Cultural habits – like people – go through stages when they face death. Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described this process as the “five stages of grief”: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance of reality. In human society, growth economics will eventually collapse in the face of ecological reality. We have witnessed decades of denial and anger about this end of growth, some remain stuck there, but society at large now appears to be entering the bargaining stage.

This bargaining appears in thousands of new corporate marketing strategies that promote “sustainability.” They’ve changed the ink in the printing presses, rolled out green and blue designs, replaced lightning bolts with fern leaves, and stamped images of the earth on plastic containers. We now have “sustainable detergent,” “sustainable events,” “sustainable development,” “sustainable profits,” “sustainable fashions,” and even “sustainable countertops” for the kitchen makeovers of discerning consumers.

The bargaining goes like this: If we call ourselves “green” and “sustainable” can we keep selling stuff? But like a drug addict, the patient has not yet changed the habit that is killing it. That habit is consumption growth. All these sustainable marketing campaigns are designed to sell more products to more people. Meanwhile, every day, we lose forests, exterminate species, erode soil, drain aquifers, and pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eventually, we’ll notice that labeling things “sustainable” doesn’t make it so. That day may signal the “depression” stage.

The foolish king

The bargaining strategy we know as “sustainable growth” gained popularity with the 1987 Brundtland Report (Our Common Future), from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. The report recognized that human activity had caused serious ecological degradation, and they sought ways to reconcile economic growth, particularly for the poorer countries, with environmental health. The rich countries, meanwhile, sought ways to allow global corporations to continue plundering the earth for riches.

The Brundtland Report envisioned, “a new era of economic growth … that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.” This idea represents a noble vision that most people would support: a growing human economy that relieves poverty while sustaining the Earth’s resources. However, in nature, all physical growth eventually stops. There are no exceptions.

To understand why this is so, we must understand what real sustainability means in a biological habitat. For a species to maintain a pattern of energy and material exchange with its environment over a long period of time, it must achieve what biologists call homeostasis or dynamic equilibrium, whereby its consumption remains below the energy input into the system. 

We must also understand the nature of exponential growth. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” says physicist Dr. Albert Bartlett at the University of Colorado, “is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Since human population and consumption have been growing for thousands of years, we might assume that we can continue to grow for thousands more, but this is not how exponential growth works. This complex-sounding bit of arithmetic is actually quite simple.

Any material growth (a fixed or variable percent increase per year) eventually yields a huge number over time. You may have heard the story of the legendary king who agreed to pay a clever inventor with one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the next square, then four, eight, sixteen, and so forth. This is a story about exponential growth. All such growth has a doubling time, represented by the 64 squares of the chess board. However, by the time the foolish king reached square number 30, he needed a billion grains of rice. By square 40, a trillion grains, and the kingdom was bankrupt. This is the power of exponential growth.

In one of the more famous cases of delusion about endless growth, American business professor Julian Simon claimed in “The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving,” Cato Policy Report, 1995:

“We have in our hands now – actually in our libraries – the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7  billion years.”

Like so many modern business leaders, Simon does not appear to understand ecology or exponential growth. Our current human population, growing at just over 1% per year, will double every 60 years. (To find any doubling time, divide the growth rate into the number 70). These doublings are the “squares” of the chess board. At this rate of growth, the human population on earth would reach an impossible 7 trillion people in 600 years, a tiny fraction of Simon’s “7 billion years.”

Even if we assumed a slower population growth of only 0.1% per year, the population would reach over one trillion people in 5,000 years. A city such as Tokyo or New York would swell to over two billion people. It would not be possible to feed, house, or water, this population on Earth. The processing of waste and sewage would not be remotely achievable. The planet would be a cesspool of human waste. Simon was dead wrong by a factor of over a million.

Bargaining with nature

For the last two centuries, our consumption of critical resources – forests, energy, water, copper, phosphorus – has been growing over three times faster than population, at about 3.5 percent per year, meaning that humanity’s material consumption has been doubling every 20 years. We are now consuming about 8-thousand times as much as humans consumed in 1750. This is already more resources than the earth can supply. Humanity is in habitat overshoot, as evident by forest and soil loss, species extinction, and ocean and atmospheric pollution.

At this rate, in twenty more years, we’ll be consuming 16-thousand times the 1750 level, and by 2050, 32-thousand times. Earth cannot supply this material growth. Like the naïve king, we have bankrupted our kingdom, the Earth itself.

Some growth advocates claim we will save our growth economies with “efficiencies.” The history of human industrial development provides thousands of efficiency examples, which almost never result in less consumption of energy and materials. Rather, efficiency tends to make a resource cheaper, and therefore we consume more. This fact is well known in economics, called the “rebound” effect or “Jevons” effect, after William Jevons, who noticed that coal consumption increased as efficiencies increased.

Others bargain with natural law by claiming that we will “de-materialize growth” with new technologies. However, in every case in history, as economies grow, material and energy consumption grows. Marginal efficiency gains are swamped by population and consumption growth. Remember when people claimed that computers would save paper? It never happened. In 1950, before private computers, the human community used about 50 million tonnes of paper each year. Now, in the full-blown computer age, we use five times as much paper, 250 million tonnes per year.

“Sustainable growth,” Dr. Bartlett reminds us, “is an oxymoron.” In nature, no such thing exists. So growth economists and politicians attempt to haggle with nature, proposing policies that might take us “toward sustainability” to hedge the obvious contradiction. We hear about policies that might make us “more sustainable,” which means what? That we will last a little longer before we collapse?

Our bargaining with nature won’t work. Growth and sustainability are not compatible in the material world. If humanity wants sustainability, we must abandon the belief in endless economic growth. We don’t get to re-write the laws of nature for our own convenience.

Genuine Sustainability

When we get past our denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, when we finally accept the demands of ecology, what will real human sustainability look like?

First of all, when we talk about sustainable human civilization, we mean for thousands of years, not a few decades or until the next election. Sustainability in nature, dynamic equilibrium, allows diversity to increase and relationships to fluctuate, thus “dynamic,” but a species population and its consumption must cease growing, a state of balance we call homeostasis.

When humanity achieves real sustainability, it will no longer be necessary to bulldoze more forests, erode soils, drain aquifers, dam more rivers, deplete non-renewable resources, and fill the atmosphere, land, rivers, and oceans with our waste.

Genuine sustainability will value localized trade over globalization, not relying on fossil fuels – ancient sunlight – to ship food and materials around the world. Real sustainability will solve problems with the simplest, low-technology, whole-systems-based solutions available. Such a system will be aware of scale, and will not assume that “more” and “bigger” are in any way equated with better. We will learn to value a genuinely rich quality of life over mere quantity of stuff, to value a living watershed or mountain over corporate profit.

Real sustainability will include social justice, because our current state of injustice breeds conflict, violence, and additional destruction of nature. Most current economic growth benefits the already wealthy. Real sustainability will reduce total consumption, while closing the gap between rich and poor. We will discover a new definition of wealth: The health of our living world.

