The real problem isn't climate change, even man-made climate change, which of course is a bad thing and will almost certainly whack us. My son David just sent me
http://climate.pembina.org/blog/71 which is a great explanation of the present situation in terms of the science and its credibility.
No, the real problem is the fact that we're using up our planet's resources faster than they can be renewed, 1.3 times faster according to one measure. The way the earth has worked for a very long time now is by maintaining an equilibrium, a steady state: if you cut down trees, or they fall down in a storm or get burnt in a fire, new trees will grow to replace them; if you take fish out of the river to eat, others will take their place because there'll be more food to go around so more fish will survive; if you take water out of the river for irrigation, it'll eventually end up back in the system and fall back down again as rain, so there's no harm done. If you drop a grape in the garden, it will decompose and the ants and the fungi will get it and its goodness will go back into the earth and enrich it.
But this only works up to a point. When you cut down not just a few trees but all the trees on Easter Island or on Haiti, they don't grow back and the resource disappears. When you take huge quantities of water out of the Aral Sea or divert them from Mono Lake in Southern California, they start to dry up and ecosystems are destroyed. When you overfish, stocks become so low that if you don't stop, the fish disappear from the face of the earth and the waters thereof. And no trees, no water and no fish is a far worse scenario than no more oil, or no more coal, or no more natural gas, because you absolutely need the trees and the water and the fish, whereas there are all sorts of other possibilities for fuel: solar, geothermal, wind, nuclear, tides...
Now look at the global economy in the wake of the latest crisis. My god, people say, it almost stopped "growing"! No more "growth". We're so used to the metaphor, economies as living beings, that anything that stops them from growing must be bad. Living things need to grow, right? Those that don't grow well are "stunted", "retarded", "the runt of the litter", "krummholz". Not growing is a bad thing. Except that it's not. Nothing grows forever: at a certain point, when we've reached a good size, we stop. So do trees and fish and ants. Things that grow disproportionately are monsters. They scare us, kill us, gobble up little children.
And our economies are beginning to look like monsters. They've grown and grown and now they're too big, and they're gobbling everything up. And yet economists, and influential journals like The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the mainstream media, and therefore society at large, want them to grow more. Three per cent this year and maybe five per cent next year would be good, and so on for the next decade and the next century and the next millenium. Everything has to get bigger: GDP, businesses, towns and cities, our salaries. Zero growth, or, god forbid, negative growth, are unthinkable, the absolute worst thing that can happen to a country. You think?
Good economists, of course, people like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, who thought carefully about the world they lived in, talked quite naturally about limits to growth. They knew that economies couldn't keep expanding forever and they didn't see zero growth as necessarily a bad thing. But we've forgotten that. All we want to do now is grow, and the only way to grow is to make sure there are plenty more people, and that these people consume more and more stuff. So the rich world, with its low fertility rates, has to make sure it has lots of immigrants to fill up the workplace (too often in ways that are exploitative, in terms of pay, dignity and rights) and make it possible to grow more, so we don't lose out to the rest of the world.
All this growth is based very largely on consumption. For things to go well in the economy, we have to consume more and more. Countries that don't consume enough are reprimanded: "Germany, like China, [said the Wall Street Journal on March 16] has come under international pressure since the 2008 financial crisis to rebalance its economy away from reliance on exports, and to contribute more to global demand." Germany and China aren't playing the game: they don't consume enough. What a disgrace!
When I was little, my family's consumption was almost exclusively food. Nearly all our furniture, our linen and our kitchenware were either inherited, or wedding presents my parents had received. From time to time we would replace a glass or a plate, but I remember we had the same two pairs of scissors, the same bowls, the same gas stove, the same table, the same beds until I was a teenager and beyond. We had the same radio for twenty-five years. We eventually bought a vacuum cleaner and a television, and I remember quite clearly replacing my father's armchair, because he'd burnt too many holes in it with his cigarettes, but these were very special cases, written down in a little book where we kept track of the important events in our lives: March 1946, Brian's broken arm; February 1949, Sandra born; September 1955, bought vacuum cleaner; June 1960, Dad's new armchair. When I was nine, I got a bicycle which I used to get around and all through high school I rode it four miles a day to school and back, rain or snow. For doing dishes we used a sort of cheesecloth the butcher gave us. There were no kleenex: we used newspaper when we had to. When I was fifteen, I worked as a delivery boy for two years so I could buy a record player, and after that I always asked for records for birthdays and Christmas. Needless to say, we lived in the same house during all this time.
This sort of life, where objects are part of your life for long periods and not replaced willy-nilly, where consumption is about food and a few necessities (now including cell phones), is of course how most of the world still lives. However, to the delight of latter-day economists, that is about to change: already, billions of people in India, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, are beginning to consume more. Their economies are growing at breakneck speeds, they are flooding the world with cheap goods, often amazingly attractive, like Ikea furniture. And all this stuff will be used, and then thrown away, to be replaced by something more modern, more fashionable, and probably less durable.
What's happening in the third world now is simply what has happened in the rich world over the last fifty years. My family, mostly after I left home, became a little more affluent and did enter the consumer society, just like everyone else around us. We started to buy things in plastic, which changed colour or cracked, so had to be replaced. We bought new crockery, an automatic washing machine, a new carpet, new sofas, several pairs of scissors that weren't very good. Now with a family of my own, we consume what I consider to be disgusting amounts of stuff, though because of the childhood I had, I insist on continuing to use items that still work: a thirty-year-old food mill, a chip pan, pressure cooker, tools and bottle openers that are older than my marriage, my mother-in-law's kitchen knife and sieves. If I were allowed, I would use socks with little holes at the toes, shirts with frayed collars, sweaters with worn-out elbows, ski-jackets with some of the puff gone out of them.
