By: S. Rowan Wolf, PhD
This work is licensed under a "Fair Share" Creative Commons License
Study after study, report after report, shows that global warming is real, and that environmental collapse is real, and that human beings are intimately implicated in the changes. The Millennium Ecosystem Reports are currently being released. More than 1350 researchers from 95 countries have been preparing the global assessment, and are now working on 30 sub-global assessments. What is clear is that there is broad scale, human-caused environmental destruction and that it threatens the life of the planet.
"The full costs of this are only now becoming apparent. Some 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on earth have been seriously degraded or used unsustainably - an ecosystem being defined as a dynamic complex of plants, animals and micro-organisms that form a functional unit with the non-living environment in which the coexist." Independent/UK 3/30/05
The current study adds specifics to information already known. It gives a hard measurement of damage done. It is likely to go on the pile of other such reports gathering dust in the offices of decisionmakers.
My perception was reinforced by a fairly extensive report on the Canadian news covering the release of the study. The solutions offered did not make sense with the report. Those suggestions included global poverty, social development and economic growth. While I would agree that all of these are important aspects of addressing environmental (as well as other) problems, if they occur within the current paradigm they will only accelerate destruction - not reduce it.
The current paradigm demands ongoing exploitation of resources and populations to feed over-consumption as a gauge of "development." It demands massive poverty in some areas of the world to feed the maw of consumption in other areas of the world. "Social development" is not a real factor unless it somehow benefits the big players in the global game. Given that this is occurring in an environment where it is clearly known that resources are disappearing, then the control of those resources - regardless of the cost to surrounding populations and environment - becomes the top priority.
It seems clear to me that in order to have any effect on mitigating the damage done, and to get on a "sustainable" path, that we need to change paradigms - and change definitions and standards. The gauges of "social development" and "economic development" are set in an environment of globalized hegemonic capitalism. Development is gauged by a nation's ability to develop an exportable commodity (including its labor product) and focus on a mondevelopment path. In other words, have one or two products as the focus of the economy which are then exported for capital to purchase those goods on the global market needed to live. This results in nations decreasing their ability to survive independently in exchange for a global interdependence. I might mention that global interdependence does not assure success as one's product may be undermined by another nation or technological development (creating vanilla chemically in vats, for example).
This whole system is based on an unsustainable transportation system dependent on petroleum - which is a rapidly declining resource. As the price of oil goes up (which it is and will continue to do) the cost of both exporting and importing goods on the global market will become prohibitive. Less and less product and products of labor will be economically accessible to consumers. This will decrease demand, and those nations which are producing will find themselves with less demand for export and fewer resources available for purchasing necessary imports.
Another aspect of the current system of "development" is for nations to directly sell ownership of natural assets to transnational corporations (and sometimes even nations). For example, sell rain forests to transnational timber interests, or mines to transnational mining interests. These resources are then no longer the nation's. That basis of "wealth" has been converted into capital to meet current needs. It is no longer a resource of that nation, nor usable by that population. Such is the process that is happening in the United States with the privatization movement, and impacts everything from "bandwidths" to oil and gas reserves.
No, in order to address the crisis in our midst, we do not need social and economic development, nor the end of poverty, within the current framework. We need to de-globalize and de-capitalize (at least within the current structuring of global capitalism). This is not a call for isolationism. The global environment is shared by, and impacted by, all of its inhabitants. However, the basis and focus of our interconnection needs to dramatically change.
Poverty does need to be addressed. Desperate people will do almost anything to survive - including destroying the environment they are in. Social development does need to happen. There needs to be the ability to communicate information and ideas. There desperately needs to be cultural competency (and by that I mean people's knowledge of their own cultures - no more cultural genocide, no more cultural absorption into hegemonic US/Western culture). This is critical because we need a wide diversity of ideas, and a wide diversity of ways of being in order to resolve the problems facing us.
Economy does need to be addressed. We need an economic evolution or revolution. We need to re-vision economics away from a system based on winners and losers, and away from an exploitative exchange system based on consumption. So economic "development" is not based on global export "interdependence," but on the sustainable healthy process of living within nations and regions.
So what do we share in this new scenario. What keeps us from becoming isolationist? We share a goal - a global goal - the survival of the planet. We share information, perspectives, technology. We work together. Global sharing of resources and products does not necessarily need to end, but what resources, what products, and how they are shared may change dramatically. We work together by becoming stronger independently. This is very different than creating forced mutuality through manufactured weakness.
It is here, that the so-called "Western" ideology has its fatal flaw. The idea that wholes are made of incomplete parts. Everything is a perceived as a mutually exclusive duality where there are no shared qualities. This belief finds its clearest statement in the defining of the relationship between male and female. Men are logical, but women have heart. Men are aggressive, but women are nurturing. Men are messers, but women are cleaners. Partners are referred to as my other (or sometimes "better") half. Inevitably, one of the "halfs" is the leader, the other the follower; one of the "halfs" is subordinate and one superordinate. In marriage, two "incomplete" persons become one "whole." All of this underlies a belief that two independent entities cannot come together - rather that it is weakness that brings us together.
The strategy of modern globalization is to weaken "wholes" so that they become "dependent" on others for survival. However, as with the analogy above, the system is not structured equally. The superordinates have many sources for meeting their "weaknesses," and the ultimate power to take by force what cannot be extracted by agreement.
The one item not mentioned thus far is population. Quite simply, there are too many of us on the planet. However, that is not simple at all, and the "population problem" is not one thing, but many. To survive, the so-called "developed" nations need to radically reduce consumption. Most of these nations do not have a "population problem" in the standard sense of the word. The United States, in particular, has a consumption problem. They can either radically reduce consumption or radically reduce the US population that is consuming at current levels. On the global scale of sustainable consumption that would likely require a 75% reduction in population (assuming "sustainable" consumption under the current paradigm). On the other hand, "less-developed" nations need to stabilize and reduce population to reach sustainable consumption, and decrease environmental destruction. [Believe me, if humans don't take action on this, "nature" will and already is threatening to do so. All you have to do is look at the new diseases emerging and fears of pandemics, or the emergence of "super bugs" a.k.a MRSA.]
Population is one of the "sticky" problems, but one which we can no longer ignore. It will be "solved" one way or the other. Either we will learn to humanely control our own populations, or nature will step in, or some nation, like the US, will decide to "eliminate competition."
The problems are no longer debatable. It is not a matter of opinion whether humans are destroying the planet or not - it is clear that we are. Of course, most of us only have to take a quick walk across the areas we live in to see that this was the case, but seemingly many have been convinced they are blind. It is also clear, that no matter where we live, we all share one thing. We all share this planet. The question that remains is whether humans will be a plague on the earth with the typical natural controls of that, or whether we will use our vaunted "higher development" to address our destructive path.
Another good report is the Climate Change 2001 Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change