As ecologists, we have to help humanity navigate through these difficult stages of grief over the fact that our very economic system is simply unsustainable. According to Dr. Kübler-Ross’s observations, after we finish with our quibbling and bargaining, we may experience depression. We need to help our neighbours realize that accepting reality delivers us finally to the joyful stage of meaningful action.

============== 

Critics regularly accuse environmentalists of being ‘doom and gloom’ prognosticators who complain of endless problems, but offer ‘no solutions’. However, if we check the record, we’ll discover that serious ecologists have been offering solutions for centuries.

Real Economic Solutions

Economist John Stuart Mill realised the limits of nature 160 years ago, as he witnessed British factories multiplying across the landscape, spoiling woodlands, mowing down hedgerows, and turning rivers into sewers.

Mill proposed that nations achieve a “stationary state”, at which point economic growth would stabilise for the sake of environmental preservation. “If the Earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness,” Mill wrote in 1848, “I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary long before necessity compels them to it.”

Mill’s solution did not imply that we cease developing qualitatively. “A stationary condition of capital and population,” he insisted, “implies no stationary state of human improvement.” He understood that we might improve the quality of life, even as we reduce our destruction of the Earth.

In the 1920s, as securities traders like Goldman-Sachs engineered a stock bubble that resulted in a decade of mass poverty, Nobel laureate Frederick Soddy proposed an economics rooted in physical reality. He pointed out that a perpetually growing economy pursuing infinite wealth was doomed to fail. Debt – an intangible claim on future wealth – could approach infinite size, he noted, but real wealth had limits. This systemic flaw, said Soddy, would result in financial scams, defaults, and crashes. His solution – “Stop creating money from nothing.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, others – Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Howard Odum, Hazel Henderson, Donnella Meadows, Herman Daly – described realistic economic models based on living systems, accounting for energy transfer and physical limits. “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca,” said Georgescu-Roegen. Daly’s Steady State Economics described realistic solutions that would allow for qualitative development without economic growth.

Systemic, steady state, or biophysical economic models recognise that all growth in ecological systems eventually stops. The economic visionaries offered realistic solutions, but their realism limited the accumulation of phony “wealth.” so they were ignored or even mocked by conventional voices.

Plans B, C, D …

Our modern ecological crises – global warming, species loss, water shortages, soil depletion – are all symptoms of a larger problem: Human overshoot. When a species overshoots its habitat, there are only two results – (1) crash and perish, or (2). stabilise consumption and discover ecological balance with the environment. Growing bigger is not a solution; it’s the problem.

Ecologists, environmentalists and planners have offered thousands of solutions. Visionaries such as Jon Todd, Janine Benyus, and Wes Jackson have shown how ‘biomimicry’ and ecological resource harvesting can create genuinely sustainable systems. Benyus writes in Nature’s Operating Instructions: “… we are nature. … life’s adaptations spell out a pattern language for survival. … the hummingbird manages to pollinate its energy source, ensuring that there will be nectar next year. .. These organisms have had about 400 million years of R&D.” Copying natural systems provides real solutions, but it doesn’t necessarily create billionaires.

Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia and Mathis Wackernagle with Earth Council in Costa Rica developed the ‘Ecological Footprint’ analysis to help nations, regions, and cities properly account for their consumption. Rees concludes that humanity’s resource consumption is now about 30 per cent beyond the Earth’s capacity to replenish. Typical cities require somewhere between 300 and 3000 times their area to supply the resources they consume.

Rees has proposed real solutions that take advantage of dense urban population: full accounting, urban and rural unification, public transport, electricity co-generation, closed circuit industry, and reduced per capita demand for materials and energy. In Linkoping, Sweden, the city powers its industry and buildings by burning its waste, rather than creating landfills.

Richard Register’s EcoCities proposals offer similar solutions. In Managing without Growth, Peter Victor offers sound policies – shortened workweeks, cap on resource extraction – to improve public welfare without consuming more of the planet. Harvey Wasserman in Solartopia and Lester Brown in Plan B (now in version 3.0), Jeffrey Sachs in Common Wealth, and hundreds of other research papers, books and practical projects have outlined sensible solutions to human overshoot. Most urban and regional plans, however, want to grow their populations and consumption, the exact antithesis of genuine sustainability.

A Good Solution

In 1980, farmer and author Wendell Berry wrote a short essay, "Solving for Pattern," which outlined the features of “a good solution.” He showed that many problems we face today are the consequences of previous ’solutions’ that failed to think beyond an isolated short-term gain. Toxic pollution, dying rivers and nuclear waste provide examples. Other alleged solutions, such as an arms race or a ‘war on drugs’, make the problems worse.

Berry demonstrated, using farming examples, how a good solution preserves the ‘integrity of pattern’, improves balance and symmetry, and addresses the health of the whole system rather than treats symptoms. All problems are parts of a whole, and all systems are contained in larger systems. A good solution maintains the integrity of the larger systems.

In this way, a good solution solves multiple problems and avoids ‘magic bullet’ solutions that fail to account for their full impact. For example, a nuclear ’solution’ to an energy need creates new problems: radioactive fuel transport, public health, waste, security, decommissioning, accidents, insurance costs, evacuation plans, radiation exposure, and so forth. "In a biological pattern," Berry writes, "the exploitive means and motives of industrial economics are immediately destructive and ultimately suicidal." A genuine solution does not pollute or destroy a watershed, for example, to mine gold or generate power.

Real, integrated solutions tend to localise, accept limits and use resources at hand. However, genuine solutions exist only in actual proof and cannot to be expected from absentee owners and absentee experts. People who will benefit from success or suffer the consequences of failure should guide local solutions with real work that fits the scale of their communities, and in a specific place, with local knowledge. A solution, says Berry, "should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another." The scale of a solution proves critical. Solutions that require massive, expensive, imported infrastructure often cause more problems than they solve.

Healthy, integrated solutions distinguish biophysical order from mechanical order. A mechanistic plan often works ‘on paper’ by ignoring related systems. In crafting solutions, consider wisdom, not just calculation. Well-designed solutions maintain natural, organic pattern. Human communities exist only within large-scale layers of organic systems, with natural cycles and laws of material and energy exchange.

Systemic solutions satisfy multiple criteria and consider form as well as function; they are healthy and pleasant to live around. Large-scale industrial solutions have a history of addressing only one criteria – profits for shareholders – without considering toxic waste, full energy costs, habitat disruption, carbon emissions, or depressing work environments.

Rather than ‘going for broke’ with a single large-scale plan that serves business interests, good solutions consider many diverse, small-scale applications that may scale up and down and prove out over time. Small-scale solutions are easier to replace when something doesn’t work as planned, and easier to multiply when they do work well.

A good solution does not assume ‘more is better’. The growth solutions that do make this assumption destroy communities, families, cultures, and environments. Large-scale centralised solutions allow wealth to be concentrated but do not necessarily achieve optimum, systemic health.  "The illusion can be maintained," Berry points out, "only so long as the consequences can be ignored." Thus, a series of village-scale power systems that can be operated by village skills is more stable and more sustainable than a massive corporate industrial power system with invasive environmental disruption and long transmission lines that cut through wilderness ecosystems.

