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‘Rampant’ society upsets natural order
Fazlun Khalid, BBC (Viewpoint)
…Pursuit of progress and prosperity, it seems, are based on creating discontent; consumers seduced to vie with each other in the ownership of the latest gadgetry; television and advertising hoardings constantly making one feel inadequate; the media exploited as an instrument of manipulation.
Until quite recently, the human race functioned unconsciously within natural, unwritten boundaries. They had an intuitive disposition to live within the natural state (fitra), though this was achieved by a conscious recognition of the existence of a superior force, the divine. This was an existential reality, neither idyllic nor utopian.
Breaking the limits
We are clearly no longer functioning within these limits. Two events in the 16th and 17th Century Europe allowed the human species to break free of the natural patterning of which it had always been a part.
The first of these was the appearance of the Cartesian world view, from which point onwards the human began to worship itself. We now have reason to support us in our acts of predation.
The second event was when the early bankers developed a system whereby they can lend money to others which they have created out of nothing. In Islamic terms, this sabotaged the balance (mizan) of the natural world.
This explosion of artificial wealth provides the illusion of economic dynamism but, in reality, it is parasitic – endless credit devours the finite fitra. If kept up, this would eventually result in the Earth looking like the surface of the Moon, as it is already doing in some places.
People who lived in the pre-Cartesian dimension, before we were told that nature was there to be plundered, were basically no different from us. They had the same positive and negative human attributes, but the results of human profligacy were contained by the natural order of things, which transcended technological and political sophistication and even religious disposition.
Excess in the natural order was contained because it was biodegradable. When old civilizations, however opulent, profligate, greedy, or brutal, died, the forests just grew over them or the sands covered their traces. They left no pollutants, damaging poisons or nuclear waste.
By contrast, and assuming we survive as a species, archaeologists excavating our present rampant civilisation are going to have wear radiation protection suits.
The Koran says:
Corruption has appeared in both land and sea
Because of what people’s own hands have brought about
So that they may taste something of what they have done
So that hopefully they will turn back (30:40)
But will we?
Fazlun Khalid is the founder of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences
(8 Feb 2007)
David Korten interview (audio and video)
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment,
The planet is rapidly confronting us with limits to the exploitative, dominator system of the past 5000 years. David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, and more recently The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, implores us to replace the old dominator-control stories with new stories — affirming life values of cooperation, community and interdependence.
(29 Jan 2007)
Living in a state of exponential delusion
Simon Ratcliffe, Business Day
WHY IS it that our planners and politicians understand so little of basic mathematics and its implications? Let me explain how serious the consequences of not understanding some basic mathematical concepts can be. Let us take economic growth, the basic premise of conventional economics, and the assumption that without it our economic model falls apart. It is important that we understand the implications and consequences of this assumption. To understand the implications, we need to understand the underlying exponential mathematics.
Exponential growth refers to a situation where there is constant growth. It doesn’t matter what the rate of growth is, only that it is constant. For example, our current economic strategy is aimed at achieving 6% growth over a sustained period of time. What 6% growth means is that we will be doubling the size of our economy in roughly the next 11 years.
Yes, at this rate of growth we will double our gross domestic product, which means we will double what we produce. In order to double what we produce, we will need to double what goes into what we produce.
This includes raw materials and crucially, energy. So, roughly speaking, in the next 11 years we are going to need to double the amount of energy we are currently consuming.
…Very soon we are going to have to face up to the very short life of globalisation. The inevitable decline in oil production will bring with it restricted mobility, and a far more localised way of living. Work, schools, social services, medical care will all need to be close to where we live. Sustainable neighbourhoods are going to need to be connected with good, reliable public transport. We need to begin planning at every level of government, in every sector of the economy, in every town and in every village for this. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.
Ratcliffe is an energy and sustainability consultant and is chairman of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil SA.
(7 Feb 2007)
Contributor Dr Johnny Anderton writes: “A fundementally important article which explains why endless growth is unsustainable, and why the confluence of resource crises are coming together more or less simultaneously to create “the perfect storm”.”
The Ecology of Destruction
John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review
…The point is that not just global warming but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn.
Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.
Transcending Business as Usual
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as “business as usual.” The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe.
Yet, the dominant solutions-those associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant class-emphasize minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. …In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all.
Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist economy-an economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation.
(Feb 2007)
Related from Monthly Review: A Marxist Ecological Economics and Change the System — Not the Climate!.
Author John Bellamy Foster is aware of peak oil and other sustainability issues, and Monthly Review is one of the best publications of the left. Unfortunately, their discussions about ecology seem to me too theoretical and overly concerned with whether Marx and Engels really did consider ecology in their works. At this point, is it that important?
Marxism has a profound understanding of the processes of capitalism. For more than 100 years, it has been a source of insights for economic and political thinkers across the spectrum, conservatives as well as leftists. I think that Marxists are right that one can’t really understand our environmental dilemma without seeing how capitalism exacerbates it.
I continue to look for good Marxist analyses on the web, but have found very little. The typical article has several paragraphs about ecological problems, discusses the flaws of capitalism, then announces – deus ex machina – that socialism is the solution. Marxist thinking in the past was (at times) much more creative. Perhaps it will be so again. Works on specific subjects, like those of Mike Davis, seem to be more successful than abstract writings.
UPDATE: More comments and links about Marxism in the editorial notes to Michael Parenti’s article Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism.
-BA
