democracy and destroyed from within. And in Spengler's words: "Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect." (Etzioni & Etzioni-Halevy, 1964, 23). An indicator of this is Trump's cabinet, the richest in USA history, with seven of the picks worth 11 billion US$ (Goldman, 2016).
While Khaldun and Spengler, offer the cyclical, Sorokin takes us to the pendulum. His brilliant insight is the systems or coherent social realities move back and forth between the two poles of the pendulum. In contrast, are those who see the future as linear, a continuation of more of the same, but better. Within the framework of the linear, the evidence collected suggests that the rise will continue. However, Sorokin posits that this is not the case since anytime we focus on a particular dimension of reality, other aspects become disowned, until there is a marked pendulum shift, for example, between centralization and decentralization; belief systems focused on truth or many truths; or uni-culturalism and multiculturalism. Sorokin posits that the pendulum is the norm. And thus from the current sensate (materialistic, individualistic, growth oriented) we see the return to the Idealistic, as evidenced by the earlier Campbell, Markley, Harmon study as well as the extensive literature pointing to a global transition to a different type of world - green, gender partnership, glocal governance (Inayatullah, 2017 and Inayatullah, 2012). however, this emerging idealistic future denies the realist: the world of power, of money, of pleasure - of sensate reality. While Sorokin has argued that the most likely long term 100 year future is a grand shift from the sensate to the idealistic, the rise of Trump could be seen as mini-reversal back i.e. Obama went too far towards inclusion within the US narrative of the survival of the fittest, and thus Trump is a logical pendulum swing.
In any case, for Sorokin these moves back and forth are the norm, not linear movements in any particular direction. Rather, we see moves toward more human rights and dignity (progressive and idealistic) and then a pendulum return to racialist descriptions of which group is above and which by nature below i.e in the colloquial language of today: the revenge of the white male.
Thus, while in the short run Trump is the reversal to Obama (and multiculturalism), in the longer term, Trump could be seen as the last of the sensate leaders, as he is fully sensate, totally embodying sensate civilization (reality tv, alternative facts, sexist, hierarchy based, external appearance oriented) - the last swing to the extreme before the pendulum shift to an idealistic future or the possible integration of sensate and idealistic.
But why would it swing away from the sensate given how much sensate civilization can offer?
For Sorokin, writing generations ago:
When any socio-cultural system enters the stage of its disintegration, the following four symptoms of the disintegration appear and grow in it: first, the inner self-contradictions of an irreconcilable dualism in such a culture; second, its formlessness - a chaotic syncretism of undigested elements taken from different cultures; third, a quantitative colossalism - mere growing at the cost of qualitative refinement; and fourth, a progressive exhaustion of its creativeness in the field of great and perennial values. In addition to all the other signs of disintegration, these four symptoms of disintegration have already emerged and are rampant in this contemporary sensate culture of ours.
Our culture in its present sensate phase is full of irreconcilable contradictions. It proclaims equality of all human beings; and it practices an enormous number of intellectual, moral, mental, economic, political, and other equalities. It proclaims "the equality of opportunity" in theory; in practice it provides practically none. It proclaims "democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people"; in practice it tends to be more and more an oligarchy or a plutocracy or a dictatorship of this or that faction. It stimulates an expansion of wishes and wants, and it inhibits their satisfaction.
It proclaims social security and a decent minimum of living conditions for everyone, even as it is progressively destroying security for all and showing itself incapable of eliminating unemployment or of giving decent conditions to anyone. It strives to achieve the maximum of happiness for the maximum number of human beings, but it increasingly fails in that purpose. It advertises the elimination of racial, class, religious, and other group hatreds, while in fact it increasingly seethes with group antagonism of every kind: racial, national, state, religious, class and others. The unprecedented explosion of internal disturbances and wars of the twentieth century is an incontrovertible evidence of that failure. It condemns egotists of all kinds and boasts of the socialization and humanization of everything and everybody; in reality, it displays endless, unbridled greed, cruelty, egotism, and avarice of individuals as well as of groups, beginning with innumerable lobbying and pressure groups and ending throughout economic, political, occupational, religious, state, family, and other groups (Sorokin, 1941).
What he noticed in the 1940s has not disappeared, indeed, it has become increasingly accentuated. But wouldn't it continue if it is meeting the needs of the many. It is here we turn to the Indian macrohistorian P.R. Sarkar. He argues that the system - more and more - is unable to meet the needs of the many.
Sarkar offers an alternative approach, but with the same conclusion. For him, there are four classes of power, four epistemes or ways of knowing the world. The worker, the warrior, the intellectual and the capitalist. Currently, and generally, while there is some variation amongst collectivities throughout the world, we are at the end of the capitalist era. Capitalists generally rule using the skills of the intellectuals - for strategy - and the warriors, to keep discipline, extracting labour from workers. However, as they are unable to discipline themselves, to stop themselves, the capitalist continue to accumulate wealth until all "become their boot lickers." (Sarkar, 1984). Thus that eight males have the same wealth as 50% of the world population comes as no surprise (Mullany, 2017). It is clearly an indicator, for Sarkar, that mobility of money has slowed down. Money is not moving, but rather accumulating in a few sites (Sarkar, 1987).
Thus, the dramatic concentration and immobility of money is seen as the end of the capitalist era. That a capitalist himself ascends to the presidency, to power, illustrates that there is longer any need to hide the power of capital. Disguise is not needed. Indeed, it becomes the only desired image of the future. A particular worldview totally dominates - ideas, honor, and work disappear, what matters is the accumulation and its display. All wish to become like Trump - he is aspirational. And yet has many have pointed out, all cannot become like Trump - the contradictions are too great, and thus, Trump signifies the end of the end of the Pax Americana, indeed, perhaps, the end of the capitalist era. For Sarkar, whether through Artificial intelligence ending work, peer to peer ending inefficiencies and the middle man, the sharing economy creating vast new wealth through enhanced efficiencies and sharing of power or through workers destroying in violent revolutions, the edifice of capitalism, the current era will end, sooner than later.
Even if this too far or too dramatic a pronouncement - there are always alternative futures, counter-revolutions (the new technological revolutions could create a new Artificial-intelligence led capitalism and concentration of wealth and power) , clearly as pointed out Trump signifies the end of an era. In an excellent article on California as the future, the argument made by Tim Rutten is that it is not the vision of Trump that is the future, but his opposite, the state of California. California is the future of the USA and possibly the world in that: (1). No single 'race" dominates; (2) It is bi-lingual; (3). Its economy works, it now the sixth largest economy in the world; (4) International trade leads to more jobs with the weak not thrown away; (5). And there is significant investment in new technologies such as solar, the sharing economy, i.e., innovation that creates new wealth (Rutten, 2016). And California is preparing to challenge the Trump agenda (Daniels, 2017).
But can't the cyclical or the pendulum be denied through the linear, through progress? Hasn't this been the brilliance of the rise of the West. Certainly, but (1) progress qua linear means more and more rights for more people and Trump denies progress qua social inclusion by excluding females, migrants, and beginning trade wars thus hurting the growing Asian middle class. (2) Isn't progress about merit? Yes, but Trump denies merit instead offers positions to relatives, to family, to those closest to him. He evokes not the linear rise of the West but the feudalism of kinship. (3) Isn't progress about science and technology. Yes, but Trump dismisses science and technology, particularly climate change science and medical science. Thus, the exact tools needed to ensure that the cycle or the pendulum are transcended, are denied, rubbished. The linear jump thus becomes nearly impossible.
Four Futures
What then for the future? What are the possibilities? Based on the above analysis, four futures appear possible.
Scenario 1 - Macrohistory and structure
The future is clear. Trump is the indicator of the end of American hegemony and perhaps the end of the Capitalist system. This does not mean that the sky is clear; rather, hegemonic transitions are brutal (Wallerstein, 2004). The end of a five hundred year economic system only accentuates the dramatic turbulence ahead. Thus, we began with the notion that Campbell, Markley, and Harmon et al were horribly wrong about the world of 2020. But by using macrohistory, we conclude with the opposite. They were perfectly correct. The end is not near, the end is here. This creates the second scenario.
Scenario 2 - Agency, first
Structure becomes so because of human agency. For our macrohistorians, patterns become real through evolution, through our behavior, our practice.. Cultural creatives not only challenge Trump et al through demonstrations, they create the new framework toward a different type of world. A far gentler economic system with far greater equity. Advances in artificial intelligence coupled with universal basic income ensure a soft landing, and it is not so much the end of capitalism but certainly the end of the factory. Efforts to mitigate climate change and other international crisis lead to greater global governance. Global skies allow movement with strong regulation to ensure safety, fairness, and prosperity for all.
Scenario 3 - A Mini-shift
We are not part of a grand shift, but these are mini-pendulum swings and mini-declines. The polarization we are witnessing now is merely superficial. The slow, protracted nature of democratic governance ensures leaders like Trump can talk as much as they wish, but the system of checks and balances ensures that they can only move forward in slow steps. The plane does not take off the ground, there is no real turbulence. Just as Obama led to Trump; Trump leads to Elizabeth Warren or another similar leader to the American presidency. Brexit disappears in importance, and the Western world continues slowly as the threat from terrorism recedes (ageing begins to occur in the Middle East and North Africa, thus reducing the number of young, unemployed, angry men) (Inayatullah 2016). Asia continues to economically rise, indeed, takes-off.
And as with all good scenario work, we do not know the fourth, that is the outlier; hard to imagine from the terms of the present. But lurking, changing how we travel.
What should we do then, given the map ahead. Let us conclude by returning to epistemology and macrohistory.
For Foucauldians, the task is always the same - ensure power has no place to hide. We should not treat any reality as given; rather we see it as constructed. We challenge categories, ensuring that the price of any truth claim is investigated.
From Ibn Khaldun, in the decline, it is crucial to identify the Bedouins (1958). They are outside the system, challenging political and normative power. Understanding them, and aligning with them is wise. In the current system, are these the cultural creatives, the forces of holism that Markely, Ray et al have identified? Or?
From Sorokin, once one can understand the pendulum, one is not, remembering Gramsci, excited by rubbish. Short and long term strategy means not being swayed the politics of the immediate, and to use the swings of the pendulum wisely.
From Sarkar, the task is multifold. First, in times of great change, spiritual practice (as defined as inclusion, meditation, and social service) is a must as this keeps the mind balanced. Second, the goal is not to focus on particular capitalists, but to help create a transition to a new global economic system - for him this is PROUT - a new framework focused on gender cooperation, neo-humanism (humanism plus the rights of nature and technology), a maxi-mini balanced economy, and global governance (Sarkar, 1987; Inayatullah, 2017). The transition, while local, is ultimately global - new institutions of global governance. Trump is one of many indicators taking us to a different future.
That women are leading the challenge to Trump in the USA fortifies the argument made earlier by Campbell, Markey, Harmon, Anderson, Tibbs, and Sarkar (Slobon, 2017 & Women March, n.d.). The future can be different.
Sohail Inayatullah is on the advisory board of Systems Change Alliance and is a Professor at Tamkang University, Taiwan; Inaugural Chair in Futures Studies, and instructor at Metafutureschool.org. The article originally appeared in the Journal of Futures Studies. March 2017, 21 (3): 27-36.
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The most serious threat facing our planet today is not the commonly conceived causes of global warming, water shortages, or pollution—these are simply the symptoms of an unsustainable economic system and culture. The main threat, and thus the main cause, is the materialistic lifestyle which the people of the ‘modernized’ countries have become accustomed to in the last decades and continue to take for granted. Our overconsumption of material goods, and the following depletion and destruction of natural resources, has a direct cause-and-effect relationship to the state of the natural world we live in.
Seen from the perspective of those living in the poor part of the world, the lifestyle of the privileged nations and the economic and political decisions it promotes, can be experienced as a direct threat to survival. In the words of Indian environmental activist, Vandana Shiva:
Greed and appropriation of other people's share of the planet's precious resources are at the root of conflicts, and the root of terrorism. A way of life for the 20 percent of the earth's people ~ who use 80 percent of the planet's resources will dispossess 80 percent of its people of their just share of resources and eventually destroy the planet. We cannot survive as a species if greed is privileged and protected and the economics of the greedy set the rules for how we live and die.[1]
The environmental problems facing our planet have the potential to drive us further apart, even destroy us, but they also have the potential to bring us closer together. In fact, if we do not come together as one planetary nation to solve these imminent problems, we may no longer have a planet to call our home much longer. Here are some of the most pressing environmental problems we need to solve in the immediate future:
Destruction of the earth’s natural habitats has at times been severe, at other times catastrophic. As mentioned above, two-thirds of the world’s ecosystem is being harmed by human activity, and the destruction is carried out at an ever increasing rate. According to the British newspaper, the Guardian, “The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.”[2]
That hazardous species is us. In addition to destroying the natural cycles that sustain life, we also actively introduce pollutants in water, air and earth, killing microorganisms and poisoning the planet. In nature, all waste functions as food for other organisms, which means that there is no waste without having an ecological function. Everything is recycled. However, with modern inventions, human beings have introduced artificial and toxic particles that nature is unable to utilize or break down. Radioactive waste, industrial waste products and many chemicals used every day belong to this group.
In his book The Future, Al Gore explains that, “the rapid growth of human civilization—in the number of people, the power of technology, and the size of the global economy—is colliding with approaching limits to the supply of key natural resources on which billions of lives depend, including topsoil and freshwater.” Topsoil and freshwater are singled out here because of their importance in meeting our most basic needs. However, as Gore also points out, limits on virtually all of the natural resources that we use are becoming apparent.
A recent major study, according to Greenpeace, indicates that if global temperatures increase 1.8-2° Celsius (3.2-3.6°F), a million species would be threatened with extinction over the next fifty years. Rapid CO2 emissions reductions on a global scale can remedy this situation, but currently there is not enough political will to enact the changes needed to stop this massive species holocaust. If temperatures rise even higher, even more species will be lost.
Of all the negative effects that are currently being caused by the collision of industry with the Earth“the single most important and threatening of this collision is the climate crisis.”[3] The climate crisis, an overwhelming majority of scientists believe, is being caused by the build-up of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, the main contributor to which is the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal.
However, the increase in the earth’s temperature is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to climate change, for this phenomenon causes a series of knock-on effects that are also potentially devastating. These include the disruptions from numerous weather and weather-related patterns in the environment. Southern Scandinavia, where I grew up, has experienced less snow cover, more rain and floods and even droughts in the past 20-30 years, as a direct effect of climate change. In many other parts of the world, other weather-related destructions, such has rising sea levels, storms, droughts, and typhoons are already beginning to impact people, plants and animals, and these natural disasters are only expected to intensify.
Barely three months before super-cyclone Haiyan ravaged parts of the Philippines in the fall of 2013 and gained notoriety as the strongest storm to hit land ever recorded, an article in the Geophysical Research Letter reported that the temperature in the Pacific Ocean has increased steadily since 1990. This area needs to be watched carefully, the report concluded, as devastating cyclones are likely to be formed here. [4] And the list goes on. Other serious threats to the global natural systems due to climate change include rising sea levels, which are already impacting many island nations, due to melting polar ice; acidification of the oceans due to increased carbon dioxide absorption; oxygen depletion in the oceans which could have devastating effects on ocean life; and increased droughts in some areas and increased flooding in others could severely affect the global food supply. As temperatures increase, the greater will be the threat to the environment and to the future of humanity.
One of the most serious aspects of the environmental crisis is the loss of bio-diversity. Losing a species is loss of life, ecological balance, as well as the loss of food, medicine and other scientific information that can potentially be useful in the future.
If current trends continue, the polar bear—a symbol of not only global habitat loss but also climate change and global pollution trends—will likely be gone by the end of the century. Global warming and the resulting melting ice sheets threatens the feeding habits of polar bears and dioxin pollution, caused by plastic waste in the oceans, threaten its mating habits.
If a country loses its food harvests due to natural disasters, it may cause famine and death. But as long as the knowledge of how to grow food is maintained, food harvests will eventually be restored. However, if the know-how as part of food production is lost, it can take generations before that knowledge is rediscovered.
Similarly, in the natural world, information is stored in the genetic code of an animal or a plant’s DNA. This information has taken millions of years to develop, and once it is irretrievably lost by the loss of a species, we cannot recreate it. Therefore, it is in our ethical, ecological and economic interest to preserve cultural and biological diversity.
All life has existential value. The life of a bird or a goat is as important to them as our own lives are to us. We therefore have an ethical and ecological responsibility to preserve as many natural life forms as possible for the sake of their own right to exist. This fundamental right is grossly overlooked in today’s economic reality, where utility value vastly trumps existential value. One way to support the existential value of other living beings is to eat as low on the food chain as possible. As popular American food writer Michael Pollan suggests, we should eat 1) whole foods, 2) mostly plants, and 3) not too much. From an ethical, health and ecological point of view, this is sound advice—plants are good for health; eating plants causes less animal suffering, and growing plant food has less of an environmental impact, as it uses less water, less energy, etc.
Another, more fundamental, and political, way to guarantee the existential value of nature is to follow Ecuador’s example, which has included in its Constitution the chapter, “Rights for Nature.” Rather than treating nature as property under the law, Rights for Nature articles acknowledge that nature in all its life forms has the right “to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.” The Ecuadorian people have legal authority to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems, and the ecosystem can be named as defendant in court cases. [5]
All life forms, beyond their existential value, also have utility value in the great cycle of nature and in human society. The extinction of any species is a great crime against nature and humanity. The utility value of bees, for example, as pollinators of crops, is unquestionable. It is estimated they add 420 billion pounds to the UK economy alone. But bees all over the Western world are currently threatened by the pesticides, neonicotinoids, various pests, and also lack of bio-diversity—fewer varieties of flowers to feed on make them more susceptible to disease. Therefore, in view of both the existential and utility value of bees, it is in the interest of human society to preserve their lives by banning neonicotinoids, as well as by preserving, and even increasing, the bio-diversity the bees depend on to stay healthy and to multiply.
Even exotic plants and animals seemingly of no real value, and existing in such small populations that they cannot possibly contribute anything substantial to the global system, or to human progress, are in fact repositories of information that might be crucial should the environment change. Containing unique gene pools, these exotic species might suddenly become essential for life under different ecological conditions. We may not fully understand a certain genome’s utility value at present, or what utilitarian potentials exist in certain species, but every time a species is lost, it potentially impacts our future and the ecological balance of life on the planet. Consequently, it is in the interest of all nations to follow Ecuador’s example to include “the rights of nature” in their respective constitutions.
In the award winning film, Trashed, actor Jeremy Irons documents how we are slowly but surely trashing our planet with non-biodegradable, plastic garbage; thereby jeopardizing the health of plants, animals and humans. Irons, a smoker, knows full well that waste from cigarette butts contain millions of toxins that are especially deadly to marine life. According to the film’s website, 4.5 trillion filters from smoked cigarettes make their way into the environment every year. Still, like most us, he continues to practice his environmentally unfriendly habits.
We are trashing the planet in small and big ways. When you buy a plastic toothbrush, and you throw it away, a few years later, according to the film, Trashed, it may end up in the stomach of a large fish. Yes, even the oceans have now become our planet’s garbage dumps. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego produced a study, which revealed that more than nine percent of the fish in an area of the Pacific Ocean contained plastic waste in their stomachs. The study estimated that up to 24,000 tons of plastic waste per year was ingested by fish in that area alone. [6]
To save our planet from drowning in garbage, industrial innovators are learning to produce and reuse material waste from the way nature is designed. In nature, biological waste or nutrients decompose into the natural environment, soil and water without causing any pollution, providing food for bacteria and microbiological life. Later, these organisms become food for plants, animals and humans. Similarly, we can design industrial, commercial and waste systems according to these natural design mechanisms. Technical nutrients, the inorganic or synthetic materials manufactured by humans—such as plastics and metals—can thus be used many times over without any loss in quality, staying in a continuous cycle.
To save the planet from drowning in waste, we must bypass the garbage dump, whether on land or in the ocean, altogether. There are basically two ways to prevent trashing the planet: 1) make things that biodegrade just like in nature—you use it; you throw it in the compost, and 2) reuse all non-biodegradable materials as part of the industrial production cycle—your electronic gadget becomes outdated, you turn it in to the upcycling plant to make parts for new gadgets. In either scenario, nothing is wasted and no trash is created. This is our best hope for saving us from suffocating in our own waste.
As mentioned above, fresh water is in short supply. Think about it: Global reserves of drinkable water are only a fraction of one percent. One in five humans does not have access to safe drinking water due, in part, due to polluted rivers. Strife has already broken out in some stressed regions. In others, there is conflict due to privatization of drinking water.
Indian scientist and activist, Vanadana Shiva, highlights the complexities involved in the global water crisis. “The water crisis,” she writes, “is an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions. Market solutions destroy the earth and aggravate inequality. The solution to an ecological crisis is ecological, and the solution for injustice is democracy. Ending the water crisis requires rejuvenating ecological democracy.” [7]
Scarcity and the growing demand for water means big business for global corporations. The two largest in the water industry are the French companies, Vivendi Environment and Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, whose business operations extend to 120 countries. One of the main solutions to the water crisis is to ban the corporate privatization of water and to make it a key industry guaranteed to people by their local governments. Water is part of the global commons—it belongs to us all. Second, more efforts need to go into preservation of water, such as building rain water catchment systems on houses, and on cleaning up polluted rivers and lakes.
The way we grow and distribute food is, perhaps more than any other human endeavor, a symbol of our unsustainable planet. Food researcher and author, Frances Moore Lappe, has maintained for many years that we do not lack food on this planet: we have a distribution problem, and we have a concentration-of-junk-food problem. Millions of people in the southern hemisphere are hungry and malnourished due to lack of food, and millions of people in the northern hemisphere are getting sick and obese from eating too much of the wrong kinds of foods.
We are turning food crops into biofuels to fill up our SUVs; we are giving corporations like Monsanto near absolute control of the global seed market; we import food we could grow at home from thousands of miles away; soy beans are imported from poor countries that lack protein to fatten pigs and cattle in rich countries with too much protein; pesticides and artificial fertilizer are poisoning fields, crops, water, animals and humans at an unprecedented rate.
The “green revolution” initiated in the 1970s by researchers, philanthropists, and governments sought to end world hunger by increasing food crop yields worldwide. Their productivity logic went something like this: modernize agricultural techniques, make high-yield crops pervasive, and food prices will drop and poor people will be fed. This largely failed paradigm still dominates worldwide, yet a billion people go hungry despite increases in food production.
The production, distribution and consumption of food today are symptoms of a lack of an ecological outlook and an unsustainable economy. Food production needs to become more localized; food consumption, especially in rich countries, needs to be much more plant-based—as this increases efficiency, health and sustainability; corporations should be banned from monopolizing seed production; and organic methods of farming need to be increased and supported with research and subsidies.
We are in the process of gradually destroying our planet’s delicately balanced ecological systems. We are compromising an extremely effective and sophisticated web converting solar energy into life-giving energy and an atmosphere supporting an abundance of life. If we upset this delicate balance much more, the potentially catastrophic consequences are unpredictable. What we do know is this: it is time to change course; it is time to become better stewards of the only planet we have—the only home we know. From today onwards, we must start creating a more sustainable, more ecological, more resilient world. It is time for deep systems change, both economically and politically.
[1] Vandana Shiva, Water Wars, (South End Press, 2002), p. 14
[2] George Monbiot, from article in the Guardian, London
A green economy is not an end in itself. Rather, […] it is a means towards a shared and lasting prosperity. But what exactly does prosperity mean? We propose a definition of prosperity in terms of the capabilities that people have to flourish on a finite planet. It is clear that a part of our prosperity depends on material goods and services. Living well clearly means achieving basic levels of material security. But prosperity also has important social and psychological components. Our ability to participate in the life of society is vital. Meaningful employment, satisfying leisure, and a healthy environment also matter. […] Thriving communities are the basis of shared prosperity.
Tim Jackson and Peter A. Victor (2013: 6)
In 2009, Professor Tim Jackson catalysed a step-change in the conversation about the ‘growth imperative’ that is structurally built into our economic system. In a report for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Jackson dared to name the elephant in the room by asking whether “prosperity without growth” was a possibility, stating clearly why ‘business as usual’ was no longer an option (Jackson, 2009a).
The report showed that while the global economy has more than doubled in size in the last 25 years, it has severely degraded more than 60% of the world’s ecosystems without delivering a more equitable sharing of wealth. To the contrary, inequality has grown both within and between nations. We live in a world with 5 billion poor and the bottom fifth of the world’s population have to make do with just 2% of global income. According to a Credit Suisse report, the richest 1% of people now own more than half of the world’s financial wealth (Treanor, 2014). This extreme inequality drives a series of devastating chain reactions, affecting health, community cohesion, national and international security, and the environment.
Yet prosperity and wellbeing are not simply a function of the (financial) wealth a person has. We need more than money to feel well. Participation in thriving communities makes individuals prosper and through collaboration in community we can create prosperity for all. The report by Tim Jackson and Peter Victor on Green Economy at the Community Scale (2013) concluded that communities can take independent positive action to create a green local economy and improve prosperity for all.
“At its best, green economy offers a positive blueprint for a new economics — one firmly anchored in principles of ecological constraint, social justice, and lasting prosperity” (p.6). Taking a systemic perspective on true prosperity means going beyond simply meeting material needs and giving equal importance to the establishment of social and psychological conditions in which individuals and communities can thrive. “Material bounds do not in themselves constrain prosperity; […] with appropriate attention to material limits, it may be possible to improve quality of life for everyone even as we reduce our combined impact on the environment” (pp.17–18).
At the scale of local communities, abundance and human thriving are not exclusively based on the availability of material resources and energy but on human creativity and relationships. Community and individual prosperity depend on how we collaborate to create win-win-win solutions for all. Jackson and Victor identified four enablers of thriving communities: “the role of enterprise, the quality of work, the structure of investment, and the nature of the money economy” (p.6). Entrepreneurial and business activities in a community need to offer people the opportunity to flourish. Beyond providing the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, “prosperity depends on ‘human services’ that improve the quality of our lives: health, social care, education, leisure, recreation, and the maintenance, renovation, and protection of physical and natural assets” (p.7).
Almost all of us spend much of our lives working. In doing so we participate in important relationships that shape our culture. These relationships form part of the ‘glue’ of our society. “Good work offers respect, motivation, fulfilment, involvement in community and, in the best case a sense of meaning and purpose in life” (p.7). In the face of the multiple convergent crises that are challenging humanity, to participate in co- creating thriving local communities as expressions of a regenerative human culture can offer this sense of meaning and purpose in life. As previously mentioned, the restructuring of investment and the redesign of our monetary systems are two important enablers of such community-scale collaboration.
Many inspiring and informative examples from around the world show how communities and regions can start to create economic structures that facilitate the emergence of regenerative cultures. The website Global Transition to a New Economy maps many of these initiatives. They all have a common thread: The path towards prosperity for all is co-created through collaboration. Regenerative systems are collaborative! The ‘solidarity economy’ approach illustrates this. SolidarityNYC, for example, tries to give visibility to, and create synergies between, existing initiatives that are part of community collaboration within New York City’s solidarity economy.
The solidarity economy includes a wide array of economic practices and initiatives but they all share common values that stand in stark contrast to the values of the dominant economy. Instead of enforcing a culture of cut-throat competition, they build cultures and communities of cooperation. Rather than isolating us from one another, they foster relationships of mutual support and solidarity. In place of centralized structures of control, they move us towards shared responsibility and democratic decision-making. Instead of imposing a single global monoculture, they strengthen the diversity of local cultures and environments. Instead of prioritizing profit over all else, they encourage a commitment to shared humanity best expressed in social, economic, and environmental justice.
SolidarityNYC (2015)
The US Solidarity Economy Network supports this transformative impulse in the USA. Internationally, The Alliance for Responsible Plural and Solidarity Economy has stimulated dialogue on how we can co-create a collaborative economic model that builds rather than divides community in Asia and Brazil, and www.socioeco.org offers an excellent resource in this area. A UN Research Institute for Social Development report concluded: “Policy makers and the international development community at large need to pay far more attention to ways and means of enabling SEE [Social Solidarity Economy]. This is particularly apparent in the current context of heightened risk and vulnerability associated with economic and food crises and climate change” (UNRISD, 2014: v). Ethan Miller (2010) has attempted to map the diverse economic strategies, organizational forms and tools that can contribute to the creation of a solidarity economy (Figure 25).
Figure 25: The Solidarity Economy — Redrawn with original content with permission of Ethan Miller
Once again, the important message is that we are not trying to reinvent economics with ecology and community in mind from scratch. There are many time-tested strategies and tools already available to us today. They have been developed on the innovation-rich fringes of the mainstream. Some of them may well be H3 ‘islands of the future in the present’, waiting to be spread not necessarily by scaling-up but by employing and adapting them everywhere at the scale of local communities and regional economies. Even if the transformation of the wider macro-economic context will test our patience for a little longer, we are already beginning to meet the descending top-down globalized economic system with ascending H2+ bottom-up innovation. Applying scale-linking, health- generating design to economics means creating diversity and resilience by strengthening the solidarity economy at the local and regional scale. [… more on the 3 Horizon framework and transformative innovation]
Our needs are few, but our wants are many. Therefore the basic goal of an economy is to take care of our basic needs. What are those basic needs? Housing, medical care, employment, education and food. We must learn to fulfill these needs without leading us astray into thinking that more and more sophisticated versions of these basic needs will ever satisfy our main need: the need for inner fulfillment, for happiness. [1] We need to build an economy of happiness. But how?
There are various reasons why humans have destroyed the environment. There are economic, cultural and political reasons. But the main cause is rooted in human nature and psychology itself, in our insatiable need for more—more money, more things, more pleasure. We humans come hardwired with two innate characteristics: the need to take care of ourselves, and the need to take care of others. We may call the first need self-interest and the other group-interest. Our modern insatiability for more things originates in the human psychology of self-interest.
I think human needs are basic and few and that providing these needs for all, without compromising the environment, is the new economy’s main priority.
We have built our economic system on the principles of selfishness and insatiability, of confusing our few basic needs with more material wants. Moreover, capitalism is based on the idea that selfishness and the desire for more are not only necessary drivers of the economy, they are also virtuous human qualities. President Ronald Reagan, with his Hollywood persona and neo-liberal ideology, epitomized this mythic vision of capitalism: that the dream of wealth and the wrath of scarcity are two opposing principles that are essential to form a dynamic economy. Since the Reagan era, this vision has become an economic dogma, and, we think, one of the main reasons we are a global society in deep economic and environmental trouble. Unlike Reagan and his ideological supporters, I think human needs are basic and few and that providing these needs for all, without compromising the environment, is the new economy’s main priority. Does that mean the economy in the rich countries needs to stop growing in order to save the environment?
Growth, No-growth or Degrowth?
Our environmental problems, now spanning the globe, have painfully taught us the limits of economic growth. The industrial and commercial growth machinery of capitalism has taught us at least three things:
Capitalist growth creates economic inequality. Over the past 30 years, as GDP growth has risen, economic inequality has also risen dramatically in the Western world, while at the same time global inequality between rich and poor countries has also increased.
Capitalist growth is often environmentally disastrous. Thanks to ever-expanding loans and credit lines, we in the Western world are able to purchase fancier cars and upgraded electronic gadgets at increasingly shorter intervals, exotic foods from faraway places, and bigger houses filled with more stuff than ever before. At the same time, the Chinese and Indian middle class is growing by tens of millions of people every year who demand cars and more consumer goods. The escalating rise in production of these goods puts a growing strain on the environment by rapidly reducing non-renewable resources such as oil and gas while also increasing pollution and toxic waste.
Capitalist growth has manifested economic globalization but, in my estimation, it has not created a “good global society” in the spirit of Aristotle. It was indeed he who first outlined some of the qualities of the good life—individual courage, moderation, generosity, wisdom and the social and economic requirements needed for the individual to realize those qualities. It is environmentally wise, I think, to aspire for the good society, where human expressions such as art, music, ethics, spirituality, literature, sports, rather than material qualities, are favored. But capitalist materialism does not consider these valid notions of progress.
For the true believers in unrestricted, neo-liberal capitalism today, the good society is a society where the most successful have the most toys, and where the dream of the rest is to one day in the future have even more toys, even more money than the most successful today. In Europe, and to a lesser degree in the US, this cut-throat form of capitalism has been tempered by some government control over the market, redistribution of wealth and environmental regulations, but these checks and balances have not been enough to stem the growing increase in environmental problems.
Economist John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a time when growth would end, a time when we were materially satisfied and had plenty of time to pursue leisure activities. Not unlike a contemporary environmentalist, he had realized, already in the 1930s; that capitalist progress was a “soiled creed, black with coal dust and gunpowder.” In an address to students at Cambridge in the 1920s, he outlined his prophetic vision of a society 100 years hence where “the economic problem may be solved, or at least within sight of solution.” We would work no more than three hours a day and spend the rest of our time in a joyous spirit of artistic and intellectual pursuits—not just the privileged few but society as a whole.
So far, Keynes’ prophecy has not been realized. The reason is simple, say many environmentalists: we cannot grow our way into the future and expect to live in both harmony with nature and ourselves. The influential Club of Rome sponsored book, Limits to Growth, published in 1972, has set the tone for much of the environmental writings ever since: growth is bad, reduced growth is good, going back to nature and living the good life of simplicity and sustainability is the answer to capitalist excess. From John Stuart Mill to John Maynard Keynes to contemporary ecological economist Herman Daly, the vision of steady-state economics has been strong and consistent.
Economist John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a time when growth would end, a time when we were materially satisfied and had plenty of time to pursue leisure activities.
According to Daly, a steady-state economy, like the idea of the good society, will enable any non-physical component of the economy to grow indefinitely; while there will, from time-to-time, be limits to economic growth as per ecological constraints. The basic tenets of steady-state economics are: (1) Maintain the health of ecosystems and the life-support services they provide. (2) Extract renewable resources like fish and timber at a rate no faster than they can be regenerated. (3) Consume non-renewable resources like fossil fuels and minerals at a rate no faster than they can be replaced by the discovery of renewable substitutes. (4) Deposit wastes in the environment at a rate no faster than they can be safely assimilated. [2]
While many, if not most, environmentalists adhere to this form of ecological economics, there are technological optimists within the sustainable economy camps who promise ecological designs “beyond sustainability” ensuring abundance and ecological balance in perpetuity. In other words, economic growth and ecological balance is possible, argues architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart in their book, The Upcycle, if “technical nutrients” such as metals, plastics and other materials not continuously created by the biosphere become, in an industrial ecological cycle, “resource food” for another product and yet again for another product—forever and ever.[3] Inventers of various industrial designs, they, and a growing number of ecological activists and scientists, now believe economic growth is possible through ecological designs by turning sewage plants and houses into alternative energy generators and industrial plants into non-polluting facilities where all waste is cycled back into productive use.
Unless there is economic restructuring of the economy, green capitalism will not be able to deliver what it promises: a sustainable world for all of us.
I agree, but what is missing in this optimistic, green vision is an economic structure to ensure that such ecological designs do not only become a feature of a privileged few countries. As Heather Rogers suggests in Green Gone Wrong, in the name of profit, corporations could easily start to dominate these new industrial concepts as well, ensuring monopoly and control. Unless there is economic restructuring of the economy, green capitalism will not be able to deliver what it promises: a sustainable world for all of us.
Global retail giant Wal-Mart, to name one example of a corporate giant gone green, is one of the most profitable businesses in the world. It is one of the largest sellers of organic produce, but the company is, despite four billion dollars of profits each year, still paying their workers low wages without providing them medical care. Their environmental focus has not translated into better business practices. The bottom line, not a new-found, progressive conscience, dictates their business practices. Plus, wherever Wal-Mart sets up shop, the aggressively competitive company inevitably drives smaller firms out of business. In our observation, this is not only green gone wrong, this is green gone mean.
Economic growth or de-growth depends on the situation.
Selling environmental products is therefore not enough. This practice must also be supported by economic policy changes and economic restructuring. Otherwise, the profit motive will continue to dictate environmental concerns. And that kind of sustainability is too shallow, too green-washed to have any meaningful impact on the economic and environmental crisis we’re in.
Economic growth or de-growth thus depends on the situation. Currently, the Western world does not need to grow in the production of luxury goods, or in constructing bigger houses, more coal fired power plants, or in designing more weapons of mass destruction. The Western world needs to grow in providing more fuel-efficient cars, greener homes, greener industrial plants, less waste and increased recycling. The Western economy needs to grow leaner and greener companies and products, and its economy needs to decentralize and localize.
