The last word

Not happy? Blame the economy

New economic systems that support society and the environment

For many people life is becoming less satisfying and making less sense. Daily life seems to alternate between stress and flight. The rat race only seems to intensify, and people yearn for a simpler, more fulfilling life. However the more we flee the less we seem to escape.

Meanwhile, the world is slowly disappearing before our eyes. Some of us notice, some do not. Birds no longer sing. Frogs fall silent. A shopping mall stands where fields used to be.  Farmland becomes salt pans, silent and dead. Coral reefs sicken. Rain forest gives way to monocultures or weeds. Wild chimpanzees, our nearest living relatives, may be gone within ten years, or perhaps five, victims of logging, indiscriminate hunting and political anarchy in the Congo forest.

Two thirds of adult Americans agree we will destroy our environment if we don’t change the way we live. Two thirds agree that humans are part of nature, not rulers of nature, and three quarters agree we have a moral duty to protect and preserve all God’s creatures. Two thirds of Americans are concerned their children will inherit a degraded world, and four fifths agree we should change the way we live now so future generations can enjoy a good quality of life.

There have been major shifts in many peoples’ values during the late twentieth century, and the media, which focus on the sensational, the transient and the superficial, have not been reporting them. Because the shifts are not reported, many people feel isolated and different, and so they have been reluctant to confide their change of heart. Their reluctance has made the shifts even less visible.

Fully nine tenths of Americans think economic growth and protecting the environment should be compatible. Yet politicians, big business and most economists claim that slowing environmental destruction would be hideously expensive, and many of them deny there is any environmental crisis at all. In the face of the seemingly-overwhelming power of governments, corporations and the media, most people feel helpless to stop the decline in quality of life and the drift into crisis they perceive.

However there is good news. There are people who are developing sensible national accounts that monitor our quality of life, rather than measuring the rate at which we pump resources through our wasteful system. There are others who have been inventing stable and healthy monetary systems. Our unstable and parasitic financial markets can be stabilised and brought back into the service of commerce and industry.

A few inspired people are demonstrating how we can use resources very much more efficiently, so we can live better even as we reduce our devastating effects on Earth’s living systems. For example, a major U.S. carpet manufacturer now makes its carpets out of completely recyclable material invented to its own specifications. As of 2002 German car manufacturers are required to take back most parts of their cars after they are worn out, and to take responsibility to recycle or safely dispose of the materials in the parts. Agriculture is being reinvented as stable, healthy and productive polycultures instead of the vulnerable, polluting and machine-intensive monocultures of industrial agriculture.

As is suspected by many people, the environment can be protected as our economic development continues. However economic development would mean something different and better than it did in the twentieth century: it would mean improving quality, for rich and poor, rather than just ever-greater quantity, inequitably distributed.

The prospect offered by these promising new developments is of a less erratic economy, a less wasteful and destructive industrial system and a less stressful life, if we can implement them widely. Yet surely we can aspire to more. Surely we don’t have to settle for ruining our lives and the Earth more slowly.
Indeed the full potential of the new developments is likely still to be subverted, unless we also understand the larger functioning of our total economic system. Its internal connections and feedbacks are just as important to its overall behaviour as are the actions of myriad individuals. The old theory of free markets, it turns out, is useless as a guide at this level. We therefore need to build a new understanding of how modern industrial economies work. Such understanding can be gleaned from the phenomenon of self-organisation, which came to be well understood only in the latter half of the twentieth century.

This new understanding combines with the new attitudes, methods and technologies already mentioned to open a powerful new prospect: stable economies, healthier societies and new kinds of technologies and industrial systems that support human values and that promote a flourishing biological world.

This is an edited extract from Economia: New economic systems to empower people and support the living world (ABC Books) by Geoff Davies (above), a Senior Fellow in the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

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