Human solutions do not endure without human input, energy, organisation, maintenance and so forth. Wendell Berry points out that the integrity of human artifacts depends on human virtues: accurate memory, rigorous observation, insight, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity and restraint. Here Berry emphasised ‘restraint above all’. We must learn to resist the temptation to ’solve’ problems by accepting ‘trade-offs’ and bequeathing those to posterity. A good solution, Berry wrote three decades ago, is "in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law."

So yes – ecologists, farmers, environmentalists, workers and simple people in common communities have all proffered thousands of realistic solutions. Ecologists are not ‘doom and gloom’ pessimists. They are realists.

Integrated, healthy solutions may present opportunities for business, jobs, and community enterprise, but since the human community has already overshot the sustainable productive capacity of the planet, genuine ecological solutions demand less consumption, not more. And since over a billion people remain hungry and in need of water, and since our soils and forests are in decline, the wealthy nations will have to share the Earth’s resources. Less consumption and sharing aren’t going to make anyone fabulously wealthy, but it may provide us with a viable future.

As a global community, we often appear as a dysfunctional family. We bicker constantly, the strong abuse the weak, and alleged leaders behave like addicts, unwilling to change the destructive habits that are destroying our home. As in any abusive relationship, the powerful proclaim a taboo against protest and vilify those who cry out as the crazy ones.

Ten million people in our human family starve to death every year. Children serve as slaves and wither in factories, making trinkets for the rich. On top of this horrific injustice, we daily devastate the only source of real wealth: the earth itself. We lose fertile soil, discharge CO2 into the atmosphere, scatter toxins, turn grasslands into desert, and create islands of plastic garbage in the sea.

Our governments and captains of industry shrug off the signs of dysfunction, and promise to “change,” to become “more sustainable,” like the alcoholic parent who promises to reform, but never does. Marketing geniuses dress up business-as-usual in a “green” disguise – printing pictures of the Earth on plastic containers of detergent – to ease our worries. The sanctioned voices of the status quo assure us that all is well. As rivers die and species vanish, some in our global family watch in horror, others in denial.

Ecological psychology:

A person today, whose senses remain alive, will experience trauma when witnessing the abusive exploitation of nature. They will cry out and try to fix the dysfunction. However, some people may suffer the trauma unconsciously, may not know what is missing in their life, may work in a technological environment for 50 weeks each year, and then flee into nature, where they can feel alive again, for a two week holiday.

Modern neuroses, so prevalent in industrial nations, can be traced to our separation from nature. The marvels and conveniences of technological society provide only a thin veneer over our natural being. We remain biophysical animals akin to ants and raccoons. Millennia ago, certain clever primates overwhelmed all other species by controlling fire and developing tools, winning hegemony over planet Earth, but in our fundamental instincts, desires, and reactions, we reflect a long evolution in the lap of nature.

Regardless of prevailing conceits, we retain learned patterns from 50 million years of primate evolution, 5 million years of hominid development, and 500,000 years of fire-bearing, tool-making hunter-gatherer culture. During this long genesis, humanity grew within the comfort and constraints of an intact ecosystem that supplied sustenance, vital lessons, wonder, and a home. Watching that home fall under the blade of industrialism shocks our system, whether we know it or not.

Although modest and physically challenging, primal life offered benefits and shaped our nature. Early humans, like all animals, matured in stable communities with relatively secure food supplies. For millennia, families remained intact and children grew up watching parents work, surrounded by nature – the ultimate parent – learning lessons from the wilderness and from all creatures.

These natural comforts nourished us for 99.99 percent of our ancestral development. Then, only a few thousand years ago, some humans began living in urban environments, relying on remote agriculture, specialist skills, and the wiles of moneychangers. Within the last few hundred years, industrial culture has widened this separation from nature, divided families, and destroyed communities, creating alienated individuals clinging to scarce jobs and rewarded with packaged food and entertainment, the “bread and circuses” that Roman emperors bestowed to the peasants.

In spite of our civilized ways, human psychology remains linked to our primal origins. As a result, we suffer the trauma of witnessing ecological abuse, watching wilderness obliterated, other creatures eradicated, and the earth diminished.

The capacity of feel

According to Kathy McMahon, a clinical psychologist, who posts stories of environmental trauma on her Peak Oil Blues website, “We live in an insane culture. Rather than marginalize the cries for reform, we need to normalize the pain. Protest and concern are healthy reactions to loss and grief.”

Psychologist Chellis Glendinning – in the book Off the Map and essays such as “Recovery from Western Civilization” – describes the “original trauma” of living in industrial society, the failure of technology and globalization to provide essential comforts that nature and community once supplied. This loss, she explains, leads to addictive behaviour as people fill the void with consumption, drugs, and fashions. She describes a “desperate coping” manifested as addiction, anger, numbness, and attempts to appear “normal” by the standards of an insane culture.

A quarter century ago, ecological pioneer Paul Shepard examined natural alienation in Nature and Madness and other books. Shepard proposed that the deficient development of modern citizens has led society to the destruction of its habitat. Ancestral humans, he believed, acquired a healthy reciprocity with nature because young children experienced a mother always present, fathers with comprehensible roles, non-human beings in a primordial terrain, and deliberate adolescent initiation into adulthood.

On the other hand, Shepard explains, industrialized cultures have abandoned nature and divided families, leading to an arrested development. Poorly matured adults, Shepard says, harbour an infantile duality between themselves and nature, fear the organic world, and attempt to fulfill childish fantasies with patriotism, fundamentalism, or social status. Like Glendinning and McMahon, Shepard saw the symptoms of this “childhood botched,” in massive therapy, escapism, and intoxicants. He described our “increasing injury to the planet” as a “symptom of human psychopathology.”

“The only society more frightful than one run by children, as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies,” Shepard wrote in Nature and Madness, “might be one run by childish adults.” 

The enablers 

Addicts and abusers typically deny their actions, make promises about changing, and reward adult enablers, those intimidated into silence or enticed into support by a share of power’s rewards. 

McMahon believes that “normal” acceptance, denial, and even support for ecological destruction “isn’t just misguided silliness, but financial self-interest. Most citizens are invested in or dependent on the lie,” she says. “A lot of money is riding on the insanity of depleting and destroying the biosphere.”

The status quo resists change by marginalizing and ridiculing the whistle-blowers. “Thus the media stereotypes of people concerned about ecological issues,” explains McMahon, “calling them names such as ‘Carborexics” or ‘gloom and doomers,’ creating a phony disorder in people driven to fear because they witness the abuse of the earth.”

Bush administration lawyers Jay S. Bybee and John C. Yoo, who crafted rationalizations for torture, are typical enablers. For their contributions, Bybee earned a lifetime federal judge appointment, and Yoo a professorship at the University of California. When the American Psychiatric Association published a statement against torture, the American Psychological Association “decided” against such a statement. The U.S. military rewarded the psychologists with grants and contracts denied to the outspoken psychiatrists.