Regarding localization of the economy, the online retail giant Amazon is a case in point. The heavily centralized yet global company employs 65,000 people, most of whom earn only a fraction of what the shareholders earn. If all the operations of Amazon were decentralized, according to economist Robert Reich, the various companies it would create would employ nearly 850,000 people. This would not only ensure a growth in the economy by spreading the wealth around to more wage earners and away from the wealthy one percent in the shareholder class now running the company, it would also cause fewer shipping miles and thus have less impact on the environment—in sum, the economic impact would be more equitable and the carbon footprint would be drastically reduced [4] in a win-win situation for both the economy and the environment.
What we need instead is sustainable growth in some areas, degrowth in others, and human, cultural and spiritual growth yet in other areas.
In recent years, we have painfully learned that capitalism has created an economy mainly based on material growth. We have also learned that material resources are limited; that their utilization sometimes creates pollution, and that pollution has a cost—economic, social, personal, and environmental. We have learned that we cannot simply grow the economy without paying off these debts to nature and to humanity.
But for most of modern life, politicians and business leaders have told the public that economic growth is the single most important pursuit of society. Today we know this economic goal is the number one cause of the environmental crisis. We have also learned this: of all the crises that humanity is faced with today, no matter how devastating they may be, the one with the possibility of the most profound impact on human life is the environmental crisis. Without solving that, we will have endless material growth leading to a final catastrophic sate of collapse and no-growth. What we need instead is sustainable growth in some areas, degrowth in others, and human, cultural and spiritual growth yet in other areas. Growth or degrowth is not an either/or proposition; within a well-balanced and regenerative economy it can be a long-term yes/and formula.
[1] Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough?, New York: Other Press, , 2013
No doubt, the climate crisis is one of the most serious problems we face. It is a symptom of a deeper problem: the plunder of nature in the name of profit and consumption. But rather than seriously responding to climate change, rich and corrupt governments are teaming up with corporations, the United Nations, World Bank, and other institutions to implement a new type of “disaster capitalism,” which advances market-based climate mitigation strategies to create new business opportunities. These schemes do little for the climate. Rather, they promote and prolong a dominant development model that is both unjust and ultimately suicidal.
We need an economy where work is not a job to make yourself and a few others wealthier, but a livelihood that is sustaining, fulfilling, and in tune with the common good.
The dominant worldview that turns land, life, and humans into market commodities is antithetical to life in harmony between humans and the Earth. This commodification of the environment is the main cause of environmental degradation. Instead, we need an economy where work is not a job to make yourself and a few others wealthier, but a livelihood that is sustaining, fulfilling, and in tune with the common good. But while the corporate capitalist system seems inextricably entrenched and too powerful to change, its transformation is necessary, even inevitable. How and when this system will change is the challenge we now face.
In the shadow of both worsening climate chaos and a looming financial collapse, bankers, corporate elites, and international institutions have evolved the Shock Doctrine into a Green Shock Doctrine. This “Green” version of the Shock Doctrine involves use of the global ecological and social crises to create a whole new system of economics based on financial speculation and trade in so-called “environmental services.”
This is commonly referred to as doing business in The Green Economy and sets the framework to privatize and commodify every natural organism and ecosystem on the planet, along with the so-called “services” they provide—such as clean water, energy, food, soil, and so on. Social movements, Indigenous peoples, peasants, and grassroots groups are denouncing this greening of capitalism, which has the sole purpose of enabling the continuation of business and profits as usual.
Just listen to the new language used by these new corporate leaders: “Supplying energy to the billions who lack electricity and clean fuels is not just a moral imperative; it’s also a strategic business opportunity with trillion-dollar potential.” Sustainable Energy For All cochairs Charles Holliday, Chair of Bank of America and former CEO of DuPont, and Kandeh Yumkella, Director-General of the UN Industrial Development Organization.
One of the most important movements right now will therefore be to make sure that the commons—the land, the forests, the water (lakes, river, oceans) and the mountains—are truly owned by us all, by humanity, by the nations, by the local people, not the corporations.
That kind of language does not indicate sustainable systems change but rather business as usual—corporate capitalism with a green face. If we want systems change, we need to denounce this form of green disaster capitalism, but more importantly, we need to develop alternative ways of doing business.
One of the most important movements right now will therefore be to make sure that the commons—the land, the forests, the water (lakes, river, oceans) and the mountains—are truly owned by us all, by humanity, by the nations, by the local people, not the corporations. Furthermore, that this collective ownership becomes part of our national and international constitutions by law, so that we can take legal steps to prevent the commons from becoming corporate capitalism’s last unregulated frontier for exploitation. It is indeed the lack of such protective laws that corporations are allowed to cut down rain forests, deplete the oceans of fish, and pollute rivers with impunity.
Secondly, we must develop sustainable and local small, cooperative and governmental business models to ensure that the commons are utilized in a regenerative way, so that future generations can—as the Native Americans phrased it so eloquently-- enjoy this natural wealth for “seven more generations.”
Catlin: And that leads me to the next question I’d like to ask. It’s not like the economy is working for us. Rather, we’re working for the economy at this point. And so, we pretty much have to do whatever the bankers tell us has to be done to keep the whole system going. Anyway, so that’s what I’m seeing, the tail that’s wagging the dog. But I’m not sure it is the tail anymore. It’s beginning to feel more and more, like it’s the brain, or some demonic part of the brain that’s telling us all what we have to do. Would you comment on that?
Bjonnes: Yes, I agree very much with what you’re saying. The Norwegians and the Swedes, they are practical people in many ways, even though, as I said earlier, they have become part of this speculation economy as well. We saw that with Iceland [during the crash of 2008]. Iceland became a hotspot of investing, prior to the economic crash. We write a little bit about this in the book. However, when the stuff hit the fan, so to speak, then Iceland did something that other countries should emulate: they let the banks fail.
Some economists, such as Eric S. Reinert, the Norwegian economist, which we quote quite a lot in the book, he said: “Let the banks fail. Let them go down and take the ship down with them, because they created this problem.” And that’s essentially what Iceland did. They let the banks fail. They didn’t allow the taxpayers to bail out the banks, which is what happened, as you so wonderfully stated, in America. Here, we let the taxpayers pay for the massive failures of the banks. We paid the people who created the big mess. On top of that, they themselves cleverly created a new financial speculation system, which gave them even more money. Sometimes more money than they previously earned. This is an outrageous system of economics, and we need to stop it.
At the same time, as I said in my introduction, I think that it is a system that will eventually implode because it is so unhealthy. It is so unbalanced. And I think that this quote by Sarkar that “Capitalism will explode like a firecracker” implies something about this. This system represents the essence of capitalist greed. And again, this system of rewarding greed is the essence of the problem of capitalism. And we cannot just keep reforming this system, keep propping it up. We are seeing the elephant in the room, but we are not really talking about the elephant in the room. What we need to do, is to start talking about that elephant in the room. We need to do something about it.
Catlin: That leads me to exactly the next question that I want to ask you. There’s a wonderful line in the book that says, “Capitalism has, in a sense, a self-destructive gene in its DNA.” Would you talk about that for a little bit?
Bjonnes: Yeah, as I said earlier, I grew up in Norway, and, like my father, I was part of the leftist movement in Norway. And I remember my father saying that, “People’s consciousness is tied to their pocketbooks.” He also said that “People need to understand that the essence of capitalist economics is profit.” Sarkar said the same thing, that the problem with capitalism is that it is based on “the profit motive.” Capitalism is based on Adam Smith’s idea that selfishness is good. The idea that, because selfishness breeds inventiveness and creativity, ultimately there will be enough profit created, enough good for everyone. But Sarkar said, in essence, that this gene is the real and essential problem with capitalism, this profit motive.
Capitalism is based on Adam Smith’s idea that selfishness is good. The idea that, because selfishness breeds inventiveness and creativity, ultimately there will be enough profit created, enough good for everyone.
So, this selfish gene is also capitalism’s own self-destructive tendency. And this tendency needs to be curbed. We have tried to curb it, through tax reforms, and so on. But over and over, we see that these reforms have not been enough. And this is now being reflected by two very essential problems. One is the environmental problem, and the other one is the inequality problem. In a sense, we’ve created two planets, one rich, and one poor. So this is what we mean by the selfish gene. It’s an essential issue.
And so the very system of capitalism needs to be balanced by cooperation. Capitalism says selfishness is good, it is inventive, it is creative; it creates positive things; and it’s based on this idea of the survival of the fittest, as its social outlook. Sarkar, on the other hand, is saying that we have two tendencies as humans. Yes, we have this selfish tendency. But we also have something that he calls the gene of cooperation. The gene of helping others, of altruism. And this is the gene that needs to balance the gene of selfishness. And the way to do that is through creating economic democracy.
Yes, we have this selfish tendency. But we also have something that he calls the gene of cooperation. The gene of helping others, of altruism.
That’s why in Sarkar’s economy, private enterprise will be allowed only on a small scale. If it is not, the capitalists will always want more profit, more domination, more control. And eventually, no matter how many reforms we have, we will end up with the system we more or less have today. And because of this gene, the whole capitalist system is geared towards increasing concentration of wealth, of making some people super-rich and the general population poor. So that’s basically what that gene perpetuates. And instead we need to create more balance.
Because of this gene, on the environmental level, capitalism also tends to deplete natural resources, to destroy the environment, to take nature for granted, see it as a free lunch. And that is something that the environmental movement and the environmental economists have been very good at pointing out. They have documented this problem very well, and I think that this is something that more and more people are waking up to, this insight, and this wisdom.
So, what we are suggesting in the long-term solutions section of the book, is that we need to redesign the system itself. Not simply to reform the system, but rather to restructure the entire economy. So that the economy and the ecology become part of the same system of economics, and thus to remove the inherent weaknesses of capitalism altogether. And this is what I believe Sarkar has done in developing his new economic model.
Catlin: I want to ask you about the last time I think that capitalism was really challenged. Marx wrote, accurately it turns out, that workers would not stand for the system as it was operating then. And so, what I’m wondering about is if you have any insight into why we are so tolerant of the system now? I mean why aren’t we rallying in some way?
Bjonnes: As I said earlier, I think it is Facebook’s fault. It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s cleverness that got us all, made us lazy and complacent. I’m saying this as a joke, but as my math teacher used to say, “There’s always something serious in every joke.” So, I think that the capitalist system has been very, very clever in covering up its tracks. And that has been achieved in so many different ways.
The system of capitalism has become so clever in designing a system that makes us all into slaves. We have all become invested in this system. We have all become its sleeping slaves. During the housing crisis in the early 2000, I had friends who “flipped” houses. But then I thought, this is just crazy, this will crash very soon. And that’s exactly what happened.
The capitalist system has developed a very clever, very robust, very resilient system, and it’s very good at covering up its own problems, and in making us believe it’s okay. You know, if we vote for a Democrat, everything will be okay. Or, if we can get Trump out of office we’ll have a better world, and so on. But, it isn’t that simple. Therefore, I am heartened by movements such as Economic Democracy Advocates, by people that you have in your group who are asking the tough questions, looking for deeper answers. This is what we need more and more of now. And I think so many of the answers are there already. And I think the next thing is that we need to create that movement which says, “Enough is enough.” And I think that that movement is coming.
Paul Hawken said something important a few years back. He said that there’s a growing movement throughout the world, of millions of people, a grassroots movement, which is never covered by the mass media. And that movement is quietly working on all of these issues, asking the right questions. And at the same time, building an alternative economy, an alternative environmental movement. Ecologists, local economy movements, and so on. They are discussing the commons, and they are using the resources properly. So that movement is there. And I think when the right time comes, when there is a deeper and more fundamental crack in the system; then I think we will see a massive change.
Catlin: Wonderful, I’m going to pause there. Thank you for that one. And Anita I’m going to just ask you to come on with any question, that looks like a good one.
Anita: Sure, I have a question from Janet, and this is on the theme of the changes that are coming. And specifically, she’s asking, “How you see the change to the capitalist system coming, and what can we as interested parties do to help bring about change?” And speaking to that, I think when there’s a crack in the system, there’s an opportunity for change to happen. If you could speak to that and anything now that we can help bring it about.
Bjonnes: You know, Leonard Cohen has this beautiful line, where he says, “There’s a crack in everything, and that’s where the light comes in.” And I think that is what is happening, that the light is coming in through the crack. What can we do, and what is being done? I think that on a personal level, it is very important that we walk our talk. If we speak up about saving the environment, then we need to also live according to those values as much as we can. So, on a personal level, I think that it is very important, that we shop at the farmers market, and support the local economy in a very direct and complete way. And that we boycott companies that we think are not healthy and not sustainable, and so on.
I also think that it’s very important that we join groups, such as your group, Economic Democracy Advocacy (EDA). I also think it is important that we educate ourselves; that we become activists; that we start to speak out. At the same time, as we are doing right now, it is important to study alternative ideas, to study alternative economics. But the major change will come through some form of crisis. Unfortunately, that is often how change happens. However, it is very difficult to say when, and how it will happen.
Catlin: Thank you. Anita, I want to just keep going, with what you’re seeing on your screen there.
Anita: Sure, I’ve got a couple of questions that are really about who we are as human beings and our values. One of the questions here is can we change the economic system to economic democracy without first changing people’s values from separation and selfishness, to unity? Who are we, and what is our relationship to each other?” So really questions about how we relate to each other as human beings, and can we really transform our economy, without first looking at that or somehow integrating that into the conversation?
...we need to practice deeper spiritual values, finding peace within so that we don’t blame others, don’t scapegoat others, and so on. All of those values and practices are very important.
Bjonnes: Wonderful question. It contains an important issue, which so far has been missing in the leftist movement, or the progressive movement. It is addressed to some extent in the environmental movement, the idea that we need to live our values. And, we could say, to some extent in the spiritual movement. However, in each of these movements, there are some missing links, some loopholes. In the spiritual movement, there’s a tendency to think that, it if we all become spiritual, then everything will change. In the environmental movement, there is the idea that if we all become environmentalists, there will be change. I think it is very important and fundamental that we walk our talk as much as we can. And so, this integration of our own values, the value of cooporation, the value of caring for the environment, taking care of our neighbors, and all of those community values—these are all fundamentally important. And at the same time, we need to practice deeper spiritual values, finding peace within so that we don’t blame others, don’t scapegoat others, and so on. All of those values and practices are very important.
So yes, I do think that real change will come. Sarkar spoke to this very clearly. He had a Sanskrit term, since he came from India, for a personality type he called a Sadvipra –and this personality, Sarkar said, is an integral personality, a leader type, who has integrated all of the different qualities of being human. It is a person that is spiritual, but who also understands the real world, who lives in the world, who is a warrior, and who understands injustice, economics, and social change, but who also deeply values spirituality and ethics. This type of a person, he said, will be the leader who will bring us the new economy, who will inspire us into the new world.
Catlin: Fascinating approach. I think that many of the people on the call are pretty involved in their own value-based living. And I think on lots of refrigerators that we have in our homes there is the quote from Gandhi saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I suspect Gandhi had in mind another sentence that would come after that: “Be the change you want to see in the world, and then go out and make it happen.” Which is what he obviously did so wonderfully. So Anita I think we’ve got probably time for another one for Roar to address now?
Anita: Yes actually I see there are a couple of them. “You state that capitalism is clever at disguising its problems. Do you think this is a concerted effort on purpose? Does Mark Zuckerberg really know what he’s doing long-term to the economy? And are these people, perhaps asleep slaves, as we are, just with more money?”
Bjonnes: Wow, great question. Yes, I think that there are some capitalists, that are very devious, very aware of the exploitation and the damage that they are doing, because this we have seen throughout history. We saw it in the early industrial era, when we moved from the mercantile economy into the industrial capitalist economy. The way that factory owners would treat their workers, you know child laborers, and so on. And this is in many ways still happening today, in many corners of the world. There are capitalists that are basically criminals. And so, you have people like that, who are in a sense demons in human form. Yes, there are capitalists like that, but I don’t think that Mark Zuckerberg is one of them. I don’t think so. I think that many of the people in Silicon Valley, and in this new creative bubble, they are, in many ways, well-meaning. But at the same time, as the questioner mentioned, unconscious about their own reality, about what they are creating. There is an unconsciousness about what they create, and there is denial.
Take Amazon, for example. There is a new book which just came out called Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century. It’s about people in their 60s, who travel in motor homes. A kind of underclass of people, who move from town to town. They work three, four months here and there, in an Amazon facility. And they live paycheck to paycheck. And so, these kinds of workers are part of the economy which Amazon has created. The bosses of Amazon may not think very deeply about that. But at the same time, we know that they are not really concerned about it either. So, there is a conscious awareness of the problems they are creating, but it may not be as demonic as the actions of a capitalist engaged in child slave labor. So, I think that capitalism can express itself in demonic and terrible ways, but it can also be unconscious, just part of an unhealthy system. As I said earlier, we have all become part of this unhealthy system.
And we need to speak to that, to that fact, that we have become slaves of the system. And Sarkar also spoke about that. He said that, in many ways, the capitalists are also slaves of their own system. And we need to reform them both—to restructure the system and also to reform the capitalists themselves.
Catlin: Thank you once again, great answer. Roar, if there were three essential messages, which you really wanted the American people to get at, what would they be? So, I’m really asking you to think about this as if you were the education wing of Economic Democracy Advocates, and we want you to take on three messages here, what three do you think are the best places to direct energy?
...on the local level, we engage in economics more than in politics, on a day-to-day basis. If we want to take the power back, we need to emphasize that the real power lies in economic democracy.
Bjonnes: Okay, I haven’t thought it through completely yet. But let me try. There is one issue that comes up clearly for me. And I hope you’ll be happy I came up with that idea. It’s about economic democracy. I think it is essential for people in America to understand that the power of people, lies more in economic democracy rather than in political democracy. And this is not just for Americans, this is for people all over the world. And again, I think that this is one of the beautiful insights of Sarkar. This understanding that, on the local level, we engage in economics more than in politics, on a day-to-day basis. If we want to take the power back, we need to emphasize that the real power lies in economic democracy.
So that’s the number one thing. To say it another way, in order to balance the often futile endeavors of political democracy—and we see this in America again and again. How futile it is to think that the next president is going to create a better America. It is not that easy, of course. And so, to emphasize this need for economic democracy, and to educate people about that, this is very important. To let people know that the real power lies in creating economic democracy. This is the way that we can take back the power from the corporations, and from the politicians that are paid and bought by these same corporations.
Secondly, and this is part of economic democracy also, this idea that we need to create a vibrant local economy. We cannot have economic democracy if we don’t have a vibrant local economy. And that means that we need to emphasize the importance of a decentralized economy. That people in the local areas take back economics into their own hand and develop the infrastructure from the bottom up, on the local level. That means producing food locally. That means having industries in rural areas, and so on.
So for example, in the Southern Appalachia area where I live, there is a lot of poverty. Still, this area has tremendous potential. There is labor potential. There is vast amounts of land available, and so on. But it is largely unutilized. If this area had been anywhere in Europe, it would’ve been a flourishing agricultural area. So, there’s tremendous potential in America. But so much is wasted on this belief that if I work hard enough, I will become as rich as whoever. This myth of individualism is so ingrained in people. I think that this is something that is very difficult for many Americans to grasp and to speak to.
...those are the three main issues: economic democracy, the importance of a decentralized economy, and changing the American cultural mythos from individualism to a more communitarian spirit.
So, maybe that’s the third point, to emphasize the need for a more communitarian culture in America, for values that are community-oriented, rather than individualist. This rugged individualist, this myth is so strong in America, and it needs to change. This is perhaps the biggest challenge in America, to change that myth of the rugged individualist, because it is part of the culture. And I think that is perhaps why in Scandinavia people are more community oriented. For example, in Denmark, if you would ask someone if we should have a single-payer healthcare system, they wouldn’t think it’s even a question. They would just take it for granted that this is how it should be. That everybody should have healthcare, and everybody should have free education, and so on.
These issues are fundamental, all the basic needs, such as housing, education, medical care, etc., should be guaranteed for everybody. Not through welfare handouts, but through guaranteed employment and collective shared wealth. So perhaps those are the three main issues: economic democracy, the importance of a decentralized economy, and changing the American cultural mythos from individualism to a more communitarian spirit.
Catlin: Perfect, and that last point you addressed connects to the last question that came in that we didn’t get to. I’m not going to ask you to go into fully, but it was about the role of government.
Bjonnes: Okay. Yes the role of the government is very important. Again. this is another problem in America, that there is so much suspicion about the role of government. As someone said in the Michael Moore movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, “In Europe, the government is afraid of the people. In America, the people are afraid of the government.” So, I think it is very important to understand that the government has a very good and important function.
And again, we are not just talking about the federal government in Washington. But rather on the state and local level, as well, even down to the city level. So again, government needs decentralized politics as well. So, the government’s role is to set policies, good policies for the country. Good policies regarding the environment, regarding economics, regarding healthcare, and so on and so forth. So that is the role of government. And at the same time, it is important that the government sets rules for the economy, but also stays out of the economy, out of meddling with things on the local economic level, so that there is a clear separation there.
Sarkar also thinks it is better to have a party-less democracy than a party democracy. He thinks that it would be better if politicians were not affiliated with parties, but rather affiliated with policies. In other words, that they stand for policies, and not necessarily any certain political party. And this is something that many, such as Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, also talked about. But that’s for the future, a party-less democracy. But yes, the role of government is very, very important. If we look at the Scandinavian model, we see a very different attitude towards the government, because people there feel that the government is doing good things for them. And even the right-wing party, the party that is equal to the Republican Party in the United States would never think of ever saying that we should take away universal healthcare from the people; that people should just fend for themselves, and find the best healthcare deal on the market. So, with a change in consciousness, we will also see a change in understanding the proper relationship between government and economics and good policy. And by giving people the freedom to implement good economic policies on the local level, then I think that there will be a shift towards the possibility of good government.
...it is important that the government sets rules for the economy, but also stays out of the economy, out of meddling with things on the local economic level, so that there is a clear separation there.
Catlin: Here is a question from one of the participants:I’ve heard a lot of people that share what’s happening with capitalism in terms of what you’ve talked about in your book. There are a lot of people who want to do something. So, I really have two questions. One, how do we reach all these people, and secondly, what can we have them do? They all want to do something, but they don’t know what to do to bring about this change, and I don’t either. We talk about it, but what do we do? What do we tell this mass of people that are getting onboard slowly, how can they be involved and how can they make a difference?
Bjonnes: These are important questions and also very big questions. I ask myself the same question. What can I do? I’ve written two books about alternatives to capitalism, and I’m trying to reach people that way. So, each person, each individual will have to ask themselves, “What can I do? How can I reach people?” For example, if you are a writer, you can write letters to the editor of the newspaper. If you are more of a hands-on person that likes to do activities, you could do activities — let’s say, for example, if you are into growing things, you can maybe form a farm community or do something in a local community around that. So, I think the first question to ask is what can I do and how can I contribute? Now, on the larger level, I think that what you are doing in EDA is important. You’re into education and advocacy, so every organization starts with something, has a goal, has a certain set of values that they want to follow and so on. So, education and study are very important. I think that’s the first step. And then find some way of being an advocate, and you’ve already started that by forming a website. You’re studying. You’ve been studying my book. And then the next step will be to create some kind of advocacy or some kind of movement.
If there are certain issues that are pressing in your local area, then take up that issue and form a committee and a movement around that. That is one way to go. And then the next phase would be to involve politicians, local politicians, to see if policies can be changed and so on. So I think a step by step way of doing things is important and to accept that failures will be made, mistakes will be made, and at the same time, accept that small incremental changes may be as important as the big changes, because the big change is going to come from the small incremental changes. And lastly, what is really important, I think, is that we walk our talk as much as we can. So, if we are into local food, organic food and we are able to grow something — like for example here where I live, we have some land, so we grow a lot of our own vegetables. Those are small activities that we can do, but we can also be advocates and be writers and be spokespeople for the bigger vision and the bigger activities as well, so acknowledging the importance of making small changes that can lead to bigger changes and work with that in as many ways and as creatively as possible.
Catlin: I’d like to step in here, Roar, and point to a few of the specific things that are advocated in your book and through PROUT that, when I really think about it, create partially an answer to the previous question. I’m just going to name two of them now and allow you to comment on them if you want. One is that it seems to me one of the main suggestions in the book is to try to get cooperatives to be the most common business structure, worker-owned cooperatives. It’s amazing to me actually how many of them there are now in the United States. Someone recently sent me an article about two women who are so sold on the idea of cooperatives that they’ve left very good corporate jobs to just push the development of cooperatives. That’s something that we can be looking for ways to implement in our own lives, and we can certainly be thinking about what are the kind of legislative changes that would be necessary to make it more possible for cooperatives to thrive. The other one that really jumps out from your book is this idea of full employment. I think that that is really an achievable, important ideal: full employment for everyone at a living wage.
Bjonnes: Right, yeah, exactly. As I mentioned earlier, if we want to change capitalism, if we want to change the economy, we need to restructure the economy. And so as we mentioned in the book, Sarkar suggest a restructuring of the economy into a three-tier structure, which is in many ways the best of capitalism and the best of socialism. So, there is the state, the government from the national to the local level, that controls certain key industries such as electricity, water, infrastructure, and so on, to make sure that these vitally important features of the economy are available for everyone. And then the largest part of the economy will be, as you said, cooperatives. In other words, the corporations will be turning into cooperatives and then capitalist private enterprises can thrive on a small scale, so that’s the three-tiered structure of the economy. And part of that, as you also mentioned, is guaranteed employment at a living wage. That is very, very important. For example, here in Asheville, North Carolina where I live, we have in the city a living wage campaign, so for example, there is an Asian restaurant that doesn’t accept tips because they’re paying their workers a living wage.
And so, you can go there and eat at a reasonable rate, but you also know that the workers there are paid well. So many initiatives like that are taking place throughout the country, so yes, I would agree with that. Also, cooperatives, there are quite a few cooperatives in this area as well. And as a matter of fact, on the land that I live — I live in a small eco village, and we are now working on starting a farm cooperative. Prama, where I work, is itself a kind of a cooperative, so yeah, I think that those two issues are very, very important. Developing a cooperative spirit in business is very, very important. And then there’s the second issue of a living wage, because everybody should have the right to earn enough money, have the purchasing power, to have the basic necessities. That is also a foundational issue, which will reduce inequality and poverty.
Catlin: It’s such a different view. I’m really glad you began this whole interview by talking about the additional piece that you bring to contrast the capitalist view, capitalism being just focused on profit and that Sarkar and your book is saying, that no, there’s this other motive, which is the sharing motive—that making-it-work-for everyone motive. It could be called the cooperative sphere of society. That’s why we’d want a living wage, because we care about everyone having a chance.
Bjonnes: Exactly.
Catlin: I keep thinking about whether there’s some phrase which the liberals could latch onto, which we could use as our catchphrase, sort of the equivalent of the flag-waving part that’s used by the right wing. It occurred to me that there’s a thing called The Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, which you may not be familiar with, but all of us probably had to say it with our hands over our hearts as school children, and it ends with an amazing line. It ends with the line “with liberty and justice for all,” and I’ve recently thought that’s actually what we’re all about. We’re about liberty and justice for all. We want real freedom, the kind of freedom which you can only have if you have enough money to support yourself. And we want justice for all, real justice, not just a kind of punitive and legalistic justice, but the sort of justice where everyone’s getting a fair deal. So, I see that language is right there within our system, and maybe we just need to bring it to the fore and make it actually happen somewhere.
Bjonnes: Yes, exactly. I think that it’s very important to point towards those issues in the American society and the American mythology that represents these values. I think that is very, very important and the best way to bring people together. Yeah, that’s a wonderful point.
Catlin: Let me ask you another big question, which has to do with strategies going forward. You’ve advocated these incremental changes in the last half hour here, and there’s also a thought that I think also exists in the minds of many people, which is that there is some big crisis coming and that it’s during a post-crisis when people are really going to be open to systemic change. Do you have any comment on that?
We must advocate for these same issues and these same values, but even more importantly, we must try to walk our talk, engage ourselves in starting cooperatives or working cooperatively.
Bjonnes: Right. Yeah. I think that it is very likely that we’ll have some kind of a crash, because of the way that capitalism is structured and is inherently dysfunctional. And often when we are in a dysfunctional state, we need some kind of a crash in order to get out of it, and so I think that that is very relevant to the economy as well. However, if we’re just sitting around hoping that the crash will come and then everything will be hunky-dory after the crash; that is a false way of looking at it.
That’s why I think it is so important that we study, that we educate ourselves about the issues, and most importantly, that we become active. We must advocate for these same issues and these same values, but even more importantly, we must try to walk our talk, engage ourselves in starting cooperatives or working cooperatively. For example, in your own organization, looking at those issues, are you working cooperatively, how much do you value the values that we talk about and how much do you actualize them in your work, and so on. So, I think both are important and that’s why I think that examples are important. Let me give one example. Last year when I was in Denmark at a convention, we had invited some people from the global permaculture organization. As you know, they work with land use and how to bring a small-scale farmers together in developing permaculture farms. In other words, creating or recreating a farm the way it used to be, when you had chicken and pigs and cows and corn and vegetables all growing together, and also utilizing the forest for harvesting and so on. So the people active in permaculture are very good at doing that, but when we came together, we both realized that we are not so good at developing permaculture farms or permaculture villages, but we’re really good at seeing the big picture. We had some very interesting meetings and interactions, so I think that it is important that we see the big picture; that we study the issues; that we do the research, but at the same time, that we also engage with people that are active on the ground. So both strategies are important, because then we are creating examples of thriving economies, cooperative economies, and hopefully also enable people to earn a living wage through these economies, so that when there is a crash, we already have good examples of the future economy.
...it is important that we see the big picture; that we study the issues; that we do the research, but at the same time, that we also engage with people that are active on the ground.
Another way of explaining this is in an evolutionary sense, and going back to what we talked about earlier, I believe that what we are seeing is the evolution towards a more cooperative economy. This is something that is in our genes, and it is an inevitable result of the global breakdown that we’re facing. It is going to be the way that we will save ourselves, so the growth of cooperatives is already happening. All the systems that Sarkar talks about — and that’s why I believe that more than Marx, who was very good at pointing out the defects of capitalism, that the strength of Sarkar and others like Schumacher, Polanyi, and so on is that they pointed towards an alternative vision. And when we look at it, when we take it apart, for example, the three-tiered economy, it already exists. It is not something that Sarkar invented in the attic when he had a bright day, but rather he’s putting the pieces of the puzzle together, the pieces of the puzzle that are already existing as an outgrowth of human evolution. So, when I see that, when I contemplate those issues, it gives me tremendous hope and tremendous inspiration to move along, because I know even if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, it is bound to happen at some point because this is the way that we need to move in terms of human evolution.
Catlyn: Perfect. Here’s another question from Betsy. In Norway, for instance, is the agriculture more like local family farms or more like American agribusiness? Let’s start there. From the agricultural standpoint, is that an example of what we could point to?
Bjonnes: Okay, good question. Yes, I think that compared to the United States, Norway has done a much better job of taking care of its farmers because Norway is a mountainous country. It’s interesting because now that we are developing this farm here on our land, we ended up buying some equipment that have been used on small farms in Norway for the last 50 years probably. These are small, two-wheel tractors that are very good at working at steep hills because it’s very dangerous to drive a regular tractor on steep hills. So, it just dawned on me that one of the reasons why Appalachia is poor is because they don’t have that kind of equipment here. They’re not used to using these kinds of tractors. But if they did, you can actually grow a lot of different things here. The climate is relatively warm, much warmer than the Norwegian climate. So yes, I would say that Norway has done a much better job than the US in terms of taking care of its small farms, but because it is a capitalist economy, it’s not good enough and that’s very frustrating because when I studied the economy in the mid-’70s in Norway, I could already then see the change for the worse, and I wrote some articles in some of the national newspapers at that time about this.
I was seeing the writing on the wall of what was coming to happen, coming to be. So yes, Norway has also had those changes, but not to the same extent as the US has. Another example of an alternative economy and probably the best in terms of a cooperative economy is the Mondragon economy in the Basque region of Spain where you have 80,000 people engaged in several hundred cooperatives, and I think that is probably the best example of a functioning, very effective and very successful cooperative economy. As I understand, nobody has been laid off since the 1950s. What they do is, they retrain people and they basically bring the worker from one co-op into another co-op whenever there is a problem with labor, so these are some examples. In Denmark, you have a strong cooperative housing movement where people live together cooperatively. For example, they may share a meal once a week, the rents are lower, they may have a kindergarten in their housing complex and so on and so forth, so that’s a very strong movement in Denmark. These are some examples of where we need to move on an international scale to build a more cooperative and sustainable economy.
Catlin: Here is a question form Greg.One of my big fears is when we get some form of collapse, or a vacuum, that this country has a tendency for violence. Is there a formula for a better transition phase from capitalism to where we want to go – making the transition the least violent? I know we need to educate ourselves in terms of what we need, and for people to understand the education systems, but there’s also the psychological aspect of how we’re going to behave in the middle of a transition when people don’t get their needs met. I haven’t really read much on this. Do you have any kind of opinion on the best way to keep violence to a minimum?
Bjonnes: Well, that’s an issue that I’ve thought a lot about, but I’m not sure I have a very good answer. I think that the United States is in a very unique situation, that here is this potential for violence. In the rural areas here where I live, everybody has a gun and there is a tremendous fear of the government, and many of the people that are my neighbors, they say they have guns because they’re afraid of the government. Of course, in a situation where there is a collapse of the economy, where the infrastructure falls apart and so on, there will unfortunately be a tendency towards violence to safeguarding one’s own resources, and then other people who don’t have them will want to steal and so on. A kind of civil war might develop.
I think again, we need more education. Sarkar said that the more intellectual a country is, the more aware and the more educated we are, the less violence there will be in a crisis situation, when there is a collapse.
That is very possible in the United States, unfortunately because of the history of the country and also because of this love affair with guns, and so on, and also due to the lack of infrastructure. I think that something like that would be less likely in Canada or in Scandinavia where there is a better collective economy, and a sense that the government is not such an evil empire and so on. How to avoid that? I think again, we need more education. Sarkar said that the more intellectual a country is, the more aware and the more educated we are, the less violence there will be in a crisis situation, when there is a collapse. So again, I think that what you guys are doing, raising people’s awareness, educating people, doing advocacy is a part of that solution. I think it is important to educate people and to do outreach in the community. For example, here where we are, we are kind of strange people, yogis, meditators who moved into the mountains, and so we do as much outreach as we can, mixing with the local population, going to concerts and activities, farmers markets and so on, so that we can make friends with the local people here. That kind of outreach is very, very important.
Catlin: Now, John has a quick question. It’s kind of the central issue of capitalism. How do you bring capital into a co-op? For example, I want to build an inn and it’s going to cost $1 million. Now, how do I bring capital in and still create a co-op?
Bjonnes: Capital is important. There needs to be a banking system. We can also have a cooperative bank. For example, in the Mondragon system, they have a cooperative banking system. So yes, we need banks, we need capital in order to create businesses. Cooperatives also needs capital. So in that sense, it is not that different from a simple capitalist system in which you’d borrow money from the bank to develop your business, so that will also be part of a cooperative economy. You borrow the money, but the percentages can be lowered because the need for profit is less, so there may be better terms for the loans and so on. Also, the profit again will not be used for speculation as in the capitalist economy, but in many ways, the system of loans to raise capital for a business would not be that different.
Catlin: But most banks require some equity, so if I did a project for $1 million, it would require $300,000 of equity, which I have to get from some investor. How does that investor get pulled in in a cooperative venture?
Bjonnes: Well, the investor will have to see if this is a viable business? Is this cooperative going to turn a profit? Because an investor will not invest in something that is not going to be profitable and successful, so again, you have the basic — the same rules will apply for an investor as well.
Catlin: I think the problem, Roar, here is one that really has to do with the nature of the hotel industry, which is that what we hope for are worker-owned cooperatives obviously, and most of the people who work in hotels are people who are changing beds and aren’t going to have any money to actually invest in terms of becoming owners of the hotel itself. I actually have heard of some businesses that allow their workers to gradually, gradually earn shares in the business, which seems like a good model to me. Is that something Sarkar addressed at all?
Bjonnes: That’s another model where, as you say, the workers in the business, as they stay in the business let’s say after five years, they can have a certain share in the business. Yeah, that’s one model, but if you’re starting a business from scratch, the money will have to come from somewhere. John was creating one specific scenario, but another scenario could be that ten people have $10,000 each and they put that into a pot and they start a cooperative with $100,000 as capital, so that’s another way of doing it where the workers bring in the capital, so that can be the starting capital. And then because the business plan makes sense, then they could loan the rest from a bank, for example, so there are many ways that this could happen.
