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 on 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 that 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 medieval 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 on 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 on 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 AD 0 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 accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 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 phosphates, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty percent 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 Brits fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded on 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 on the denial of ecological constraints. Every national news-paper in Britain lamented the ”disappointing” volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from a mall in north London, 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.
Some have even suggested that part of the solution lies in the sterilisation of poor people who keep having children despite their not being able to support them.
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors that 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 that is repeatedly emphasised.
It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based on 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 those who hold power today know that their political survival depends on 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. — Â