The U.S. “Waxman-Markey” climate bill demonstrates how an addict creates the impression of change while feeding the habit. The bill, just passed by the US House of Representatives, features free pollution permits for the biggest polluters and loopholes to help avoid genuine emissions reductions. Although scientists now estimate humanity must cut emissions by 50 to 80 % of 1990 levels to avoid climate disaster, the U.S. legislation suggests cuts of 4 %. Even so, the New York Times praised the bill as, “the most ambitious energy and global warming legislation ever debated in Congress.” To the extent this is true, it only exposes the deplorable record of the US Congress, but the statement in the New York Times attempts to make this sound like a success, concealing the failure and superficial pretense of this legislation.

Al Gore applauded the bill as “a crucial step.” Joseph Romm, a physicist and climate expert, wrote, “How can I reconcile my climate science realism, which demands far stronger action than the Waxman-Markey bill requires, and my climate politics realism, which has led me to advocate passage of this flawed bill? The short answer is that Waxman-Markey is the only game in town.” Romm adds, “If Waxman-Markey becomes law, then I see a genuine 10% to 20% chance of averting catastrophe.”

Would you accept a 10% chance of avoiding catastrophe for your children? Romm, Gore, and the journalists at the New York Times are smart people, and perhaps they think this slim chance is the best they can do for the human family. However, they are also deeply invested in the status quo. Like the abused wife who makes excuses for her alcoholic husband, they appear afraid of a divorce from the domineering power structure.

Al Gore, for example, is a principal in the venture capital fund, Generation Investment Management, along with David Blood and other alumni from Goldman-Sachs, the company that engineered the junk mortgage derivatives bubble and every other major pump and dump scam in America since 1920. They are positioned to make a lot of money from carbon trading deals, the next big stock market bubble. Will the company do any good. Maybe. Will it save the earth? Probably not. It will make a few very wealthy people wealthier and stimulate consumption. The point is, these enablers are invested in the status quo power structure and economic system responsible for reckless consumption and ecological overshoot of the planet. They will protect the abusers. Their support for the watered down, corporate-friendly, reality-denying Waxman-Markey bill shows their loyalty to the dysfunctional power brokers.

In practical fact, the U.S. legislation will sabotage efforts to establish meaningful change at the Copenhagen climate conference later this year. A ten-percent chance of averting catastrophe provides scant comfort to our children.

Recovery

Chellis Glendinning writes, “the ultimate goal of recovery is to refind our place in nature … to feel, to come alive, to come out from under the deadening of the machines and the mechanistic worldview.” Paul Shepard found hope in the fact that, “Beneath the veneer of civilization … lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human.”

Shepard saw recovery through rediscovering “this full and natural human.” He wrote that to rebuild healthy adults, children must be born in gentle surroundings and grow up exposed to a rich nonhuman environment. A healthy youth must experience juvenile tasks, use simple tools, and learn “the discipline of natural history.” Finally, adolescents must learn the “metaphorical significance” of natural phenomena and experience the “ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship.”

Humanity, on a path to destruction, requires an intervention. As Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote in the 1970s: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

rw. July 2009.

========================== 

Naess, one of the most influential philosophers of his generation, died in his sleep at the age of 96 in Oslo, Norway. The avid mountaineer founded the Deep Ecology movement, drawing inspiration from Buddhism, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and above all from nature itself. Greenpeace can be proud that he served as the first chairman of Greenpeace Norway in 1988. His personal story illuminates the path of ecology in the 21st century.

Arne Naess at the opening of the Greenpeace office in Oslo, 1988
(c) Henrik Laurvik NTB/Scanpix – used under licence

On the Mountain

Naess was born in 1912, in Slemdal, near Oslo, and his father, banker Ragnar Naess, died the next year. Naess later recalled that his mother, Christine Dekke, appeared preoccupied with raising his two older brothers, so he often wandered alone into nature for companionship.

In How My Philosophy Seemed to Develop he revealed, at the age of four, "I would stand or sit for hours … in shallow water on the coast, marvelling at the overwhelming diversity and richness of life in the sea."

At the age of 17, while climbing on Norway’s Hallingskarvet massif, he met a kind Norwegian judge, who also adored nature. This mentor advised young Arne to read Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who equated the ‘highest virtue’ with knowledge of nature. For Spinoza, Naess learned, all thinking about truth and human society begins with recognising the basic ’substance’, the diversity and magnificence of the natural world.

In his 20s, Naess built a life-long writing cabin, Tvergastein, high on this mountain. "In the mountains," Naess once said, "you are small compared to the surrounding view, so you more easily and more intensely feel that you are a part of something greater. You find that your idea of your ’self’ is more vast and deeper." This depth he felt in vast nature – mountains, sea, forests – inspired his use of the word ‘deep’ to describe his understanding of ecology.

Ecology in Action

After graduation from the University of Oslo, Naess studied in Austria where he met the famous Vienna Circle of philosophers and psychoanalysts influenced by Sigmund Freud. Although inspired by the Vienna group, Naess found their philosophy too disembodied and intellectual. He pointed out that their understanding of the ’self’ failed to include nature, and was therefore ‘dead wrong’. Based on the notion from Spinoza that all being exists wholly in nature, he expanded the Freudian idea of ’self’ and ‘ego’ to include our place in nature. Thus began one of the most influential traditions of modern ecology, Naess’ development of ‘Deep Ecology’.

Naess returned to Norway, became Oslo University’s youngest professor, and during World War II joined the Norwegian resistance, helping prevent the shipment of Norwegian students to German concentration camps. After the war, he led a UNESCO project to improve communication between the East and West by exploring how various cultures use similar words. The resulting report sold out, but UNESCO never reprinted it, according to Naess, "due to the politically dangerous character of its items." During the Cold War, listening to each other was not a high priority in Washington, Moscow, or London.

In the meantime, by learning about Buddhism and Gandhi, and by reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Naess realised that his love of nature had to be put into action if his ideas were to matter. In 1969, at the age of 57, he resigned his position at the University of Oslo and became active in environmental protection, "to live," he said, "rather than function." In 1970, he joined rural farming families near the town of Myvatn, Norway to stop a dam on the Laxá (‘Salmon’) River that threatened to flood their farms. This successful campaign, along with the Chipko movement in India, marks the beginning of environmental action that inspired the early Greenpeace movement.

The names of things

In the early 1970s, members of the nascent Greenpeace group in Vancouver, Canada began to hear about the Norwegian activist, Arne Naess, and his ideas about ‘deep ecology’. As Greenpeace evolved from peace protests to full-fledged ecological action, Naess served as one of our inspirations. We agreed with his belief that other beings in nature – whales, seals, insects or trees – had their own ‘intrinsic value’. We protected whales or seals not just to preserve the environment for human purposes, but for their own sake. This fundamental respect for nature became an important distinction in the environmental movement.

