OUR FAILURE TO RECOGNIZE THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF MAINTAINING exponential growth in consumption and the economy is creating a global crisis of catastrophic proportions.
In the summer of 1988, Toronto was host to both the Economic Summit and a conference on the Changing Atmosphere. Prime Minister Mulroney attended and made pronouncements at both. At the Economic Summit, he reiterated the importance of maintaining economic growth, and at the atmosphere meeting, he urged action to avoid further destruction of the atmosphere. And he acted as if there was no connection between them! We continue to allow the same old concerns for growth, jobs, and profit to determine the political and social priorities of government. Leaders of all major parties are hemmed in by pressure groups, ignorance, and their personal value systems and seem to have neither the time nor the inclination to rise above the immediate exigencies of political survival and long-held political truths. Political “vision” seldom extends beyond the interval between elections, yet the environmental crisis must be seen on a longer scale.
It is economics that now preoccupies the media and politics. Maintaining growth in the economy by carving out a presence in a global economic community has become the raison d’être of almost every government in the world. Implicit in any economic system are arbitrary and irrational human values about work, profit, and goals. They alone render economic systems opaque to prediction and hence beyond “management.” But today the magnitude of the global trade and monetary system has taken us into new dimensions of complexity for which there is no historical precedent— we simply have no idea where we are heading.
Global economics must be exposed for what it is—a complete perversion. To begin with, economics is a chauvinistic invention, a human creation based on a definition of value solely by the criterion of utility to our species. As long as we can see a use for something and hence can realize a profit from it, it has economic worth. Yet it is the ecosystem that is the fundamental “capital” on which all life depends. Financial leaders manipulate the monetary system for immediate profit with little regard for environmental or human consequences. The current climate of laissez-faire economics in which the marketplace and private sector are being released from government constraints only ensures greater environmental depredation. We are only one species out of perhaps thirty million, and however much we may think we are outside nature and control it, as biological beings we remain as dependent on clean air, water, and soil as all other organisms. Economics has no ecological foundation because it dismisses air, water, soil, and biodiversity as limitless “externalities” shared globally.
Our preoccupation with profit deflects us from taking effective action on such issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, salmon depletion, forest destruction, or contamination of fresh water in an ecologically sensible way. Countries like Canada and Australia, whose natural resources are the envy of most people on the globe, squander their natural treasures in a rush to maximize profit. Even though we have barely begun to understand the scope of diversity of life on Earth and the complexity of atmosphere, oceans, and soil, the drive for profit subsumes any concern over the long-term implications of our ignorance. These days when entire ecosystems are destroyed by clear-cut logging, hydroelectric dams, farming, or urban sprawl, we offer money to the dispossessed as if cash can compensate for things that are unique and irreplaceable.
Modern economics is perverted by an addiction to military spending. Each year, over a trillion (U.S.) dollars are spent worldwide for defense, including the manufacture, sales, and use of machines of death. (That’s about $20 million every second.) The weapons trade consumes scarce resources but generates enormous profits for major industries and nations. But it is the diversion of scientific creativity by the military away from socially and environmentally useful areas that is the greatest perversion.
Military research and development now consumes more than 71 percent of all U.S. research and development, whereas only 9 percent is spent on health research. According to R.T. Sivard in World Military and Social Expenditures, 1987–88, “the U.S. government devotes well over twice as much research money to weapons as to all other research needs combined— including energy, health, education and food—and the Soviet pattern is believed to be similar.”
Global economics is perverted because it impoverishes much of the Third World by seducing its people with the blandishments of technological “progress.” High-tech weaponry, disposable goods, highly mechanized agriculture, and substitutes for mother’s milk have had devastating social and economic effects on less developed countries. To pay, Third World countries mortgage their future by selling off irreplaceable capital—their natural resources. Brazil, for example, has teetered on the brink of economic collapse for years. To keep up with a massive international debt, the country is destroying a unique world treasure, its rain forest. It is the richest ecosystem on Earth, home to much of the biological diversity of the planet and affects the atmosphere, soil, water cycles, and climate in ways we don’t understand. It is criminal to destroy those forests merely to service the interest on international debt, for when they are gone, Brazil will still be mired in debt.
If our candidates for office make claims to genuine vision and concern for the future, they must be made to answer profound questions about the interrelationship between the environment and economics. For the sake of our children, we cannot afford to go on with business as usual.
Update
Research into ecosystems and conservation can provide tools and techniques with which to measure and counter ecological degradation. But Harvard’s E.O. Wilson once told me that more money is spent in two weeks in bars in New York City than is spent annually to do basic descriptive taxonomy around the world. And the expenditure that dwarfs all commitments to scientific research, medicine, and education is for the military. In the twenty-first century, with all of our sophisticated technology and scientific discovery, we divert a grotesque amount of money to machines of destruction.
The special Congressional bill for the war in Iraq in early 2003 alone was U.S. $74 billion! Around the world, there are more than 22 million military personnel, 70,000 in Canada alone. Globally, the total military expenditures exceed U.S. $1 trillion. In 2001, military expenditures in Canada were U.S. $7.9 billion (representing 1.1 percent of the GDP); in Sweden, U.S. $4.4 billion (2.1 percent of GDP); and in the United States, U.S. $276.7 billion (3.2 percent of GDP). Wouldn’t the world be a more secure place in the long run if our military budget was switched with our budget for environmental commitments?