It is probably the model most of us hold and pretty unconsciously take for granted: Someone who has all the money is going to own this thing and then there are a bunch of other people who are actually going to do the work to make it happen... There’s nothing fair or just about it.
Catlin: Right. It’s such a great example, John, and thank you for raising it because it so points to the inherent psychology of American business because I am willing to bet there’s not a single hotel owner of a hotel of any size who actually works in their hotel in any practical, normal way, certainly not changing the beds and probably not even staffing the front desk. It is probably the model most of us hold and pretty unconsciously take for granted: Someone who has all the money is going to own this thing and then there are a bunch of other people who are actually going to do the work to make it happen. And we see those as two completely different sets of people with two completely different roles in life. That’s just what capitalism has given us. There’s nothing fair or just about it.
Bjonnes: Right.
Catlin: And that leads to a question I’d really like to get you to address regarding the very first principle of the PROUT economy that Sarkar advocates, which is this idea of putting limits on individual wealth, or at least the idea that no one would be allowed to accumulate a lot of wealth without the consent of the collective. Can you address that a little bit? Why is that the first principle, and could or would that ever happen?
Bjonnes: Well, I think it’s already happening in different ways. Earlier, we talked about taxes. Taxation is one way of limiting wealth. And so a progressive tax system, which we had in the United States in the ’50s, ’60s and then it started to go away in the late ’70s, when Friedman became the main economist or inspiration for modern, American neo-liberal capitalism. Then Reagan introduced the trickle-down philosophy, reducing taxes for the rich. But progressive taxation is not a foreign concept, even to capitalism. The idea behind it is that when the purchasing capacity of the middle class is strong, then you have a more balanced and a more thriving economy. This we have seen. This we know is what is happening when we tax the rich. So, one of the reasons why we have a weak and unstable economy now is because the purchasing capacity of the middle class is falling, and that’s why we have all these speculation bubbles.
It forces everybody wants to get in on the race at the stockmarket, and then we have a crash, and then we never learn and then we start over again. But to limit wealth creation, and thus to minimize speculation, I don’t think is a foreign concept. For example, if we look at the example I made earlier, that the average fast food worker makes about $19,000 a year while the average fast food CEO makes $23 million a year in salary, that’s about 1200 times difference in income. Let’s say we don’t create a complete economic revolution, but we make a moderate change and reduce that difference in income to 500 times. I’m just using that as an example. But if we compare Norway to the United States, for example, I’m not sure of the exact numbers, but as far as I remember, the difference between the average middle class person in Norway and the top CEO in Norway is not more than 15-20 times. It’s much, much less than in the United States.
The average CEO in Norway makes maybe a couple of million dollars and then the worker in that business may make $70,000 to $80,000 or whatever it is. I’m not sure about the math. In other words, who decided that? Well, the Norwegian society decided that, the collective decided that. And similarly, Sarkar is saying that that’s a fundamental principle that needs to be part of the economy.
We need to talk openly about what the richest person should have and what the poorest person should have. That needs to be on the table because both are eating from the same table. We’re all sitting around the same table. We are a society. We are not a group of individuals trying to compete with each other. And because there are limited resources on this planet, in every society, there’s a limited amount of land, there’s a limited amount of water and so on, that’s why we need to share it all. That is, I think, one of the genius aspects of the PROUT economic system, to acknowledge the scarcity of resources and the fact that we need to share them all. That we need to have a discussion about how to share the pie.
We need to talk openly about what the richest person should have and what the poorest person should have. That needs to be on the table because both are eating from the same table. We’re all sitting around the same table.
Catlin: Right. It makes good sense. When I try to think about why is it that in the United States we’ve allowed our CEOs to get paid $20 million to $30 million and then in Norway, they’re around $2 million, I think it gets back to the American notion of freedom. I believe this country has a very specific notion of freedom, which is “I’m free to do anything I want and no one is going to interfere with me.” It comes from the frontier mentality. I actually have a friend who is a fellow therapist here in California who wants to move to New Hampshire, and I asked him, “Why New Hampshire?” It comes down to the fact that he basically likes their license plates, which says, “Live free or die!” And New Hampshire backs that up a little bit with their taxation system. But my point is that Americans, at a deep, deep level, really want to be left alone to do whatever they want whereas Europeans seem to be more willing to regulate their sense of freedom to incorporate the common good. Do you have any insight into what to do about that? How are we going to get Americans to be more willing to embrace a different notion of freedom?
Bjonnes: Yeah, you nailed it. Well, the historical difference is that Europe had a long-term socialist evolution. The workers were fighting for their rights in Europe at a much higher rate than in the United States, so socialism has been balancing capitalism to a much larger extent in Europe than in America, and that is the main difference historically. For this to change in the United States, we need to have a similar evolution, or maybe even a revolution, for that to change. And that’s why again, talking about these issues, educating and advocating for these issues is so important. The United States needs to have a similar evolutionary development.
And in that sense, Lakoff is right on. That is something that the conservatives need to be educated about, need to learn. But that is, as we know, not so easy. But when we think about the fact that Bernie Sanders became so popular, and other candidates are now coming onboard with similar values, then there is hope. Bernie Sanders talked about Scandinavia as being the model that he was aspiring to, so I see changes happening in the United States. Most of the people living here in the mountains where I am, they’re mostly democrats. And so, I don’t see that it is impossible to change them.
I think that part of the problem in America is the value system, the Christian values and the lack of the Democrats to speak to those values and support those values, and at the same time, speaking about an economic value system that is really to the benefit of the people. Many Christians have turned their backs on Democrats simply because they’re not seeing any cultural value in their programs. They feel the Democrats don’t really support them anymore. That they don’t stand for their needs.
Also there is the perception that Democrats and liberals don’t believe in God, and so I think that that’s been a huge problem in the United States. We need a party or a group of politicians that can really stand up for the middle class and the poor and to speak their needs and to support their needs. That has been missing in the United States, but it existed in Europe for a long, long time. It is fading and that’s why we see the backlash with Brexit, or extreme nationalism and the return to conservative, even neo-fascist, anti-immigrant values and so on. That is a backlash, and it’s an unfortunate backlash and the reason is because of neoliberalism in the EU taking over the economy and the value system.
Catlin: It’s a pivotal moment. It seems so clear to everyone now that the world is imbalanced. Obviously, we need to do everything we can to shift the balance in the direction of a system that works for everybody. That’s my final thought. It looks like we’re close to a wrap-up point. Do you have anything you want to say, Roar? Is there any last point you’d like to make about your book or about EDA or anything else that’s on your mind?
...intellectuals and activists, positive warriors and active workers need to come together and create a better, healthier and a more balanced society, and I see it happening inspite of all the negative things going on. I see great hope.
Bjonnes: Well, I’m very thankful that you invited me into this conversation. I really enjoyed it and I feel very honored to be part of your work. I wanted to mention that and at the same time, I want to emphasize that I’m very hopeful, very inspired by the fact that thinkers like Sarkar has presented ideas like the PROUt economy, for example, which I think represent the basic outlines of the next economy. I’m inspired by all the activists throughout the world that are standing up for change. They may never have heard of a system like PROUT, which I think is going to rise up from the ashes, so to speak, because it makes sense, and because I think it is the direction that humanity is moving in.
But those people that are working on the ground, these activists are truly inspirational and an important part of the change that we need to see. And so, intellectuals and activists, positive warriors and active workers need to come together and create a better, healthier and a more balanced society, and I see it happening inspite of all the negative things going on. I see great hope. And as I mentioned just a few minutes ago with the Bernie Sanders movement, I see great hope for America as well. In many ways, my heart is more Norwegian than American, but I am in many ways inspired by America. I’m inspired by people like you guys. I’m inspired by all the alternative people here in Asheville that are into organic farming and community living and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of positive energy in America, and so I have great hopes for the future. I think that the good will overcome the bad, and I think we will do well in the end.
Catlin: Thank you so much for that, Roar, and thank you for writing the book. It’s become kind of our textbook for EDA. As you may know, we’re actually going to run a second book study on it for people who want to do it again and there’s a fair number of people in that category. We’re hoping to attract a whole new group to join with them, so the second time through, we’ll get into it a little bit deeper.
Bjonnes: That’s great.
Catlin: Yeah, it really is great, and it really has helped us as an organization tremendously, I think. So, thank you again for this evening and for writing the book.
Bjonnes: Thank you so much. That’s really nice to hear.
Catlin: Earlier, we went over the nature of the problem posed by the current neoliberal, capitalist economic structure, and now we want to concentrate on the solutions to those problems that are suggested in the book. But before we get into those solutions, it seems to me that it would be a good thing to just review the essence of the problem that we’re trying to solve. So, my first question would be, in a nutshell, what’s wrong with capitalism?
Bjonnes: Okay. That’s a good question and also a big question, but I think it is important to acknowledge the big difference between, for example the PROUT economic system and capitalism. I think a major difference is that PROUT acknowledges two broad human sentiments. One is the sentiment of selfishness, of selfish pleasure, and the other is the sentiment of sharing and cooperation. PROUT economics is based on those two sentiments, we could say. Capitalism, on the other hand, is based on the first sentiment primarily and not the second. In fact, Adam Smith, the so-called Father of Capitalism, he said in so many words that if the individual makes profit, we will all profit. We will all benefit. In other words, capitalism is based on this idea that we have a selfish gene so to speak and this selfish gene is the main driver of economics, of inventions and of productivity and in capitalism in general. And as we all know, capitalism is what we think of as economics in many ways. So, if the individual is successful, according to capitalism, then the group will also be successful, but as we also know, this is not always the case. In fact, it’s often not the case. In economic terms, the selfish human gene leads to profit, yes, but that is also the problem with capitalism because this profit motive, when that is the main driver of economics, then that is the sole focus.
...the average fast food worker makes about $19,000 a year while the average fast food CEO makes about $23 million in annual salary, that’s 1200 times difference between the lowest pay and the highest pay, an incredible inequality.
It leads to inequality and exploitation of humans and nature. That single focus of the profit motive or the selfish gene is really the main problem of capitalism, as I see it. The need to accumulate and create and innovate leads to competition, which to some extent is healthy, but only up to a point. When competition is the main driver of economic trade, it eventually leads to inequality because some will get very rich and some not so rich. A stark example in our economy in the United States is that the average fast food worker makes about $19,000 [which is barely enough to survive] a year while the average fast food CEO makes about $23 million in annual salary, so that’s a huge difference, some 1200 times difference between the lowest pay and the highest pay, so an incredible inequality.
And as we have seen during the growth of capitalism, unfortunately, the inequality has risen, has grown, rather than shrunk. It has not, as Adam Smith envisioned, benefitted the masses, at least not in the global sense. Even in the United States, we know that there’s a lot of inequality and a lot of issues regarding this. So that is the reason we need to limit capitalism to small enterprises, because if capitalism is allowed to fulfill its basic philosophy then it grows too big and turns into monopoly capitalism. We end up with a few people controlling the economy to the detriment of the masses. Because we don’t have unlimited resources, even though we have unlimited needs, or unlimited wants, there are not enough resources or money to fulfill those unlimited wants. The book and the film The Secret says that if you have the right spiritual intention, then there’s unlimited amount of everything for everybody, but in reality that’s not the case. So that point needs to be part of the equation in economics, as the basics of economics, but it is not part of capitalism. It hasn’t been recognized by capitalism.
So, in a sense, capitalism is based on a myth, and we are trying to demonstrate in the book that this myth has been explained away by economists using mathematics to try to justify this myth. That’s one major problem. So that reality is not built into the capitalist economy, and that is the main problem to take into account, that we have limited resources on the physical level. Private enterprises need to have a ceiling on growth and on expansion. And that basic issue is not accounted for in capitalism. Reform capitalism, of course, has tried to deal with this through taxation, by taxing the rich, taxing corporations and so on. In some decades in the ’50s and ’60s, we did quite well doing that. Corporations were taxed heavily. The rich were taxed heavily and the wealth was spread around in many different ways in a much more just way than we see today, but since the ’70s, that has again changed with trickle-down economics, neoliberalism, and so on. And we see this now again with Trump. The tax package that Trump presented is doing the same thing, basically giving incentives to the rich to become richer.
...we need to limit capitalism to small enterprises, because if capitalism is allowed to fulfill its basic philosophy then it grows too big and turns into monopoly capitalism.
This has also benefited the speculative economy, as we talked about earlier. The speculative economy is now the largest portion of the economy. In other words, speculation produces more money than the real economy, much more money. Private accumulation of wealth needs to be limited. Otherwise, we won’t create a healthy economy. Corporate capitalism creates a few winners and many losers. The second problem with capitalism is that it views nature as a free commodity, something to be exploited, that nature only has value if it is turned into a commodity. Again, using Adam Smith as an example, he imagined nature as a field, as a fallow field, and it is of no use to the economy until you start plowing and cultivating that field.
According to Sarkar (propounder of PROUT) again, nature has both value as a commodity and it also has an existential value. It has value in itself. It has life and that life has value and the right to exist. So, for human beings, we could say that nature has a value for the economy as a resource, but it also has value in the form of recreation and peace, a place to meditate, to enjoy. It has value as an ecological system and that ecology is again the source from which all life and economics comes from. Without nature, there wouldn’t be any economy at all. So, this is a vital, important aspect that is not acknowledged by capitalism.
Nature has both value as a commodity and it also has an existential value. It has value in itself. It has life and that life has value and the right to exist.
However, again, we see that green capitalism is taking this into account and is trying to reform capitalism. That’s a good sign, but still the problem of profit is not dealt with by green capitalism, and that is why I think we need a new system. We need to restructure the economy and not just keep reforming it. So if we focus on these two main problems with capitalism, the selfish gene which leads to accumulation of profit and the fact that nature is seen as a free commodity, then we get the kind of world we have today, one with material inequality on the one hand and environmental destruction on the other. Some other problems with capitalism are the dynamics between centralization and decentralization of the economy. Capitalism tends to centralize economics, again because of the profit motive. It leads to a centralized economy, a more monopolistic economy, with large corporations, since it does not put proper value on decentralization or the local economy.
We could use American agriculture as an example, which has literally killed off small farming over the last few decades. Although it is coming back through the environmental movement, with an increase in small, organic farms and farmers markets, but on the whole, that is a drop in the bucket. The big agribusiness farmers have decimated the small farm economy. Small farms are no longer able to compete with the big agribusinesses, which again are competing with China. An example of that is that China has become the major garlic producer for American garlic lovers. Honey from China is more common in the US than American honey, so these are just some simple examples of the problems with capitalism when we don’t take care of the local economy.
The Chinese now also own large interests in American food giants and food companies making food production into a global business and a global competitive market. Capitalism, due to the sole emphasis on the selfish profit motive, leads to destructive competition and therefore to increased inequality and increased environmental degradation. The shallow view it has on nature as a free commodity leads to the destructive exploitation of the environment. So those two issues—the profit motive and seeing nature as a free lunch—are the main problems with capitalism.
Catlin: It’s fascinating to me to hear this, Roar, and when I think about it, I realize that it also partially explains why capitalism has had such a good run for 150 years or so because these problems really just emerged with time. It’s almost like early stage capitalism was relatively benign, but now in its more mature stage, we really run into the problem of this single motivation of profit, profit, profit. It’s created these tremendously rich, self-centered people who are controlling more than they really should be and who are apparently not very concerned about the rest of the world. Is that an evaluation or a way of looking at it that you would agree with?
Bjonnes: In some ways, that is true. On the other hand, if we look at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when capitalism really took off, we saw factories with child laborers and adult laborers working 12 to 14 hours a day. They didn’t have holidays. They were working on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays, so there was tremendous exploitation I think from the very beginning of capitalism. However, on a global scale, we didn’t see the problems at that time. It started in England with the industrial revolution, and then it spread throughout Europe and then to the United States. What we’re seeing now is that the economy on a global scale, in the form of global warming, is one issue. You were just mentioning the floods and the fires, so we’re seeing these effects that global capitalism has on the environment. We’re seeing it in terms of the inequality on the planet where the North is relatively rich and the South relatively poor and tremendous economic exploitation in so many ways.
...it was justified that this is how nature works: you have to be strong, you have to be tough; thus discounting the fact that nature is also very cooperative.
So I think that capitalism has been a mixed bag since the beginning, but it has been justified by a philosophy that was embedded in the system itself and held up by, for example, the justification of social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest. That is really, we could say, the source of the philosophy behind capitalism. And so it was justified that this is how nature works: you have to be strong, you have to be tough; thus discounting the fact that nature is also very cooperative. I think it was Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist, actually, and also a biologist, who was one of the first to point out that nature is also very cooperative. But again, the philosophers, the spokespeople for capitalism, has not taken that into account. They focused on the competitiveness in nature. In sum, I think yes, you’re right in many ways that it has become worse, but as I said earlier, the systemic defects of capitalism have been there since the beginning.
Catlin: That makes really good sense to me, and I’m convinced by that argument that right from the beginning there was a flaw in capitalism. And part of me wants to think that that’s a flaw that has to do with human nature, that there is this kind of greedy aspect of every one of us, the selfish piece of ourselves that’s worried about our own survival first and foremost. And then once that part starts getting oriented toward taking care of me first, it never knows when it’s done enough of that and just keeps going.
And then there’s this other voice in all of us, that’s relatively quiet in many, but nevertheless cares about the good of the whole and is interested in some kind of cooperative model where everyone does in fact benefit from what we do. We need to be thinking about taking care of everybody and taking care of nature as well. Is that something you’d agree with? Do you see a kind of gradual evolution of consciousness toward a kind of state wherein we’re more willing to bring in the second aspect, the sharing principle?
Bjonnes: Yes, I think that that is well put. I do think that there is an evolution, and I think that is our hope. I think that we’re seeing a groundswell of consciousness rising around these issues. At the same time, as I said earlier, it is also getting worse in so many ways. We are in a very interesting situation now where, yes, the consciousness and the awareness, the need to share the wealth and to share the habitation and utilization of this planet with our friends, animals and plants, that consciousness is on the rise, for sure. At the same time, we see also a backlash of a degenerative consciousness of nationalism, me first, and a tremendous growth of the corporations as well. But I’m very hopeful that the cooperative consciousness of sharing, that that awareness will win out in the long run.
Catlin: Let me ask you a more practical question around education. Economic Democracy Advocates is ultimately an advocacy organization, so ultimately, we’re going to be advocating for specific changes in laws and practices at national, state and local levels. But before we get to those specific changes, it seems to me anyway, that a great deal has to be done to introduce people to all the ideas that you’ve been discussing tonight and all the ideas that would stand behind economic democracy. So, I’m thinking of a kind of two-step or at least two-tiered process that we’re going to have to pursue: one being a major educational effort and another being the advocacy effort. Is that a breakdown that makes sense to you?
Bjonnes: Yeah, absolutely. I think that education is so important. Creating an awareness, a change of consciousness, I think that is absolutely important. So yes, I would think that that’s the right way to do it, to educate, to study, to learn and spread the awareness about these issues. That is very important, because when you do advocacy then you can explain the reasons behind the advocacy so much better. And it is also very important to study the situation on the ground. Let’s say for example if you’re working in a local area and you want to improve the local economy, it is very important to study and learn and to be educated about what’s going on in the local economy. What are the resources, for example, here in Western North Carolina where I live? What are these resources in terms of water, in terms of land, in terms of agricultural sources, and so on? So yes, this kind of education is very, very important. And then when you go out and do advocacy work, activist work, you’re so much better equipped to convince policymakers about what you’re about, and also the voting populous, so yes, I would agree with that way of doing it.
It is very important to study and learn and to be educated about what’s going on in the local economy. What are these resources in terms of water, in terms of land, in terms of agricultural sources, and so on?
Catlin: Roar, what I want to do next is to digress for a minute into the work of George Lakoff, who’s a cognitive scientist at Berkeley who addresses the importance of framing conversations in a way that supports one’s core values. The thing I like most about Lakoff is that I think he’s got a really good insight into the models of life that separate conservatives and liberals in our country now. This is a question I’ve been scratching my head about pretty consistently over the last year. I just want to run his model by you and see if it makes any sense to you and then, if it does, what does that have to do with all the things we’re talking about. So, in his model, Lakoff says that what conservatives really seem to endorse is a model with a strong male leader and it’s a model of family and of life in general. So their model is based on a strong, dominant male who knows what is right and what is wrong, and it’s his job to direct the rest of the family. Children are seen as inherently pleasure-oriented and need to be disciplined into a moral and productive approach to life. And with this view, morality and productivity go together. In fact, producing a lot, being prosperous, is seen as the highest form of morality. And it’s believed that if everyone maximizes their own personal gain, just like what Adam Smith said, that will create the optimal society.
You can see how this model would strongly oppose all entitlement programs to those who have not earned their benefits by being productive. It would also foster a view of international relations in which the most prosperous and powerful country — that would be us — is expected to impose its superior moral vision on the rest of the world. And so Lakoff is saying that conservatives in general basically come from this mindset, and that’s how the world and family should be ordered. And then he says that liberals, on the other hand, favor what he calls a nurturing parent model of the family and life in general. And within this view, children are good and need to be supported in developing their unique capabilities. Underprivileged populations are seen to be deserving of whatever support they need to have a fair chance in life, and the aspirations of the so-called developing nations needs to be understood and supported by the wealthy states. This conceptualization makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it explains a good deal about the inability of liberals and conservatives to respect one another in this country right now. I’m thinking that whatever progress is going to be made in our country going forward is best coming out of an informed awareness of this possible underlying difference in world views. So I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about that way of thinking about things and how it might fit into your model.
Bjonnes: Well, I do think that it makes a lot of sense, what Lakoff was saying, that there definitely are these two ways of looking at the world. Certainly, here in America, I think that these worldviews are very, very strong. I think that if I’m not mistaken, Paul Ray, who developed the idea of cultural creatives had a similar idea, and he was saying that it is the cultural creatives, the liberals that will bring about the change and that’s where the change is going to come from.
I think that rather than pitting the liberal and the conservative against each other, we need to think about a common ground.
In many ways, I would agree with that. On the other hand, it may be a little more complex and I would like to throw in a different model coming from India and from Sarkar, which are four different types of psychologies. One is the warrior, one is the intellectual, one is the merchant, and one is the worker. Sarkar said that society is often controlled by either one of them or at least either one of the three. The worker rarely controls society, but the warrior often does, the intellectual and the merchant, and now we are in this merchant era, the capitalist era. So this is of course a different way to look at it, but I think it is important to acknowledge that there are different archetypes and I think that what is important for liberals to acknowledge is perhaps that this patriarchal — we could maybe call that the warrior, is an archetype that is real and that we need to acknowledge it `and that it has a role, but the problem becomes, Sarkar says, when the patriarch or the warrior becomes an exploiter or becomes the only leader in town. That’s the problem. The same thing if you have an intellectual leadership and we see that — for example, Sarkar talks about the evolution of society. From the worker society, which was the society that Karl Marx actually studied and became in many ways the inspiration to his idea of communism. In other words, early societies were living together in large families, in large tribes, sharing everything together. And as we know, Karl Marx also studied American Indians and learned from them about the idea of sharing and what he envisioned as the perfect communist society without the state and all that. So yes, I do think that the cultural creatives or the liberal mindset is very, very important. At the same time, family values are important. Morality is important. Working hard is important.
So rather than pitting one against the other, I think that we need to try to see the positive aspects in the different models and find ways to collaborate and to appreciate each other’s strengths and of course also acknowledge some of the weaknesses. For example, I live in a part of the country where the conservatives are maybe not in the majority, but there are plenty of them around here and many of them are my neighbors. I have to deal with them, and so I face these issues on a daily level and I think it’s very important for America to build bridges. And so going back to trying to put all of this together, what Sarkar was saying that the future of humanity belongs to the person that has an integral personality that embodies the warrior, the intellectual, the merchant and the worker, but who is not embedded in either one of them fully. In other words, it’s a kind of wise person, a kind of detached person that knows how to fight if that’s necessary, knows how to stand up for his rights, knows how to study and knows how to create a business and knows how to work hard.
So I would hope that the future of humanity and the future of America is more of a hybrid personality, or you could say — Sarkar called this person a “sadvipra”, which is a Sanskrit term, but it basically means a person that has an integrated personality. Actually, Ken Wilber has — I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ken Wilber, but he had a similar concept of the integral leader. I think that rather than pitting the liberal and the conservative against each other, I think we need to think about a common ground. However, when it comes to the uses of economics and what we talked about earlier regarding selfishness and all that, I would say that the conservatives have definitely something to learn and some issues to overcome. That is for sure, and that is one of the challenges in America. For example, in Norway where I come from, the people living in the countryside and the people living in the city have a much closer relationship. They’re not so much pitted against each other. Their values are much more similar, so I see that this kind of an integration is possible, and I think that that is the future.
The current situation of so many of us in #lockdown as a viral pandemic is making it clear to many that there is no going back to the deeply dysfunctional “Normal” we left behind on March, 11th 2020. Many politicians, corporate leaders and billions who were trapped in the dehumanising hamster wheels of a dysfunctional economic system are now given time to reflect on what Joseph Campbell meant in suggesting: “There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.”
Maybe we need a manifesto setting out what the ReGeneration — the generations called to regenerate the Earth and her people — is aiming to achieve by the end of this Century? We need a lighthouse to sail past and improve on as we leave the Anthropocene epoch and enter into Ecozoic era.
In time for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day (on April, 22nd, 2020), here is a first draft for a ‘Manifesto of the ReGeneration’. It is just that: a draft. I am actively inviting suggestions for improvements in the comments below, or simply add your name in support and share the link.
The Manifesto of the ReGeneration (Version 0.0)
We the undersigned — as conscious members of the human family and the wider community of life — commit to unite — in celebration of our diversity as a reservoir for evolutionary creativity — to co-create a future of diverse regenerative cultures cooperatively engaged in the healing of the Earth. In that process and on that ‘common ground’, we hope to engage in healing ourselves and much of the trauma that has divided humanity.
Such regenerative cultures will be elegant expressions of the bio-cultural uniquenees of the places they inhabit. We are capable of being a responsible keystone species humbly regenerating community, ecosystems and planetary health while building resilience, self-reliance and the capacity to transform at the bioregional scale.
We actively respond to the urgency to redesign the human impact on Earth from being predominantly destructive, exploitative and degenerative to being healing, restorative and regenerative. In all our diversity of life-style and beliefs we come together in glocal solidarity and the understanding that caring for the health and wellbeing of communities, ecosystems and the biosphere is in our enlightened self-interest.
In recognising the direct link between individual and population health and the health of soil, water, marine and terrestrial ecosystems and the biosphere, we commit to a salutogenic (health-generating) intention in the redesign of how we meet human needs within planetary limits while establishing solid socio-economic foundations for all — grounding regenerative “Doughnut Economies” in place and region, everywhere.
We recognise that global bio-productivity and the planetary life-support system are the primary source of all value creation. In service to current and future generations of humanity and life on Earth we set ourselves the following goals to be accomplished during the remaining decades of the 21st Century. This is ‘Cathedral Building Work’ which can only be started by the generations alive today, yet the future of life on Earth will be shaped by our successes and failures on this path.
Goals for Ecological Regeneration:
to stabilise global climate patterns through significant reduction of ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below 300ppm (from the current levels of 414ppm) by the end of this century,
to halt the haemorrhaging of planetary biodiversity and bring extinction levels down to ‘background level’ as opposed to the current rates that are more than 100 times as high, with a recent IPBES report (2019) suggesting that more than 1 million species are now facing extinction (see aslo video),
to rapidly halt continuing deforestation and steadily increase global forest cover by 350 million hectares of diverse forests by 2030 (accomplishing the Bonn Challenge) en route to regenerating 1500 million hectares by the end of the Century to restore the loss of the last 300 years and rebalance the global hydrological cycle, stop erosion and reverse global warming trends,
to restore ecosystems health at landscape scale everywhere through a process of re-wilding in combination with a fundamental redesign of the food system and a shift to regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, valuing farmers not just as primary producers but also as guardians of ecosystems health,
to fundamentally redesign our material culture in order to reduce the release of fossil fuel derived toxic substances and pollutants (including plastics) into terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the atmosphere,
to fundamentally redesign our economic and monetary systems so they incentivise activities that create collaborative abundance rather than competitive scarcity through ecological and socio-economic regeneration,
to fundamentally redesign our systems of governance in ways that enable active citizens participation through the implementation of subsidiarity, making national and international levels of governance subsidiary to and enabling of bioregional and local decision-making in glocal solidarity and responsibility,
to fundamentally redesign education as a life-long learning process that builds the capacity of individuals and communities to co-create diverse regenerative cultures in co-evolving mutuality with all of humanity and the wider community of life,
to enable glocal cooperation through peer-to-peer innovation and knowledge sharing by changing the laws on intellectual property rights,
to transform the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ of the United Nations into the ‘Regenerative Development Goals’ through local and bioregional implementation, a whole systems approach, and a reframing of SDG 8 to “Good Work and Qualitative Growth”,
to establish a foundation of shared values and goals by endorsement of the Earth Charter as a common ground for all of humanity,
to commit to a responsible use of technology that considers that not everything that is technologically feasible has to be implemented and evaluates the use of a given technology on the basis of its potential for regenerative impact on human communities and life as a whole — moving “from weaponry to livingry”,
to once and for all abolish ecocide and genocide by acknowledging and enforcing the rights and wisdom of (more-than-human) nature and indigenous people everywhere as they offer vital contributions to achieving all of the above.
… (what’s missing?)
To be clear: I am not suggesting that this is a definitive list or that I have not omitted important points. I have simply made a start. May it serve! I look forward to your comments and contributions. Clearly a ‘Manifesto of the ReGeneration’ will have to be co-created by those of the generations alive today who are feeling called to contribute to the healing of the Earth and her people. ReGeneration Rising! Trimtabs Unite!
Daniel Christian Wahl — An author and an advisor to Systems Change Alliance, he is also constantly catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Since you got attracted to this article, you probably feel quite strongly that the world needs to change and have realized that the problems we are facing will not be solved by taking only individual responsibility and action. The systems our society are rooted upon do not allow the planet or humankind to thrive, so there is a real need for profound systems change. However, this task can seem daunting in its magnitude. But the fact is, despite many things still remaining the same, there are also many projects and initiatives around the world that are exploring alternatives and serve as inspiring examples of how we can live differently while supporting one another. Read on for a list of heartwarming projects making real impact in their communities.
La Via Campesina is a global movement representing the voices of peasants, small farmers and agricultural workers from all around the world. All people are represented, including minorities and marginalized groups, such as rural women and youth, indigenous people and migrants. The movement was founded in 1993 in Belgium by a group of farmers’ representatives from four continents, at a time when concerns about the globalization of agribusinesses and agricultural policies were rising among small scale farmers. They saw the need for union and solidarity to make their voices heard, and today La Via Campesina represents around 200 million farmers.
The grassroots movement advocates for peasant agriculture, and for the role of local food sovereignty in promoting social justice and dignity, and it strongly opposes transnational corporate agriculture that harms nature and social relations. The organization also strongly defend women’s rights and the importance of their role and struggle as the producers of 70% of the food on earth, so that they and the rest of us can be free from all forms of oppression.
The purpose of this eco-city in India is to realize human unity by becoming a universal town where men and women of all countries can live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, politics and nationalities. The concept for Auroville was developed in the 1960s and obtained the backing of not only the government of India, but also of UNESCO, which commended it as a project of importance to the future of humanity. It was inaugurated in 1968, in a ceremony which counted representatives from 124 nations, and currently counts around 2500 inhabitants from 59 nations and of all age groups.
The growing town is divided into several areas: of particular note is the industrial zone, whose small businesses and green sustainable industries contribute to Auroville’s aim of becoming self-supporting, with some of them also working to improve living conditions for the neighboring villages. Auroville excels in many different fields, such as architecture and design, reforestation, experimental education, renewable energy and food security, and the town receives thousands of visitors every year, many of which come to participate in workshops and training programmes in one of the town’s many schools, which base their programs on experiential learning and active collective projects. The town’s international zone features regional pavilions celebrating the different cultures of the world, and there is a lively community life, with many members meeting for meals under a giant solar bowl that can prepare food for about a thousand people.
The Lowry is an art center and a charity with a belief in the arts as a tool for social change. Their Arts for Social Change program brings together artists and young people experiencing challenges in life, enabling them to learn new skills, improve their wellbeing and explore their own self-expression, all the while empowering them to make art that challenges the world to stop and listen. The various projects target young people faced with challenging career responsibilities, young parents and young people facing homelessness, among other groups.
Their Youth Homelessness project guarantees that, aside from engaging in creative activities that help them express themselves and reduce isolation, the young people get access to shelter through partner organizations, support regarding mental health and wellbeing, and also have the opportunity to gain qualifications towards education or employment. The focus and support they give to young people have inspired many of their project participants to choose life paths that extend this influence into their communities and to embrace social work for themselves.
TimeBanks USA is a non-profit dedicated to expanding the knowledge and advance the use of time banking. The organization was created in 1995 by Edgar Cahn to expand the time banking concept born in Japan in 1970s at the hands of Teruko Mizushima. This concept revolves around the idea of allowing people to swap time and skill instead of money. The system runs on an alternative currency called time credits. When individuals spend hours of their time providing services and helping others, they receive the corresponding amount of time credits, that they can then use to request help from others when needed.
One hour always corresponds to one credit, irrespective of the type of help provided, as a reminder of the fundamental equality of human beings. We all have something of value to share with someone else, but there are also some forms of work that are not easily included in the value chain, such as building strong families and revitalizing neighborhoods. Time credits aim also to reward and recognize the value of these less acknowledged types of work. While time banks can be very large, they are generally local, and they help to build trust, community and respect for others. Since its foundation, TimeBanks USA has helped to create a large and expanding network of time banks in the country, and they estimate that around 30 000 – 40 000 people are already engaged in time banking in the United States.
The Sarvodaya Samadhana Movement of Sri Lanka seeks a no-poverty, no-affluence and a conflict free society through community-based efforts and volunteering. The project started as an education program in 1958 that allowed students to help with community development in the most remote villages of Sri Lanka, and has since reached over 15 000 villages in the country and become its largest community-based development network. The learning program turned into a powerful movement for nonviolent social transformation.
The members of Sarvodaya travel through the country offering help to others to transition into a sustainable way of life. The basic premise is that by working together to meet their needs, villagers can enhance their material wellbeing, their social relationships, and their spiritual consciousness. When a village decides democratically upon a community project and commits itself to supplying the necessary labor, Sarvodaya brings in other assets they might need, such as supplies and technical support. There is also a strong spiritual component to the movement that relies on the power of sharing labor for transformation, as stated by their motto: “We build the road and the road builds us.”
Catlin: It’s not like the economy is working for us. Rather, we’re working for the economy at this point. And so, we pretty much have to do whatever the bankers tell us has to be done to keep the whole system going. Anyway, so that’s what I’m seeing, the tail that’s wagging the dog. But I’m not sure it is the tail anymore. It’s beginning to feel more and more, like it’s the brain, or some demonic part of the brain that’s telling us all what we have to do. Would you comment on that?
“Let the banks fail. Let them go down and take the ship down with them, because they created this problem.”
Erik Reinert, Economist
Bjonnes: Yes, I agree very much with what you’re saying. The Norwegians and the Swedes, they are practical people in many ways, even though, as I said earlier, they have become part of this speculation economy as well. We saw that with Iceland [during the crash of 2008]. Iceland became a hotspot of investing, prior to the economic crash. We write a little bit about this in the book. However, when the stuff hit the fan, so to speak, then Iceland did something that other countries should emulate: they let the banks fail.
Some economists, such as Eric S. Reinert, the Norwegian economist, who we quote quite a lot in the book, he said: “Let the banks fail. Let them go down and take the ship down with them, because they created this problem.” And that’s essentially what Iceland did. They let the banks fail. They didn’t allow the taxpayers to bail out the banks, which is what happened, as you so wonderfully stated, in America. Here, we let the taxpayers pay for the massive failures of the banks. We paid the people who created the big mess. On top of that, they themselves cleverly created a new financial speculation system, which gave them even more money. Sometimes more money than they previously earned. This is an outrageous system of economics, and we need to stop it.
At the same time, as I said in my introduction, I think that it is a system that will eventually implode because it is so unhealthy. It is so unbalanced. And I think that this quote by Sarkar that “Capitalism will explode like a firecracker” implies something about this. This system represents the essence of capitalist greed. And again, this system of rewarding greed is the essence of the problem of capitalism. And we cannot just keep reforming this system, keep propping it up. We are seeing the elephant in the room, but we are not really talking about the elephant in the room. What we need to do, is to start talking about that elephant in the room. We need to do something about it.