I met Arne Naess in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and later at a conference convened by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in Northern California. I discovered that the best way to engage him in conversation was to walk with him in whatever natural setting was close by. I recall his genuine sense of curiosity about species of trees, birds, or being engulfed in what he called ‘the total-field’ of nature. He never seemed intellectual, but rather spoke with a humourous, teasing quality that appeared to be always searching for some fresh, new understanding. He said his ideas were not ‘philosophy’ in the classic sense but rather ‘intuition’ gained from observation. We once pondered whether a particular sparrow was a ‘Fox’ or ‘Song’ sparrow, and I recall how he laughed that humans believe they understand something because they have named it. We talked about seeing an ‘individual’ in an animal, not simply a ’species’.

In 1988, we felt honoured when Naess agreed to serve as the first chairman of Greenpeace Norway. Upon hearing of his passing, Greenpeace Nordic’s Truls Gulowsen remarked, "Naess’ ecological philosophy is still important to Greenpeace." So, what is that philosophy?

Deep Ecology

Deep ecology starts with accepting the intrinsic value of all beings in nature and of the ecosystem itself. Naess challenged environmentalists to think beyond ‘humans in nature’ to recognise that the ecological system is not something separate that we are ‘in’. Nature made us, made our eyes to see, made our limbs, tastes, and even our thoughts. He taught ‘diversity and symbiosis’, both in nature and in human ideas. A rich culture, he said, like nature finds stability in diversity and recognises how distinct parts and points of view serve the larger whole. This did not invite, he insisted, lazy thinking, but rather required precise language to express observations and experiences.

Naess believed that humanity has no right to reduce the richness and diversity of nature except to meet vital needs of health and survival. He taught that our current impact on the world was excessive, perhaps obvious today, but a radical idea in the 1960s. He believed that the human population was too large, and that we should stabilise population growth and eventually allow human population to decrease. He believed this might take a century or more, but he believed humanity could eventually achieve a state in which our technology was non-invasive and "children could grow up in nature".

"Then," he said, "we are back in the direction of paradise."

Some environmentalists and human rights activists thought Naess’s ideas were ‘anti-human’, but his compassion remained universal. "Appreciating a forest or mountain does not diminish anything humans do," he said. "We don’t say that every living being has the same value as a human, but that it has an intrinsic value … it has a right to live and blossom."

He challenged the common psychological notion that the ’self’ develops from childish ‘ego’ to an adult social-awareness and finally to spiritual awareness. "Nature is left out of this formula," he noticed. "Humanism displays a certain arrogance, as if we are somehow separate or superior to nature." He believed that with enough attention to the world around us, "we cannot help but identify our self with all living beings; beautiful or ugly, big or small, sentient or not."

He insisted that through this sort of maturity, we will discover that genuine quality of life has very little to do with consumption, wealth, and power. He summarised this in a proverb for the ages, and certainly for our time, about living lightly on the earth:

                 "Simpler means, richer ends."

 rw. February 2009

The self-serving theories of growthaholic economists peel away from this deep reality like cheap wallpaper. Since the days of Akenaten and Ceasar, overfed profiteers have insisted that their elite and esoteric genius creates wealth. When they salted the soils or decimated forests, they would march into the next watershed or “discover” another continent.

Those days are over. There are no more giant resource pools to plunder. The wealth of Pharaohs and stock hustlers arrived not from their genius, but from their facility with deception, fashioning loans with fantasy money, and trading bets on the changing value of paper promises, the modern “derivatives” market. But in the end, all this affluence relies on the real wealth: nature, her systems, her materials, and her energies.

Markets will rally and crash again, and paper pushers will stuff more cash into their safety deposit boxes, but in the end, money cannot replace soil and water. Gross domestic products provide no surrogate for authentic well-being.

As world stock markets collapsed this fall, several urgent environmental events rumbled below the superficial hand-wringing, like deep volcanoes awakening to announce, “Nature shall not be mocked.”

It’s the soil, folks

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” wrote American ecologist Aldo Leopold five decades ago. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Economists ignored, even ridiculed, such warnings from ecologists, and the planet now faces a shortage of fertile soil, the result of erosion, salination, contamination, desertification, and a swelling population. U.N Agriculture head, Lennart Bage announced last summer, “Fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset.” It always has been, for everything that lives.

This year, Iran bought over 1 million tons of wheat from the U.S., something they have not done since 1980. Iran would not come begging to their avowed enemy if they had any other option. Iran, the Saudis, and other oil-rich Middle East nations rely on global agriculture for grain. The United Arab Emirates buy farmland in Sudan and Kazakhstan. South Korea seeks land in Mongolia, China in Southeast Asia. Libya leases farms in the Ukraine.

With the closing of Ukrainian shipments, only three major grain exporters remain: North America, Australia, and New Zealand. However, these global producers rely entirely on fertilizers and fossil fuels. However, the production of phosphorus, principal component of fertilizer, is rare and in decline, and the era of cheap energy is coming to an end.

The big bonfire

Globalization is literally running out of gas. Geologists at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) Conference in California, in September, confirmed that world oil production has stopped growing and will begin its inevitable decline during the next decade.

A U.S. Department of Energy study (The Hirsch Report) warned in 2005 – the year that global production plateaued – that society required a 20-year lead time to implement an optimal new energy plan. It is already too late for such a measured response, and this failure to act in time is the direct result of denial from lobbyists and economists, who chanted “eternal growth,” while obscuring or ignoring the evidence before them.

Conventional economic theory has claimed that resources are virtually infinite, that only capital and labour are required to create “wealth.” Oil depletion exposes this tragic conceit. Oil production declined last year in eight of the top twelve producing nations. Every major oil field on the planet is in decline, and global discoveries peaked forty years ago.

Meanwhile, economic growth promoters expect humanity to double its vehicle fleet over the next decade, from 1 billion to 2 billion vehicles, while building more roads across arable farmland.

Wind and solar power developments will help mitigate the coming energy crunch, but will not replace cheap liquid fuels. Biofuels will have certain localized value, if based on agricultural waste, but will prove insignificant on a globalized scale. Corn ethanol undermines food agriculture, and will not remotely replace cheap oil. Cellulose and algae biofuel projects cannot even produce net energy, so they are not economic at any price.

New oil discoveries and recovery technologies lag hopelessly behind the decline of conventional oil fields. Oil industry promoters recently proclaimed “90 billion barrels of oil” in the Arctic. However, these lobbyists failed to mention that this oil – even if it could be confirmed and recovered – represents three years of global supply.

The best and cheapest energy source is conservation. The only environmentally feasible solution to the end of cheap liquid fuels is to burn less. Randy Udall, who drafted Colorado’s Renewable Energy Mitigation Program, told the ASPO conference that energy companies have no use for conservation. Instead, they will burn more coal, make liquid fuel from coal, and melt bitumen at unearthly temperatures in low-efficiency tar sands and oil shale projects.

Udall called our era of history “the Big Bonfire.” We burn a million tons of fossil fuel every hour, releasing 80-million tons of CO2 each day. And here, we arrive at the third big crack in the growthaholics’ thin facade.

