Shelf Life Conservation Biology, Volume 23, No. 2, 2009 On: 2009-04-08 For a long time to come economists, pundits, and politicians will be wondering what to do about the largest and deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and how it happened, yet again. Overlooked is the fact that we are simultaneously running two intertwined deficits with very different time scales, dynamics, and politics. The first deficit is short term and has to do with money, credit, and how we create and account for wealth, which is to say a matter of economics. However difficult, it is probably repairable in a matter of a few years give or take, most likely in the time-honored fashion of stimulating even more consumer spending and causing greater environmental disorder. The second is an ecological deficit. It is permanent, in significant ways un-repairable, and potentially fatal to civilization. The economy, as Herman Daly has pointed out for decades, is a subsystem of the biosphere, not the other way around. Accordingly, there are short-term solutions to the first deficit that might work for a while, but they will not restore longer-term ecological solvency and will likely make it worse. Ecological debt cannot be remedied so easily, and in the case of climate destabilization, no matter what we do, it is a steadily—perhaps rapidly— worsening condition with which humankind will have to contend for a long time to come. University of Chicago geophysicist David Archer (2009) puts it this way: The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge. Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far. Each ton of coal that we burn leaves CO2 gas in the atmosphere. The CO2 coming from a quarter of that ton will still be affecting the climate one thousand years from now at the start of the next millennium. And that is only the beginning. In short, we have already bought disaster but not necessarily the final catastrophe. How could we have come so rapidly to the brink of extinction with hardly a twitch of apprehension? Assuming we don’t go over the cliff, it is a question that doubtless will provide much fodder for several millennia of dissertations, academic conferences, and, for the sensitive, much deep thinking and anguished soul-searching. As we mull it over we will rediscover, as conservative philosopher Richard Weaver once said, that “ideas have consequences” (1948/1984). And in our case some really bad ideas of the last half century are leaving a legacy of very bad consequences. Weaver’s 1948 book was an extended argument for conservatism beginning with the recognition of knowledge higher than our own and the importance of such things as virtue, character, craftsmanship, enduring quality, civility, and, above all, piety. Applied to nature, Weaver argued for a “degree of humility,” such that we might avoid meddling “with small parts of a machine of whose total design and purpose we are ignorant” (p. 173). “Our planet,” he wrote, is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects—nay, menaces—the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost” (p. 173). Weaver regarded the modern project to reconstruct nature as an “adolescent infatuation.” One can reasonably imagine the approbation he would have felt for the exhibition of thievery and stupidity leading to our present circumstances. Weaver’s idea that ideas have real consequences, alas, had less consequence than one might wish. It is honored mostly among a small band of true conservatives, the uncommon sort who actually value the conservation of tradition, law, custom, nature, culture, and religion, and who take ideas and their realworld implications seriously. Other than the title of his book, however, Weaver is presently unknown to the wider public and probably not at all to the faux conservatives who daily bloviate on FOX News. Unfortunately, ideas, whatever their consequences, seldom “yield to the attack of other ideas,” in John Kenneth Galbraith’s words, “but to the massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend” (30). That appears to be true in our own time in which the pecuniary imagination was given such full reign. The convenient idea that foxes could be persuaded to reliably guard the henhouse, for example—derived from free marketeers like Milton Friedman, libertarians like George Gilder, supply-side economists like Arthur Laffer, and “long-boomers” like Peter Schwartz—did not voluntarily surrender to superior reason, logic, or evidence. Rather, it was an idea whose consequences turned out to be bad for both the hens and a bit later for the starving foxes, some of whom, now professing different ideas, stand in line for public bailouts—road kill on the highway called reality. What might be called the shelf life of such ideas will turn out to be brief, as such fads go, but the consequences will last a long time. When delusion is popular, however, durable ideas are unpopular or more likely forgotten altogether. But in the present wreckage we have no choice but to search for more durable ideas with more benign or even positive consequences. When we find truly durable ideas they are mostly about limits to what we can do or should do. But restraint, prudence, and caution are, “ohmah God, sooo not cool,” as one of my students thoughtfully expressed it. Accordingly, such things are put on the shelf where they gather dust until necessity strikes again and they are called back into use as we try once again to find our bearings amidst the debris of popular delusions gone bust. In this regard, the Greek poet Archilochus left a fragment of a manuscript with the words: “the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Like the hedgehog, advocates for the environment, animals, biological diversity, water, soils, landscapes, and climate stability know one big thing, as biologist Garrett Hardin (38:1972) once put it, that is “we can never do just one thing.” In other words, there are many unforeseen consequences from what we do, so there are limits to what we can safely do. Because consequences are not only unpredictable but often remote in time and distant from the cause, we are often ignorant of the victims of our actions, so there are moral limits on what we should do as well. To think about consequences over time requires, furthermore, that we know how things are linked as systems and understand that small actions can have large consequences, many of which are unpredictable. Around the first Earth Day in 1970 there was an efflorescence of brilliant thinking along these lines. In different ways it was mostly about the things we could not do. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), for example, launched the modern environmental movement with the simple message that we could not carelessly spread toxic chemicals without causing damage to animals and eventually to ourselves. The book was attacked by proponents of what she called “Neanderthal biology” most of whom (then and now), with a great deal of money or reputation, invested in the petrochemical business. Other books making the same point addressed unlimited growth of population, economies, technology, and scale. However prescient and true, most of thewisdom was quickly forgotten. Now, however, we live in “the age of consequences” and have good reason to rethink many ideas and systems of ideas called paradigms. Perhaps this is what educators describe as a “teachable moment” or inventors refer to as the “aha” moment. Assuming that it may be so, I have some suggestions for those assigned to rebuild the United States and global economies. The first is the old idea that we cannot build a durable economy that is so utterly dependent on trivial consumption. In 2007, for instance, Americans spent US$93 billion on tobacco and another US$83 billion on casino gambling, but only US$46 billion on books. Another example is from the recent Skymall catalog found in the seat pocket of commercial airplanes, which announces that it is “going beyond the ordinary.” To do so it offers those burdened with money and credit such items as a “startlingly unique” 2-foot high representation of Big Foot to be placed in the garden where it will no doubt amaze and delight, available for only US$98.95. “The keep your distance bug vacuum” equippedwith a 22,400-rpm motor is available for US$49.95. And for just US$299.99 cat lovers can buy a marvel of advanced technology: “The 24/7 self-cleaning, scoopfree litter box!” Technologyoriented catalogues regularly offer dozens, nay, hundreds of devices that digitally amaze, ease, simplify, gratify, sort, store, scratch, waken, warn, multiply, compute, freshen, check, sanitize, and personalize. It may be possible, one day, to live in a digital, stainless steel nirvana of the sort George Orwell once said would “make the world safe for little fat men.” There are, however, many problems with an economy so dependent on ephemeralities. It is a cheat because it cannot satisfy the desires that it arouses. It is a lie because it purports to solve by trivial consumption what can only be solved by better human relations. It is immoral because it takes scarce resources from those who still lack the basics and gives them to those with everything who are merely bored. It is unsustainable because it creates waste that destroys climatic stability and ecosystems. It is unintelligent because it redirects themental energies of producers and consumers alike to illusion, not reality, which makes us stupid. And because of such things an economy organized to promote fantasy will eventually collapse of its own weight. In The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry (1974) describes the main character as “troubled and angered in his mind to think that people would aspire to do as little as possible, no better than they are made to do it, for more pay than they are worth.” The masters of the recently imploded financial universe who made millions while destroying much of the economy, along with the chief executive officers of any number of corporations from Enron to General Motors, would have appropriately aroused Old Jack’s fury, as it should ours. My second suggestion is simply that we ought to build a slower economy. It is also an old idea embodied in aphorisms such as “the race is not to the swift” and “haste makes waste.” In the age of hustle, cell phones, and instant everything we are inclined to forget that lots of worthwhile things can only be done slowly. It takes time for all of us, economists included, to think clearly. It takes time to be a good parent or friend. It takes time to create quality. It takes time to make a great city. It takes time to restore soil. It takes time to restore one’s soul. In each case speed distorts reality and destroys the harmonies of nature and society alike (Orr 1998). Hurry certainly changes society for the worse. Ivan Illich’s provocative 1974 book Energy and Equity, makes the case that “high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu” (1974:3). “Beyond a critical speed,” Illich argues, “no one can save time without forcing another to lose it” (p. 30). But any proposal to limit speed “engenders stubborn opposition . . . expos[ing] the addiction of industrialized men to consuming ever higher doses of energy” (p. 55) Even assuming nonpolluting energy sources, the use of massive energy of any sort “acts on society like a drug . . . that is psychically enslaving” (p. 6). The irony, Illich exposes, is that the time it takes to earn the money to travel at high speed divided into the average miles traveled per year gives a figure of about 15 mph . . . about the average speed of travel in the year 1900 but at considerably higher cost. What does a slow economy look like? Woody Tasch (2008:175), chairman of Investors’ Circle offers one view: It would be driven by . . . the imperatives of nature rather than by the