Catlin: That leads me to exactly the next question that I want to ask you. There’s a wonderful line in the book that says, “Capitalism has, in a sense, a self-destructive gene in its DNA.” Would you talk about that for a little bit?
Bjonnes: Yeah, as I said earlier, I grew up in Norway, and, like my father, I was part of the leftist movement in Norway. And I remember my father saying that, “People’s consciousness is tied to their pocketbooks.” He also said that “People need to understand that the essence of capitalist economics is profit.” Sarkar said the same thing, that the problem with capitalism is that it is based on “the profit motive.” Capitalism is based on Adam Smith’s idea that selfishness is good. The idea that, because selfishness breeds inventiveness and creativity, ultimately there will be enough profit created, enough good for everyone. But Sarkar said, in essence, that this gene is the real and essential problem with capitalism, this profit motive.
So, this selfish gene is also capitalism’s own self-destructive tendency. And this tendency needs to be curbed. We have tried to curb it, through tax reforms, and so on. But over and over, we see that these reforms have not been enough. And this is now being reflected by two very essential problems. One is the environmental problem, and the other one is the inequality problem. In a sense, we’ve created two planets, one rich, and one poor. So this is what we mean by the selfish gene. It’s an essential issue.
And so the very system of capitalism needs to be balanced by cooperation. Capitalism says selfishness is good, it is inventive, it is creative; it creates positive things; and it’s based on this idea of the survival of the fittest, as its social outlook. Sarkar, on the other hand, is saying that we have two tendencies as humans. Yes, we have this selfish tendency. But we also have something that he calls the gene of cooperation. The gene of helping others, of altruism. And this is the gene that needs to balance the gene of selfishness. And the way to do that is through creating economic democracy.
...we need to redesign the system itself. Not simply to reform the system, but rather to restructure the entire economy. So that the economy and the ecology become part of the same system of economics, and thus to remove the inherent weaknesses of capitalism altogether.
That’s why in Sarkar’s economy, private enterprise will be allowed only on a small scale. If it is not, the capitalists will always want more profit, more domination, more control. And eventually, no matter how many reforms we have, we will end up with the system we more or less have today. And because of this gene, the whole capitalist system is geared towards increasing concentration of wealth, of making some people super-rich and the general population poor. So that’s basically what that gene perpetuates. And instead we need to create more balance.
Because of this gene, on the environmental level, capitalism also tends to deplete natural resources, to destroy the environment, to take nature for granted, see it as a free lunch. And that is something that the environmental movement and the environmental economists have been very good at pointing out. They have documented this problem very well, and I think that this is something that more and more people are waking up to, this insight, and this wisdom.
So, what we are suggesting in the long-term solutions section of the book, is that we need to redesign the system itself. Not simply to reform the system, but rather to restructure the entire economy. So that the economy and the ecology become part of the same system of economics, and thus to remove the inherent weaknesses of capitalism altogether. And this is what I believe Sarkar has done in developing his new economic model.
Catlin: I want to ask you about the last time I think that capitalism was really challenged. Marx wrote, accurately it turns out, that workers would not stand for the system as it was operating then. And so, what I’m wondering about is if you have any insight into why we are so tolerant of the system now? I mean why aren’t we rallying in some way?
Bjonnes: As I said earlier, I think it is Facebook’s fault. It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s cleverness that got us all, made us lazy and complacent. I’m saying this as a joke, but as my math teacher used to say, “There’s always something serious in every joke.” So, I think that the capitalist system has been very, very clever in covering up its tracks. And that has been achieved in so many different ways.
The system of capitalism has become so clever in designing a system that makes us all into slaves. We have all become invested in this system. We have all become its sleeping slaves. During the housing crisis in the early 2000, I had friends who “flipped” houses. But then I thought, this is just crazy, this will crash very soon. And that’s exactly what happened.
The capitalist system has developed a very clever, very robust, very resilient system, and it’s very good at covering up its own problems, and in making us believe it’s okay. You know, if we vote for a Democrat, everything will be okay. Or, if we can get Trump out of office we’ll have a better world, and so on. But, it isn’t that simple. Therefore, I am heartened by movements such as Economic Democracy Advocates, by people that you have in your group who are asking the tough questions, looking for deeper answers. This is what we need more and more of now. And I think so many of the answers are there already. And I think the next thing is that we need to create that movement which says, “Enough is enough.” And I think that that movement is coming.
We need to create a movement which says, “Enough is enough.” And I think that that movement is coming.
Paul Hawken said something important a few years back. He said that there’s a growing movement throughout the world, of millions of people, a grassroots movement, which is never covered by the mass media. And that movement is quietly working on all of these issues, asking the right questions. And at the same time, building an alternative economy, an alternative environmental movement. Ecologists, local economy movements, and so on. They are discussing the commons, and they are using the resources properly. So that movement is there. And I think when the right time comes, when there is a deeper and more fundamental crack in the system; then I think we will see a massive change.
Catlin: Wonderful, I’m going to pause there. Thank you for that one. And Anita I’m going to just ask you to come on with any question, that looks like a good one
Anita: Sure, I have a question from Janet, and this is on the theme of the changes that are coming. And specifically, she’s asking, “How do you see the change to the capitalist system coming, and what can we as interested parties do to help bring about change?” And speaking to that, I think when there’s a crack in the system, there’s an opportunity for change to happen. If you could speak to that and anything now that we can help bring it about.
Bjonnes: You know, Leonard Cohen has this beautiful line, where he says, “There’s a crack in everything, and that’s where the light comes in.” And I think that is what is happening, that the light is coming in through the crack. What can we do, and what is being done? I think that on a personal level, it is very important that we walk our talk. If we speak up about saving the environment, then we need to also live according to those values as much as we can. So, on a personal level, I think that it is very important, that we shop at the farmers market, and support the local economy in a very direct and complete way. And that we boycott companies that we think are not healthy and not sustainable, and so on.
I also think that it’s very important that we join groups, such as your group, Economic Democracy Advocacy (EDA). I also think it is important that we educate ourselves; that we become activists; that we start to speak out. At the same time, as we are doing right now, it is important to study alternative ideas, to study alternative economics. But the major change will come through some form of crisis. Unfortunately, that is often how change happens. However, it is very difficult to say when, and how it will happen.
Anita: I’ve got a couple of questions that are really about who we are as human beings and our values. One of the questions here is, can we change the economic system to economic democracy without first changing people’s values from separation and selfishness, to unity? Who are we, and what is our relationship to each other?” So really questions about how we relate to each other as human beings, and can we really transform our economy, without first looking at that or somehow integrating that into the conversation?
Bjonnes: Wonderful question. It contains an important issue, which so far has been missing in the leftist movement, or the progressive movement. It is addressed to some extent in the environmental movement, the idea that we need to live our values. And, we could say, to some extent in the spiritual movement. However, in each of these movements, there are some missing links, some loopholes. In the spiritual movement, there’s a tendency to think that, it if we all become spiritual, then everything will change. In the environmental movement, there is the idea that if we all become environmentalists, there will be change. I think it is very important and fundamental that we walk our talk as much as we can. And so, this integration of our own values, the value of cooporation, the value of caring for the environment, taking care of our neighbors, and all of those community values—these are all fundamentally important. And at the same time, we need to practice deeper spiritual values, finding peace within so that we don’t blame others, don’t scapegoat others, and so on. All of those values and practices are very important.
So yes, I do think that real change will come. Sarkar spoke to this very clearly. He had a Sanskrit term, since he came from India, for a personality type he called a Sadvipra –and this personality, Sarkar said, is an integral personality, a leader type, who has integrated all of the different qualities of being human. It is a person that is spiritual, but who also understands the real world, who lives in the world, who is a warrior, and who understands injustice, economics, and social change, but who also deeply values spirituality and ethics. This type of a person, he said, will be the leader who will bring us the new economy, who will inspire us into the new world.
Catlin: Fascinating approach. I think that many of the people on the call are pretty involved in their own value-based living. And I think on lots of refrigerators that we have in our homes there is the quote from Gandhi saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I suspect Gandhi had in mind another sentence that would come after that: “Be the change you want to see in the world, and then go out and make it happen.” Which is what he obviously did so wonderfully. So Anita I think we’ve got probably time for another one for Roar to address now?
Anita: Yes actually I see there are a couple of them. “You state that capitalism is clever at disguising its problems. Do you think this is a concerted effort on purpose? Does Mark Zuckerberg really know what he’s doing long-term to the economy? And are these people, perhaps asleep slaves, as we are, just with more money?”
Bjonnes: Wow, great question. Yes, I think that there are some capitalists, that are very devious, very aware of the exploitation and the damage that they are doing, because this we have seen throughout history. We saw it in the early industrial era, when we moved from the mercantile economy into the industrial capitalist economy. The way that factory owners would treat their workers, you know child laborers, and so on. And this is in many ways still happening today, in many corners of the world. There are capitalists that are basically criminals. And so, you have people like that, who are in a sense demons in human form. Yes, there are capitalists like that, but I don’t think that Mark Zuckerberg is one of them. I don’t think so. I think that many of the people in Silicon Valley, and in this new creative bubble, they are, in many ways, well-meaning. But at the same time, as the questioner mentioned, unconscious about their own reality, about what they are creating. There is an unconsciousness about what they create, and there is denial.
Take Amazon, for example. There is a new book which just came out called Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century. It’s about people in their 60s, who travel in motor homes. A kind of underclass of people, who move from town to town. They work three, four months here and there, in an Amazon facility. And they live paycheck to paycheck. And so, these kinds of workers are part of the economy which Amazon has created. The bosses of Amazon may not think very deeply about that. But at the same time, we know that they are not really concerned about it either. So, there is a conscious awareness of the problems they are creating, but it may not be as demonic as the actions of a capitalist engaged in child slave labor. So, I think that capitalism can express itself in demonic and terrible ways, but it can also be unconscious, just part of an unhealthy system. As I said earlier, we have all become part of this unhealthy system.
And we need to speak to that, to that fact, that we have become slaves of the system. And Sarkar also spoke about that. He said that, in many ways, the capitalists are also slaves of their own system. And we need to reform them both—to restructure the system and also to reform the capitalists themselves.
...it is essential for people in America to understand that the power of people, lies more in economic democracy than in political democracy.
Catlin: Thank you once again, great answer. Roar, if there were three essential messages, which you really wanted the American people to get at, what would they be? So, I’m really asking you to think about this as if you were the education wing of Economic Democracy Advocates, and we want you to take on three messages here, what three do you think are the best places to direct energy?
Bjonnes: Okay, I haven’t thought it through completely yet. But let me try. There is one issue that comes up clearly for me. And I hope you’ll be happy I came up with that idea. It’s about economic democracy. I think it is essential for people in America to understand that the power of people, lies more in economic democracy than in political democracy. And this is not just for Americans, this is for people all over the world. And again, I think that this is one of the beautiful insights of Sarkar. This understanding that, on the local level, we engage in economics more than in politics, on a day-to-day basis. If we want to take the power back, we need to emphasize that the real power lies in economic democracy.
So that’s the number one thing. To say it another way, in order to balance the often futile endeavors of political democracy—and we see this in America again and again. How futile it is to think that the next president is going to create a better America. It is not that easy, of course. And so, to emphasize this need for economic democracy, and to educate people about that, this is very important. To let people know that the real power lies in creating economic democracy. This is the way that we can take back the power from the corporations, and from the politicians that are paid and bought by these same corporations.
Secondly, and this is part of economic democracy also, this idea that we need to create a vibrant local economy. We cannot have economic democracy if we don’t have a vibrant local economy. And that means that we need to emphasize the importance of a decentralized economy. That people in the local areas take back economics into their own hand and develop the infrastructure from the bottom up, on the local level. That means producing food locally. That means having industries in rural areas, and so on.
So for example, in the Southern Appalachia area where I live, there is a lot of poverty. Still, this area has tremendous potential. There is labor potential. There is vast amounts of land available, and so on. But it is largely unutilized. If this area had been anywhere in Europe, it would’ve been a flourishing agricultural area. So, there’s tremendous potential in America. But so much is wasted on this belief that if I work hard enough, I will become as rich as whoever. This myth of individualism is so ingrained in people. I think that this is something that is very difficult for many Americans to grasp and to speak to.
So, maybe that’s the third point, to emphasize the need for a more communitarian culture in America, for values that are community-oriented, rather than individualist. This rugged individualist, this myth is so strong in America, and it needs to change. This is perhaps the biggest challenge in America, to change that myth of the rugged individualist, because it is part of the culture. And I think that is perhaps why in Scandinavia people are more community oriented. For example, in Denmark, if you would ask someone if we should have a single-payer healthcare system, they wouldn’t think it’s even a question. They would just take it for granted that this is how it should be. That everybody should have healthcare, and everybody should have free education, and so on.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge in America, to change that myth of the rugged individualist, because it is part of the culture.
These issues are fundamental, all the basic needs, such as housing, education, medical care, etc., should be guaranteed for everybody. Not through welfare handouts, but through guaranteed employment and collective shared wealth. So perhaps those are the three main issues: economic democracy, the importance of a decentralized economy, and changing the American cultural mythos from individualism to a more communitarian spirit.
Catlin: Perfect, and that last point you addressed connects to the last question that came in that we didn’t get to. I’m not going to ask you to go into fully, but it was about the role of government.
Bjonnes: Okay. Yes the role of the government is very important. Again. this is another problem in America, that there is so much suspicion about the role of government. As someone said in the Michael Moore movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, “In Europe, the government is afraid of the people. In America, the people are afraid of the government.” So, I think it is very important to understand that the government has a very good and important function.
And again, we are not just talking about the federal government in Washington. But rather on the state and local level, as well, even down to the city level. So again, government needs decentralized politics as well. So, the government’s role is to set policies, good policies for the country. Good policies regarding the environment, regarding economics, regarding healthcare, and so on and so forth. So that is the role of government. And at the same time, it is important that the government sets rules for the economy, but also stays out of the economy, out of meddling with things on the local economic level, so that there is a clear separation there.
Sarkar also thinks it is better to have a party-less democracy than a party democracy. He thinks that it would be better if politicians were not affiliated with parties, but rather affiliated with policies. In other words, that they stand for policies, and not necessarily any certain political party. And this is something that many, such as Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, also talked about. But that’s for the future, a party-less democracy. But yes, the role of government is very, very important. If we look at the Scandinavian model, we see a very different attitude towards the government, because people there feel that the government is doing good things for them. And even the right-wing party, the party that is equal to the Republican Party in the United States would never think of ever saying that we should take away universal healthcare from the people; that people should just fend for themselves, and find the best healthcare deal on the market. So, with a change in consciousness, we will also see a change in understanding the proper relationship between government and economics and good policy. And by giving people the freedom to implement good economic policies on the local level, then I think that there will be a shift towards the possibility of good government.
“What’s our favorite documentary of all time? The one film we wish everyone could see? Hands down, this is it. It is truly one of the most important and useful films for inspiring change that has been made in a generation.”
Films For Action
Despite being nearly 10 years old, there is good reason why The Economics of Happiness, made by Local Futures in 2011, is still considered the best documentary by the Films for Action team.
If you are not yet familiar with Films for Action, it is a constantly expanding library sharing articles and short to feature-length films on topics of social, economic and environmental change and action.
So why after nearly a decade are we still grappling with the concept of happiness as a key factor in economics? Undoubtedly because the need for a shift in the way we extract, buy, sell and use the planet’s resources is as urgent now as ever. The impact of the Covid pandemic alone has been widespread and multi-dimensional. Among other effects, it has massively heightened food insecurity, even in the wealthiest countries and widened the already gaping disparity between rich and poor.
The Economics of Happiness draws our awareness to the elevating crises brought about by global capitalism. While globalisation has been painted as a pinnacle of human, technological achievement, in our day-to-day lives, the main people benefitting from it are the shareholders of transnational corporations. For the 99%, regular people, like you and me, and especially those who live in poorer countries, the global economy and free trade, is draining our local communities of money, resources and wellbeing.
The remedy for this? A reconfiguration of the trade of goods and services, with an aim to revitalise and strengthen local economies so that bioregions can become resilient and able to sustain local populations, even in the face of challenging circumstances.
How would our lives be different if the mainstay of our daily nutrition was provided by flourishing local, organic farms rather than processed foods that have criss-crossed the globe to reach our plates; if we honoured and preserved local knowledge and culture rather than looking to big brand multinationals to shape our identities and aspirations; if we measured our progress, not on the scale of ongoing growth and the rise of GDP but on the health and wellbeing of each and every individual in our local and global communities?
To explore some of these questions and solutions, watch the Economics of Happiness and join the international movement for localisation. In our quest to become ever bigger and better, we have tipped life on Earth way out of balance. We are humans and we need to rediscover what it means to operate on a human scale.
Helena Norberg Hodge is the founder of Local Futures. She has been pioneering the movement for localisation for over 40 years. We are grateful to have Helena as part of our Advisory Panel and we look forward to forging a collaborative relationship with this vital organisation.
Let’s face it, with all the money and resources flowing through the music industry, only a small percentage of what we, the audience, receive is focused on topics of social change. The rise in consciousness around racial inequality and social justice has seen a flurry of releases highlighting these important issues. Yet there is so much more scope for music to be used as a tool for raising awareness and fuelling solutions.
For me, one of the telltale signs that I’ve found a song that inspires positive transformation is that it makes me want to cry and smile at the same time: Cry, because it touches me in a tender place of grief as I reflect on the point at which we stand as a human race. Smile, because the words and music ignite hope that we can and will move forward with grace, dignity and reverence for all life. Every so often, I come across a song that hits this sweet spot.
Here are three of my top songs for transformation, along with a selection of lyrics that I find most impactful and why. These all happen to be by female artists. Next time, I’ll mix it up.
We’d love to hear your favourite songs for change. Come on over to the Community Forum and share yours in the comments for this post.
“Realigned and on point Power to the peaceful Prayers to the waters Women at the centre All vessels open to give and receive Let’s see the system brought down to it’s knees”
There is something subtle and powerful in these words. They evoke a felt-image of a strong, peaceful society emerging, in which qualities of receptivity and harmony are central to human systems.
The term ‘resilient’ is being used a lot these days and it means different things to different people. For me, it implies our ability, as individuals and communities, to respond and move with the needs and circumstances that arise, while maintaining integrity within ourselves and integration with our surroundings.
Here is what Rising Appalachia say about the video and the song, illustrating the deep and positive intention behind this creative work:
“Filmed in North America's most diverse setting, New York City, Resilient is a stark telling of the song's message through the grace of the dancers bodies and reflections on the poetics. The video was made to be simple, stark, and direct, engaging the viewer into the intimate space of each artist. We wanted to strip away the clutter of objects and centralize the song on our common humanity. Our eyes. Skin tones. Muscles. Smiles. Power. Each dancer responded both with choreography and improvisation to what resilience meant to them personally, and we sang the words straight into the camera to bring the listener in close to this intimate song. Resilient is meant to be a tangible, graspable, relatable folk song for people of all backgrounds and walks of life.”
Originally from Atlanta, USA, Leah and Chloe Smith see their roles as musicians as one component of a greater overall vision, which includes advocating for social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights.
“Everybody's saying that there's no hope on earth, We should build a spaceship and form the next rebirth, Blast away into the blackness, in search of carbon worth, One leaf of what we have here, already have here, have here... And everybody's saying that time is running low, so Meet you in the supermarket, panic-buy and then Down below into the bunker, like rats in a cave, I wanna stand on the edge of a cliff just to feel brave, just to feel brave, there's something we could save, there's something we could save”
This song takes you on a journey. Through her vivid imagery, Martha Tilston takes us to an almost apocalyptic reality that is eerily close to our own. Despite the edginess, she invites us to hold onto the courage and goodness that will see us through this era of consumerism and ecological destruction.
Tilston, an English singer-songwriter, based in Cornwall, UK, is described as possessing ‘a voice like spiderwebbed hollows and lyrics that inspire and captivate.’
“They call me migrant, and they call me a thief, And they call me a beggarman and asylum seeker. And I was once a teacher, I was once a family man, I was once a dreamer and community leader. I’ve seen friends and family all scattered and broken, And we don’t know why the cruelty keeps raging.”
Based in Brighton, UK, Carrie Tree wrote this song after volunteering at a refugee camp in Calais, France.
The terms ‘migrant’ and ‘asylum seeker’ can allow us to distance ourselves from the identities and life experiences of each person who flees their native country looking for safety.
In this song, Carrie Tree captures, with her emotive voice and lyrics, the raw humanity of so many people seeking a secure place to live and, in doing so, reminds us what it means to feel a true sense of ‘home.’
Her words offer a chance to reflect on our fear of and prejudice towards the most vulnerable people in our society; and to ponder how our personal interactions and collective responses might be different if we were to honour the stories, pains and gifts of each individual.
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Catlin: I want to begin by giving you a chance to set the stage. When you pull way back and look at this moment in history and the current economic situation, what do you see? I’m asking for a broad look at the cycle and where the paradigmatic break downs are taking place.
Bjonnes: As many of us have noticed, we’re living in a time of great polarization, as well as a time of great economic, environmental, political and cultural turmoil. Some economists, such as the German economist Wolfgang Streek, the author of How Will Capitalism End, said that “The finance sector will very soon implode in a crash.” Incidentally, P. R. Sarkar, the Indian philosopher and economist, said something similar–that capitalism would eventually “explode like a firecracker.” When this will happen, is, of course, anybody’s guess. But it could happen soon, or it could happen in a decade. As we all know, the beast of capitalism, is very resilient. I am here, of course, talking about corporate capitalism, since small scale capitalism, or small private enterprises such as farms, restaurants, shops, and so on are vital to any healthy economy.
So, as you said, let’s step back and take a brief overview by looking at the four crises we mention in our book: the finance, inequality, resource, and environmental crises. Each one of these crises are quite severe on their own, and they cannot be solved in a piecemeal fashion, by reforms. We opened our book with a quote by Naomi Klein. She wrote that, “We live in a time of overlapping crises, and we need to connect the dots. We do not have time to solve each crisis sequentially. We need a movement that addresses all of them.” And that’s essentially the essence of our book, as well.
We need solutions. The times for reforms are over. That’s why it’s likely we’re in for a big crash, because the reforms are not working. We’ve been, in a sense, taking a reform pill for decades.
We are offering our solutions in the third part of our book. We need solutions. The times for reforms are over. That’s why it’s likely we’re in for a big crash, because the reforms are not working. We’ve been, in a sense, taking a reform pill for decades. The acid reflux of corporate capitalism has turned into heart disease. But the good news is that this heart disease can be reversed. But only if we throw away the reform pill and change our lifestyle, our way of living, our economy. As we say in the book, we have to restructure the entire economy, step-by-step.
As we have also seen recently, there’s a growing discontent, both from the right and the left. The right is reacting in many reactionary ways, and sometimes even in ugly ways. And on the left, people are protesting against racism, inequality and climate change, sometimes violently. But nevertheless, many of the reactions are justified, as many people are frustrated, grasping for answers, for solutions. There is great instability and uncertainty from the growing precariat, a term used recently by James Kurth, when he spoke at the Festival of New Economic Thinking, in Edinburgh, Scotland. One of my friends sent me some notes from that conference, and he said that James Kurth, who used to work for the Council on Foreign Relations, surprisingly sees hope in the restless precariat, the underemployed, and those of us working three jobs to make ends meet.
He also sees hope in the Bernie Sanders movement. And again, Sarkar said something similar, that the change would come from the “disgruntled intellectuals”, those with a “revolutionary spirit.” At that same conference, Joseph Stiglitz was speaking as well. The former chief economist of the World Bank, who in many ways has made a complete turnaround, as he is now very skeptical of neoliberal policies, of deregulation, [corporate] free trade, and so on. These are all policies, which he once supported, but now he says, “We need to create a Nordic model of economics everywhere.”
If we go back to the roots, to the Greek word Oikos, economics then literally means to take good care of our Earth household. Oikos is thus the common basis of both economics and ecology. That idea, to combine ecology with economy, needs to be our basic economic philosophy.
But in Growing a New Economy, we ask: is that going to work? Does the Nordic model hold the solution to our problems? This is an essential issue, I think, because many progressive people, many people who talk about economic democracy, they are seeing great hope in the Nordic model. And the environmentalists see hope in sustainable capitalism. But are these models good enough? I don’t think so. Instead we need to pose some more fundamental questions. The main question, which E.F. Schumacher also talked about, is the following: what should be the philosophical underpinning of our economy? Then we need to ask what economics is all about? If we go back to the roots, to the Greek word Oikos, economics then literally means to take good care of our Earth household. Oikos is thus the common basis of both economics and ecology. That idea, to combine ecology with economy, needs to be our basic economic philosophy.
So, first, we need to bridge ecology with economics. Then we need to bridge ethics with economics. And we need to bridge science with soul, or with spirituality. These vital links are totally missing in our economic system today. But this is something we need to address. We are not doing that on any big scale. Finally, we need to ask what “progress” means. Capitalism says that progress is equal to material growth, to making profit. Sarkar, on the other hand, says that material progress is not real progress because there are always side effects to any kind of material progress. You can never create perfection on the material level. So, he says that real progress is found in creating a good society and in creating great culture. In other words, in finding inner meaning, in a society that supports the spiritual growth of humanity. This is fundamental. And again, these are all issues missing in mainstream economics and in capitalism in particular.
...society and our ethics and our basic philosophy of life, and not some abstract mathematical theory, need to guide economics.
There’s a fundamental failure in materialism, because materialism can only give us some physical comforts, but not inner peace and happiness. Fortunately, there are a few economists focusing on this today, which is very heartening. But because of this failure in modern, mainstream economics, the capitalists try, but have failed, to turn economics into a pure science. They are operating in a theoretical vacuum, and Karl Polanyi pointed this out already in the ‘40s, that society and our ethics and our basic philosophy of life, and not some abstract mathematical theory, need to guide economics. We can’t just assume that economics is some sort of numbers game. And he also pointed out that capitalism tends to commodify everything, to make everything into a commodity. And finance capitalism has made economics into a speculative game. In a sense, I think today’s speculative economy is an outgrowth of this commodification.
Capitalism is also based on the selfish pursuit of greed, the freedom to earn as much as you like. But also on the freedom to exploit, the freedom to have the power to deny other people their fair share. This freedom is totally ignored by conservatives. They simply justify exploitation and great inequality, as if that’s normal. The Marxists criticize this aspect of capitalism, but they haven’t really come up with a real alternative.
Then we have the reform movement, which again points towards the Scandinavian model. Incidentally, I grew up in Norway, and I’m quite familiar with that society as an alternative to the more hard core capitalism of the US. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, with his reform policies, and the European left in general, struggled to soften the blows of capitalism, to redistribute wealth through higher taxes and wages, and so on. And this created a European welfare state, and many economists are today looking towards that as the model of the future. Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Bernie Sanders, they all love that model, as well as many other economists.
But, I think that this model also has serious flaws. For one, it’s not environmentally sustainable. It also wastes enormous resources on propping up a welfare system that has many flaws. I can go into great detail about that, but in short, I agree with some of the criticism on the right about that model. And again Sarkar has, I think, an answer to that: not to create a welfare model, but rather a full employment model, to utilize people’s inventive spirit and strong work ethic. And again, the EU is a reflection of this flawed welfare model. And in the book, we are quite critical of the EU, mainly because the EU is fundamentally based on a neoliberal economics model with the four freedoms: the free movement of goods, capital, people and services. And I think because of this neoliberal economic foundation of the EU, we’re seeing a crisis in the EU right now. Both a political crisis and an economic crisis.
So, the reform movement, supported by Stiglitz, Sanders, and so on, is in many ways a very positive sign, but it is also a limited vision. Then we have the environmental movement, which again is very important and very positive. But it has certain weaknesses also. And we’re trying to reveal some of those weaknesses in the book. The main weakness is that they haven’t really understood the fundamental flaws of capitalism. We are also seeing that these reform societies are leading us toward increased inequality, and into speculative finance capitalism. Every time I go home to my mother in Norway, I see more rich people, more and more materialism, more and more wealth and inequality, and a general movement away from the decentralized economic system that I grew up with in Norway in the 60s and 70s.
On the other extreme, we have the American model of less regulation, less reform. An extreme neoliberal economic model, which has created a speculative, rentier economy, with large monopoly companies, and so on. Banks controlling the economy and the rest of us, who are, in a sense, economic slaves. Many of us have become part of that precariat, the educated underemployed. And as an economist said, we’ve created a “casino capitalist economy.” We’ve got increased inequality. We have created an inverse welfare state, welfare for the rich. Or, as Ralph Nader put it, we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And, as we have written in the book, we have created a resource crisis, we are on the way to live out our means. As some researchers have pointed out, we are literally using the resources of one and a half planet, and soon we will double that usage.
We’ve created a tremendous global ecological crisis. On top of the debt crisis, and the inequality crisis. And again, the green movement has been a great response to that, but I don’t think it is enough. We don’t need a reform system, or a sustainable capitalist system. We need a new economic structure.
So, I don’t think the next economy will be the Nordic model, or the EU model, because, as I said earlier, these economies are also based on neoliberal economic values, on deregulation. They are not really about true economic democracy. I also think that it will likely get a lot worse before it gets better. It is possible, and quite soon, that the finance sector will implode in a great crash. So, yeah, as Bob Dylan sings in one of his songs: “Everything is broken.” I think, in many ways, that is true, and on a global scale. At the same time, more and more people, both on the left and even on the right, are realizing these fundamental issues. I was surprised, for example, that the biographer of Margaret Thatcher wrote in Fortune magazine some time ago that he thought that corporations should be turned into worker enterprises. Quite a surprise, and this was printed in Fortune magazine!
We can’t just tinker with the system any more, which a lot of the so-called sustainable capitalist ideas are doing, simply tinkering with a system that really needs to be restructured completely.
Of course, one article like that, is not going to create any revolution by any means. But I think it is important that some people on the right are also waking up to some of these new possibilities and realities. I also think that more and more people are realizing that nationalism is not working, that we need to both protect the local and the global at the same time. This is a very important point. We need to bridge economics and culture. We need to bridge science and spirituality. And we need to solve all of our crises in an integral way. That is very important. We can’t just tinker with the system any more, which a lot of the so-called sustainable capitalist ideas are doing, simply tinkering with a system that really needs to be restructured completely.
The positive thing is that people need to, and will, at some point, rise to the occasion, and hopefully very soon. But before that, it is likely that we will have more economic turmoil, more international turmoil, and so on, on many different levels. Different crises, both economically and environmentally, will take place. But finally, I think that these crises together will give us the critical mass of people, of awakening, which we will need for creating real change.
Catlin: Thank you, Roar. Great, great introduction. Where I want to begin is going over the distinction that comes up repeatedly in the first chapters of the book between the real economy and the financial sector.
The real economy is the easier part for me to understand. I think of it as old, basic capitalism from maybe 40, 50, 60 years ago. And in that system, someone has some money which they put into building a factory, buying machines, purchasing raw material, and hiring workers. All of that goes into producing something that is presumably sold at a profit. The workers get their salaries. And, the original investor, the capitalist, gets whatever additional profit there is. And the basic idea is that now this wealthier person will then use some of his new wealth to buy more machines and hire more workers. In this way, his profit keeps getting turned back into the real economy, helping it grow in a way that benefits everyone. Is that an essentially accurate description?
Bjonnes: Yeah, I think that your analysis is basically correct. I think the real economy is, in a sense, economic activity that adds to the amount of wealth in the world. So, yeah, I essentially agree with that description of how the system works, which also more or less corresponds to Marx’s MCM formula: money, commodity, money. In other words, money is invested to produce commodities and then sold for profit. In this system, as you said, the capitalist ends up with more money than what he had when he started. And then at the same time, he is producing something with that money. Prior to that system of capitalism, in the more feudal system, they used what Marx would term the CMC model: commodity, money, commodity. In other words, a farmer had land, and that’s a commodity, and he produced something from that land, and he sold it, and then made money, and then with that money he purchased more commodities, another horse, or some more cows. So that’s a very simple model of economics.
So in this style of capitalism, where there’s profit, that profit can be used for good, by investing it back into the real economy. Or it can be used for speculation, in what we call a Rentier economy, or the Rentier system. And this is very much what is happening today. This Rentier economy, this speculative economy has grown tremendously. But essentially, the way that you describe it, is basically right. That is how “good capitalism” functions. This would be the small-scale capitalist in the private enterprise system, where the profit margins are not allowed to become huge. And where inequality is not allowed to expand to an unhealthy level. So, rather than taming the beast of capitalism with taxes and so on, it’s better to keep capitalism on a small scale. And when capitalist firms become bigger, then we turn them into cooperatives.
Catlin: I think I remember that Sarkar suggested once a business had expanded to a certain number of employees, that that’s when it would need to become a cooperative. But, we’re not in that world yet. So let’s switch now into the world that we are in, and let’s pretend that the capitalists that I just described in the first piece there has a fairly substantial manufacturing industry. And let’s pretend he’s made a million dollars that he now has. And in this new financial sector, what are his options? What are the kinds of things he might do with that money that don’t actually create anything in the real economy?
Bjonnes: Yes, so he can invest that money in the stock market, into what we call the speculation economy. He can become a casino capitalist, if you will. If he is lucky, he can turn that $1 million into 10 million, even more. You know, many people have, for example, invested in the bitcoin market, 10 years ago, or whenever it started, and they are now multimillionaires. So this is happening more and more. This part of the economy, ironically, is now the largest part of our economy.
We can also lose all of that money in the stock market, in a stock market crash, which I’ve also seen. I studied agronomy, and I was very inspired by John Robbins’ book Diet for a New America in the 1980s, a book on factory farming. And then I learned recently that he became quite rich, after he first gave up his fortune as an heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream company. He made quite a lot of money writing books and having speaking engagements. He became an environmental activist. And then he lost most of that money in the financial crash of 2008. So this can happen to people like him, who basically gave up a financial fortune for ethical reasons, as he was a vegan and wanted to have nothing to do with his father’s company, and then he made his way up again. So these kinds of restless, economic crashes, these kinds of boom and bust cycles are very much a part of the American system. And we see it more and more, how the financial economy has taken over.
So in a sense, this system, or this economy, isn’t producing much tangible wealth. Yes, you may make a lot of money, and you may build five houses. So there is some spill over into the real economy, but very little. You may start another business, and so on. Yes, some tangible wealth is created, but most of that money is just sitting there somewhere and doing nothing for the real economy. So, in a better economic system, or a more ideal society, the wealth would be the oil in the machinery of the economy to produce more real wealth. We need financing. We need some debt to create more money, to produce something, to create some profit. But this financial system has become so pervasive, so powerful, that it literally controls the whole system that it was designed to serve.
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, basically doesn’t own any taxis. Facebook, the world’s most popular owner of media, doesn’t create their own content... And so we have this strange new economy that creates tremendous amounts of wealth, but most of that wealth is going to the top.
Catlin: Right. Let me ask you a follow-up question on that. You mentioned that my hypothetical millionaire could invest in the stock market and go the speculative route there. And the question I have now is this: Would everyone agree that that’s not a really productive, useful way of investing, or of using that money? So, if we brought in a center-right businessman at this point, what would he say about investing in the stock market? Would he argue that that’s actually good for the world?
Bjonnes: Yeah, I think so.
Catlin: Okay.
Bjonnes: I think that this is very much what is happening now. In that way, the conservatives, the right, has done a fantastic job of explaining away the exploitation of capitalism. And we have all become caught up in it, more than ever. Yes, they will explain that away. This is what we hear from Trump. This is what we hear from the Republican Party. Even to some extent from the Democrats, we hear this, that more wealth creates more jobs, and so on. But it isn’t necessarily so. The financial system is necessary for the real economy to exist because it enables human beings to cooperate in complex ways, and so on. It increases productivity. So, the problem isn’t necessarily with the financial system, but due to the fact that this system has taken over the control of the real economy. That it’s siphoning off too big a portion of the profits, which could have been reinvested into the real economy instead. So today, the rentier economy has become very pervasive, and it is a system of economics which we are all caught up in.
Tom Goodwin wrote in an article recently that Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, basically doesn’t own any taxis. Facebook, the world’s most popular owner of media, doesn’t create their own content, like a newspaper does. We create the content. And the same thing with Airbnb, the world’s largest provider of accommodation, they don’t own hotels. We own those accommodations. And so we have this strange new economy that creates tremendous amounts of wealth, but most of that wealth is going to the top. And this has been illustrated by the recent research by Oxfam. When we first began researching the book, some 359 people had as much wealth as half of the world’s population. Today that same number, of extremely rich people, has dwindled to only eight people. To me, that is really astounding. That is incredible.