Ancient methane

According to the international Global Carbon Project, last year’s annual increase in carbon emissions, 2.9 percent, exceeded previous projections, “generating stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.” All the international gatherings, carbon-trading festivals, and Kyoto handshakes have failed to reduce carbon emissions or even stabilize the growth rate of these emissions.

Meanwhile, in September, Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University – with the International Siberian Shelf Study, sponsored by the Russian Science Academy and American Geophysical Union – announced evidence that millions of tons of a methane gas – 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – now escapes into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed. As the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned, the deep permafrost appears now to be thawing. 

Scientists on board Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi recorded methane bubbling to the sea surface, causing air-borne concentrations 100-times background levels. Ten previous expeditions since 2003 did not detect these levels of free methane. The new data describes releases so intense that the methane does not have time to dissolve in seawater but rises as bubbles to the ocean surface. Similar releases have been recorded in the East Siberian and Laptev Seas, amounting to millions of tons of methane from melting sub-sea permafrost.

The escaping methane represents a massive exhalation of ancient hydrocarbons likely captured in the Paleozoic warm era when amphibians crawled from the sea. The carbon escaped once before, during the Permian ecological collapse, 225 million years ago, leading to peak Mesozoic heat, and was recaptured as methane during the last 100-million years. Meteorologists warn that this significant store of ancient carbon could lead to run-away global warming, far beyond the influence of human technologies to sequester or forestall.

The methane represents an unaccounted cost of doing business in the era of the big bonfire. Market wizards may shave toxic assets from their balance sheets, but they cannot dictate nature’s accounting.

Resilience

Regardless of stopgap bailouts and more paper promises, economic collapse will continue in fits and starts until humanity achieves genuine ecological balance, adopts a steady state economy, and finally understands that ecology is the foundation of human enterprise. There are only two options for living cultures in a physical system: homeostasis or collapse.

Future generations will have every right to dismiss “the big bonfire” as an era of ignorance and  unconscionable excess. But I want future generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out. We kept our eyes open, witnessed the truth, and did our best to warn our bumbling, myopic civilization.

I speak to young people, who are terrified and/or angry about the state of the world, the wasteful extravagance of society, and needless ecological destruction. I experienced similar reactions when I learned as a child that our world could be vaporized by nuclear weapons. When we’re young, our families and teachers protected us from certain disturbing realities. If we remain naïve or ill-informed, the discovery of alarming truths about our world may create shock and outrage.

The best way to never again be disillusioned is to not be illusioned in the first place.

Economic slight of hand won’t restore our place on this earth. Human survival strategies now will be as much about resilience during transformation as finding “solutions” to preserve untenable expectations. Our resilience will include a rediscovery of a richer life with simpler means, a genuine quality of life that cannot be purchased but only lived. Human society can change, and in fact has to change. Don’t get depressed. Get informed and get active.

See this and other essays at "Deep Green," on the Greenpeace International site.

U.N Agriculture head, Lennart Bage, says, "fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset." Oh, really?  

This summer, Iran bought over 1 million tons of wheat from the U.S., their bitter enemy, something they have not done since 1980.  Iran would not come begging to the U.S. if they had any other option to buy grain, but these options are dwindling. The planet at large faces a fertile soil shortage, loss of top soils, desertification in Africa, China, and elsewhere, all aggravated by water shortages.

Financial analyst Chris Mayer at Daily Wealth, one of those investment sites that advises people how to profit from the crashing economy and depleted ecosystems, says: “Fertile soil may become more important to land values than oil or minerals in the ground.” He calls soil “a strategic asset on par with oil.”

Hello? Is this the economic community waking up? The problem is, these people think you "buy" everything.   I wonder if any of these types know you can make soil at home. Yes, with compost and good agricultural practices. Instead of raking up the leaves in your yard and putting them in plastic "trash" bags, make a compost pile!  But perhaps that is too peasant-like for the investment community. The "strategic asset" they’re talking about is the arable land itself. They still don’t really get it. 

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."  – Aldo Leopold

We borrow the land we use, from nature and from our children.

Meanwhile, Libya is trying to lease farms in the Ukraine because Ukraine farmers have stopped global wheat shipments due to local demand, and now, only three major grain exporters remain: North America, Australia, and New Zealand. All of these grain producers are propped up with fertilizers and fossil fuels. As cheap liquid fuel depletes, and as arable land is used to grow ethanol fuel, these grain supplies will also decline. One U.S. farmer put it this way recently: "Oh, great, we’re going to use the last six-inches of our top soil growing SUV fuel."

Iran, the Saudis, and other oil-rich Middle East nations rely on global agriculture for their grain. They are now scouring the globe for food. The United Arab Emirates are attempting to buy farmland in Sudan and Kazakhstan. South Korea is seeking land in Mongolia, China in Southeast Asia. China’s problems are twofold: decreasing water supplies and deserts sweeping in over their depleted soils in the north. China has purchased its "impressive" economic growth with ecological devastation. 

Any well-informed, aware person knows that soil and food are fundamental to human life and society, but it is interesting that this is now a global investment issue. The so-called "free market" system that wants to privatize the entire planet still has not learned the fundamental truth that humanity must face: The ecology is the economy.

It’s the soil, folks.

For years, I’ve been advising highschool and college students: If you have dreams of going into international finance, you should probably take some permaculture courses as well. Here are some useful permaculture sites: 

Permaculture information and links

Permaculture International, with links, articles, networking

A simple, good permaculture primer. 

More good permaculture links.

And remember to save and take out the kitchen compost.

Rex Weyler, Sept 19, 2008

In the 1980s, fishermen caught the last wild Beluga sturgeon from the Sea of Azov, source of prized caviar, and wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea failed to reproduce. The sturgeon catch plunged by 95 percent, and the cost of caviar soared. Such extraordinary price growth is known as "hyperinflation," or as economist Eric Sprott says, "the caviar syndrome."

This may sound trivial regarding caviar, but hyperinflation turns critical with commodities such as oil, gas, copper, zinc, water, or fine hardwood, all now growing rare on a global scale. Industrial civilization has already depleted the best and most accessible of these resources. Sturgeons might recover if we leave them alone, but copper and oil do not reproduce themselves.

As humanity scours every last region of the planet for resources, we enter a new historic period in which certain vital commodities no longer have a traditional market price linked to demand and supply, but rather to the cost of access.

Hitting the wall

In April, 500 migrating ducks landed on a Syncrude Canada oilsands tailing pond and perished. Syncrude CEO Tom Katinas reported being "very saddened" by this, quickly banned media from the site, and issued an internal memo: "It is our responsibility to ensure that the best interests of Syncrude are maintained." To clarify, the oil company’s best interest is cash flow, not ducks.

The Canadian oilsands, once promoted as a saviour of the world petroleum crisis, now appears anaemic. Shell Canada recently adjusted its oilsands production estimates from CAN$ 7.3 to CAN$ 11 billion, an abrupt 50-percent cost increase. Then, last month, Imperial Oil geologist Clement Bowman insisted that the Canadian government commit billions of dollars to solve "the huge environmental problems associated with the resource," namely, carbon-dioxide emissions, water divergence, a nuclear power plant to boil the sludge, dead ducks, and an obliterated prairie ecosystem. Bowman emphasized that unless these environmental issues are solved, "the oilsands have almost hit the wall."