imperatives of finance. Its first principle would be, I suppose, the principle of carrying capacity, embedded in the process of nurturing. A slow-money economy would change the way we invest and discipline the expectations of quick returns to capital to, say, 5% to 8% per year,which now sounds pretty good. It would require buyers, for example, to hold stock for, say, 6 months before they could sell. Tasch calls this “patient capital,” but by any name it involves the recalibration of money and finance to the pace of nature. And that would be a revolution. My third suggestion is to build an economy on ecological realities, not on the belief that we are exempt from the laws of ecology and physics. In his classic 1980 book Overshoot, William Catton writes “The alternative to chaos is to abandon the illusion that all things are possible” (p. 9). He goes on to say that “we need an ecological worldview; noble intentions and a modicum of ecological information will not suffice” (p. 12). Each ratchet upward of human population and dominance required the diversion of “some fraction of the earth’s life-supporting capacity from supporting other kinds of life to supporting our kind” (p. 27). Eventually, the method of enlarging our estate by expanding into unoccupied lands gave way to industrialization and drawing down ancient ecological capital. “The myth of limitlessness dominated people’s minds” to the point where we have nearly trapped ourselves (p. 29). For Catton we are caught in an irony of epic proportions: “The very aspect of human nature that enabled Homo sapiens to become the dominant species in all of nature is also what made human dominance precarious at best, and perhaps inexorably self-defeating” (p. 153). Nobel Prize-winning chemist and economic theorist, Frederick Soddy (1877–1956), made a similar point in Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt (1926) arguing that Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest (quoted in Daly 1996: 178). “Debt,” in Herman Daly’s words, “can endure forever; wealth cannot, because its physical dimension is subject to the destructive force of entropy” (p. 179). As a result, Daly continues, “the positive feedback of compound interest must be offset by counteracting forces of debt repudiation, such as inflation, bankruptcy, or confiscatory taxation, all of which breed violence” (p. 179). The growth of the money economy in reality represented the expansion of claims (debt) against a stable or nowdiminishing stock called nature. As the economy grew, what we call wealth represented only a growing number of claims against a finite stock of soil, forests, wildlife, resources, and land, and hence was the source of long-term inflation and ruin. Although he apparently did not know of Soddy’s work, economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) later made many of the same points about the relation of entropy to economic growth in his monumental but widely ignored The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. “Every Cadillac produced at any time,” he wrote, “means fewer lives in the future.” Given our expansive nature and the laws of physics, our fate, he concluded, “is to choose a truly great but brief, not a long and dull, career” (p. 304). Or as John Ruskin (1968) once put it more poetically: “the rule and root of all economy—that what one person has, another cannot have; and that every atom of substance, of whatever kind, used or consumed, is so much human life spent” (192) Human society is running two deficits simultaneously, and we must solve them together. If we fail to do so nature will take its course. This will require a great deal of rethinking, and it will not be easy. But the present economic collapse is too farreaching, and the threat of climate disaster is too real to do otherwise. Taken together, they indicate we are not nearly as rich as we once presumed. We have been living far beyond our means by drawing down natural capital, rather like a corporation selling off assets in a fire sale and calling the proceeds profit. The housing bubble, dishonest accounting, and the use of unaccountable financial instruments like derivatives are merely the tip of a far larger problem that includes the failure to account for carbon emissions and the loss of species diversity. The ideas that led us to the brink are the equivalent of junk bonds and derivatives, unsecured by real assets and ungrounded in reality. There are better ideas by which to order our economic and ecological affairs based on the principle that “for every piece of wise work done, so much life is granted; for every piece of foolish work, nothing; for every piece of wicked work, so much death” (Ruskin 202). David Orr Environmental Studies, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074, U.S.A., email david.orr@ oberlin.edu Literature Cited Archer,D. 2009. The long thaw. PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Berry, W. 1974. The memory of old Jack. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York. Daly, H. 1991. Steady-state economics. Island Press, Washington. Daly, H. 1996. Beyond growth. Beacon Press, Boston. Catton, W. 1980. Overshoot. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Galbraith, J. K. 2001. The essential Galbraith. Mariner, New York. Georgescu-Roegen, N. 1971. The entropy law and the economic process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hardin, G. 1972. Exploring new ethics for survival. Penguin Books, Baltimore, Maryland. Illich, I. 1974. Energy and equity. Harper & Row, New York. Orr, D. 1998. Speed. Conservation Biology 12:4–7. Ruskin, J. 1968. Unto this last. Dutton, New York. Tasch, W. 2008. Slow money. Chelsea Green, White River Junction. Weaver, R.M. 1984. Ideas have consequences. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Whitehead, A. N. 1948/1974. Science and philosophy. Philosophical Library, New York. Download PDF <-- Go Back |