Posted on 10/25/2003 11:42:31 AM PDT by PushForBush2004
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the United Kingdom in 1974 and in the United States in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.
This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today -- governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late mediaevel Church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year 0 AD would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134 billion times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.
Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelarating is not very far away. Within five or ten years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75 billion tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around nine million hectares of productive land. As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.
One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America, the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies, the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery. Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately. ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasised.
It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good -- giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers -- turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.
Sure, it sounds so serene until one has a kidney stone, heart problems, or breaks a bone.
One thing we all could gain by living off the land is the lack of knowlege of writings like this, however if one was living off the land one would be more concerned about survival than even communication skills.
Shoot now that I have given it some thought, we would ALL be better off! We wouldn't fight so much about trivial issues for we would be too involved with surviving! We would be arguing and killing for food, not unknown issues like "global warming".
Outside forces are always at work.
In the late 1880s the big concern was that they were running out of whale oil. In big cities the biggest pollution problem was horse droppings. If you were to extrapolate both those trends out today we should be sitting in the dark, buried under a mile of horse manure.
It did not happen, why?
Things changed.
Any raw material we use today, will upon it becoming scarce will be replaced with something else, or we will do with out.
To the socialist of the world, me sitting in my nice three bedroom home with two cars, and a fence yard, with a kitchen full of groceries, somehow causes poverty in some third world country.
The socialist can not make anyone wealthy (except for themselves), they can only make everyone poorer.
1968 - I got out of the Army, no education, no training and the only work I could find was a $2.00 an hour minimum wage manual laborer on a construction site.
In the socialist world, that would be where I would be today, but in a capitalistic world, I had the chance to get a education and improve myself.
If 1968 was the year we "peaked" it is because that is around the time that the Great Society was beginning to be felt, and it is still a drag on this country.
As farm land goes I guess he has never heard that in the United States we pay people NOT to plant crops.
Lots of conservatives don't know this either.
The same people have the same faulty belief that more and more government is the solution.
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
±
"The Era of Osama lasted about an hour, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty." 
Toward FREEDOM
Only one thing left to say....
Be Seeing You,
Chris
He's a classic case of little learning. In this single bloviation he's managed to demonstrate that he is ignorant of economics, biology, geology, and physics, just for starters. Capitalism is not, for example, a "millennarian cult," it is a highly adaptive and flexible means of turning information into wealth. For another example, we've been 10 years short of running out of oil (as he claims) for the last half a century. I'd dearly love to place a large wager with Mr. Monbiot on this issue, say, $10,000, to be decided when I turn the ignition key in 2013. Sucker bet.
But here's the one that takes the cake for sheer aching profundity: The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Uh huh. That's the sort of thing that wows the coeds in the student union building and has the physics professors shaking their heads sadly at the poor sap who flunked freshman calculus. For anyone needing a refresher on the Laws of Thermodynamics, click here. This little bit of important-sounding fluff is wrong from so many angles it's hard to know where to start - for one thing, the earth isn't a closed system, and for another, if the interpretation of the Second Law he's attempting to cite were true life itself would be impossible - the order necessary for biologic activity would appear to defy the trend toward disorder mandated by the Second Law - but only if you're as entirely wrong about your interpretation of that law as Monbiot is in this article.
Well, consider the source. Monbiot will pop up now and again with this sort of superficial pseudointellectualism and "prove" that something that exists and is functioning before one's very eyes is impossible. At which point you just shake your head that asininity can still provide a living wage plucked from the credulous and pocketed by the glib, and turn the page.
I was an adult in 1968.
1968 was right about when things started to nose-dive and they haven't stopped nose-diving since (actually, culture--in decline since the late 19th cent--seriously began to nose-dive when the Beatles made their appearance in the early/mid 60's).
So let's make it 1960, then.
Yep. I'd rather live in an America permanently frozen in the year 1960.
And as for the more primitive 1960 medicine, no problem.
Just don't eat like a pig, stop smoking, get exercise--
And you'd probably live longer with 1960's medicine than you would eating like a pig, smoking, and sitting on your butt with today's medicine.
Riots in every capitol and on every American campus
Yes--and they only stopped rioting because they won . . .
which is why today's Republicans sound like 1950's Democrats.
So had I a choice, I'd rather not live in the world those rioters helped to create.
Well then--if there's so much room, why is real estate so expensive?
They said in the 1960's . . . . all the oil would be gone.
Who's "they"--the same people who are telling you now that we can fit the world's population into Texas with room to spare?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