There you have it. The "wall" is profitability. The "free-market" strategy to dodging this wall is public welfare: socialize the costs; privatize the profits.

The full environmental and social costs of doing business are never reported on the operating budgets of these billionaire companies. Public money and toxic lakes do not appear on the balance sheets. Why? Because it wouldn’t be profitable. Investments from the public and from nature don’t earn stock options, although the free market wizards need these investments to avoid hitting the wall.  

The Alberta, Canada oilsands: obliterated prairies 

Great powers  

Since 2003, the US has spent over a trillion dollars, and killed over a million people, to secure Iraq’s oil supply. The long-term public cost of the war is now projected to reach US$ 2-3 trillion, which roughly amounts to a US$ 30/barrel subsidy for every drop of oil in the Iraqi proven oil reserves.

Nations have waged oil wars for a century, since 1912, when the British Navy abandoned coal for oil and Winston Churchill declared, "You have got to find the oil … purchased regularly and cheaply in peace, and with absolute certainty in war." Such tactics are not lost on China. "A great power must be one that controls more resources," wrote Zhang Wenmu, a research fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, "and there has never been a case in history where such a pursuit is realized in peace."

To gain access to forests and oil fields, China finances thugs in Burma and Sudan, just as the US has backed deadly juntas in El Salvador and Chile, or Russia in its provinces. China has caught up with the US and Europe in consumption, now using over a quarter of the world’s copper and steel, and half the cement. Note that we now discuss resource use in large fractions of the Earth’s entire supply.

Construction projects in poorer countries simply stall because there isn’t enough cement or steel at any price.

The rising costs of retrieving oil – war, subsidies, energy input, and ecological disaster relief – will increase the price of everything. Economists call this "cost-push" inflation, a more virulent strain than commonly reported inflation. Central banks are helpless to manipulate cost-based inflation with bank rates or money supply. This state of affairs is the logical conclusion of growth economics on a fixed planet warmed by a modest star.

Bidding wars

In 1979, Soviet geologists discovered the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposits in Afghanistan. The CIA-armed Taliban booted out the Russians, and in 2005, companies from the UK, US, and Canada bid for the rights to the Afghani Anyak copper field. The bids came in at about US$ 1.2 billion, including infrastructure, roads, a power plant, and a profit margin acceptable to shareholders.

But then, in the fall of 2007, China offered Afghanistan US$ 2.8 billion for the copper, more than doubling the effective value in a single stroke. By financing US trade debt, China holds fist-fulls of rapidly sinking US dollars that they would rather trade for resources, Sudanese oil, Afghani copper, or swaths of northern Alberta. The estimated 12 million tons of copper in the Anyak field – the largest known untapped reserve in the world – will supply China for four years.

No profit-minded company could have matched the Chinese copper bid, because it left no profit. Overnight, world copper prices were no longer about supply and demand, but about access. Since 2003, the price of copper has soared from US$ 0.81 per pound to over US$ 3.90, a surge of about 38 percent annually. Traditional economic theory tells us that commodity price increases dampen consumption and boost supply by making marginal deposits profitable. However, the reverse is now true with oil, copper, and other limited natural products. As price accelerates, global demand still grows, and recoverable reserves still dwindle, unleashing hyperinflation, the End of Price, an era in which access to vital commodities is about power, not market mechanisms.

Human suffering also booms with commodity prices. Gulf News economics writer Sean Kelleher suggests, "we are into a new paradigm." Surging commodity prices, he writes, "might well be a boon to investors, but it will be a burden to the poorer end of all societies." Traditional wealth creation reveals its dark side. China’s Southern Metropolis Daily reports that an open child slave trade now thrives within China. Factory managers purchase children "like cabbages" in Sichuan street markets and ship them to the Pearl River Delta industrial heartland, following the tradition of English textile factories, Belgian rubber dealers in the Congo, or American cotton barons.

We now see the real face of modern industrialism: plunder public assets, enrich the wealthy, exploit child slaves, lay waste to living habitats, design obsolescence, and sell shoddy goods in community-killing giant box stores. On paper, it’s all profitable. In reality, the ship of industry steams forward like the Titanic.

The tech fix  

Another favourite theory of the growth economists is that "technology" will save us from resource depletion. Ethanol will replace petroleum. Oops. We forgot that corn grows in soil that once supported forests or supplied food.

Innovators, we hear, will allegedly find alternatives for everything, but copper and oil, for example, possess unique properties. Copper water pipe is strong and flexible at a wide range of temperatures, antibacterial, and easy to use. Copper remains essential for high-efficiency, high tech electronics that supposedly promise efficiency gains.

As James Kunstler explains in The Long Emergency, technology is not energy. Technology costs energy. Electronic wizardry does not replace a depleted earth. The world’s copper, lead, and tin consumption might endure for 20 years at current rates before it reaches the "caviar syndrome." Bauxite and iron ore may last 50 years. But the clock keeps ticking, 3 billion more people will inhabit the planet in 50 years, and nature shall not be mocked.

Bankrupt theories  

Robert Ayres, Professor Emeritus at the INSEAD business school in France, explains that eternal-growth economists make four erroneous assumptions:  

1. Steady growth projected into the future is a fallacy. There are no examples in nature of exponential growth continuing indefinitely.

 

2. Traditional economic growth models rely on an unjustifiable simplification of human activity, and an ignorance of nature’s laws and complexities.

 

3. Growth economists imagine abstract firms and consumers making optimum decisions with perfect information. None of this exists. Sovereign, monopolistic, and special interests direct decisions and foreclose valuable options.

 

4. The theory that capital, plus labour and technology, equals growth ignores nature’s requirements and limits.

To this we may add the so-called "invisible hand" of Adam Smith. The theory assumes that people pursuing their own self interest will guide civilization to the "best possible world." The evidence of history shows that no such invisible hand transforms collective greed into paradise. The history of slavery, sweatshops, and dead lakes filled with toxic sludge attest to this fallacy.  

Traditional economists – socialist and capitalist – have presumed that industrial output could grow forever. Other more visionary economists – Donella Meadows, Herman Daly, Hazel Henderson, E.F. Schumacher – long ago pointed out that traditional economic theory forgot to account for ecological systems and natural value.

Even some traditional economists now recognize the error. A 2008 Goldman-Sachs investment report about commodity shortages stated, "we see parallels with Malthusian economics." Engineers, planners, UN advisors, and investment bankers now commonly admit that the maligned economist Malthus was essentially correct. His work involves nothing more obscure than high-school calculus. The limits to growth are real.

Earth’s economics  

We now see that our galloping economies rely on handouts, massive debt, war, abuse, waste, and a diminished earth. Rivers die, species go extinct, forests disappear, deserts grow, and people suffer. This state of affairs signals social dysfunction on a global scale. The industrial world exhibits sociopathic and "ecopathic" behaviour. Innocent citizens sometimes appear traumatized, even while doing their best to remain optimistic and apply creative solutions.