Similarly, Thomas Piketty, the French economist who wrote the bestseller Capital in the 21st Century about inequality, pointed to the fact that inequality is increasing. When we study his statistics, we understand that this is happening on a massive scale. But at the same time, as I said, the capitalist market is cleverly bringing us all into this very same system. We are all on Facebook. We are all buying from Amazon. We are all part of it. And I think this cleverness is part of the reason why we are all asleep at the wheel and not standing up and saying: “Enough is enough!” So, this is a very odd realization, I think, but an important one. And I’m heartened by seeing that more and more people are waking up to these insights and speaking the truth.
Recently there has been a flurry of activity around the notion of regenerative leadership. This comes not really as a surprise within the context of the global trend of the reGeneration rising — what Paul Hawken called so aptly “a planetary immune response” to the crisis we are facing.
The awareness of the need for widespread regeneration of our social and ecological systems is steadily growing and with it we are also beginning to witness that ‘regeneration’ can mean different things to different people. In my opinion, it will not serve to tell people that their interpretation of regeneration is “wrong” and dismiss them.
How can we engage more people in the generative dialogue that can deepen our collective understanding of the deeper significance of regeneration and the transformative potential of regenerative practice as held in the work of Carol Sanford and the Regenesis Group?
How can we celebrate that every day there are more of us wanting to become active participants in the reGeneration rising and meet them where they are at, rather than dismissing them or insisting they have to start from where we might want them to be?
In 2018, the markenting giant J. Walter Thompson published a report entitled ‘Regeneration: The New Sustainability’ — a clear sign that the so called mainstream is waking up to the notion that not doing any more harm to our communities and ecosystems is by now no longer good enough.
We need to go beyond sustainability and aim to have a positive - a regenerative - impact on the systems we participate in. The J.W. Thompson report highlighted many inspiring examples of incremental change, of business doing things a little better and aiming to have some positive impact, but it fails in highlighting the need for deeper transformations of the entire playing field the exemplary companies mentioned are operating in.
More and more business are making the bold claim that they are already regenerative enterprises. Personally, I sense those companies who committed to having a regenerative impact as their “direction of travel” rather than claiming they are already there have the necessary humility and honesty to embark on the long journey of transformation that will be necessary to create enterprises that truly add health and value for people and planet.
It is a long journey as it cannot be the doing of any individual or a company alone. Re-patterning the future regeneratively requires the transformation of the whole playing field, the redesign of our economic system and our monetary system, and — ultimately — the collective redesign of the human presence and impact on Earth.
The path towards achieving this is through myriads of locally attuned projects carefully adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of the places and bioregions we inhabit, and this requires global collaboration and solidarity. As a natural pattern, regeneration is glocal (not a typo) in its very essence. It is fundamentally scale linking — healing the world one heart, one place, one bioregion at a time.
Regeneration is about alining with life as a planetary process
Many people are currently speaking about ‘regeneration’ in the way they are used to speaking about the newest trends to get on board with in order to be a cutting edge consultant, company or leader. Yet the inherent potential of becoming regenerative is much deeper than that.
The notion of regeneration is deeply woven into the fabric of life and the evolution of “eternally regenerative Universe” as Buckminster Fuller liked to call it. Bucky tried to remind us decades ago that we are far less beings (nouns) here to hoard individual wealth and recognition, and far more doings (verbs) here to contribute to manifest life’s potential to be regenerative and decrease rather than increase entropy.
Life — as a planetary process — is syntropic. It temporarily — over the time scales of biological evolution — reverses the tide of entropy and acts as a neg-entropic force by creating more complexity, coherence and bio-productivity within the structurally closed and energetically open system integrity of our planet.
“Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”
Buckminster Fuller, in 'Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth', 1969
Once we understand ourselves as processes that are actively re-patterning relationships and reweaving the fabric of meaning through which we collectively contribute to bringing forth the world, we will understand wealth as something very different from the money or assets we own.
Bucky was one of the early visionaries to understand Universe as “eternally regenerative.” He saw humanity at a threshold: an evolutionary transition that would align our human patterns to the patterns of regeneration and renewal we can observe in the natural systems we participate in and have emerged from.
Our challenge and our latent potential is to free ourselves from the mindset of scarcity and competition and step into co-creating a future of shared collaborative abundance for all of humanity and the community of life.
One crucial aspect of this transition is to understand the limitations of the narrative of separation that has informed our understanding of who we are for too long and reconnect with our fundamental interbeing with the very fabric of life that our common future depends upon.
We have the inherent potential, as life, to aline with the the biotic community and to nurture the vitality enhancing patterns of life as a planetary process. As Janine Benyus has so beautifully summarized in a single sentence: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.”
Regenerative leadership — to me personally — is the process of aligning one’s own way of being, one’s actions, ways of communicating and being in relationship with the wider pattern of life’s evolutionary journey towards increasing complexity and coherence within the nested wholeness of community, ecosystems, biosphere and Universe we participate in. In doing so we add health and value to the continuously transforming and regenerating whole that brought us fourth and that we have co-creative agency in!
As both co-creative participants in and emergent properties of this continuously transforming wholeness we can consciously choose to manifest the potential of expressing our unique essence as expressions of life’s evolutionary journey.
“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren’t any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn’t be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person. ”
Buckminster Fuller
At this time of planetary crisis we are all called to step into regenerative leadership. It starts by leading our own lives regeneratively in service to our communities and to the wider community of life.
“We are great programmes of integrity with the capability to support the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, and we are here for that purpose: to be in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.”
Buckminster Fuller
The time to act is NOW! We have already failed to respond to climate change and social and ecological break down early enough to have guarantees for success.
Even if we do the seemingly impossible now and rally all of humanity with all its diversity of perspectives, worldviews and belief systems into a locally attuned and bioregionally and globally collaborative effort to undo the damage of centuries of exploitation of people and planet, we will not know for a few decades whether we responded in time to avoid cataclysmic run-away climate change.
Regenerative leadership can no longer be about positioning your company as a market leader celebrated for having some positive impact on society. The near future will be fundamentally different than the past and the present.
Much of the conversation about how to help corporations and companies become ‘net-positive’ and ‘regenerative’ is still stuck in assuming that the world in a few years or decades will be not fundamentally different from the one we live in today.
We have to get off these mental tram-tacks, admit that capitalism as usual is broken and structurally degenerative, and understand that redesignig the human presence and impact on Earth will go hand in and with re-localization and re-regionalization supported by global collaboration and solidarity.
Regenerative leadership will require us to avoid becoming complicit in more ‘predatory delay’ just because big corporate clients are only willing to engage in more incremental change. Let’s help them make incremental change— if only to keep them engaged and buy us some more time — but let’s not shy away from stressing the urgent need for transformative innovation and change.
This also means inviting many corporates to face the fact that they are too big not to fail and — as multinationals depending on global supply networks, fossil materials and energy — they are structurally degenerative and explotative. A deeper understanding of regeneration as a pattern by which life creates conditions conducive to life invites us to understand that death, dissolution, and collapse are part of nature’s “expert contrivance to create plenty of life.”
We have to question the very structures, patterns and cultural narratives that shape our current economic systems, corporations and societies. We have to co-create diverse locally attuned regenerative cultures everywhere! Time is running out! The window of opportunity is closing fast!
Daniel Christian Wahl is a member of our advisory panel and author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures.
Last week, we launched our 2020 Flash Fiction Challenge: Visioning a Better World Beyond the Pandemic.
We invite you craft a story that plunges us into a post-pandemic reality where a new paradigm is established or unfolding, inspired by the values of Systems Change Alliance such as, economic democracy, ecological sustainability, resilient communities, equality and universal values of love and respect.
The challenge is open to participants from anywhere in the world. Entries need to be in English and between 1000-1250 words long. The closing date is 1st November 2020 and winners will be announced on the 1st December.
Flash Fiction is a challenging but fun medium that requires you to quickly build a scenario, character presence and denouement without wasting precious words.
Got some revolutionary ideas bubbling? Get writing – we can’t wait to read your work.
Lockdown restrictions to air and land travel lowered pollution levels. However, the pandemic also provided a distraction from illegal deforestation and poaching operations and emphasised the lack of sustainability of the long supply chains of the global food market.
There is huge potential at this pivotal moment in our history to make a shift in the way we interact with each other and our planet.
Yet, with everything that is at stake, it would be very easy for us to move into an era of unrest and surveillance, glossed over with the reassuring polish of 'Green' Corporate Capitalism.
Faced with this crossroads—a choice as to which direction we want to move forwards as a society—we have the power of collective consciousness to shape our future together.
Thinking outside the box
That’s where the artists and writers come in. We need to think creatively if we are to move into a new era of post-capitalist economy and achieve anything close to true sustainability.
We need to stay solution-focused. It is all too easy, in the throes of this year’s rollercoaster, to get derailed by the fear of worst-case scenarios and paralysed into not acting, not speaking up, not following our hearts.
When our creative energy is channelised into a positive focus, we have the potential to be great visionaries for our communities and to use the medium of arts and, in this case, the written word, to give others – even our world leaders—a glimpse into what it possible and to lift the collective spirit.
What do those solutions look like to you? What would it mean to have vibrant bioregional economies; inspiring, ethical leadership; humans living in respectful exchange with the Earth? Paint a picture with your words. We want to journey there with you.
Every story is visible
We are running this challenge in an unconventional way. Usually, when writers submit their work to a contest, nobody but the judges gets to read the pieces, which the participants have earnestly put love, time and energy into crafting.
We have decided to have all submissions posted to the submission thread of our Community Forum. In this way, your story will be visible to the other people taking part in the challenge and any interested readers from the public.
By joining the forum, you also have the possibility to get to know other artists and writers inspired by systems change; to participate in future Arts events; and to keep the conversation flowing after this challenge closes.
The top three stories will be published on our website and shared through our social media channels.
Find us on other platforms
We are looking forward to reading your stories.
Over the next few months, we will be sharing updates on this event through our Twitter and Facebook channels.
If you know of a popular site where we could add the event or have any other questions about taking part, give us a shout at [email protected]
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When we turn on the television these days, we mostly see negative news—crime, disasters, and war—and we can easily end up feeling discouraged and stressed. Do not despair, however, for there are many great things happening all over the world by wonderful people realizing the need for systems change. The young folks featured below are currently taking action to make the world a better place. These five changemakers have started inspiring projects in several vitally important areas needing transformation, including sustainability, human rights, and education.
Marcus Briggs-Cloud, USA – Cultural and ecological sustainability
Marcus Briggs-Cloud is working to preserve his native Maskoke language and culture, a culture which is rooted in the natural world. In his own words:
"The decolonization of the mind for indigenous peoples begins with language acquisition. All of our worldviews are encompassed in our respective languages."
As a teenager, he realized that not many young people around him were speaking Maskoke and that the ancestral culture was slowly being lost. After attempting to revitalize the language through language programs and teaching university classes, he realized that “In order to see a real reversal of language loss, we have to altogether change the way we live.” So, after getting a master’s degree at Harvard, he started a community where people can live sustainably, speak their native tongue and return to traditional ways of life on reclaimed ancestral land, allowing the community to practice linguistic, cultural and ecological sustainability.
At the Ekvn-Yefolecv Maskoke Ecovillage, residents of the ecovillage are building an off-grid income-sharing community with natural building construction and renewable energy. Threatened animal species are being reintroduced and the community practices ethnobotanical conservation. A new school has also been created, with a curriculum centered on traditional agricultural and ecological knowledge, taught exclusively in the Maskoke language.
Oladosu Adenike, Nigeria – Climate action and education, human rights
The 25-year-old Oladosu Adenike is an ambassador for Fridays for Future, Earth Uprising, and African Youth Climate Hub, but this is only part of her work to educate communities on climate change. Her interest on climate change issues started at university, as a student of agricultural economics in an area vulnerable to climate change, and where the effects of climate change can already be felt.
“I saw farmers and herdsmen fighting because their land is becoming more arid. It took me an extra year to finish studying because of the fighting.”
She also witnessed communities face heatwaves and floods the likes of which had never been experienced before. Considering that Africa is the continent most vulnerable to climate change, and seeing the need for quick action, she started holding community education forums, visiting schools and other public places to educate people on climate change, the link between climate action, poverty and women’s rights, and to encourage them to plant trees. She is also head of the “ILeadClimate” movement for peace, security and equality in Africa, particularly in the Lake Chad region.
Leyla Acaroglu, Australia – Sustainable design, non-formal education
Australian designer Leyla Acaroglu, who was awarded 2016 Champion of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Programme, challenges people to think cross-borders in the areas of design, social science and sustainability. She enrolled into design school for her undergraduate education, which she quit after finding out about the harsh impact that the design industry had on waste. Instead, she pursued a social science degree in environmental sustainability, for which she has been an advocate ever since.
“A lot of the reason I do sustainability is because of the entrenched poverty and lack of opportunity faced by so many people.”
She developed the Disruptive Design Method, a unique approach to design-based systems change, as well as several tools for circular economy and the use of disruptive design across sustainability and educational initiatives.
For her, leadership through action (she is also an advocate for the disruption of gender-based stereotypes of leadership) is essential, but inspiring others becomes more difficult when the prevailing narrative is despair, which is why she has also taken into her hands the regeneration of a farm in Portugal to house her Creative Optimism Project. This projects brings together people from all over the world to experience sustainable living, organic agriculture and creative change making.
Kalyan Akkipeddi, India – Rural development, self-sufficiency
Kalyan Akkipedi gave up a lucrative corporate job to spend more than two years travelling around India’s villages in search for knowledge. He became inspired by what he saw in local communities:
“Their wisdom allowed them to live in synergy with their surroundings. I thought of demonstrating that kind of life based on three simple principles -- a deep respect for soil, air and water, inter-dependence and, as a result, self-reliance.”
So, at the end of his travels, and after helping a family of farmers substantially increase their income by putting scientific practices to work and tapping natural resources such as solar and wind power, he bought 12.5 acres of land in Tekulodu village, in the second driest district in India, and started Proto village together with ten families. Applying scientific methods to farming and living sustainably, in four years they transformed the barren piece of land into an inspiring replicable model that is self-reliant, environmentally sustainable, and socially cohesive.
At Proto village, habitants harvest rain to conserve water, homes are built using locally available natural materials, all energy needs are met through solar and wind power, food is grown organically, and children study at Mayabazar, a “makerspace” where students have all the tools they need to self-learn through executing their own ideas and projects. Visitors are welcome to the village to learn the model so that they can replicate it elsewhere and spread the knowledge to others in need.
Alexia Akbay, USA – Sustainable food systems, circular economy
Alexia Akbay founded Symbrosia while still in grad school, an aquaponics startup focused on production of sustainable protein through a circular economy model. Despite past attempts to encourage people to give up meat and dairy, Alexia says:
“I didn’t like the narrative of framing farmers as the bad guys, or that they’re creating all this ecological damage. Because that wasn’t really the story. In fact, they’re providing food for everyone.”
The challenge did not discourage Alexia, who is now scaling-up the model she developed in Hawaii. The company is growing the seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis, fertilized with refuse from a nearby Pacific shrimp farm, thus using a by-product of shrimp production. Their growing technology involves zero fresh water and actually bioremediates waste from fish farms. The seaweed is grown with the purpose of adding it to the diet of cows, since a 2% diet replacement has been shown to reduce their methane emissions over 90%. Also, the process of adding seaweed to animal feed uses 100% renewable energy.
Alexia also works with the Environmental Justice Clinic at Yale Law School and is a founding member of the Yale Blockchain Initiative, as she is a proponent of the technology for creating responsible supply chains.
Why is capitalism unsustainable? Why is our economy causing mass extinction of species, mass poverty and growing inequality? And why is it that green capitalism and The Green New Deal will never be green or sustainable enough? Let’s blame it all on Adam Smith, the father of capitalism himself.
Classical capitalism is built on Smith's idea that selfish needs lead to creativity and productivity. By using a plough, Smith prophesized, a farmer makes fallow soil fertile, and a baker makes loaves of bread for sale from the farmer’s field of grain.
The result is small scale capitalism at its best—both the farmer’s and the baker’s efforts produce profit and society benefits through these private initiatives. Hungry people are fed, so that they can work and make money to purchase more bread. Private enterprise thus creates more wealth—for everyone. This is how Smith envisioned capitalism. Seems simple enough, right?
In Smith’s economic universe an “invisible hand” would even make sure that growing markets were balanced and that everyone would benefit from private trade—the production and selling, the supply and demand of goods, the purchasing power of the workers would all be guided by an invisible hand.
Karl Marx realized, however, that this was a myth, and that unless checked, capitalism would lead to accumulation of vast amounts of capital for the few and economic exploitation for the many. A walk through the factories of London of his day (just read Charles Dickens), where starving laborers worked 12-hour days seven days a week, would confirm his observation.
This economic divide between people and owners of capital gave Marx the idea that it was the workers, not the individual business owners, who should have the right to the main share of society’s wealth. Marx agreed, however, with Smith that it was a man's hands, by managing and dividing nature's raw materials, that created economic value.
This is how they both inspired the materialistic growth economy based on the idea of exchange value: that a loaf of bread can be exchanged for money, a price.
This, in simple terms, has been the ongoing conflict in modern economics: the struggle between the rich and the poor, between workers and owners, between private accumulation and collective sharing of wealth.
Inspired by Marx, various forms of socialism have attempted to balance private interests with collective interests by raising people’s wages or by taxing the rich. This, in simple terms, has been the ongoing conflict in modern economics: the struggle between the rich and the poor, between workers and owners, between private accumulation and collective sharing of wealth.
The reason for this struggle is that capitalism did not account for another value, what we may call distributive value—the value of sharing the wealth, the value of cooperation, the value ensuring all needs are met. That value has to be an essential part of economics as well.
Problem is, profit mostly defies gravity, it flows upwards--to the rich and the famous.
Capitalism’s main mistake, therefore, has been to take for granted that selfishness leads to productivity and that everyone will have enough. Ronald Reagan called that the “trickle down” of capitalism. Problem is, profit mostly defies gravity, it flows upwards--to the rich and the famous.
After Marx, economist John Maynard Keynes tried to ensure distributive value by government intervention, through higher taxes and deficit spending. Hence, Marxism and Keynesianism gave us the “mixed economy” of the welfare state. But, unfortunately, neither socialism nor welfare reforms have been able to entirely balance capitalism’s inbuilt flaws.
Capitalism thus created a systemic, global economic problem—economic inequality. And, despite increased economic growth and a reduction in global poverty, inequality is actually growing. Just check out the works of France’s pop-star economist and expert on inequality, Thomas Piketty.
Moreover, neither capitalism nor socialism, nor their hybrid offspring, the European welfare state, has been kind to nature. Neither Smith nor Marx understood the extent to which every economy depends on nature and its many limited natural resources. They did not take into account that some cultures, which have ignored the limits of nature, such as the one on Easter Island, eventually disappeared.
Instead, these forefathers of modern economics saw nature as a perpetual free lunch. Therefore, both socialism and capitalism, in all its variants, have contributed to the environmental, resource and economic systems crisis we now are in.
The British economist E. F. Schumacher—walking in the footsteps of another prophetic economist, Karl Polanyi, who, already in 1944, warned us of capitalism’s commodification of people and nature—understood what Smith and Marx had missed. In his seminal book Small is Beautiful, Schumacher pointed out that our ethical and philosophical views have important political and economic consequences.
Our compulsion for economic growth and the separation of the economics from ecology, Schumacher claimed, are the two main reasons why we are in perpetual economic and ecological crises.
This insight—that economics is not a science but a reflection of our social values and that it is dependent on following the laws of nature—became the green movement’s most important contribution. Thus, the important green dictum of the triple bottom line of economics: profit, people and planet. The greens understood that an economy is not all about profit, it also needs to serve people as well as planet.
Therefore, I agree with Rasmus Hansson, former parliamentary leader of Norway’s Green Party, that "Ecology must lay the framework for the economy, not the other way around." I also agree that green values are important for the future of Norway, Europe and the world. But I do not agree with those who claim that capitalism with a green face will save us.
"Ecology must lay the framework for the economy, not the other way around." ~ Rasmus Hansson
Reforming capitalism is no longer a practical strategy. If that had been the case, then relatively green and equitable Denmark, should have become a sustainable paradise by now. It is not. It has one of the highest carbon footprints in the world. Three other European countries and the US are among the top ten.
The rest of the industrialized countries—all capitalist—follow closely behind. History has thus clearly shown that an economy built on capitalism does not create economic justice nor ecological balance. All capitalist reforms, whether socialist or green, have tried in vain to reduce the false fundamentals of growth capitalism: the one-pointed focus on making profit from the exchange of material goods.
The green politician Mr. Hansson also believes that we must "build on the best of today's market economy." However, such green slogans have started to ring quite hollow. The time for reforms are over. We need systems change.
Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world is notorious for underpaying workers and destroying the local economy, but the highly profitable company is also a promoter of green capitalism. The retail chain is the world’s biggest seller of organic foods and has solar panels on many of its rooftops.
Such superficial measures, however, do not alter the fact that Wal-Mart’s profits are built on the backs of an underpaid labor force without health insurance, and that the long distance distribution system the company is based on is highly dependent on fossil fuel burning trucks.
We cannot simply shop ourselves out of the unsustainable predicament we are in. Green consumerism, such as increased use of organic food, biodegradable soaps, and solar panels, cannot by itself build a more sustainable economy.
Green, personal values are also not enough to turn things around. We cannot, as many green capitalists advocate, simply shop ourselves out of the unsustainable predicament we are in. Green consumerism, such as increased use of organic food, biodegradable soaps, and solar panels, cannot, by itself, build a more sustainable economy.
Since green values became popular in the 80s and 90s, the world economy overall has become alarmingly less green. The contradictions are flagrantly visible: large portions of the world’s organic sugar cane are grown on diminishing Amazon rainforest lands and Tesla cars are mainly fueled by electricity produced from coal and burnt garbage.
Even the oil giant Shell is now backing green values. The corporation learned early on that a PR campaign based on “profit, people and planet” would greatly enhance profits and its image. In this way, the speculators and owners of capital continue with business as usual so that they can stay a strategic step ahead of the public and green reform politicians.
We need to connect the economic dots and realize that green capitalism is itself part of the problem.
Therefore, we need to connect the economic dots and realize that green capitalism is itself part of the problem. The days of endless reforms are over. We need economic restructuring. We need economic systems change. The good news is that a new economy is emerging from the ashes of the old. Here are some of the systems changes I see emerging beyond the green and leftist horizon and forming the foundations of a new economy:
1. Utility Value and Intrinsic Value.
The capitalist market economy sees only one value in nature: its utility value. How many planks of wood can this forest produce? How much oil can we pump from this well? How many tons of fish can this lake produce? Nature’s intrinsic value, however, its value to exist in itself, the innate need for animals and plants to live and reproduce, those needs are not at all valued by the market place.
The new economy, however, must first recognize that nature serves us and the planet best as an untouched ecosystem, as a resource for beauty, recreation, fresh air and water. Secondly, within an eco-economic framework, nature can also serve us as a resource for raw materials.
Nature is part of the planetary commons, and these commons—the mountains, rivers, oceans and forests—do not belong to any one person or corporation, these commons belong to all living beings. Therefore, no private interests, however powerful and rich, should have the right to indiscriminately exploit these natural resources. The limited use of these commons must primarily be administered by the local community and government, not corporate interests.
2. Limits on income
The right to accumulate as much money as you can—the right to be greedy--is taken for granted by the free market, capitalist economy. But what about the right to a decent income? What about the right to health care, education and food? The idea that greed is good is one of capitalism’s fundamental contradictions.
This idea has given rise to both economic inequality and the destruction of the environment. Without effectively curbing human greed with both an adjustable maximum and a minimum income, we cannot achieve a balanced economy.
3. An economy of need, not growth
People’s real needs for safety, nourishment, education, health, creativity and spirituality, not our superficial greed for maximum profit, must guide the development of the economy.
4. Cooperative Economy
The mixed economy of today must be restructured so that the large corporations are restructured and turned into worker-managed cooperatives, while small ones, such as restaurants, shops and family farms can remain in private hands. Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx emphasized the importance of cooperatives.
5. Economic Democracy
Political democracy is vitally important, but economic democracy is even more important. This will ensure that the needs of local people, not the large corporations, control the economy. Real economic democracy entails a restructuring of the economy, so that capitalism flourishes as small scale business enterprises, corporations are turned into worker-owned businesses and governments are run to serve the people and the environment. This will ensure an economy of need rather than greed.
6. Decentralization and Self-sufficiency
Without a strong, local economy, built on self-sufficiency, we cannot create an environmentally friendly, democratic economy. Therefore, decentralization is an essential goal of a restructured, green economy.
7. New Free Trade
Only free trade between countries with equal economic development and export and import of mainly finished goods, rather than raw materials. In this way, all countries can become more self-sufficient and poor countries have time to industrialize.
Green capitalism is a contradiction. Reforming today’s market economy with green values only makes the power of capital even smarter and stronger.
What we need instead is a new economic structure that is in itself ecological, cooperative and creative. Such an economy functions like nature itself, in a regenerative relationship between people, culture, industry, market and nature.
Such an economy reflects that the goal of the economy is not eternal, material growth but to meet basic human needs and to increase our personal and cultural quality of life through leisure, sports, education, art, music, literature, and spirituality. Increasing these quality of life measures will ensure a more sustainable economy—they score high on the happiness curve but rather low on the economic growth curve.
Roar Bjonnes is the executive director and editor of Systems Change Alliance. He is the author of five books, has contributed essays in three other books and has written articles for several Norwegian newspapers and half a dozen international magazines and blogs. For more information about him and one of his books, see growinganeweconomy.com
The as yet incalculable physical, moral, and economic toll of the global crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic will have been to no avail if we accept the two contentions brandished by many governments as they manage the response.
Firstly, that the crisis is external, as if it were a natural calamity unrelated to human actions. Secondly, that the victory over the crisis will be attained when we return to “normal”, to doing the same things in the same ways as before.
A shift is needed; beyond the economic, and existential.
If we allow ourselves to disseminate this blinkered and feverish view we will entirely miss out on the potential for knowledge and regeneration that a crisis confronted with eyes wide open always affords.
Intergenerational compact
Contrary to what we might have deemed ourselves capable of collectively, throughout Europe and around the world the pandemic has been met with an uncompromising sense of intergenerational protection and community, driving many to voluntary seclusion even before a state of emergency was declared. That protection of the older generations, as well as of those who will succeed us, that true generational contract, must be supported in choices regarding Europe’s future, which are also choices regarding the place of Europe in humanity’s future.
We should be well aware that the choices made in the fight against Covid-19 are also the choices determining our future ways of living with one another. It is a delusion to presume that the problems of the emergency and the problems of the aftermath are dissociated. Declared states of emergency may be lifted, but many will remain in force until a vaccine becomes available. Even beyond that (no less than a year), implicitly they will remain as an acquired alternative. No less because choices are made now and are under evaluation as of now.
We currently face two main levels of choice. The first one lies in the immediate fight against the pandemic. The second one lies in the debate around the model for reconstruction that will be necessary in the aftermath of this long-drawn-out emergency.
Sovereigntist choices
The European Union got off to a bad start. It ignored the warning signs of the virus spreading within, then out of China. It wasted precious time. It neglected preparations. It declined the necessary coordination to minimise damage, and when the virus hit the heart of Europe, it was every man for himself.
European solidarity is not merely an option but a necessity if the European Union wishes not to succumb as yet another tragic Covid-19 victim.
Italy, the first hard-hit country, was left to its fate. Without warning, member-states shut their borders (to their merit, not Portugal or Spain). Europe risks sinking if it does not rise above sovereigntist choices – whether they be of the irrationally anachronistic, nationalistic, populist, and arrogant kind; or of the kind that stems from premierships opposing the issue of common eurozone bonds, necessary to face the enormous costs of protecting the population against both the disease and the deprivation of means precipitated by foreseeable months of interrupted economic activity. European solidarity is not merely an option but a necessity if the European Union wishes not to succumb as yet another tragic Covid-19 victim.
Social contract
On the other hand, given the apparent success of hard-security state choices in other places, Europe also risks sinking if it fails to preserve the very values it claims are its heritage (even if it does occasionally neglect them). The values of democracy, liberality, and solidarity may appear a meek response to the enormity of the threat, and there is no shortage of news on the preventive virtues of the digital biopolitics implemented in China.
But it is rather the opposite: the exercise of authority whose legitimacy resides in the consent of the citizens, that is the brave, encompassing response – one that does not disconnect the means of combat against the pandemic from the means of future subsistence as a free and solidary community; even though it is a slower, more strenuous response.
More than ever, democracy must prevail over other forms of political power. We should fear the police state, governmentalised cybersurveillance and big data. We should double down on efforts towards a social contract that is of all and for all, of protection and solidarity, of community and of the common good, but without antagonism against fundamental individual liberties and guarantees.
The welfare state that is – rightly – called upon to rescue us in moments of crisis, must not then be subjected to further dilapidation and greater pressures on its diverse public services. On the contrary, welfare should be reinforced both in terms of material and human resources, as well as of the range and efficacy of their intervention. As such, we cannot stifle the need to provide adequate humanitarian support to all those refugees these days stranded, in helpless agony, along many European borders.
Welfare governance
We are living a historical moment and if the Covid-19 threat summons the history of Europe, it must be so that we today reject anachronistic choices all too fresh in the memory and persevere in past choices all too easily forgotten.
But to reject and to persevere is not enough. It is necessary still to enter the future and the change it will bring with feet firm on the ground. First of all, to deepen the common project of Europe. We cannot continue to accept the idea that social policies must remain circumscribed to the national sphere, as if a monetary union could survive without the existence of a common budget from which part of those expenses are shared.
To enter into the future, a Europe with a future, with something to give to the future, means to choose integrated policies, both national and European, of protection of employment rights, of income, of the reduction of inequalities among citizens and countries. In short, a welfare governance, with adequate budget provision to complement national budgets.
And this must mean an economic governance firmly committing not only to debt mutualisation, but also to terminating the ongoing protection provided by tax havens. These are a threat to confidence in the European project, depleting the national budgets. Tax competition between States enables the use of such tax-evading mechanisms by the wealthiest, which widens social and economic inequalities.
Hard choices
And finally, the truly hard choices, those which imply a return to normal that is not a relapse back into the same state of affairs that drove us here. These are choices to be made not as Europeans, but as passengers, along with all the other peoples and human residents of the truly unique and endangered vessel which is Earth. It is important to bear in mind that, as already seen in 2003, 2009, and 2012, the pandemic stems from a zoonotic virus, transmitted to humans from animals. This would not occur without vertiginous, uncontrolled human intrusion across natural habitats, including of endangered wildlife.
A shift is needed; beyond the economic, and existential. Climate change is the most visible facet of the global environmental crisis. That is to say, of the degradation and entropy of the Earth-System’s ecosystems and common goods, which are the premise for the survival of human life in dignified conditions.
This model is grounded on a dystopian view of exponential growth, in open conflict with Nature’s laws and the Earth’s physical boundaries.
This unprecedented challenge, which posits the “end of history” as a catastrophic horizon, is the result of the same intolerance to disturbance that characterises the global neoliberal economic model in which we live, and which has become the most radical practical expression of nihilism.
If something threatens to unsettle it, this system will immediately signal equal or even more violent threats than those of the pandemic, as soon as the former is contained. It is necessary to understand and denounce the fact that this is only so because this model is grounded on a dystopian view of exponential growth, in open conflict with Nature’s laws and the Earth’s physical boundaries. This is a growth that sacrifices the diversity of life and environmental equilibria on the altar of capital, turned into a blind and malevolent god; and thus condemning the future of mankind.
The Covid-19 pandemic presents us with tasks as urgent as they are titanic.
For decades we have allowed a kind of sleepwalking to override the danger signs and the threats that the rapture of domination has placed between us and our future. The margin for error is now zero. The choice lies between the pains of a new birth of civilisation or the unforgivable acceptance of humankind’s suicide. Europe must convene, united and in solidarity, in face of this unrefusable summons which cannot be postponed.
In only a few months it has become clear to many that we do not want to go back to that “normal” but forward to a “new normal”. Exactly what that “new normal” will be is too early to tell and will depend on how each and every one of us and all of us collectively participate in shaping the future we choose.
Humanity is capable of profound transformation and spontaneous cooperation in service to a shared purpose and the wellbeing of all.
We are given time to reflect, while witnessing first-hand, that humanity is capable of profound transformation and spontaneous cooperation in service to a shared purpose and the wellbeing of all.
Without the pandemic the untouchable dogma of the economic growth imperative would have made the 26th UN Conference on Climate Change this year another uphill struggle against the fossil fuel and industrial lobbies influencing the political process to repeat its mantra: “We can’t afford to endanger the economy”.
Now most national governments will have to spend unprecedented sums of money on responding to the pandemic and in support of their citizens and businesses. This is giving us an opportunity to make sure we spend the money wisely on building more resilient and regenerative systems of production and consumption and stimulating local and regional economic activity that incentivizes increased community cohesion and the regeneration of ecosystems everywhere.
What we need is a culturally transformative response to a series of converging crises.
Climate change, ecosystems collapse, biodiversity loss, obscene levels of inequality within and between the world’s nations, dysfunctional economic and monetary systems driving the exploitation of people and planet … do I need to continue? The need for change is evident. Transformation is inevitable and already underway.
Upstream from all these crises lies a ‘crisis of perception’. Cultural evolution is also about the collective process of letting go of no longer appropriate worldviews and value systems. We need to transform cultural narratives that perpetuate a mistaken understanding of what it means to be human, a false separation between nature and culture, and use inadequate measures of success.
Working regeneratively means to not fall into a quick-fix, piece-meal, techno-centric mindset of problem solving in the face of converging crises. We have plenty of evidence that inadequate interventions in complex systems can have many unforeseen consequences. The problem-solving and scaling-up-solutions mindset can be part of the problem.
Rather than starting in a reactive mode addressing the problems associated with these converging crises, a regenerative approach would look at the transformative and evolutionary potential we are now invited to manifest co-creatively in our communities and bioregions.
We are challenged individually and collectively to contribute to the fundamental redesign of the human presence and impact on Earth.
I believe that the fastest and most effective way to find wise responses to these crises is to co-create diverse regenerative cultures rooted in and sourced-from the bio-cultural uniqueness of each place and its people. Biological evolution is too slow. Only cultural evolution can create a new normal over the coming decades!
We need to rapidly increase the capacity of people in place to participate in co-evolving mutuality with each other and the ecosystems and biosphere we all depend upon. The role of education and the role of cultural institutions in catalyzing and supporting this transformation are of critical importance. We are challenged individually and collectively to contribute to the fundamental redesign of the human presence and impact on Earth.
Daniel Christian Wahl is a member of our advisory panel and author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures.
During the global financial crisis over a decade ago, the Financial Times reported that at heart this was a narrative crisis. How you dealt with it depended on the story you used. Was it a mortgage crisis, a banking crisis, a geo-political crisis, the shift to the Pacific (higher savings rates), a financial crisis, or even a crisis of capitalism?
Ultimately, the deeper crisis was waived off and Wall Street was saved at the expense of Main Street. China too saved the day, and all returned to normalcy. The window of a possibility for deep change did not materialize.
We are in a similar situation today. As during the French revolution, time is fluid, we have entered uncharted waters. Once the crisis nears its end, many will be tempted to go back to the world we knew. However, this is also the opportunity to create a different world.
What we do will be decided by the narrative we use. How deep do we wish to go, how much do we wish to change?
Gaian leadership at this time is about charting a new direction, exploring new scenarios, and creating global systems that can help us arrive at a new future.
Disease and Cure
If this is merely a disease crisis, then it is easy: find the cure and the vaccine. Ensure open science, the free flow of information, and find the medical solutions. The main insights will be: global science working together can create a difference. As one medical scientist commented: "Where are your sports heroes now? You pay them millions of Euros a year, 30,000 for us." Science and technology with predictive Artificial Intelligence and innovative companies such as Ali Baba lead the way.
The Next Disease
While this could solve the crisis of 2020, what about when a similar zoonotic disease erupts? That would be a “food consumption crisis”. What is required then is to ban wet markets and the eating of exotic animals. It also means challenging masculine values in East Asia and the search for exotic alternative health potions. But mere legislation will not solve the day. We need to ensure that the traders in these lucrative areas - the bounty hunters - find new work, otherwise, the trade will just go underground. This again is not just a national Chinese issue; it requires a global coordinated effort. It will require Interpol to begin a shift toward becoming Earthpol.
