Living beyond our means
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Posted on January 19, 2008
Filed Under Justice, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
As our economy begins to unravel and the hurt sinks in, it might be a good time to ponder the craziness of the economic system that creates this kind of crisis — where investors pour money into fake economies that eventually crash, taking an enormous toll on lives and the environment. The housing bubble is a particularly good example of the craziness — bundled mortage paper and investment policies that helped create an articifical housing market, people taking on mortgages they could not afford, then refinancing to go on a spending spree, then finding that was not real money they were spending, but debt, then finding that when the artifice was revealed for what it really was, they had a home not worth the refinanced mortgage.
Many investors made out like bandits.
But the cost of this consumption-driven, profit-driven craziness is not only in terms of the economic crisis now facing this country, it is also in the profound damage to the Earth that this kind of crazed development has brought about — more trees and wetlands bulldozed for housing developments and their accompanying retail malls, smaller houses made into energy-wasting McMansions, cash taken out in refinancing schemes spent on consumer goods that take their toll on the carrying capacity of the planet, along with its ability to absorb all this waste (it can’t, anymore, by the way).
Would that we were the kind of conscious species that would approach this crisis as a time to ponder the folly of this way of organizing human communities and start altering the very structures and logic of economic systems.
So this weekend I want to share the little tidbit below, something I read more than a decade ago now, that changed everything about how I think about social justice, war and peace issues, poverty, economics, and more. It is one of the essays that moved me towards this path where the passion of my life’s work now is to address the planetary crisis — not just the warming of the planet, but the fact that, as a species, we are living way beyond our means. I have used this with many groups over the years in presentations and workshops and it always has quite an impact.
The quote is from an essay by former World Bank deputy director Sven Burmeister, entitled, grimly, “Can the Twilight of the Gods Be Prevented.” It appeared in a little book entitled, Friday Morning Reflections at the World Bank: Essays on Values and Development. Here it is:
Our current handling of the environment and its resources might lead to our ultimate destruction. In fact, if we continue on our present course, the question is not whether destruction will happen, but when. Acid rain, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming are clear signals that we are misusing and exhausting the resources of the planet. . . . All resources are finite in the end. . . . The important question is how we conceive of our relationship with nature. Are we here to exploit the earth and use up its capital? Or are we here to find an equilibrium with our fellow creatures, or to live as stewards off the income that the earth can yield without destroying its capital? . . . The ultimate constraint on resource use is the carrying capacity of the globe: per capita resource use should not exceed the level the globe can sustain for all the world’s people. Today’s per capita resource use in industrial countries is not sustainable for all inhabitants of the earth. . . .
The planet is capable of carrying only 500 million people indefinitely at the level of income and technology in the United States today. If resources were used more prudently as in Europe and Japan, the planet might carry one billion people indefinitely. Demographers estimate that, if present trends continue, the world’s population . . . will stabilize sometime in the twenty-first century at nine to twelve billion human beings.
You see, my friends, we have a problem.
Burmeister goes on to issue a simple rule of thumb that in its obviousness is also stark:
…per capita resource use should not exceed the level the globe can sustain for all the world’s people.
No kidding? But that is exactly what we have done. And we have done it in a world of profound inequities. In fact, from a moral perspective, if one is approaching this with any modicum of human decency, one has to address the simple justice that is embedded in this reality. Poor people, including the 2-3 billion to join us over the next four decades, have as much right to lives of dignity as every affluent person in the rich western nations. Which means, unless we are willing to ratchet down our consumption drastically, alter our values regarding lifestyles and wealth, we will need to eliminate 8 billion people in order to go about our happy little lives.
This essay was published in 1989 — many wasted years in which the damage to the planet, the consumption and waste, only increased at an ever-accelerating rate.
We are getting crowded, as this NASA photo shows. We can’t go on like this, but we go on like this. Solutions to ’stimulate’ the economy include cash rebates from the government to get us spending again.
We seem doomed by our inability to get this. Somewhere along the way, affluent lifestyles in the US became our drug, our self-esteem, our sense of personal worth and value, our reason for being. Corporations don’t want you to get off this drug or even become aware that you are on one. It is wrong for wealth to be this skewed, for the planet to be this wasted, for us to be so numbed by material gain and comfort that we are no longer able to sense our biological connections to all that is being destroyed.
