http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1231-01.htm
Published on Tuesday,
December 31, 2002 by the Guardian/UK
Deliver Us from Finity
Capitalism
is not even mathematically possible, let alone biologically viable
By George Monbiot
Our
Quality of Life Peaked in 1974. It's All Downhill Now.
We will pay the price for believing the
world has infinite resources
Published in the Guardian 31st December 2002
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve.
As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world
will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is
no
basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as
pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the
quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968,
and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not
be hard to grasp. Our economic system
depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with
finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result,
a delusion.
This is the great heresy
of our times, the fundamental truth
which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those
who possess power today - governments, business, the media
- as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced
by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and
you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian
cult, raised to the status of a
world religion. Like communism, it is built upon
the myth of
endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their
God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that
theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources,
they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection
will show that this cannot be true.
The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological
production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of
capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term.
As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested
at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990,
have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the
planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate
with the repayment of debt.
Now, despite the endless
denials, it is clear that the wall
towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within
five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to
outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are
washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming,
which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive
land.
As a result, we can
maintain current levels of food production
only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves
are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of
the world's food is produced with the help of irrigation;
some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result
of overuse.
One reason why we fail
to understand a concept as simple as
finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other
people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America;
the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labor and
land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the
early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical
expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its
frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite
future.
An entire
industry has been built upon the denial of ecological
constraints. Every national newspaper in
Britain lamented the
"disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky
News
devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports
from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that
we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000".
The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers
by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and
knickers.
Partly because they
have been brainwashed by the corporate
media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge
with which finity confronts them, many people respond to
the heresy with unmediated savagery.
Last week this column
discussed the competition for global
grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent,
a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem
is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately ... When
a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards
the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children
she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be
punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized to prevent
her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."
There is no doubt that
a rising population is one of the
factors which threatens the world's capacity to support
its people, but human population growth is being massively
outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals.
While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless,
the human population is likely to peak within the next few
decades. But population growth is the one factor for which
the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused,
so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasized.
It is possible to change
the way we live. The economist
Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative
rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic
value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting
taxation from employment to environmental destruction,
governments could tax over-consumption out of existence.
But everyone who holds power today knows that her political
survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to
the present.
Overturning this
calculation is the greatest challenge
humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the
fundamental presumptions of political and economic life,
but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything
we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to
our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying
newspapers - turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps,
hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such
religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving
to change them is like watching, with serenity, the
oncoming truck in your path.
www.monbiot.com
© Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2002
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