Daly, Henderson, Ayers, Mark Anielski, Nicholas Stern, and many other sound economists have described more accurate economic theories that recognize natural value and authentic quality of life. What human enterprise must now learn is this:

The ecology is the economy.

Everything we use, every innovation, every human enterprise or simple pleasure rests on the bounty of the Earth. Economists ignore ecology at our peril. The end of conventional price puts ecology and nature in proper perspective: priceless.

=======

See this and other Rex Weyler blog posts

at “Deep Green” Greenpeace International

As intelligent and technologically advanced as humanity appears, we remain animals living from and within a dynamic ecological system. The fundamental error that has led humanity to the brink of ecological collapse is the spurious notion that we exist independently, that we belong to some exclusive club that does not have to follow the laws of ecology, and that nature is here simply to supply us with "resources" for our galloping economies.

The ideas below incorporate ideas previously articulated by Arne Naess, Chellis Glendinning, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, David Abram, and other nature-centred ecologists including Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter. A summary of the values that we might associate with a non-human-centred, genuine ecological awareness include:

1. The inherent value of wildness, nature, diversity, symbiosis, and complexity, independent of humanity’s desires or existence.

2. Systems: Everything in nature exists in interlocking systems. No species operates independently. The survival unit of evolution is a “species-in-an-environment,” co-evolving with all other living systems.

3. An ecological-self: The human sense of “self” expanded to include these living systems. The popular economic notion that people act as “private” pursuers of “happiness” remains a tragic conceit, destined to fail.

4. Biocracy: extending the idea of “rights” to all things, but more importantly to the ecological system itself, and therefore, limiting human interference in nature.

5. Nature, not a “resource”: The elements of nature that we call “resources” also (1) provide resources for everything else that lives, and (2) possess value in themselves, in situ. A river is a living part of a system, not simply a “resource” for human purposes.

6. Ecological design: Our tools must mimic and work with the habits, laws, and designs of nature: 100% recycling, lowest possible energy use, integrated living systems, low impact, and so forth.

7. Addressing human trauma: The destruction of the supporting ecology has traumatized humanity and led not only to poverty and desolation among the poor, but to anxiety, addiction, and violence among the comfortable. Witness the “holiday” to a mountain, seaside, or forest, as self-medication for this trauma. As I write, I’m watching a pair of Wilson’s warblers, who have nested in the thicket behind my house. I cannot quantify how therapeutic this is. Every lost wild place reduces human well-being.

8. Social justice, gender equality, and international peace: War, sexism, racism, and injustice not only cause direct suffering, but also contribute to ecological catastrophes.

9. Decrease Human population: A human civilization that understands nature will limit its interference by reducing its numbers. A positive step would be a target (perhaps over two centuries) of reducing human population to, say, a billion people, roughly the 1800 population. Global women’s rights and contraception would contribute to achieving this. The population discussion invokes fear for human rights, cultural rights, racism, and immigration. Who has the right to tell other humans not to reproduce? The answer is that the living earth has the right and will impose that right if we don’t. Excessive human population reduces the quality of life for humanity and everything else.

10. Simplicity: learning to enhance the quality of life with the simplest means and least interference in nature. This requires a shift in expectations, to rediscover the joy of simplicity and a supportive environment – the joys of nature, peace, community, family, and creativity. Less stuff, more peace of mind.

11. Action: We won’t solve our dilemma with philosophy or slogans. The new environmental human society requires action at every level. Primarily, we need a massive protection of wilderness and relocalization of human survival. 

12. Worship the miracle: Since the advent of empires, agriculture, and urban living, humanity has searched for paradise in all the wrong places, in wealth, power, money, and invisible realms beyond time and space. Humans appear to possess an innate sense of mystery and the more-than-human sacredness of life, but we have failed to worship – to “ascribe worth” to – the one thing that sustains us, the living earth.

If ecologists claim to work for the earth or if presume to negotiate with governments or corporations on nature’s behalf, they owe ultimate allegiance to their client, the earth. We dare not sell her cheaply. If ecologists represent the earth’s voice at the table of human society, we must point out that nature has its own values and purposes. Rivers, trees, and hawks are going about affairs as noble and important as my own affairs feel to me. No matter how powerful and clever we appear, we are not in charge of how nature will evolve on earth.  

Ecologists must help prepare human society for the depth and breadth of the authentic shift at hand: Nature possesses values, laws, and limits beyond human purposes. Wise design is essential, but we won’t simply engineer ourselves out of our economic dilemma, without changing our habits of excessive consumption. We won’t consume ourselves to freedom by tacking “green” onto every enterprise like a postscript. Natures own laws will be our primary guidance.

Ecology remains the subversive subject as Paul Sears said four decades ago. Humanity may flourish in a long run with nature, but only by revisioning human society as a guest of the earth’s living systems.

(Excerpted from my Deep Green column at Greenpeace International)

Dolores LaCapelle, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, Lynn White, and others built on this theme that nature possesses intrinsic value independent of human needs. Some environmentalists felt insulted by being depicted as shallow, and criticized the deep ecology movement as elitist. Naess, however, simply intended to distinguish core ecological values from human concerns. He referred to his approach as “ecosophy,” approaching wisdom from nature’s point of view.

Paul Sears called ecology the “subversive subject” in 1964, because it signalled a shift in awareness that would revolutionize all human enterprise, economics, politics, biology, cultural mythologies, engineering, everything about human habitation on the earth.

We either learn ecology, deeply, or experience a drastic crash. And by “learn” ecology, I don’t mean 10% recycled paper cups, solar panels on the ski lodge, and hybrid cars. I mean learning that we remain a natural species that must find our place, in peace with our host, fully integrated with the systems that sustain us. This will mean re-designing human technologies to a scale appropriate with a living earth. Learning from nature means shifting focus from consumption to the authentic qualities of life.

Naess articulated this well four decades ago as “simple means, rich goals.” Ivan Illich, about the same time, wrote Tools for Conviviality, advocating that we “invert” technological society from massive, centralized systems, to simple tools that foster “independent efficiency.” Illich depicted optimum human technology, for example, as the bicycle.

So-called “deep” ecological awareness refers to humanity’s reunion with nature. We are animals, and regardless of our technologies, we live from the bounty of a wild habitat. Even as we learn ecology and the laws of exponential growth, we still cannot engineer or “manage” the planet solely for human enterprise and benefit.

During the whale campaigns of the 1970s, Greenpeace did not set out to protect whales or seals for human enjoyment. We pointed out that whales possess their own inherent value, their own communities, and vital needs. We protected whales, seals, and forests for their own sake first.

An ecological renaissance does not mean a planet engineered for 12 billion humans, mining nutrients from every acre of soil, diverting every river, burning the last coal deposit. An ecology renaissance means honouring nature and experiencing the joy of being a natural being in a paradise that once fed us without any farms, oil, or computer chips.

For more on this, see my "Deep Green" column at Greenpeace International.