Beyond Meat
But perhaps this is more than just a zoonotic crisis. It is not just wildlife that is the problem, but our consumption patterns. Many blame factory farming and warn that the next pandemic will emerge from how we produce food. We thus need to redesign cities and what we eat, so we do not encroach upon wildlife areas. We also urgently need to change our relationship to meat. While challenging someone’s meat consumption habit may be too much for many, the current food production models certainly need to shift.
We now know that a global focus on global problems is possible. We now know that global coordination is possible. Solutions unimaginable months ago are now the new normal. Given that Covid-19 dwarfs as a crisis compared to climate change, this crisis can be seen as a pre-run, a mock trial, preparing us for the real event. What we learn today, or the changes we need to make today, can be crucial for the world we create. Thus, this crisis is essentially about leadership. Can we ensure the shift to a greener planet? This means moving toward alternative energies, ending the fossil fuel era for good.
The End of Capitalism
As we enter a severe recession, or a seven-year malaise, possibly a global depression, the real issue is economic. Creating a world where "money keeps on rolling" and not getting stuck in the hands of a few will become urgent and imperative. That means a world where “glocal” solutions are focused on equity and prosperity. Universal basic income, free education, health, and housing for all are not just the concerns of the left, but these are now issues required to be solved for global security. We thus need to challenge the world capitalist system with its mantra of "more, more, and even more, for the few. " Development is very uneven, distorted by deep global inequity. But capitalism will die if we help it disappear.
This will mean that three economic spheres will evolve. Global cooperatives, globalized industries, and markets. It will require global governance, if not a global government. If fascism evolves, this will mean surveillance and the loss of individual liberties. But it can also mean the end of identity based on whom one hates, the end of imagined realities. It will mean accepting that we are first human beings. If we learn to cooperate instead of just competing, innovative technologies can create stunning wealth for all.
The New Renaissance
It is time to fix the great imbalance. In our four spheres of life: economy, society, spirit, and nature, we have overly favoured the economy at the expense of the others.
This, then, is a much deeper crisis and challenge. Our view of ourselves as material beings is being challenged. We can either panic or go deep within and mindfully find peace. Our view of ourselves as defined by the nation-state is being challenged. Viruses do not care about boundaries nor does nuclearization bring safety. Our view of ourselves as outside of nature, as separate from Gaia is being challenged. Our view of ourselves as defined by economics only is being challenged.
It is time to fix the great imbalance. In our four spheres of life: economy, society, spirit, and nature, we have overly favoured the economy at the expense of the others. We need a great Gaian rebalance, a move to a world with a quadruple bottom line: Prosperity, Purpose, People, and Planet. Covid-19 can help us create a new Renaissance - a transformation of self and society, home and planet. There have been two historical renaissances. The Asian classical Renaissance was personal: the quest for inner peace, enlightenment. The European Renaissance challenged dogma, allowing science and art to flourish, creating the possibility of revolution after revolution against authorities that do not serve us.
We are in a similar process now. However, the push, after a vaccine is found, will be to go back to what we know, the used future. It will be a pause followed by the light-speed economic growth back to where we were. But Gaian leadership at this time is about charting a new direction, exploring new scenarios, and creating global systems that can help us arrive at a new future.
Sohail Inayatullah is a member of our advisory panel and UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies; Professor, Tamkang University, Taiwan; Associate at Melbourne Business School, Australia, and Researcher at Metafuture.org and Metafutureschool.
Our love-hate relationship with plastic started with the invention of a simple shopping bag. In 1965, Scandinavian shoppers discovered they no longer needed to bring their own canvas bags to the store. Thanks to the ingenious invention of engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin from Sweden, shoppers could from then on carry their groceries home in a light but sturdy plastic bag.
By folding, wielding and die-cutting a tube of plastic, Thulin had masterfully created the world’s first plastic bag. The design was simple and durable, and it was introduced to the world by a company aptly called Celloplast. The bags were popularized for their convenience and, later on, for their environmental edge: no clearcutting of trees needed. No matter the logic, people began grabbing the light, plastic handles and soon turned back to the stores for more.
From Thulin’s single plastic bag, fast forward a few generations, and we have become a planet of compulsive plastic bag users. We earthlings carry nearly one trillion plastic bags a year. Not surprisingly, Americans more than others—each person in America carry about 290 plastic bags each year filled with food, drinks, dishwashing liquids, and toothbrushes packaged, of course, in various kinds of plastic.
This habit, introduced and perfected by capitalist marketing, has made us into a planet of plastic pack rats.
Throwaway plastic, or polymers, are used for nearly everything these days. This habit, introduced and perfected by capitalist marketing, has made us into a planet of plastic pack rats. We have so much plastic trash that we cannot even find enough dump sites to dump the trash in. So, we also dump it into streams, rivers, and oceans.
Today, there are reportedly islands of plastic trash the size of small countries floating lazily on the seven seas. Every year, we dump about 5 million tons of plastic into the liquid backyards of fish, crabs and whales—not just plastic bags, but everything from plastic straws to plastic sandals, from plastic wrappers to plastic cups.
One garbage truck of this stuff is dumped into the oceans every single minute. By 2030, it will be two trucks per minute and by 2050, four. By that time, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. Just let that sink in for a while—more plastic than swift moving schools of fish!
Several hundred million years ago the Tethys Ocean was a sprawling mass of strange fish and huge plants. When these organic masses died, they sunk through the dark, liquid depths where during millions of years they transformed into a black syrup.
And it is from this crude mass of oil that modern civilization has fueled its engines of progress, its assembly lines of cars and runways of planes. And, of course, Mr. Thulin’s first plastic bag was also made from it. Today, plastic is also made from natural gas.
The oil and gas made from organic matter over hundreds of millions of years at the bottom of the oceans have, through a combination of human ingenuity and short term, capitalist profit, been turned into artificial waves of trash. Eventually, these plastic waves will also sink to the bottom. But unlike the organic creatures that sunk millions of years ago, the plastic bags will take between 500 to 1000 years to degrade.
As the plastic bags, bottles, straws, wrappers and containers are tossed around in the oceans, parts of them do break down—into minute particles, five millimeters or less, of microplastics. These tiny pollutants are ingested by various forms of aquatic life, from tiny feeders like zooplankton to small fish, all the way up to whales and sharks.
Microplastics are also found in predators higher up the food chain, such as in polar bears. A study found that nearly 80 percent of life on the ocean floor hundreds of feet down had some form of microplastic in them.
Our plastic planet has finally come full circle: the oil that we pulled up from the oceans is now sinking back down in the form of microplastic flakes, infiltrating anything alive with mouths and pores in its wake.
Once these inorganic microplastics ends up inside the cells of fish or plankton, they cannot be digested. They are stuck inside the cells as foreign elements. There is even a fancy word for this: phagocytosis. Inorganic particles stuck in organic cells.
There are many sources of these microplastics. Very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene plastics are added as exfoliants in health and beauty products, from shampoos to toothpaste. Microplastics are also found in synthetic clothing, tea bags and glitter. As these tiny particles float down washing machine and shower drains, a large percentage eventually end up in our aquatic backyards.
So how do we stop the planet from drowning in disposable plastics? How do we stop whales from swallowing hundreds of plastic bags and birds from being strangled by them? How do we stop the silent cellular invasion called phagocytosis?
Green activist organizations inform us that there is a lot each one of us can do: 1) Bring your own bag to the grocery store. 2) Use reusable plastic containers. 3) Buy in bulk. 4) Say no to straws and plastic lids. 5) Bring your own take-out containers and cup. 6) Compost. 7) Use a glass water bottle. 8) Use a water filter. 8) Use only natural and organic shampoos and toothpastes. The list goes on and on.
Strategies have failed to recognize that our addiction to plastic has become systemic
Yes, there is a lot each one of us can do to reduce plastic trash. But, frankly, we have tried to follow the gospel of individual lifestyle change since the 1980s and look where we are today: at the point of covering the entire planet in various forms of throwaway polymers.
These strategies have failed to recognize that our addiction to plastic has become systemic; that we use plastic for nearly everything, and that we have become slaves to its ubiquitous presence. Seduced by its convenience, we have denied plastic’s environmental destruction. Meanwhile, corporations profit from our overconsumption and unwitting addiction. We are in need of a major detox.
But time is short. A 2018 study conducted by the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey (GOES) Foundation found that the oceanic ecosystem may collapse in 25 years due to a combination of plastic, acidification, and ocean pollution.
We need to move from an economy of ease and greed to an economy of knowledge-sharing and cooperation. And we need to do it fast.
If we want an ocean of fish rather than plastic, we require large scale political and economic systems change. We need to move from a culture of shallow, throwaway convenience to a culture of deep, environmental caring. We need to move from an economy of ease and greed to an economy of knowledge-sharing and cooperation. And we need to do it fast.
It is time to ban one-use plastics made from oil and gas from the business cycle for good. We need environmental science inventing bags and containers that are 100% compostable. In fact, Avantium, a Dutch company, is currently developing a promising biodegradable plastic made from plant sugars. Many countries, including Denmark and Ireland, have already banned the use of plastic bags. But that is just a start.
Collective action from business and politicians are now needed on a planetary scale. It is too late for incremental changes and reforms.
Collective action from business and politicians are now needed on a planetary scale. It is too late for incremental changes and reforms. We must end the use of oil-based throwaways for good.
If we want our children to experience blue oceans of fish, whales, and dolphins rather than plastic islands of trash, we need to implement zero waste policies throughout the industrial cycle—all over the planet. Bringing your own bag to the grocery store is no longer enough. It is time for a revolution, a planetary plastic rebellion.
Roar Bjonnes is the executive director and editor of Systems Change Alliance. He is the author of five books, has contributed essays in three other books and has written articles for several Norwegian newspapers and half a dozen international magazines and blogs. For more information about him and one of his books, see growinganeweconomy.com
Every incident of racist discrimination or violence strikes at the dignity and wellbeing, the very lives of individuals, their families and their communities.
The current anti-racism uprisings are reminding us that Europe and the US have been built upon the wealth and prosperity enabled by the trade and labour of slaves and the plundering of resources from colonised lands and peoples.
One of key ways in which racial inequality is upheld and perpetuated is through the economic system.
One of key ways in which racial inequality is upheld and perpetuated is through the economic system - According to inequaity.org, in the US in 2016, the median white family had 41 times more wealth than the median black family and 22 times that of the median Latino family. The UK government Wealth Disparity Audit in 2017 found that around 25% children in households headed by Asian people or those in the Other ethnic group were in persistent poverty, as were 20% children in Black households, compared to 8% in White households.
Capitalism is driven by the philosophy of 'each man for himself', encouraging people to place personal and material gain before the wellbeing of others and the ecosystem.
It has enabled those who have historically held institutional power i.e. white males in banks and corporations to gain and hoard a disproportionate amount of wealth in populations the world over.
In order for us to achieve anything close to equality between people of different ethnicities and genders, we need to move towards economic democracy.
In order for us to achieve anything close to equality between people of different ethnicities and genders, we need to move towards economic democracy - a system that ensures basic needs are met for all and resources and employment are controlled locally.
In this way, prosperity remains within local communities, where local people have control over resources and decision-making and are able to fulfil their physical, emotional and spiritual needs.
Social justice is more achievable when people from marginalised communities have access to healthcare, education, jobs and a higher standard of living and can have a greater influence over the systems that govern our societies.
Economic democracy and resilient local communities are what can bring about a shift in the locus of power to people at the grassroots of society.
Political democracy is broken; twisted and manipulated by power-hungry individuals and the same vested interests that dominate and exploit the financial system.
Economic democracy and resilient local communities are what can bring about a shift in the locus of power to people at the grassroots of society – those who have been allowed to struggle for their livelihoods because of the dog-eat-dog nature of corporate capitalism.
If the economic system is changed, if there is an economy that meets the needs of all, that will be one of the most effective means of alleviating suffering and improving lives, dismantling inequality - one of the pillars of structural racism in our society.
Thanks to artist and art educator, Lorna Mahler, for sharing this short film illustrating the ways in which street artists use images and text to communicate messages around social issues, justice and change.
A far cry from scrappy tags spray-painted by territorial teenagers, street art can be beautiful, provocative and hard-hitting. In plain sight, this guerrilla artform unofficially places itself in the public domain, obliging passers-by to absorb the visual content and messaging.
Not only is it a commentary on society, street art is also a rebellion against the commodification of art and the disenfranchisement of artists by commercial and elitist art institutions and galleries.
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ~ Banksy
Sometimes used to beautify urban areas and at others to draw attention to the failings of the system, street art can indeed fulfil the purpose of Art, as seen by renowned yet anonymous street artist, Banksy, to “..comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
Have you seen or produced street art with a strong social message? Share a photo in our Community Forum and we’ll put it out through our social media channels.
In this piece, aired in 2017, London-based spoken word artist, George the Poet, states his case for why artists should be 'political'. He says artists are not just entertainers and they can’t simply ‘sit on the fence’. Rather they should be the vanguards of the social movement for change.
His words and his sentiment are captivating and, for any of you active or dormant creatives out there, might make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. It is a call to action, for artists to be advocates and their audiences, activists. George acknowledges how his place, as a poet in his community, positions him to have a positive influence on the young people who follow his work.
George Mpanga, born to Ugandan parents, grew up in Harlesden, North West London, just a stone’s throw from my own former neighbourhood. His voice and sound are iconic of UK black urban youth and, like many, his first art form was rapping. However he quit just before the release of his first album and moved into the genre of performance poetry. Why? To have a greater impact.
“Poetry can make things clear. No one gave a monkey’s when I used to rap, but the minute I turned the music off and delivered the exact same words acapella, people paid attention.”
In a Q & A with fellow poet, Raymond Antrobus, back in 2012, George explained “Poetry can make things clear. No one gave a monkey’s when I used to rap, but the minute I turned the music off and delivered the exact same words acapella (literally), people paid attention.”
For an artist who wants to convey important messages about life, culture and society, capturing people’s attention is everything.
These days, George combines poetry and social political commentary in his multi award-winning podcast, Have you heard George’s podcast? In 2019, he turned down an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) because ‘he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to make people “really understand how damaging the legacy of British colonialism has been on the African continent”’ George took this moment in his personal life to raise awareness of a bloody period in history that continues to influence the lives of black people around the world today.
If you listen to his podcast, you will hear how George uses lyricism, rhythm and rhyme to highlight important issues and raise awareness of the opportunities for change. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of other activist poets, such as Jamaican-born, UK dub poet, Linton Kwesi-Johnson, who once said, "Writing [is] a political act and poetry [is] a cultural weapon."
Our aim is to explore the creative ways in which powerful ideas can be transmitted. We want to support artists of all genres and backgrounds to be a voice for their communities and a catalyst for change in our society.
Art can bring personal and social transformation. It can be a tool and a gift. It can shed light, raise questions, illuminate hope and bring people together.
Not only can it provide poignant commentary on what is broken in our systems, Art can bring personal and social transformation. It can be a tool and a gift. It can shed light, raise questions, illuminate hope and bring people together.
Yes, we can make pictures and films that please the eye, we can play music that makes you tap your feet, but when artists offer their craft in service to humanity, to a positive vision for the Earth, then both they and we, their audience, take a step closer to fulfilling our true potential.
Are you a visual or performance artist, writer, musician or film maker with a focus on social change? We want to hear from you. Become a member of Systems Change Alliance and be part of sharing your work and ideas in our Community Forum.
A carta social da EU,
como previsto por Jacques Delors, um dos arquitetos originais por trás
da UE, baseia-se numa visão fundamental de segurança básica económica e social
para todos os europeus.
De acordo com o New Internationalist, no entanto, "Esta visão social também estava ligada à noção de um mercado único 'livre' que abrange toda a Europa. A compatibilidade entre o mercado e a sociedade foi simplesmente assumida – um erro fatal não só para a UE, mas em toda a abordagem da corrente democracia social."
Com efeito, o comércio livre não é garantia para a segurança social, nem para a prosperidade, já para não falar da democracia económica e da sustentabilidade ambiental.
Enquanto
a criação de um mercado europeu comum aproximou o continente,
e pode ter tornado a guerra menos provável, o mercado livre teve efeitos diferentes em
diferentes partes da União.
No
início da UE, grandes pagamentos de transferências foram efetuados para ajudar as mais pobres
nações, como a Grécia e Portugal,
para desenvolver infraestruturas, saúde, educação e apoiar a agricultura.
No entanto, como
estes fundos não foram usados principalmente para modernizar o setor industrial e tornar
os países competitivos, o efeito a longo prazo do mercado comum tornaram as
nações mais pobres menos competitivas, e mais dependentes da ajuda.
O boom inicial
criado por pagamentos de transferência do resto da UE foi seguido por
outra infusão de capital de empréstimos baratos após a formação da moeda
comum. Ambos estímulos de curta duração, e os recursos não foram utilizados
para aumentar a produtividade do trabalho, mas para criar infraestruturas e apoio
ao consumo.
Na Espanha,
o crescimento económico deveu-se a mais pessoas que entram no mercado, em vez
do trabalho se ter tornado mais eficiente. Todos os empréstimos concedidos à Espanha resultaram num boom imobiliário
com os preços dos imóveis a subir, mas não em crescimento industrial.
"Para ter certeza",
escreve Bill Dawidow no Atlantic Monthly, "as economias do sul da Europa teriam lutado mesmo sem estarem
ligadas ao Euro. Mas eu acho que é razoável culpar o Euro por transformar aqueles
problemas numa catástrofe.
O Euro,
argumenta, seduzindo estes países a pedir dinheiro emprestado a juros a taxas
muito baixas. "Bolhas imobiliárias,
continua ele, "foram apenas uma das consequências. Dinheiro barato permitiu que os países
fizessem grandes dívidas, pagassem salários altos aos funcionários do governo, e criaram falsa prosperidade
que encorajou os consumidores a gastar e fazer empréstimos." [1]
Agora que os
pagamentos de transferência reduziram e o dinheiro emprestado é devido para reembolso, o
verdadeiro efeito do mercado livre da UE pode finalmente ser avaliado. Comércio livre entre
parceiros económicos desiguais, como entre o México e os Estados Unidos, muitas vezes
divide a economia em zonas de alto e baixo rendimento onde as indústrias não podem
competir com as nações industrialmente desenvolvidas.
Depois do Acordo Livre
de Comércio Norte-Americano ter sido assinado entre os Estados Unidos
Canadá
e México
criando a maior economia de comércio livre do mundo, a economia mexicana
começou a deteriorar-se rapidamente.
O economista norueguês, Erik Reinert, nomeia este processo como três fases de desindustrialização, desindustrialização e desertificação. Como resultado, a economia agrícola mexicana foi devastada. Alimentos básicos locais como o milho e o feijão tiveram de competir contra as importações muito mais baratas do Norte. Em breve, milhões de imigrantes ilegais de zonas rurais migraram para os EUA para procurar trabalho, em muitas áreas locais apenas pessoas com mais de 60 anos ainda permanecem.
Um desenvolvimento menos dramático, mas semelhante está a acontecer na própria UE. Partes da UE estão a tornar-se um terceiro mundo em miniatura, com os mesmos problemas fundamentais que os países em desenvolvimento na Ásia e em África. Nestes domínios, o sector da indústria e da tecnologia não pode competir a nível internacional ou dentro da UE, pelo que são obrigados a promover a agricultura, os serviços e o turismo. Como nenhum país da história, para além de talvez alguns paraísos fiscais insulares, conseguiu prosperar sem uma indústria forte, o futuro destes países é sombrio.
Com o comércio livre e a
livre mobilidade de capitais e mão de obra, as pessoas movem-se de uma área para outra em busca
de trabalho. Este movimento de pessoas é
certamente vantajoso para as corporações, que têm um fluxo constante de trabalho e,
a curto prazo, para os indivíduos e suas famílias.
Mas este fluxo livre
além-fronteiras nacionais também cria problemas e complexidades para os países,
comunidades locais, e pessoas. Mesmo que a Noruega não seja um membro completo da
UE, todos os noruegueses estão cientes de que uma grande percentagem dos enfermeiros e
empregados de mesa que trabalham na Noruega são da Suécia, enquanto uma grande percentagem de
carpinteiros e pintores são homens polacos, que muitas vezes ficam longe das suas famílias
por meses a fio.
Tal mobilidade laboral
além fronteiras nacionais contribui para um aumento da economia paralela, uma redução
de salários, e para uma redução do trabalho qualificado no país de origem do
trabalhador móvel.
Outro complexo
efeito colateral do comércio livre europeu tem sido "fuga de cérebros", a saída de
trabalhadores altamente qualificados de países industriais chave está a tornar-se cada vez mais
um desafio para muitos países da Zona Euro.
Más perspetivas de carreira,
restrições à liberdade, salários baixos, desemprego, más condições de vida e trabalho,
insegurança social e instabilidade política são apenas alguns dos
fatores que contribuem para as decisões do jovem profissional deixar a sua casa,
o seu país e procurar ambientes mais rentáveis noutros locais.
Consequências negativas de
fuga de cérebros incluem a perda direta de potencial intelectual, e também
perda indireta de investimento económico, receita fiscal e escassez de pessoal em indústrias
chave. Enquanto a fuga de cérebros é benéfica as suas falhas são inerentemente
no seu título, pois geralmente envolve a perda de capital humano ou seja, força de trabalho qualificada,
que são vitais para o desenvolvimento da sociedade e do país como
um todo.
No caso de mão de obra qualificada, Alam et al. reconhece a emigração desses trabalhadores qualificados como “essencialmente fornecendo benefícios pessoais a indivíduos, em vez de benefícios públicos”
Países receptores com
padrões de crescimento económico positivos, como a Alemanha e países fora da
Zona Euro estão a beneficiar por exemplo compensando a escassez de mão de obra, melhorando
os níveis médios de competência na mão de obra e aumento da pressão salarial no mercado
de trabalho nacional etc.
No caso da Europa,
três grandes direções de fuga de cérebros são aparentes:
Dos países em desenvolvimento para a UE
Fluxos inter-europeus (fluxos Leste-Oeste)
Da Europa para os EUA, e, mais recentemente, aos países em
desenvolvimento.
Quando a crise financeira atingiu em 2008, a economia do conhecimento foi uma das maiores vítimas. Uma grande e comum preocupação são as desigualdades salariais europeias, e há quem diga que a igualdade salarial por trabalho igual na Zona Euro pode ser uma solução.
Desigualdade não
está só a crescer entre países, mas entre pessoas dentro do mesmo
país também. Devido à liberalização económica ter sido amplamente aceite
dentro da Europa, políticas fiscais e
as regras do governo estão a tornar-se cada vez mais regressivas, favorecendo os ricos.
As pessoas que trabalham pagam impostos mais altos do que aqueles que vivem do que costumava ser chamado de
rendimentos não adquiridos, tais como mais-valias e juros.
Redes de Segurança social
estão a ser desmanteladas. Dizem-nos frequentemente que não têm capacidade de sustentar os
sistemas de segurança social, e ainda assim os ricos estão a ficar mais ricos e
e a ficar com a maior fatia do bolo.
Historicamente,
a economia europeia, e especialmente o modelo económico nórdico, reduz
disparidades económicas deixando os sindicatos e os empregadores negociar
os salários juntos. Se não chegassem a um acordo, os sindicatos continuariam
as greves, e se ainda não concordasse, o Estado entraria como mediador
para chegar a uma solução agradável para ambas as partes.
De acordo com
o historiador norueguês Edvard Mogstad: "Este sistema gradualmente melhorou os salários
dos trabalhadores e funcionou muito bem durante décadas, até à década de 1980,
quando o capital e a indústria europeia ganharam vantagem, seguindo um compromisso neoliberal ao estilo da agenda neo-liberal de Thatcher / Reagan
” [1]
Este ponto de vista é apoiado pela Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Económico (OCDE), que afirma que "a desigualdade na Europa aumentou substancialmente desde meados da década de 1980. Embora o processo de alargamento da UE tenha contribuído para isso, não é a única explicação, uma vez que a desigualdade também aumentou num "núcleo" de 8 países europeus." A crescente disparidade de riqueza na Europa é simultaneamente preocupante e inevitável no âmbito das atuais políticas económicas seguidas pela UE e pelos seus Estados-Membros.
[1]TvzetinaBorizova, Small Farming in Sout East Europe at a Crossroads, article on November 19, 2013 on www.balcanicaucaso.org [1]EirikGrasaas-Stavenes, WTO Conducts War on Resources (WTO førerressurskrig), article in Klassekampen, November 13, 2013
Enquanto as quatro liberdades criaram a base para um mercado livre e
removeram muitas ferramentas dos governos nacionais para controlar o desenvolvimento económico
dos seus países, subsiste ainda um obstáculo a um mercado totalmente aberto.
Este foi a taxa de câmbio usada para proteger a indústria local e promover
crescimento económico. Se um país começasse a tornar-se menos produtivo do que o seu
vizinho, a balança comercial tornar-se-ia negativa, e a sua taxa de câmbio
cairia. Isto ajudaria os produtores do país a incentivar as exportações e
a desencorajar importações.
Mas do ponto de vista dos negócios internacionais, as moedas
nacionais aumentam os custos de transação, tornam as importações e as exportações dispendiosas, e
introduzem incertezas nos cálculos financeiros.
Taxas de câmbio flexíveis também foram contra os interesses da maioria
dos países produtivos, como a Alemanha, que antes do Euro viu a sua moeda
se valorizar, que por sua vez compensou parcialmente a vantagem que tinha do aumento
da produtividade. Quando a moeda é valorizada, torna-se mais
caro para outras nações a compra de bens alemães, e assim baixou as exportações.
De modo a
remover este obstáculo final para um mercado aberto, a UE introduziu o Euro como
a sua moeda comum a 1 de janeiro de 1999. Naquela época era apenas
uma moeda contabilística. As notas bancárias foram emitidas três anos depois, em 2002. O
Euro é atualmente utilizado por 334 milhões de europeus.
Inicialmente, este
movimento foi bem recebido por vários estudiosos, como o historiador britânico Niall
OFerguson. O principal problema, pensou, seria uma união monetária sem uma
política fiscal comum, isto é, sem um governo central que controla
despesas.
Logo após o
Euro finalmente surgiu em 1999, Ferguson
advertiu num artigo publicado nos Negócios Estrangeiros em 2000 que "uma união monetária
sem uma união fiscal iria cair cerca de dez anos depois, por causa de
divergências entre os Estados-Membros.[1] Em
2010 disse Ferguson, ele andava a correr pela Europa a tentar lembrar os políticos
que era uma crise bancária semelhante como a Europa estava então a experienciar que
causou a Grande Depressão no verão de 1931.
Historicamente,
as uniões monetárias não têm sido bem sucedidas. No seu recente livro, The End of the Euro, o editor belga de negócios,
Johan van Overtveldt escreve que uma união monetária entre diferentes
países já foi tentada na Europa, mas
falhou.
Os dois principais fracassos da União Monetária foram a União Monetária Latina (LMU), criada em 1866 entre a França, a Bélgica, a Itália e a Suíça e a União Monetária Escandinava (SMU) criada em 1872 entre a Suécia, a Dinamarca e a Noruega (aderiu em 1875). A LMU nunca estabeleceu um padrão monetário comum e isso acabou por levar à sua queda em 1927, mas essencialmente já tinha falhado durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial. Apesar dos países escandinavos estarem amplamente integrados politicamente, culturalmente e monetariamente, os seus sistemas políticos independentes criaram políticas monetárias que se revelam incompatíveis com a União. Em 1924, cada país membro deixou de aceitar moedas de cada país como proposta legal nos países parceiros e, em 1930, a SMU desintegrou-se oficialmente quando os três países deixaram o padrão de ouro.
Enquanto muitos
atributos bons podem ser associados a uma moeda comum, como a facilidade de
troca monetária e redução dos custos de transação, historicamente nenhuma
união monetária já conseguiu sem uma política fiscal comum.
Isto é, uma
autoridade central comum controlando o fio da bolsa. Até agora apenas um governo
nacional tem sido capaz de fornecer a estrutura funcional necessária para uma
moeda comum. Este facto fundamental foi ignorado quando o Euro foi
introduzido.
Na falta de
uma força que conduza os países da Europa a uma união fiscal muito mais estreita, que seria
equivalente a criar uma república federal da Europa, há pouca esperança de que
o Euro possa sobreviver com o tempo. Por conseguinte, o futuro do Euro é incerto.
Entretanto, o claro vencedor é a Alemanha, que beneficiou imenso do Euro. Os grandes perdedores são a Grécia, Espanha, Portugal e outros países com economias mais pequenas e uma base industrial fraca. Aqueles que optaram por ficar fora do Euro, como o Reino Unido e a Suécia, provavelmente beneficiaram, uma vez que as importações e as exportações para o resto da Europa foram simplificadas, enquanto continuam a poder controlar a sua própria política monetária.
Tanto a UE
e, num contexto mais amplo, as instituições financeiras que moldaram a politica
económica durante a última parte doséculo XX, bem como no
oXXI,basearam-se na ideia de que a prosperidade para todos
promove a paz e a estabilidade. Se não houver guerras comerciais e tratamentos injustos
de qualquer país, não haveria necessidade ou incentivo para entrar na guerra.
A melhor maneira de
alcançar isto, foi pensado, foi pela introdução do livre comércio e
mercado aberto. Estes foram pensados como sendo autorregulados, ou possivelmente exigindo
alguma intervenção governamental limitada, e iriam no fim proporcionar
prosperidade económica para todos.
Desta forma,
os mercados livres, supostamente para alcançar esta realidade, foram construídos como base
na fundação da UE, para transformar toda a Europa
num mercado livre comum. A nível internacional, a mesma agenda de comércio livre foi
estabelecida através da OMC, do Banco Mundial, do FMI e de vários acordos comerciais
bilaterais.
A premissa
que a prosperidade generalizada entre todas as pessoas levará à paz é, pelo menos em
teoria, provavelmente inegável. O elo fraco neste argumento é se livres e
mercados abertos realmente levam à prosperidade para todos, ou para uma concentração
de riqueza, tornando algumas áreas ricas e outras áreas pobres.
Há cada vez mais indícios de que os mercados livres beneficiam aqueles que já são ricos e conduzem a disparidades económicas crescentes, a própria condição que os mercados livres deveriam eliminar. Tendo em conta as regras fundamentais do mercado livre que formaram a base da União Europeia, a atual polarização da riqueza e a crise financeira eram provavelmente inevitáveis. O pressuposto de que o mercado capitalista, o ambiente e os interesses das pessoas são compatíveis está no centro da experiência da UE e também encarna a limitação inerente e o fracasso da própria União. Por conseguinte, a continuação da integração económica da Europa não conduzirá à paz e à prosperidade, mas sim à desigualdade, ao aumento da degradação ambiental, à fragmentação, ao protesto e, talvez mesmo, à guerra.
São necessárias novas políticas económicas para capacitar cada região e cada país a desenvolver o seu potencial industrial e tecnológico, a utilizar e manter de forma sustentável os recursos locais, a fim de competir em igualdade de condições num mercado regulamentado. Não podemos colocar crianças económicas num ringue de boxe com pesos pesados, campeões corporativos e esperar que o comércio justo e salários justos sejam o resultado.
Como a própria
base da UE é construída em mercados livres, e estes mercados muito livres
criam condições que destroem a prosperidade e a unidade da Europa, um novo
sindicato, uma confederação de estados com base em novos ideais e políticas terá de
ser criado. As economias são complexas e as soluções simples muitas vezes correm mal. A
ideia de que os mercados livres vão resolver todos os problemas económicos e sociais é tão falso
como dizer que o planeamento centralizado resolverá estes mesmos problemas. Precisamos
aceitar as complexidades inerentes da interação humana e económica, e
cuidadosamente construir novos sistemas e instituições não com base em dogmas, mas num
estudo cuidadoso sobre o que as consequências das nossas políticas realmente têm sido até agora
e serão no futuro. Temos de aprender com a história e estar preparados para
reconstruir o mundo de baixo para cima.
A unidade de uma nação ou a unidade internacional entre muitas nações, como no seio da UE, são geralmente construídas em torno de certos sentimentos, sejam eles religiosos, linguísticos ou culturais. O vasto continente da União Soviética estava unido com base num sentimento antiexploração entre os camponeses contra os ricos.
Este sentimento alimentou a Revolução Bolchevique e estabeleceu um forte Estado comunista. No entanto, no fim da Guerra Fria, depois do sonho do proletariado de justiça e igualdade se ter transformado durante muitos anos num regime opressivo, os ideais socialistas de Marx e Lenine já não eram capazes de unificar a nação. Consequentemente, a União Soviética dispersou-se em muitas nações unidas em torno de sentimentos linguísticos, religiosos, étnicos e geográficos. Será demasiado rebuscado considerar que algo semelhante pode acontecer na Europa?
Os países que, internamente, têm pouca disparidade socioeconómica, têm tradicionalmente mostrado um rápido crescimento económico. Exemplos disso são os países Escandinavos. A Noruega, por exemplo, é uma das nações mais equitativas do mundo, mas no atual clima económico, as desigualdades económicas estão a aumentar mesmo na Noruega, e ainda mais no resto da Europa.
Em vez de uma
diminuição das disparidades de rendimentos e do desenvolvimento económico generalizado, os países
e as pessoas estão a ficar cada vez mais polarizadas entre os que têm e os que não têm.
Sonhos de coesão social e paz não são suficientes para manter a economia e
estabilidade social na Europa. De modo a
manter a paz, uma prosperidade relativa deve ser generalizada entre os países da
União.
Há também
problemas na vertente política. À medida que a União aumentou de tamanho a partir dos seus
seis países membros originais para 28, a distância entre os decisores
politicos em Bruxelas para as pessoas nas
ruas da Suécia, Portugal, Irlanda,
Roménia e Itália
aumentou.
À medida que a crise económica se intensifica, existe uma perceção crescente entre as pessoas dos vários países membros de que o Parlamento Europeu é menos sensível aos interesses das pessoas e, pelo contrário, está cada vez mais atento aos interesses dos grandes grupos de empresas. Nas palavras do ativista antipobreza John Hilary,
"Tendo passado grande parte dos últimos 15 anos a lutar por políticas mais justas dentro da União Europeia, tenho agora uma profunda desconfiança em relação às suas instituições. A experiência amarga ensinou-me o quão grande é o défice democrático no centro do programa europeu. O fórum supremo de política da UE, o Conselho de Ministros, reúne-se em assembleia sem qualquer forma de supervisão externa. A Comissão Europeia poderosa, mas não eleita, segue de perto o rumo que lhe foi dado pelas dezenas de milhares de lobistas empresariais que operam dentro da bolha de Bruxelas. O Parlamento Europeu (PE) continua a ser uma "maravilha desdentada", mesmo depois das recentes reformas do Tratado de Lisboa."
A UE luta com problemas mais profundos e complexos do que meras tensões históricas e incompatibilidades entre o mercado e as forças sociais. Estes problemas fundamentais são sistémicos e inerentes à arquitetura política original da UE e à economia de mercado que serve.
Aumento da Desconfiança
Em 1985, a
desintegração dos países por detrás da Cortina de Ferro foi tida como
impensável. No entanto, no início da década de 1990, o impensável tinha sido declarado
inevitável. O salto da Europa de Leste do "impensável" para o
"Inevitável" torna este momento histórico divisor de águas um cenário importante
da nossa tentativa de contemplar o futuro da história Europeia.
Na verdade, a
desintegração da União Europeia era impensável apenas há alguns anos, mas
hoje, devido à crise económica que se apoderou de toda a Europa,
isto, de acordo com muitos especialistas, tornou-se uma possibilidade real.
A crise económica europeia demonstrou que o risco de uma UE desintegrada não é apenas um dispositivo retórico por parte dos políticos nervosos para impor medidas de austeridade. Os problemas atualmente com que a UE se confronta são verdadeiros e não são apenas económicos. O sistema político europeu também enfrenta a oposição dos povos cujo futuro foi criado para proteger. As estatísticas mostram que o envolvimento político e a confiança pública na UE nunca foram tão baixos. Os receios de que a Zona Euro possa entrar numa nova recessão são autênticos. Isto desencadeia uma série de questões fundamentais sobre o futuro da própria UE, e do euro, a moeda da União. A economia europeia parece estar numa crise profunda e, talvez, fundamental. Consequentemente, economistas, políticos e pessoas comuns perguntam-se: quão forte é a base económica e política em que assenta a Zona Euro?