So that’s my rant for the weekend, a plea, really — that we use this moment to think about these things. That we use this moment not to try to figure out how to get us all spending again, but how to live differently, so that this planet and this species might get through this profound transition in our evolutionary history, that we might begin to ratchet our way of life back down into balance with the Earth’s ability to support us (check out the new field of ‘ecological economics’), and that we do this with a sense of justice for that majority of people on this planet who live on $2 or less, sometimes much less, per day.
Technorati Tags: earth carrying capacity, housing crisis, economic crisis, sven burmeister, affluent lifestyles
Photo credit: NASA
Book credit: Friday Morning Reflections at the World Bank: Essays on Values and Development, Seven Locks Press, 1989. Out of print, but you can hunt for it on the internets.
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3 Responses to “Living beyond our means”
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Dear Margaret,
If I was to sit here and say what I wish could be, I would begin by saying simply that the world we inhabit should be flat (and therefore unbounded, limitless) and human beings could be invited to continue doing exactly as we like, doing just as we are doing now forever. Freedom and dignity of the individual are cornerstones of my life and I would extoll these virtues above all else.
Unfortunately, the world God has blessed us to inhabit is not flat. Earth is a bounded celestial orb, set among a sea of stars. Human beings evolved here. Sometimes we forget that we are a part of this Earth and members of a species that is often not adequately recognized for its distinctly human creatureliness. Until very recently, a mere two hundred and ten years ago, no one had publicly discussed, just as we are doing again now, the potential threat to humanity, life as we know it and the integrity of Earth that could one day be posed by the growth of absolute global human population numbers.
That day when the human species poses a threat to the future of humanity and life as we know it on Earth appears to have come. Here and now the human community appears to be challenged as never before by the unbridled growth of its propagation, production and consumption activities, ones we can see rampantly overspreading the surface of our planetary home.
As much as I would like to suggest we continue with “business as usual”, that option may not be open to us for much longer. Good scientific evidence from many sources indicates with remarkable clarity that humankind desperately needs to accept both human limits
http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2005/8647/letter.html
and Earth’s limitations
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYP/is_17_112/ai_ …
If only humanity could keep doing as it likes, and as it is doing now, without threatening human wellbeing, environmental health and a good enough future for our children, then please be assured you and others would be spared my contributions to this and other discussions on the internet. After seven years of going to conferences, sponsoring Earth Day Summits on Human Population, writing letters to editors, sending thousand of emails and blogging, I would honor my long-suffering spouse by fulfilling a promise I made to her in 2001: end the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population.
Margaret, thanks always.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
I hear you, Steven. If only we humans were as free of Nature’s limits as wish ourselves, or believe ourselves, to be! But here we are, a species among species, subject to the same natural limits as any other species. Only this one has run amuck.
We’re in trouble. We’re in serious trouble.
But maybe it’s our definition of freedom that we got wrong. Maybe living within the means of the planet is the source of our real freedom — our real meaning as the only self-reflective conscious being that we know.
Maybe, like adolescents growing to adulthood, real freedom comes right there in the accepting of our limits, our responsibilities, our potential, our real reason for being, for having evolved at all.
Margaret
Dear Margaret,
If the family of humanity is somehow a part of a “evolutionary” process of human growth and development, such as you describe above, and Dr. Joel Cohen has described elsewhere, then it seems to me that our leaders will soon have to begin exhibiting some of the “living within limits” behaviors one would immediately expect from a reality-oriented and mature human being.
Apparently, the economic powerbrokers and politicians are ignorant of “limits to growth” as to the real challenges of our time. They remain adamantly focused upon their own selfish material interests and privileges to conspicuously consume. The altogether transparent behaviors of the rich and powerful among us, who organize life so that they are not bothered by the vicissitudes and misfortunes of others, are instructive because their behavior dramatizes both a childish carelessness with regard to the over-consumption of Earth’s limited resources and unsustainable adolescent hubris.
In spite of the selfishness and self-seeking of their elders, our children somehow appear to have learned something too many leaders have forgotten. The children know something about sharing (not hoarding) and generosity; they are smarter (not more clever) and more capable; and they can see what a single generation can do to precipitate the reckless dissipation of Earth’s resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s environment, and the ruination of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.
Yes, our children could face revolting human-induced developments and daunting global challenges soon. The underdeveloped behaviors of their elders in our time are painful reminders of a degree of immaturity similar to that of Wil E. Coyote.
Perhaps our leaders are well-advised to adopt new, more reasonable and sensible ways of behaving in a finite world before the Earth is ravaged by the human species.
Sincerely,
Steve