A participação
eleitoral na Zona Euro é a mais baixa da sua história, levando muitos a
questionar ainda mais os verdadeiros motivos dos decisores políticos e o quão
democráticos e sólidos são os seus processos de tomada de decisão? A crise financeira
reduziu drasticamente a esperança de vida dos governos e inspirou novos
partidos populares em oposição à UE. O humor público tornou-se num silencioso
coro de pessimismo e raiva.
O
inquérito sobre o futuro europeu financiado pela Comissão Europeia e publicado em abril de 2012,
mostrou que a maioria das pessoas concorda que a UE é um lugar decente para viver, mas a
falta de confiança no desempenho económico da União e na sua capacidade para
desempenhar um papel importante na política global está a aumentar.[1] Mais
do que seis em cada dez europeus estão agora convencidos de que a vida daqueles que são
crianças hoje será mais difícil do que a vida das pessoas da sua própria
geração.
Ainda mais
alarmante, quase 90 % dos europeus vêem um grande fosso entre o que o público
quer e o que os seus governos fazem. Apenas um terço dos europeus sentem que o seu voto
conta na UE e apenas 18 % dos italianos e 15 % dos gregos
sentem que o seu voto conta mesmo nos seus próprios países.
O que vai
acontecer à UE se estados mais pobres como Portugal, Itália, Espanha e Grécia
sairem do Euro, reduzir as suas perdas e traçar um novo caminho económico com diferentes
políticas económicas? Como a experiência soviética demonstrou, não só a falta de
reforma, mas, mais importante, uma série de reformas mal orientadas do centro
em si também pode levar à desintegração de uma união económica ou de um país. Em
tempos de crise, os políticos estão em busca de uma "bala de prata" para resolver todos os
problemas.
Mas quando os
problemas são mais sistémicos do que as soluções superficiais contidas nas
propostas de reformas de resgate, estas medidas súbitas podem facilmente tornar-se a causa de
outros problemas.
Por outras palavras, não só é possível que a UE se desintegre da periferia, como já começou a fazer, como poderia mesmo desintegrar-se a partir do próprio centro. Sim, alguns economistas até previram que a Alemanha, o coração da união, poderia, devido à sua estreita ligação ao Euro, ser uma causa substancial de um eventual colapso.
Como Criar
uma Unidade duradoura na Europa?
Para criar uma unidade duradoura na Europa, a fundação económica e política tem de se basear em valores duradouros, como a combinação da democracia política e económica. Neste momento, a democracia política é autocrática e burocrática e isso tem que mudar. A este respeito, estamos de acordo com a estratégia do Diem25 para democratizar a UE.
Mais importante ainda, a UE tem que s e democratizar e descentralizar economicamente. Isto significa que os países mais pobres da periferia precisam, em primeiro lugar, de receber investimentos para desenvolver indústrias sustentáveis, para que possam competir melhor no mercado e aumentar os salários da sua força de trabalho. Em segundo lugar, é necessário que haja uma mudança de política a longo prazo, a nível europeu, para descentralizar a economia de toda a Europa, para que as regiões e as nações com laços estreitos possam prosperar e tornar-se mais autossuficientes. Isto revitalizará as economias locais de toda a Europa, mantendo simultaneamente a união cultural e política. Em terceiro lugar, a agricultura na Europa tem de se desfazer de ser essencialmente à base de carne e leite para cultivar mais frutas e legumes, ao mesmo tempo que cria um plano a longo prazo para passar a métodos de cultivo orgânicos. Em quarto lugar, um programa de investimento verde em grande escala precisa de transformar a Europa numa área que se torne autossuficiente em energia verde. Em quinto lugar, um plano a longo prazo para transformar as empresas de EU em cooperativas transformará os sectores da indústria e da tecnologia numa economia dinâmica que cria mais igualdade e prosperidade. Cimentar estas mudanças macroeconómicas em grande escala serão as obrigações unificadoras através da cultura comum e dos valores do iluminismo europeu, que deve estender-se não só aos direitos básicos humanos, mas também à natureza.
Enquanto a UE
manteve um mercado comum, também pressionou outros países a adotar
políticas de comércio livre e não impor taxas às exportações da UE. Se
os países aplicassem taxas às exportações da UE, tornariam esses bens mais
dispendioso e menos competitivos. Por isso, a UE tem argumentado, que é do melhor interesse
para a União para insistir sempre no livre comércio.
No entanto, estas políticas não são totalmente coerentes, mas sim uma expressão de conveniência política. Nos domínios em que a UE tem uma vantagem comparativa, impulsionam o livre comércio. Nos domínios em que a UE não pode competir, impõe restrições às importações a outros países. Em particular, os produtos agrícolas são fortemente restringidos. Alguns exemplos:
No caso das principais exportações agrícolas, como o açúcar, o arroz e os produtos láteos, a UE impõe taxas de 350-900%.
A União Europeia paga aos produtores de tomate um preço mínimo superior ao preço mundial, enquanto os transformadores também são subsidiados. Como resultado, os tomates da UE "despejados" na África Ocidental representam agora 80 % do abastecimento local e quase destruíram a indústria nacional.
Graças a
políticas enviesadas de parar importações de todos os produtos de países em desenvolvimento poderia
realmente competir, com exceção da Ásia Oriental e Central
América, as exportações de países em desenvolvimento não aumentaram
significativamente ao longo dos últimos 40 anos. A parte da América do Sul, Central e
Europa de Leste e África no mundo inteiro
as exportações foram efetivamente mais baixas em 2002 do que em 1960.[1]
Por outras palavras, o livre comércio conduzido pela UE ou pelos EUA com a ajuda do Banco Mundial e da Organização Mundial do Comércio nos países pobres é frequentemente aplicado seletivamente e só quando beneficia as poderosas nações industriais.
Há alguns anos, a UE reformou a sua Política
Agrícola Comum (PAC) para desencorajar a sobreprodução por parte das grandes explorações agrícolas
em vez de, encorajar "a preservação das paisagens rurais tradicionais, e aves
e conservação da vida selvagem". Esta política soa bem no papel, mas no
mundo real, as Quatro Liberdades subjacentes à carta da UE vão fazer com que os principais
fortes agricultores de países estrangeiros compitam com fabricantes locais de queijo em pequenas
explorações de leite na Roménia.
Por isso, o livre comércio sob a forma de livre circulação de pessoas, capitais e bens agora
entram em massa para a zona rural romena - da Inglaterra,
Dinamarca e Alemanha para
iniciar grandes explorações cultivando colheitas para exportação.
Na Transilvânia, na Roménia, o produtor de queijo Ion Duculesu opera uma pequena exploração leiteira que dificilmente satisfaz as normas de saúde e segurança da UE. Ele diz ao repórter da BBC Mark Mardell que eventualmente terão de comprar máquinas para competir com empresas estrangeiras, mas quer continuar a ordenhar à mão, como sempre fez. "Eles vão multar-nos", diz ele, "e vamos à falência para que fique desempregado. Mas sempre trabalhei com animais desde criança, por isso vou criá-los." Desta forma, os interesses da economia local são muitas vezes confrontados com interesses económicos mais poderosos do exterior.
Não teria sido
melhor se Bruxelas
ajudasse Ion Duculesu e outros pequenos agricultores romenos a expandir e modernizar
a sua própria produção, mantendo os seus empregos e tradições? Mas este não é
o trabalho
de Bruxelas. Em vez disso, as políticas de Bruxelas, em nome da
liberdade de mercado, deixam os agricultores da Inglaterra,
Dinamarca e Alemanha invadir a paisagem romena, e deste modo
promovendo que o futuro da
economia agrícola Romena se torne um campo de jogo desigual e injusto.
Em 1972, as
ruas da Noruega
estavam repletas de protestos contra a UE quando, por referendo, a maioria
dos eleitores noruegueses rejeitaram a adesão à UE. A mesma situação repetiu-se
1994. ao longo dos anos, a oposição à UE tem sido dominada por
grupos políticos de centro-esquerda, e especialmente por agricultores, pescadores
e trabalhadores da zona costeira e do norte. Esses primeiros protestos contra a UE
refletiram, com precisão quase previdente, muitos dos tópicos discutidos
hoje em países como Portugal,
Grécia e Irlanda: falta de democracia, falta de
justiça económica, falta de liberdade e independência e falta de preocupação com a questão
ambiental.
De acordo com o movimento norueguês contra a UE (Neitil UE), ativo há quatro décadas, as principais razões para permanecer uma nação independente são as seguintes:
Democracia. A autoridade das zonas novas é sempre transferida dos estados-nação para a UE. Os cidadãos da UE raramente sabem o que está a acontecer a portas fechadas de Bruxelas. Consequentemente, apenas cerca de 45% da população da UE participa nas eleições. Como nação independente, a Noruega tem uma melhor democracia participativa.
Solidariedade: Como uma força forte na Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC), a UE está a pressionar os países pobres a permitir que empresas multinacionais se estabeleçam. A UE também celebra acordos comerciais desleais com ex-colónias e reduziu sua ajuda a países pobres da África. A UE pressiona os países pobres a aceitar a liberalização e privatização da economia.
Ambiente A UE não está efetivamente a ajudar a resolver os problemas ambientais do mundo, como o aquecimento global. As políticas económicas da UE levam à centralização e à produção em grande escala, resultando no consumo excessivo de recursos, aumento de transporte e poluição. A UE provou ser ineficaz na solução de questões ambientais globais e grande e pesada demais para resolver questões locais.
Liberdade Após a assinatura do Tratado de Lisboa, muitas das decisões da política externa da UE são tomadas durante jantares políticos de elite em Bruxelas e essas decisões estão cada vez mais a favorecer os países ricos em detrimento dos pobres. Antes da adesão, a Suécia costumava votar nos interesses do sul na ONU, mas como membro da UE, a Suécia raramente o faz. Como outsider, a Noruega pode permanecer com uma voz independente no mundo.
Dois assuntos têm sido fundamentais para os noruegueses contra a adesão à UE desde que o Tratado de Roma foi assinado em 1957: 1) a percepção de que os valores democráticos tanto a nível nacional quanto local são melhor mantidos fora da UE e 2) ceticismo em relação ao liberalismo de mercado incorporado na constituição da UE. Como observamos anteriormente, estas preocupações tornaram-se cada vez mais predominantes em novos países membros, especialmente aqueles na periferia do poder de Bruxelas e nos países que mais sofrem com a crise do euro, como Portugal e Espanha.
De acordo com o movimento "Não à UE" na Noruega, a UE projetou em grande parte uma sociedade "onde as comunidades locais e nacionais são substituídas por empresas e bancos como blocos de construção fundamentais". Este movimento popular foi apoiado pela maioria dos noruegueses ao longo dos anos e tem sido muito crítico dos fundamentos do programa económico da UE, a saber, as quatro liberdades económicas mencionadas atrás. Argumenta-se que essas políticas neoliberais restringem as autoridades e os estados locais do direito de "limitar as liberdades de mercado, se necessário, de modo a alcançar importantes objetivos sociais". Por outras palavras, esse movimento, desde o seu início, no início da década de 1970, apontou diretamente para o coração dos elos fracos da UE como uma união económica e social, ou seja, a sua tendência a centralizar e monopolizar o poder económico e político.
De acordo com o movimento não à UE, “o Parlamento norueguês, como Westminster [na Grã-Bretanha], está longe de ser o eleitor individual: Bruxelas, no entanto, está muito mais distante do controlo democrático.Se queremos uma política baseada em valores de solidariedade, e se queremos levar as pessoas conosco nesse esforço, devemos começar ao nível em que o poder democrático é verdadeiro.Esta é uma tese de igual significado para a Grã-Bretanha e a Noruega. ” De fato, preocupações semelhantes ressoam entre os céticos da UE em toda a Europa hoje, da Irlanda a Portugal.
Após o término da Segunda Guerra Mundial, em 1945, a Europa era um continente dividido. Em 1946, a União Europeia de Federalistas formou uma campanha para os Estados Unidos da Europa. Em setembro do mesmo ano, Churchill pediu que os Estados Unidos da Europa que se concentrassem na França e na Alemanha para aumentar as hipóteses de paz a longo prazo. O sonho de uma Europa federalista, no entanto, permaneceu ilusório, pois poucos europeus estavam dispostos a desistir da sua identidade nacional e ingressar numa federação.
Com o apelo de Winston Churchill por um "Estados Unidos da Europa" foi ganhando apoio entre políticos de todo o continente, e o Conselho da Europa foi estabelecido em 1949 como a primeira organização pan-europeia. No ano seguinte, o ministro das Relações Estrangeiras da França, Robert Schuman, propôs uma comunidade para integrar as indústrias de carvão e aço da Europa - para controlar os dois elementos necessários para fabricar armas de destruição maciça. Por outras palavras, o ímpeto inicial que impulsionava o apelo para uma Europa unida era, em parte, um desejo de paz em nome da cooperação internacional - um sonho político aparentemente amigável.
É duvidoso, no entanto, que apenas a criação da UE tenha mantido a paz na Europa nas últimas cinco décadas. As divisões da Europa Ocidental e Oriental, a influência militar da OTAN e dos EUA, bem como o "equilíbrio estático" da paz durante a prolongada Guerra Fria, tiveram mais impacto na manutenção da paz do que a integração europeia. Nas palavras do professor de Harvard e autor de best-sellers, Niall Ferguson, “a criação da União Europeia não era sobre guerra e paz; caso contrário, haveria uma Comunidade Europeia de Defesa, que foi vetada pela Assembleia Nacional Francesa em 1954.
A União do Carvão e Aço
Como veremos, os interesses comerciais podem realmente ter muito mais a ver com a formação da UE do que manter a paz. Em 1951, a França, a Itália e os países do Benelux (Bélgica, Holanda e Luxemburgo), juntamente com a Alemanha Ocidental, assinaram o Tratado de Paris, criando a Comunidade Europeia do Carvão e Aço. Assumiu o papel da Autoridade Internacional para a região do Ruhr e levantou algumas restrições à produtividade industrial alemã. As primeiras instituições, como a Alta Autoridade (hoje denominada Comissão Europeia) e a Assembleia Comum (hoje denominada Parlamento Europeu) foram criadas, e os primeiros presidentes dessas instituições foram Jean Monnet e Paul-Henri Spaak, respetivamente.
Após tentativas fracassadas de criar comunidades políticas e de defesa, os líderes reuniram-se na Conferência de Messina e estabeleceram o Comité Spaak, que originou o relatório Spaak. O relatório foi aceite na Conferência de Veneza em 1956, onde foi decidido organizar uma Conferência Intergovernamental com foco na unidade económica, conduzindo aos Tratados de Roma, que foram assinados em 1957. Logo de seguida, a Comunidade Económica Europeia (CEE) foi criada.
A era da “cooperação pacífica” que se seguiu comprovou, durante anos, a união da Europa num sentimento comum de unidade cultural e política continental. Além dessa união pacífica, a economia também era relativamente boa. As taxas de juros foram baixas ao longo das décadas de 1960, 70 e 80, os sindicatos eram fortes, os salários dos trabalhadores aumentaram rapidamente, o padrão de vida das pessoas aumentou de ano para ano. Até 1980, à medida que a produtividade aumentava, havia um aumento correspondente dos salários reais. Assim, o padrão de vida das pessoas aumentou progressivamente. Depois de 1985, no entanto, com a introdução de mais liberalismo e livre comércio, a crescente economia do pós-guerra começou a desmoronar, e salários mais baixos, dívida, desigualdade e desemprego aumentaram. Foi no rasto desse clima económico rapidamente instável, que a UE foi formada.
O artigo 30.º do
Tratado de Maastricht proíbe os estados membros de impor taxas aduaneiras
e quaisquer outros encargos que tenham o mesmo efeito que os direitos aduaneiros sobre quaisquer mercadorias
que circulam entre países. Além disso, o artigo 110.º proíbe os países membros
de impor qualquer outro tipo de imposto sobre mercadorias importadas que seja diferente da
tributação aplicada aos bens domésticos.
Artigo 34.º
proíbe restrições não-tarifárias às importações, como cotas de importação. Finalmente,
qualquer regra que discrimine direta ou indiretamente os produtos importados
favorecendo os produtos nacionais, tornando-os menos acessíveis, mais dispendiosos ou demorados para comercializar, é proibido pela Lei da União.
para comercializar, é proibido pela Lei da União.
Esta liberdade
dificulta aos países a proteção ou subsidio da indústria local até
que se tornar competitiva, método este utilizado por todos os países industrializados
no passado para desenvolver indústrias locais. Após a introdução da livre circulação de mercadorias,
a Grécia e Portugal foram forçados a competir em igualdade de condições
com potências tecnológicas e industriais, como a Alemanha e a França.
Os estados membros podem restringir a livre circulação de mercadorias apenas em determinadas circunstâncias especiais, como quando houver riscos associados à saúde pública, ao meio ambiente ou à proteção do consumidor.
Circulação livre de
Capital
O capital dentro da
UE pode ser movimentado entre países membros em qualquer quantidade pelo mesmo custo
que as transferências dentro de um único país. Além disso, qualquer cidadão ou
empresa da UE pode comprar qualquer tipo de propriedade em qualquer parte da União.
É
interessante notar que esta "liberdade" foi subitamente suspensa para o Chipre, embora Chipre seja um membro da Zona
Euro. De modo a evitar a fuga de capitais após o colapso do setor bancário,
a movimentação de capitais para fora do país foi agora severamente restringida.
restringida.
Portanto, a
economia europeia não é um mercado completamente livre;na realidade,
nenhum mercado, apesar da retórica económica dos economistas neoliberais, já foi livre,
é sempre regulado pelas políticas governamentais.
Enquanto que a economia dos EUA é considerada uma das economias mais desreguladas do mundo, a economia mista europeia de desregulamentação branda e controlo público é considerada uma forma menos agressiva de capitalismo. No entanto, devido ao aumento da desregulamentação através da agenda das Quatro Liberdade, um aumento da riqueza especulativa e do poder corporativo, a economia europeia assemelha-se à economia dos EUA, cada vez mais a cada ano.
Circulação livre de
Pessoas
Na UE,
qualquer pessoa pode mudar-se para um país diferente e trabalhar, viver e aposentar-se,
e as suas qualificações profissionais num país serão reconhecidas em qualquer
um dos outros países membros. Devido às barreiras linguísticas e culturais, a verdadeira
mobilidade das pessoas tem sido bastante limitada.
Mesmo nas
zonas desfavorecidas na Gécia
e em Portugal, não se tem
registado um êxodo em massa para a Alemanha, Dinamarca
ou outro país mais próspero na busca de trabalho. Contudo, tem havido
um aumento do fluxo de pessoas, principalmente homens solteiros e mulheres que enviam de volta parte dos seus
rendimentos para sustentar as suas famílias na Europa de Leste, como Roménia e Polónia
na Escandinávia e outros países.
Esta migração
económica de pessoas de países da UE menos desenvolvidos para países mais ricos,
juntamente com um aumento da imigração dos países do Médio Oriente , Ásia e África,
criou uma reação de protestos de grupos principalmente de direita,
alimentando assim fortes sentimentos anti-UE.
Estes protestos,
no entanto, muitas vezes são bode expiatório da questão económica subjacente: o livre comércio
entre economias desiguais cria um fluxo migratório de áreas pobres para ricas e,
quando essa migração atravessa barreiras de país, cultura e idioma,
surgem complicações, incluindo aumento do crime, economias do mercado negro, dependência económica,
bem como a separação de famílias.
Acreditamos que quando existirem economias estáveis, nacionais, regionais e locais, as pessoas normalmente não vão querer deixar suas casas - a imigração ilegal não será, portanto, um problema. Mas, se as pessoas se quiserem mudar para outro país, devem poder fazê-lo por vontade própria.
Livre Circulação de Serviços
A livre
circulação de serviços está estabelecida nos artigos 56.º e 57.º do Tratado de Maastricht.
Serviços são definidos como qualquer coisa fornecida por retribuição
que não se enquadre em bens, capital ou pessoas.
Em outras palavras,
uma empresa de serviços de limpeza na Dinamarca
pode, de acordo com essa lei, estabelecer-se em qualquer país da UE e competir
no mesmo nível de uma empresa local. APCOA Parking AG é a maior
empresa de serviços de estacionamento com mais de 4500 trabalhadores.
A divisão
escandinava da empresa é a AuroPark, que monitora estacionamentos fora de shoppings
e empresas na Suécia,
Dinamarca e Noruega. Mesmo
nas áreas em que há "estacionamento gratuito", se os motoristas permanecerem para além do tempo previsto,
terão que pagar multas pesadas de mais de US $ 100.
Esse sistema é prejudicial para a economia local e precisa de ser alterado para um sistema no qual as empresas locais são, por lei, favorecidas em relação às internacionais.
alterado para um sistema no qual as empresas locais são, por lei, favorecidas em
relação às internacionais.
A União Europeia (UE) foi criada formalmente em 1993, resultado do Tratado de Maastricht. A UE é uma união económica e política com 28 estados membros que operam através de um sistema de instituições supranacionais e decisões negociadas intergovernamentais pelos estados membros.
As instituições da UE incluem a Comissão Europeia, o Conselho da União Europeia, o Conselho Europeu, o Tribunal de Justiça da União Europeia, o Banco Central Europeu, o Tribunal de Contas e o Parlamento Europeu.
O Parlamento Europeu é eleito a cada cinco anos pelos cidadãos da UE em Bruxelas, a “capital” da UE. Essa cidade parlamentar também abriga milhares de burocratas que fazem lobby com políticos para realizar os seus sonhos e políticas económicas. Cada uma das maiores empresas multinacionais pode ter mais de 200 lobbyist que as representam.
O Tratado de Maastricht estabeleceu a União Europeia em 1993. A última grande alteração à constituição da UE, o Tratado de Lisboa, ocorreu em 2009. A UE desenvolveu um mercado económico único através de um sistema padronizado de leis que se aplica a todos os estados membros.
No espaço Schengen (que inclui 22 países da UE e 4 países terceiros), os controlos de passaportes foram abolidos. As políticas da UE visam garantir a livre circulação de pessoas, bens, serviços e capitais, promulgar legislação em matéria de justiça e assuntos internos e manter políticas comuns de comércio, agricultura, pesca e desenvolvimento regional.
A formação da UE foi uma extensão consequente da CEE e foi uma tentativa de aproximar ainda mais os países europeus de um mercado comum. A União Europeia é um conceito abrangente, que pela primeira vez na história da humanidade uniu 500 milhões de pessoas de 27 países diferentes, sem um estado centralizado. O alicerce económico da UE, estabelecido no Tratado de Maastricht, são as quatro liberdades. Estas não são as mesmas quatro liberdades previstas por Franklin Roosevelt - liberdade de expressão; liberdade de crença; liberdade do querer; e liberdade do medo. Enquanto que as liberdades de Roosevelt diziam respeito
aos direitos do indivíduo, as liberdades da UE eram dirigidas para as liberdades comerciais de um
mercado aberto:a livre circulação de mercadorias, serviços, pessoas e capitais.
Com as quatro
liberdades da UE, a maioria das ferramentas que cada governo tradicionalmente tinha
para influenciar as suas economias foi removida e toda a Europa se transformou numa grande experiência do mercado livre
capitalista. Embora a visão original possa ter sido parcialmente preservar a paz
na Europa, o fundamento da UE vai mais ao encontro duma certa visão económica do mundo
do que a promoção da paz; a visão de mundo do neoliberalismo, uma economia
desregulada da competição capitalista.
As quatro
liberdades da UE foram projetados para encaminhar uma economia neoliberal
em todos os seus países membros, juntamente com regulamentos governamentais democráticos mas centralizados
do Parlamento Europeu em Bruxelas e regulamentos monetários
do Banco Central Europeu.
Este tipo de
mercado livre capitalista beneficiou os países economicamente
mais desenvolvidos, assim como as maiores empresas. ao mesmo tempo, foi
reduzindo a capacidade dos países menos desenvolvidos e comunidades para recuperar o atraso
e desenvolver as suas industrias.
Isto conduziu a um desenvolvimento desigual, onde os países e regiões ricas prosperam e as áreas mais pobres ficam frequentemente para trás, situação que também se tornou realidade na atual UE. Na verdade, o mercado livre não traz automaticamente liberdade do querer, a quarta das liberdades do presidente Roosevelt. No entanto, esta é a doutrina perpetrada por economistas e políticos do mercado livre.
O Mito do Mercado Livre
Outro
mito preferido do mercado livre neoliberalista é que mercados abertos e livres são
sempre melhores para os negócios e para as pessoas. Aqui estão algumas razões pelas quais isto
nem sempre é assim:
--mercados livres
favorecer as grandes empresas, aquelas com mais dinheiro e poder geralmente
superam as empresas menores. Portanto, o livre comércio reduz a liberdade de escolha para as
empresas menores e para as pessoas em geral - elas são forçadas a competir num
ambiente económico determinado pelas empresas maiores.
--Mercados livres
não favorecem investimentos em pequenos negócios, como quintas e
industrias especializadas em áreas pobres porque não são competitivas. Contudo, para
o crescimento e a sustentabilidade de uma área pobre, investir nesses negócios, mesmo que
se traduza em perdas por vários anos, é, a longo prazo, bom para a sociedade e
para a economia.
--Mercados livres
não permitem que as áreas menos desenvolvidas se protejam da concorrência
de empresas maiores de outros países.
--Mercados livres
muitas vezes criam uma "corrida económica para trás". Exemplos na Europa são o aumento de empresas de "hora-zero", como a Sport Direct
do Reino Unido, onde os funcionários não têm salários fixos, não sabem quantas
horas podem trabalhar e não têm benefícios de saúde.
-- Deslocação livre
de trabalho entre áreas ricas e pobres pode ser muito lucrativo para as empresas,
mas também pode criar uma economia sombria de baixos salários, funcionários ilegais, fuga de
cérebros e aumento de tensões económicas e humanas no sistema de bem-estar
social,
--Mercados livres
não reconhecem que certas empresas públicas, como no sector de energias alternativas, saúde e petróleo, podem ser uma alternativa melhor para a estabilidade da economia local e do meio ambiente.
saúde e petróleo, podem ser uma alternativa melhor para a estabilidade da
economia local e do meio ambiente.
Some people are starting to talk about regenerative cultures as possible pathways towards a thriving future of people unfolding their unique potential within the context of the communities and regions they help to regenerate — cultures that are healthy, resilient and adaptable.
A regenerative economy goes beyond sustainability and requires local collaboration and solidarity among individuals as co-creative participants.
What Is a Regenerative Culture?
Regenerative cultures are unique expressions of the potential inherent in the people and places of a given bioregion. They add value and health to the nested wholeness from local, to regional, to global in the understanding that human thriving critically depends on healthy ecosystems and a life-supporting biosphere.
In strengthening regenerative economic activities, we need to learn to balance: efficiency and resilience; collaboration and competition; diversity and coherence; and small, medium, and large organizations and needs.
In other words, regenerative economics is an economic system that works to regenerate capital assets, which are assets that provide goods and/or services that are required for or contribute to our well being. We need to recognize the earth as the original capital asset without trying to reduce the intrinsic value of life to only utilitarian value to humanity, nor trying to make living capital convertible to financial capital as that would enable the most dangerous form of enclosure of the remaining ecological commons!
Regenerative leadership is a process [of personal development that aligns] one’s own way of being and actions with the wider pattern of life’s evolutionary journey within the communities, ecosystems, biosphere and Universe [we participate in].
As Janine Benyus has said so succinctly: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” Regenerative Cultures aim to emulate this insight in how we relate to the human family and all life.
What Are the Challenges?
Our challenge is to free ourselves from the mindset of scarcity and competition and step into co-creating a future of shared collaborative abundance for all of humanity and the community of life.
Capital Institute, a non-partisan think-tank launched in 2010 by former JPMorgan Managing Director [until 2001], John Fullerton, is searching for a new narrative. The people working with the institute draw insights from modern science and are grounded in timeless wisdom traditions. Fullerton suggested 8 guiding principles:
1. In Right Relationship
2. Views Wealth Holistically
3. Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive
4. Empowered Participation
5. Honors Community and Place
6. Edge Effect Abundance
7. Robust Circulatory Flow
8. Seeks Balance
One of the core principles of a regenerative culture is to co-create shared meaning by supporting individual and collective capacity for shifting from competitive to collaborative systems. Regenerative cultures are about “co-evolving mutuality” (Regenesis Group) between people and within the community of life.
Regeneration International maps regenerative agriculture projects around the world and aims to support the transition towards regenerative land management practices and a regenerative food system.
There are events happening around the world such as Regeneration 2030 or The Regenerative Business Summit, where many of the global experts on regeneration will come together to explore how we can deliver well-being and shared prosperity on a healthy planet. You are invited to be part of it, in person or online.
What Questions are being Raised?
We have to admit that capitalism is broken and structurally degenerative, and understand that redesigning the human presence and impact on Earth will go hand in and with re-localization and re-regionalization supported by global collaboration and solidarity.
By daring to ask deeper questions we begin to see the world differently. As we engage in conversation about such questions, we collectively begin to contribute to the emergence of a new culture.
How do we create an economy with its operations based on cooperative relationships?
How would a regenerative economy nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and enable empowered participation?
How can we ensure that the economy promotes robust circular flows?
Questions more than answers can guide us as we choose a wiser path into an uncertain future. That is why Daniel Wahl’s book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ has more than 250 questions in it. Consider them a place to start!
Anti-EU sentiment is rising across much of the continent. The European Union’s institutions can appear undemocratic. And the wisdom of its commitment to austerity policies in member states like Greece has been roundly questioned. Almost everyone agrees that the EU needs to be reformed. But is it possible? Hilary Wainwright and Grace Blakeley take sides.
Making the case for YES is Hilary Wainwright, a Fellow of the Transnational Institute and co-editor of Red Pepper. Her latest book is A New Politics from the Left (Polity Press).
Arguing NO is Grace Blakeley, a political economist and author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation (Repeater Books).
Hilary Wainwright: There’s an important distinction to be made between European Union treaties in which neoliberal economics (reducing public expenditure, deregulating labour, privatization, etc) are inscribed and, on the other hand, the implementation of particular austerity policies at particular times. Changing EU treaties requires electing pro-social justice and public-spending governments across Europe. This cannot be achieved by the victory of the Left in one country. But it can be taken forward by leftwing governments forging continental alliances and shifting the balance of power.
Portugal illustrates my point: after four years of austerity imposed by the EU (and the IMF), the people first revolted through mass protests and then voted against the party of austerity. The result was an anti-austerity alliance of Left parties. The EU opposed this and manoeuvred to bring down the government in favour of the Right. The Left alliance stood its ground, mobilized the people, made alliances with other leftists in Europe. The EU backed down; partly because of the balance of power in Portugal and partly because there were forces in the EU who were reluctant, after the experience of Greece, to be responsible for again imposing austerity on a rebellious population.
Here was a successful experience of what I’m advocating: being ‘in and against the EU’.
Grace Blakeley: You’re right to state that the plausibility of the ‘remain and reform’ argument hinges on the balance of power in the EU, rather than questions of European law. Political, economic and legal institutions, after all, serve to reflect and reinforce the interests of the powerful. If the EU is neoliberal, this is simply because this reflects the interests of the dominant class. The question, then, is whether these class relations can be transformed from within it. I don’t think so.
Such a continental transformation would require labour and social movements to mobilize in every country across Europe simultaneously to disrupt capitalist power relations at both the micro level, through direct action, and at the macro level, by taking control of a political party and, through it, the state. As it stands, such a situation is hard to imagine because membership of the Eurozone militates against socialist transformation in Europe’s periphery, from where revolt is most likely to emanate.
Portugal has just about managed to claw its way out of recession but, while there have been no new spending cuts, austerity has not been reversed. It remains hemmed in by the Stability and Growth Pact, which forces Eurozone states to keep fiscal deficits within three per cent of GDP. Meanwhile, the people of Greece and Italy have been immiserated and humiliated by the euro, which benefits northern Europe at their expense.Here was a successful experience of what I’m advocating: being ‘In and against the EU’
Hilary: Our debate is as much about how we achieve a socialist transformation of society – an end to the exploitation of labour and the pursuit of private profit in favour of a political economy in which the free development of each individual depends on the free development of all – as about whether or not the EU can be reformed. Fine! While we share an internationalist perspective, I disagree that this can happen only through a simultaneous mobilization to disrupt capitalist power relations.
For sure, I would urge maximum trans-European mobilization and disruption of this kind but it has to be combined with struggling to implement reforms in the face of EU opposition (as well as the opposition of the City of London and other parts of the national and global ruling class). In reality, we need to prepare for a long-term process that is uneven and hybrid.
The stopping of TTIP [a secretive EU/US trade treaty that would have given transnationals huge power] in 2016 illustrates the value of this dual ‘in and against’ strategy. The Greeks’ failure, by contrast, came from believing they could persuade the EU to let them carry out their anti-austerity policies. They abandoned their base in extra-parliamentary struggle.
The British state is a reactionary institution and the achievement of a socialist, federal United Kingdom would involve the end of many of its key institutions, but our strategy still involves struggle within it as well as against and beyond it. The same logic applies to the EU.
Grace: The case of within and against the state is very different from within and against the EU. This is because EU institutions are inherently anti-democratic. The power of the elected European Parliament is stringently limited by the combined power of the Council and the Commission, which represent the interests of heads of states and the European bureaucracy. The Parliament cannot override these bodies, and the option of using the electoral process to gain control over the executive is removed.The only way forward is to build new institutions that extend solidarity throughout the continent
Another issue is the dearth of democratic accountability for members of the European Parliament. The nail in the coffin of the ‘remain and reform’ argument came earlier this year when Britain’s Labour MEPs agreed to support Ursula von der Leyen – a rightwing candidate backed by Emmanuel Macron – for European Commission President. Von der Leyen secured the post with a majority of just nine votes. There are 10 Labour MEPs in the European Parliament. The Labour leadership in the UK called the move ‘anti-democratic’, but without strong mechanisms to hold MEPs to account for their actions in Brussels, there is little they can do to prevent such outcomes in future.
The case of TTIP is instructive. I was at some of the earliest protests over TTIP, whose failure was framed as a victory for European citizens. In fact, the agreement was blocked by France over concerns about the impact the deal would have on French agriculture, protected by the Common Agricultural Policy: a regressive measure that has been terrible for ecological diversity and driven down commodities prices for farmers in the Global South. Hardly a victory for the international Left.
Hilary: You are right, Grace, the institutions of the EU are not the same as those of the nation state. But even from your own description of its limits, it’s clear that the national dimension is important in shaping EU policies. You say that the European Parliament’s power is limited by the combined power of the Council and the Commission ‘which represent the interests of heads of states and the European bureaucracy’. It follows then that a radical UK Labour government that adopted an ‘in and against’ strategy could provide an anti-austerity opposition in the European Council, making alliances with other progressive governments and encouraging presently beleaguered Left parties across Europe.
Moreover, without implying that the European Parliament is genuinely democratic, it does have sufficient powers of scrutiny over EU treaties – indeed more powers than national parliaments. For example, anti-TTIP MEPs successfully insisted on seeing the documents prepared for the TTIP negotiations and leaking their contents to civil society.
You’re right that France was indeed important, but it was more acting in defence of small farmers and consumers against US agribusiness than in defence of the Common Agricultural Policy. If the campaign hadn’t exploited every contradiction in the EU then TTIP would now be in place and chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef would become the affordable food options for the majority.
Grace: Today’s Europe – sandwiched between a hegemonic US and rising China – is, if anything, more focused on the interests of capital than before the 2008 financial crisis. The most significant economic debate in Europe at the moment is whether the traditional focus on competitive markets should be sacrificed in order to facilitate the emergence of European monopolies that can compete with Chinese state-backed enterprises. The stand-off between the German, French and Danish leaders in the wake of the merger of Siemens and Alstom, blocked by the European Commission, is an expression of two competing visions of Europe’s future: laissez-faire or monopoly capitalism.
In the absence of democratic European institutions even the most powerful pan-European socialist movement imaginable (itself vanishingly unlikely to emerge at the current conjuncture, as the experience of Diem25 in the 2019 European elections so depressingly demonstrated) would find itself either ruthlessly suppressed or strategically ignored (probably both) if it mounted a real challenge to the established order at this moment of existential crisis for European capital.
The only way forward for internationalist socialists is to build new institutions that extend solidarity between socialist movements throughout the continent and the world – outside of the oppressive and exploitative remit of the World Bank, IMF and European Union.
The EUs social
charter, as envisioned by Jacques Delors, one of the original architects behind
the EU, is based on a fundamental vision of basic economic and social security
for all Europeans.
According to the New Internationalist, however, “This social vision was also tied to the notion of a ‘free’ single market encompassing all of Europe. Compatibility between the market and society was simply assumed – a fatal error not just for the EU but in the entire approach of mainstream social democracy.”
Indeed, free trade is no guarantee for social security, or prosperity, not to speak of economic democracy and environmental sustainability.
While the
creation of a common European market has brought the continent closer together,
and may have made war less likely, the free market has had different effects on
different parts of the Union.
At the
inception of the EU, large transfer payments were made to assist the poorer
nations, such as Greece and Portugal,
to develop infrastructure, health, education and support agriculture.
However, as
these funds were not primarily used to modernise the industrial sector and make
the countries competitive, the long term effect of a common market made the
poorer nations less competitive, and more dependent on aid.
The initial
boom created by transfer payments from the rest of the EU was followed by
another capital infusion from cheap loans after the formation of the common
currency. These were both short lived stimuli, and the resources were not used
to increase labour productivity but to create infrastructure and support
consumption.
In Spain,
the economic growth was due to more people entering the market place, rather
than labour becoming more efficient. All loans given to Spain resulted in a property boom
with real estate prices going up, but not in industrial growth.
“To be sure,”
writes Bill Dawidow in the Atlantic Monthly, “the economies of southern Europe would have struggled even without being yoked to
the euro. But I think it's reasonable to blame the euro for turning those
problems into a catastrophe.”
The Euro, he
argues, enticed these countries to borrow money at very low interest
rates. “Real estate bubbles, he
continues, “were just one of the consequences. Cheap money enabled countries to
run up big debts, pay high wages to government employees, and create false prosperity
that encouraged consumers to spend and borrow.”[1]
Now that the
transfer payments have reduced and the borrowed money is due for repayment, the
real effect of the EU free market can finally be evaluated. Free trade between
unequal economic partners, such as between Mexico and the United States, often
divides the economy into high- and low-income zones where the industries cannot
compete with the industrially advanced nations.
After the North
American Free Trade agreement was signed between the United
States, Canada
and Mexico
creating the largest free trade economy in the world, the Mexican economy
started deteriorating quickly.
Norwegian economist, Erik Reinert terms this three-stage process de-industrialization, de-agriculturalization and de-population. As a result, the Mexican farm economy was devastated. Local staples like maize and beans had to compete against the much cheaper imports from the North. Soon millions of illegal immigrants from rural areas migrated to the US to seek work, in many local areas only people over 60 still remains.
A less dramatic, but similar development is happening within the EU itself. Parts of the EU are becoming like a miniature third world, with the same fundamental problems as developing countries in Asia and Africa. In these areas, the industry and technology sector cannot compete internationally or within the EU, and so they are forced to promote agriculture, services and tourism. As no country in history, apart from maybe some island tax havens, have been able to prosper without a strong industry, the future for these countries are grim.
With free trade and the
mobility of capital and labour people move from one area to another in search
of work. This movement of people is
certainly advantageous to corporations, who have a steady flow of labour and,
in the short run, to individuals and their families.
But this free flow
across national borders also creates problems and complexities for countries,
local communities, and people. Even though Norway is not a full member of the
EU, every Norwegian is aware that a large percentage of the nurses and
waitresses working in Norway are from Sweden, while a large percentage of
carpenters and painters are Polish men, who often stay away from their families
for months at a time.
Such labour mobility
across national borders contributes to an increased black economy, a lowering
of wages, and to a reduction in skilled labour in the home country of the
mobile labourer.
Another complex
side-effect of European free trade has been “brain drain’, the outflow of
highly qualified workers from key industrial countries is increasingly becoming
a challenge for many countries of the Eurozone.
Poor career prospects,
constraints on freedom, low wages, unemployment, bad living and working
conditions, social insecurity and political instability are just some of the
factors that play into young professional’s decisions to leave their home
countries and seek more profitable environments elsewhere.
Negative consequences of
brain drain include the direct loss of intellectual potential, and also
indirect loss of economic investment, tax revenue and staff shortages in key
industries. Whilst the brain drain is beneficial its flaws are inherently in
its title because it usually involves the loss of human capital i.e. skilled
labour force who are vital to the development of society and the country as a
whole.
In the case of skilled man powerAlam et al. recognise emigration of these skilled workers as “essentially providing personal benefits for individuals rather than public benefits”.
Receiving countries with
positive economic growth patterns such as Germany and countries outside the
Euro Zone are benefiting through e.g. offsetting labour shortages, enhancing
the average skill levels in the labour force and increasing wage pressure in the
national labour marked etc.
In the case of Europe,
three major directions of brain drain are apparent:
From developing countries to the EU
Inter-European (East-West flows)
From Europe to the US, and, more recently, to developing
countries
When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the knowledge economy was one of the greatest victims. A major and common concern is the inequalities of European wages, and some say 'equal pay for equal work' in the Eurozone might be a remedy.
Inequality is
not only growing between countries, but between people inside the same
countries as well. Due to economic liberalization having been widely accepted
within Europe, taxation policies and
government rules are becoming increasingly regressive, favouring the rich.
People who work pay higher taxes than those who live on what used to be called
unearned income, such as capital gains and interest.
Social safety
nets are being dismantled. We are frequently told that we cannot afford the
social security systems in place, and yet the rich are getting richer and
taking an increasingly larger piece of the pie.
Historically,
the European economy, and especially the Nordic economic model, reduced
economic disparity by letting the trade unions and the employers together
negotiate wages. If they did not come to an agreement, the unions would go on
strike, and if they still did not agree, the state would come in as a mediator
to reach a solution agreeable to both parties.
According to
Norwegian historian Edvard Mogstad, “This system gradually improved the wages
of the workers and worked quite well for decades until the 1980s, when European
capital and industry got an upper hand by following a Thatcher/Reagan-style
neo-liberal agenda.” [1]
This point of view is supported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which states that “Inequality in Europe has risen quite substantially since the mid 1980s. While the EU enlargement process has contributed to this, it is not the only explanation since inequality has also increased within a "core" of 8 European countries.” The increasing wealth disparity in Europe is both troubling and inevitable under the present economic policies pursued by the EU and its member states.
While the four freedoms created the foundation for a free market and removed many tools of national governments to control the economic development of their countries, there still remained one obstacle to a fully open market.
That was the exchange rates used to protect local industry and promote
economic growth. If a country started to become less productive than its
neighbours, the balance of trade would become negative, and its exchange rate
fall. This would help producers in the country to encourage exports and
discourage imports.
But from the perspective of international business, the national
currencies increase transaction costs, make import and export burdensome, and
introduce uncertainties in financial calculations.
Flexible exchange rates also went against the interests of the most
productive countries, such as Germany, who prior to the Euro saw its currency
appreciate, which in turn partially offset the advantage it had from increased
productivity. When the currency appreciated, it became more
expensive for other nations to buy German goods, and so it lowered exports.
In order to
remove this one final obstacle to an open market, the EU introduced the Euro as
its common currency on 1st of January 1999. At that time it was only
an accounting currency. Bank notes were issued three years later in 2002. The
Euro is currently used by 334 million Europeans.
Initially, this
move was welcomed by several scholars, such as the British Historian Niall
Ferguson. The main problem, he thought, would be a monetary union without a
common fiscal policy, that is, without a central government that controls
expenses.
Right after the
Euro finally came into existence in 1999, Ferguson
warned in an article published in Foreign Affairs in 2000 that “a monetary
union without a fiscal union would fall apart after about ten years because of
the divergence between the member states.[1] In
2010, Ferguson said, he was running around Europe trying to remind politicians
that it was a similar banking crisis as Europe was then experiencing that
caused the Great Depression in the summer of 1931.
Historically,
monetary unions have not been successful. In his recent book, The End of the Euro, Belgian business
editor, Johan van Overtveldt writes that a monetary union between different
countries has been attempted but failed in Europe
before.
The two main monetary union failures were the Latin Monetary Union (LMU), formed in 1866 between France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland and the Scandinavian Monetary Union (SMU) formed in 1872 between Sweden, Denmark and Norway (joined in 1875). The LMU never established a common monetary standard and this eventually led to its downfall by 1927, but it had essentially already failed during World War 1. Despite the fact that the Scandinavian countries were largely integrated politically, culturally, and monetarily, their independent political systems created monetary policies proving to be incompatible with the union. By 1924, each member country no longer accepted coins from each country as legal tender in the partner countries and by 1930, the SMU officially disintegrated when all three countries left the gold standard.
While a lot of
good attributes can be associated with a common currency, such as ease of
monetary exchange and reduction of transaction costs, historically no monetary
union has ever succeeded without a common fiscal policy.
That is, a
common central authority controlling the purse string. So far only a national
government has been able to provide the functional structure needed for a
common currency. This fundamental fact was ignored when the Euro was
introduced.
Short of
forcing the countries of Europe into a much closer fiscal union, which would be
tantamount to creating a federal republic of Europe, there is little hope that
the Euro can survive with time. Therefore, the future of the Euro is uncertain.
In the meantime, the clear winner is Germany, who has benefited immensely from the Euro. The great losers are Greece, Spain, Portugal and other countries with smaller economies and a weak industrial base. Those who opted out from the Euro, such as the UK and Sweden, have probably benefited, as imports and exports to the rest of Europe have been simplified, while they are still being able to control their own monetary policy.
[1]TvzetinaBorizova, Small Farming in South East Europe at a Crossroads, article on November 19, 2013 on www.balcanicaucaso.org [2]EirikGrasaas-Stavenes, WTO Conducts War on Resources (WTO førerressurskrig), article in Klassekampen, November 13, 2013
In theory, we have few reservations regarding free trade. Given optimum
conditions, free trade as set forth in the EUs Four Freedoms, can have great
cultural and economic benefits.
But free trade can also be detrimental to the local areas within an
economic union when local interests are not protected. Hence, a market economy
needs regulations to protect the interests of local economies, the environment
and local cultures. Currently, this is often not the case within the EU.
Take the case of fishing. The fishing
industry has a long tradition in Europe and is deeply tied to local culture,
economy and the environment Such as in Norway, where the support of fishermen
and farmers helped to ensure a NO vote in the EU referendums of 1972 and 1994.
The argument put forward against EU
membership was that it would not be wise to allow fishing boats from other
countries to compete with local fishermen—it would wipe out the industry, they
feared. Today the Norwegian fishing industry is as healthy as ever, with exports
to over 150 countries and exceeding 3 thousand tons per year. In contrast,
Great Britain joined the EU and that country’s fishing industry has not feared
so well. Spain has Europe's biggest fleet and the
largest
The Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management consultancy and Pew Environment Group found that EU subsidies had been linked to overfishing. They analyzed data from the EU's Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance (FIFG), which paid almost £4 billion in fishing subsidies between 2000-2006. The worst offenders were Spain, Portugal and France, who used subsidy payments to increase fleet capacity in Europe and 'exacerbate' the problem of overfishing of depleted stocks such as cod and bluefin tuna.
Petyo Ivanov from the
village of Razhevo produces cheese, but says he is not selling it due to all
the “administration and documentation.” The overwhelming bureaucracy makes him
question the whole purpose and sustainability of small farming within the EU,
as the regulations favor large, industrialized farming operations over, small
local farms.
Dessislava Dimitrova, an organizer with the Slow Food Movement in the Balkans, believes all Bulgarian small farms face the obstacles Ivanov described. "As a result of the formal operations of EU regulations, the small producers, the family farms, have actually been deprived of the opportunity to produce and sell their products, and we, consumers, have been deprived of our right to choose - whether to buy industrially-produced foods offered by international chains or opt for healthy foods that we really like," Dimitrova said.
EU foreign trade
policies, which are generally in line with WTO policies, also effect local
economies outside its borders, such as in Africa. These policies represent a
resource war, which has intensified even more after the European finance crisis.
“The countries in the North,” according to Ugandan economist Yash Tandon, “are trying to export their economic crisis to the South through trade.” This kind of trade is leading to a state of deindustrialization in Africa. It forces the countries in the South to export cheap raw materials to the EU and the USA to safeguard higher profits for Western corporations.
There are indeed often
big gaps between the rhetoric of free trade policy makers and what takes place
in the real world. Free trade often does not deliver what it promises, not even
within the EU and the rest of Western world.
It has promised growth,
but growth has actually slowed down in the past two and a half decades after
trade liberalization policies have been aggressively enacted world wide.
Secondly, the war on resources and local economies that the Africans complain
about, is also happening within the EU itself, as seen in the rapid depletion
of fish stocks and in the rapid decline of small farms and agro-industries.
Both the EU
and, in a broader context, the financial institutions that have shaped economic
policy during the latter part of the 20th century as well as into
the 21st, were based on the idea that prosperity for all will
promote peace and stability. If there were no trade wars and unjust treatments
of any country, there would be no need or incentive to engage in war.
The best way to
achieve this, it was thought, was by the introduction of free trade and open
markets. These were thought of as being self-regulating, or possibly requiring
some limited government intervention, and were in the end going to give
economic prosperity to all.
In this way,
the free markets supposed to achieve this reality were built into the very
foundation of the EU, to make the entire Europe
into one common free market. Internationally, the same free trade agenda were
be established through the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF and various bilateral
trade agreements.
The premise
that widespread prosperity among all people will lead to peace is, at least in
theory, probably undeniable. The weak link in this argument is whether free and
open markets actually lead to prosperity for all, or rather to a concentration
of wealth, making some areas rich and other areas poor.
There is increasing evidence that free markets benefit those who are already rich, and lead to increasing economic disparities, the very condition that free markets were supposed to remove. Given the fundamental free market rules that formed the basis of the European Union, the current polarization of wealth and the financial crisis was probably inevitable. The assumption that the capitalist market, the environment and people’s interests are compatible lies at the heart of the EU experiment, and also embodies the Union's inherent limitation and inherent failure. Therefore, the continued economic integration of Europe will not lead to peace and prosperity, but to inequality, increased environmental degradation, fragmentation, protest, and, perhaps even, war.
New economic policies are needed for empowering each region and each country to develop its industrial and technological potential, to sustainably utilize and maintain local resources, in order to compete on equal terms in a regulated market. We cannot put economic toddlers in a boxing ring with heavyweight, corporate champions and expect fair trade and fair wages to be the result.
As the very
foundation of the EU is built on free markets, and these very free markets are
creating conditions that destroy the prosperity and unity of Europe, a new
union, a con-federation of states based on new ideals and policies will need to
be created. Economies are complex, and simple solutions often go wrong. The
idea that free markets will solve all economic and social problems is as false
as to say that centralised planning will solve these same problems. We need to
accept the inherent complexities of human and economic interaction, and
carefully build new systems and institutions not based on dogma, but on a
careful study of what the consequences of our policies actually have been so
far and will be in the future. We must learn from history and be prepared to
rebuild the world from the bottom-up.
The unity of a nation or the international unity amongst many nations, such as within the EU, are generally built around certain sentiments, whether religious, linguistic, or cultural. The vast continent of the Soviet Union was united based on an anti-exploitation sentiment among the peasantry against the rich.
This sentiment fuelled the Bolshevik Revolution and established a strong communist state. However, toward the end of the Cold War, after the proletariat’s dream of justice and equality had for many years turned into an oppressive regime, Marx and Lenin’s socialist ideals were no longer able to unify the nation. Consequently, the Soviet Union broke up into many nations united around linguistic, religious, ethnic and geographical sentiments. Is it too farfetched to consider that something similar could happen in Europe?
Countries which internally have but little socio-economic disparity have traditionally shown rapid economic growth. Examples of this are the Scandinavian countries. Norway, for example, is one of the most equitable nations in the world, but in the current economic climate, economic inequality is increasing even in Norway, and even more so in the rest of Europe.
Instead of a
lessening in income disparities and widespread economic development, countries
and people are getting increasingly polarised between haves and have-nots.
Dreams of social cohesion and peace are not enough to maintain economic and
social stability in Europe. In order to
maintain peace, relative prosperity has to be widespread among the countries of
the Union.
There are also
problems on the political front. As the Union has increased in size from its
original six member countries to 28, the distance between the political
decision makers in Brussels to the people on the
streets of Sweden, Portugal, Ireland,
Romania and Italy has
increased.
As the economic crisis has intensified, there is a growing perception among people in the various member nations that the EU Parliament is less responsive to people’s interests and instead increasingly beholden to the interests of corporate lobbyists. In the words of anti-poverty campaigner John Hilary,
“Having spent much of the past 15 years fighting for fairer policies within the European Union, I now have a profound distrust of its institutions. Bitter experience has taught me just how great is the democratic deficit at the heart of the European programme. The EU’s supreme policymaking forum, the Council of Ministers, meets in camera without any form of external oversight. The powerful but unelected European Commission closely follows the steer given to it by the tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists who operate within the Brussels bubble. The European Parliament (EP) remains a toothless wonder, even after the recent Lisbon Treaty reforms.”
The EU struggles with deeper and more complex problems than mere historical tensions and incompatibilities between market and social forces. These fundamental problems are systemic and inherent in the original, political architecture of the EU and the market economy it serves.
In 1985, the
disintegration of the countries behind the Iron Curtain was thought of as
unthinkable. Yet by the early 1990s, the unthinkable had been declared
inevitable. The eastern European leap from the ‘unthinkable’ to the
‘inevitable’ makes this watershed historical moment an important backdrop in
our attempt to contemplate the future history of Europe.
Indeed, the
disintegration of the European Union was unthinkable just a few years ago, but
today, due to the economic crisis sweeping all over Europe,
this has, according to many experts, become a real possibility.
The European economic crisis has demonstrated that the risk of a disintegrated EU is not just a rhetorical device by nervous politicians to enforce austerity measures. The problems currently facing the EU are real, and they are not solely economic. Europe’s political system is also facing opposition by the people whose futures it was created to protect. Statistics show that political engagement and public trust in the EU has never been lower. Fears that the Eurozone might enter into a new recession are real. This triggers a number of fundamental questions about the future of both the EU itself, and the Euro, the union’s currency. The European economy seems to be in a deep and, perhaps, fundamental crisis. Economists, politicians and common people alike are therefore asking themselves: how strong is the economic and political foundation the Eurozone is built upon?
Election
participation in the Eurozone is at its lowest in history, prompting many to
further question the real motives of the political decision makers and how
democratic and sound their decision-making processes are? The financial crisis
has sharply reduced the life expectancy of governments and inspired new
populist parties in opposition to the EU. The public mood has become a quiet
chorus of pessimism and anger.
The Future of Europe survey funded by the European Commission and published in April of 2012, showed that most people agree that the EU is a decent place to live, but the lack of confidence in the economic performance of the Union and its capacity to play a major role in global politics is increasing.More than six out of ten Europeans are now convinced that the lives of those who are children today will be more difficult than the lives of people of their own generation.
Even more
alarming, almost 90 percent of Europeans see a big gap between what the public
wants and what their governments do. Only a third of Europeans feel that their
vote counts in the EU and only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks
feel that their vote counts even in their own countries.
What will
happen to the EU if poorer states such as Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece
quit the Euro, cut their losses and chart a new economic path with different
economic policies? As the Soviet experience demonstrated, not only the lack of
reform, but, more importantly, a series of misguided reforms from the center
itself can also lead to disintegration of an economic union or a country. In
times of crisis, politicians are in search of a ‘silver bullet’ to solve all
problems.
But when the
problems are more systemic than the superficial solutions contained in the
proposed bail-out reforms, these sudden measures can easily become the cause of
further problems.
In other words, it is not only possible that the EU will disintegrate from the periphery, as it already has started to do, but it could even disintegrate from within the center itself. Yes, some economists have even predicted that Germany, the heart of the union, could, because of its close tie to the Euro, be a substantial cause of an eventual collapse.
How to Create
Lasting Unity in Europe?
In order to create lasting unity in Europe, the economic and political foundation needs to be based on lasting values, such as combining both political and economic democracy. At the moment the political democracy is autocratic and bureaucratic and this needs to change. In this regard, we agree with Diem25’s strategy to democratize the EU.
Most importantly, the EU needs to democratize and decentralize economically. This means that poorer countries in the periphery needs to, first of all, receive investments to develop sustainable industries, so that they can compete better in the market and raise the wages of its workforce. Second, there needs to be a long term, European-wide policy change to decentralize the economy of all of Europe, so that regions and nations with close ties can prosper and become more self-sufficient. This will revitalize the local economies in all of Europe while still maintaining cultural and political union. Third, agriculture in Europe needs to divest from being primarily meat- and milk-based to growing more fruits and vegetables, while creating a long-term plan to switch to organic growing methods. Fourth, a large-scale green investment program needs to transform Europe into an area becoming self-sufficient in green energy. Fifth, a long-term plan to transform EUs corporations into cooperatives will transform the industry and technology sectors into a dynamic economy creating more equality and prosperity. Cementing these large-scale macro-economic changes will be the unifying bonds through the common culture and values of the European enlightenment, which must extend to giving not only humans basic rights but also nature.
While the EU
has maintained a common market, it has also pushed other countries to adapt
free trade policies and not to impose tariffs on exports from the EU. If
countries would impose tariffs on EU exports, it would make those goods more
costly and less competitive. Therefore, the EU has argued, is in the best
interest of the Union to always insist on free trade.
However, these policies are not totally consistent, but rather an expression of political expediency. In areas where the EU has a comparative advantage, they push for free trade. In areas where the EU cannot compete, it imposes sever import restrictions on other countries. In particular, agricultural products are heavily restricted. Some examples:
For key agricultural exports like sugar, rice and dairy products, the EU maintain tariffs of 350-900%.
The European Union pays tomato farmers a minimum price that is higher than the world price while the processors are also subsidized. As a result EU tomatoes ‘dumped’ into West Africa now make up 80% of the local supply and have nearly destroyed the domestic industry.
Due to the
skewed policy of stopping imports of all products developing countries could
actually compete in, with the exception of East Asia and Central
America, developing country exports have not increased
significantly over the past 40 years. The share of South America, Central and
Eastern Europe and Africa in total world
exports was actually lower in 2002 than in 1960.[1]
In other words, free trade conducted by the EU or the US with the help of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in poor countries is often applied selectively and only when it benefits the powerful industrial nations.
A few years ago, the EU reformed its Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP) to discourage over-production by big farms and
instead encourage "preservation of traditional rural landscapes, and bird
and wildlife conservation". This policy sounds nice on paper, but in the
real world, the Four Freedoms underlying the EU charter will make capital
strong farmers from foreign countries compete with local cheese makers on small
milk farms in Romania.
Hence, free trade in the form of free movement of people, capital and goods now
come in droves to the Romanian countryside— from England,
Denmark, and Germany to
start mega-farms raise crops for export.
In Transylvania, Romania, cheese farmer Ion Duculesu operates a small dairy farm that is unlikely to meet EU health and safety standards. He tells BBC reporter Mark Mardell that they will eventually have to buy machinery in order to compete with foreign companies, but he wants to carry on milking by hand as he has always done. "They'll fine us,” he says, “and we'll go out of business so I will be out of a job. But I've always worked with animals since I was a child so I will still raise them." In this way, the local economy’s interests are often pitted against more powerful economic interests from abroad.
Would it not
have been better if Brussels
could help Ion Duculesu and other small Romanian farmers expand and modernize
their own production while maintaining their jobs and traditions? But that is
not Brussels
job. Instead, Brussels’ policies, in the name of
market freedom let farmers from England,
Denmark and Germany invade the Romanian countryside, thus
making sure the future of Romania’s
agricultural economy is becoming an uneven and unfair playing field.
In 1972, the
streets of Norway
were filled with protests against the EU when by referendum a majority of
Norwegian voters rejected EU membership. The same situation repeated itself in
1994. Throughout the years, opposition against the EU has been dominated by
political groups from the centre-left, and especially by farmers, fishermen,
and workers on the coasts and in the north. These early protests against the EU
reflected, with almost farsighted precision, many of the same topics discussed
today in countries like Portugal,
Greece and Ireland: lack of democracy, lack of
economic justice, lack of freedom and independence, and lack of concerns for
the environment.
According to the Norwegian movement against the EU (Neitil EU), which has been active for the past four decades, the main reasons for remaining an independent nation are as follows:
Democracy. The authority of ever new areas is transferred from the nation states to the EU. The citizens of the EU are rarely aware of what is happening behind the closed doors of Brussels. Consequently, only around 45 percent of the people of the EU participate in elections. As an independent nation, Norway has a better participatory democracy.
Solidarity: As a strong force in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the EU is pressuring poor countries into allowing multinational companies to set up shop. The EU also enters into unfair trade agreements with former colonies and has reduced its aid to poor countries in Africa. The EU pressures poor countries to accept liberalization and privatization of the economy.
Environment. The EU is not effectively helping to solve the world’s environmental problems, such as global warming. The EU’s economic policies leads to centralization and large –scale production resulting in overconsumption of resources, increased transport and pollution. The EU has proven to be ineffective in solving global environmental issues and too big and cumbersome to solve local issues.
Freedom. After the signing of the Lisbon Treaty much of EU foreign policy decisions are taken during elite political dinners in Brussels and these decisions are increasingly favouring rich countries over the poor. Before membership, Sweden used to vote for the interests of the south in the UN, but as an EU member, Sweden rarely does so. As an outsider, Norway can remain an independent voice in the world.
Two themes have been fundamental to Norwegians against membership in the EU since the Treatise of Rome was signed in 1957: 1) the perception that democratic values at the national as well as the local level are best retained outside the EU, and 2) skepticism towards the market liberalism embedded in the EU constitution. As we have noted above, these concerns have become increasingly prevalent in new member countries, as well, especially those at the periphery of power in Brussels, and in those countries suffering the most from the Euro crisis, such as Portugal and Spain.
According to the 'No to EU' movement in Norway, the EU has largely designed a society “where local and national communities are replaced by companies and banks as the fundamental building blocks.” This popular movement has been supported by the majority of Norwegians over the years and has been very critical of the fundamentals in the EU’s economic program, namely the four economic freedoms mentioned above. These neoliberal policies, it is argued, restrict local authorities and states from the right “to limit the market freedoms if it is necessary in order to achieve important social purposes.” In other words, this movement has, from its very inception in the early 1970s, pointed directly to the heart of EUs weak links as an economic and social Union, namely its tendency to centralize and monopolize both economic and political power.
According to the No to EU movement, “The Norwegian Parliament, like Westminster [in Great Britain], is far from the individual voter: Brussels, however, is much farther away and too detached from democratic control. If we want politics based on solidarity values, and if we wish to take the people with us on that endeavour, we must begin at the level where democratic power is real. This is a thesis of equal significance to both Britain and Norway.” Indeed, similar concerns are echoed amongst EU sceptics all over Europe today, from Ireland to Portugal.
Article 30 of
the Maastricht Treaty prohibits EU member states from imposing customs duties
and any other charges having the same effect as customs duties on any goods
moving between countries. In addition, article 110 prohibits member countries
to impose any other type of taxes on imported goods that are different from the
taxation of domestic goods.
Article 34
prohibits non-tariff restrictions on imports such as import quotas. Finally,
any rule that directly or indirectly discriminates against imported products to
the favour of domestic products by making it more cumbersome, costly, or time
consuming to market the imported product is prohibited under Union Law.
This freedom
makes it difficult for a country to protect or subsidize local industry until
it becomes competitive, the method all industrialised countries used in the
past to develop local industries. After the introduction of the free movement
of goods, Greece and Portugal were forced to compete on equal terms
with technological and industrial powerhouses such as Germany and France.
Member states may restrict the free movement of goods only under certain special circumstances, such as when there are risks associated with public health, the environment, or for consumer protection.
Free Movement of Capital
Capital within
the EU can be moved between member countries in any quantities at the same cost
as transfers within a single country. In addition, any EU Citizen or
corporation is allowed to buy any type of property in any part of the Union.
It is
interesting to note that this “freedom” has suddenly been suspended for Cyprus, even though Cyprus is a member of the Euro
Zone. In order to prevent capital flight following the crash of the banking
sector, movement of capital out of the country has now been severely
restricted.
Hence, the
European economy is not a completely free market, indeed no market, in spite
the economic rhetoric by neo-liberal economists, has ever been free, it is
always regulated by government policies.
While the US economy is considered one of the world’s most deregulated economies, the European mixed economy of soft deregulation and state control is considered a less aggressive form of capitalism. Nevertheless, due to increased deregulation through the Four Freedom agenda, a rise in speculative wealth and corporate power, the European economy resembles the US economy more and more every year.
Free Movement of People
Within the EU,
anyone can move to a different country and work, settle and retire, and their
professional qualifications in one country will be recognised in any of the
other member countries. Due to language and cultural barriers, the actual
mobility of people has been fairly limited.
Even in
depressed areas in Greece
and Portugal, there has not
been a mass exodus to Germany, Denmark
or other more prosperous countries in search of jobs. However, there has been
an increased flow of people, mostly single men and women who send part of their
wages back to support their families, from Eastern European countries, such as Romania and Poland
into Scandinavia and other countries.
This economic
migration of people from less developed EU countries to richer countries,
coupled with an increase in immigration from Middle Eastern, Asian and African
countries has created a backlash of protests from primarily right-wing groups,
thus fuelling strong anti-EU sentiments.
These protests,
however, are often scapegoating the underlying economic issue: free trade
between unequal economies creates a migratory flow from poor to rich areas, and
when that migration is across barriers of country, culture and language, then
complications arise, including increased crime, black market economies,
economic dependency, as well as the breaking up of families.
We believe that when there are stable, national, regional and local economies, then people generally will not want to leave their homes—illegal immigration will therefore not be a problem. But if people do want to move to another country, they should be able to do so out of their own free will.
Free Movement of Services
The free
movement of services are established in Article 56 and 57 of the Maastricht Treaty.
Services are defined as anything provided for remuneration that does not fall
under goods, capital or persons.
In other words,
a cleaning service company in Denmark
can, under this law, set up shop in any of the EU countries and compete on the
same level as a local company. APCOA Parking AG is Europe’s
largest parking service company with more than 4500 employees.
The company’s
Scandinavian division is AuroPark, which monitors parking lots outside shopping
centers and businesses in Sweden,
Denmark and Norway. Even in
areas where there is “free parking,” if drivers stay past the allotted time,
they have to pay hefty fines of over $100.
Such a system is detrimental to the local economy and needs to be
changed to a system in which local businesses are, by law, favoured over
international ones.
The European Union (EU) was formally created in 1993 as a result of the Maastricht Treaty. The EU is an economic and political union of 28 member states operating through a system of supranational institutions and intergovernmental negotiated decisions by the member states.
Institutions of the EU include the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Council, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Central Bank, the Court of Auditors, and the European Parliament.
The European Parliament is elected every five years by EU citizens in Brussels, EUs “capital city.” This parliamentary city is also home to thousands of bureaucrats lobbying politicians to enact their economic dreams and policies. Each of the largest multinational companies can have upwards of 200 lobbyists representing them.
The Maastricht Treaty established the European Union in 1993.The latest major amendment to the constitution of the EU, the Treaty of Lisbon, took place in 2009. The EU has developed a single economic market through a standardised system of laws that apply in all member states.
Within the Schengen Area (which includes 22 EU and 4 non-EU states) passport controls have been abolished. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital, enact legislation in justice and home affairs, and maintain common policies on trade,agriculture,fisheries, and regional development.
The formation of the EU was a logical extension of the EEC, and was an attempt to draw European countries even closer together into one common market. The European Union is a far-reaching concept, which for the first time in human history has united 500 million people from twenty seven different countries without a centralized state behind it. The economic foundation of the EU as established in the Maastricht Treaty is the Four Freedoms. These are not the same four freedoms envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt--freedom of speech; freedom of worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. While Roosevelt’s freedoms concerned the
rights of the individual, the EU freedoms were the commercial freedoms of an
open market: the free movement of goods, services, persons and capital.
With the four
freedoms of the EU, most tools that individual governments traditionally have
had to influence their economies were removed, and the whole of Europe turned into one large experiment in free market
capitalism. While the original vision might partly have been to preserve peace
in Europe, the foundation of the EU is more about a certain economic worldview
than that of promoting peace; the worldview of neo-liberalism, a deregulated
economy of capitalist competition.
The four
freedoms of the EU were designed to forward a neo-liberal economy in all its
member countries coupled with democratic but centralized government regulations
from the European Parliament in Brussels and monetary regulations from the
European Central Bank.
This form of
free market capitalism has benefitted the most developed countries
economically, as well as the largest corporations. At the same time, it has
often reduced the ability of less developed countries and communities to catch
up and develop their industries.
This leads to uneven development, where rich countries and regions prosper and poorer areas often fall behind, a situation which has also become a reality in present day EU. Indeed, free markets do not automatically bring about freedom from want, the fourth of President Roosevelt’s freedoms. Yet, this is the gospel perpetrated by free market economists and politicians.
The Myth of Free Markets
Another
favourite myth of free market neo-liberalists is that open and free markets are
always better for business and for people. Here are a few reasons why this is
not always so:
--Free markets
favour large companies, those with the most money and power will generally
outcompete smaller companies. Hence, free trade reduces freedom of choice for
smaller companies and people in general—they are forced to compete within an
economic environment fixed by the larger companies.
--Free markets
do not favour investments in smaller businesses, such as farms and specialized
industry in poor areas because they are not competitive. However, for the
growth and sustainability of a poor area, investing in such businesses, even if
they make a loss for several years, is, in the long run, good for society and
the economy.
--Free markets
do not allow less developed areas to protect themselves against competition
from companies from larger companies from other countries.
--Free markets
often create an economic “race toward the bottom.” Examples in Europe are an increase in zero-hour companies such as UKs
Sport Direct, where employees do not have fixed salaries, don’t know how many
hours they can work, and have no health benefits.
--Free movement
of labor between rich and poor areas can be greatly profitable for corporations
but can also create a shadow economy of low wages, illegal employees, brain
drain, and economic and increased human stresses within the social welfare
system,
--Free markets
do not recognize that certain state-owned companies, such as in the alternative
energy, health, and oil sectors, can be a better alternative for the stability
of the local economy and for the environment.
After World War II ended in 1945, Europe was a divided continent. In 1946 the European Union of Federalists formed to campaign for a United States of Europe. In September of that same year, Churchill called for a United States of Europe centered around France and Germany to increase the chances of long term peace. The dream of a federalist Europe, however, remained elusive, as few Europeans were willing to give up their national identities and join a federation.
With Winston Churchill's call for a "United States of Europe" gaining support among politicians throughout the continent, the Council of Europe was established in 1949 as the first pan-European organization. In the following year, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed a community to integrate the coal and steel industries of Europe—to control the two elements necessary to make weapons of mass destruction. In other words, the initial impetus driving the call for a united Europe was, in part, a desire for peace in the name of international cooperation—a seemingly benign, political dream.
It is doubtful, however, that it is only the creation of the EU that has maintained peace in Europe over the past five decades. The divisions of Western and Eastern Europe, the military influence of NATO and the US, as well as the “static balance” of peace during the prolonged Cold War have had more impact on maintaining peace than European integration. In the words of Harvard professor and best selling author, Niall Ferguson, “the creation of the European Union was not about war and peace, otherwise there would have been a European Defense Community, and that was vetoed by the French National Assembly in 1954.”
A Union of Coal and Steel
As we shall learn, business interests may indeed have had a lot more to do with the formation of the EU than peace making. In 1951, France, Italy and the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) together with West Germany signed the Paris Treaty, creating the European Coal and Steel Community. This took over the role of the International Authority for the Ruhr area and lifted some restrictions on German industrial productivity. The first institutions, such as the High Authority (today called the European Commission) and the Common Assembly (today called the European Parliament) were soon formed, and the first presidents of those institutions were Jean Monnet and Paul-Henri Spaak respectively.
After failed attempts at creating defence and political communities, leaders met at the Messina Conference and established the Spaak Committee which produced the Spaak report. The report was accepted at the Venice Conference in 1956, where it was decided to organize an Intergovernmental Conference focusing on economic unity, leading to the Treaties of Rome, which was signed in 1957. Soon thereafter, the European Economic Community (EEC) was formed.
The era of “peaceful cooperation” that followed proved for years to unite Europe in a common sentiment of continental cultural and political unity. In addition to this peaceful union, the economy was relatively good, as well. Interest rates were low throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, labor unions were strong, the salaries of workers rose rapidly, people’s living standard increased year by year. Up until 1980, as productivity increased, there was a corresponding increase in real wages. Hence the living standard of people progressively increased. After 1985, however, with the introduction of more liberalism and free trade, the growing post-war economy began to unravel, and lower wages, debt, inequality, and unemployment increased, It was in the wake of this rapidly unstable, economic climate that the EU was formed.
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