I recently watched "Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie". It serves both as a concise biography of Suzuki’s life, as well as another rallying call for environmental change.
In the movie, David made an interesting comparison. He compared the market economy we have today to the gods of the past. Both are not “real, natural forces” (like gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, etc), but figments of the human imagination. Yet both guide how humans act and feel. We are expected to conform to both, and to appease both. When the gods, or the markets, are doing well, humans are happy. When they’re not, humans become glum and blah.
But, asserts Suzuki, if the market economy is not a real force of nature, then if and when it doesn’t work anymore, we should change it!
The recent global recession, and the economy’s destruction of the Earth, is proving that many things aren’t working with our market economy. Problem is, no-one is looking to change it!
Ironically, the business leaders and politicians that Suzuki has met have all been telling him to be “realistic”, that the “economy is the bottom line”.
Ha, retorts Suzuki. As if the market can be more real than real forces of nature.
How do I see it? Well, of course there are generalizations and simplifications made in Suzuki’s argument. People who blindly follow free-market dogma may scoff at them. And they would be correct only in their astute observation that yes, there are simplifications.
But pointing out simplifications only serves to distract the public, and maybe also themselves, from Suzuki’s main point, which is valid.
Suzuki’s argument isn’t that the economic system we have right now is completely failing us. It’s that the long-run costs of the status-quo are far greater than the short-term benefits.
In exploiting the earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate now, we’re reducing the resources available for our survival years down the road. In messing with our climate patterns right now, the costs to future generations will be enormous and unthinkable. It’s just common sense.
And what short-term benefits have we achieved with our overconsumption and reliance on the traditional free-market?
The post-recession market growth (the “jobless recovery”) seems disconnected with people’s standard of living. Just ask the unemployed 10% of the US workforce.
Moreover, while the status of the economy (i.e. per capita GDP) can be a crude indicator of standard of living, it is far from a measure of “quality of life”. Does our overconsumption make us better off in the short run? Not really. A 2010 Princeton study of 1000 US residents showed that incomes above a certain level ($75,000) do not lead to increased happiness. The Happy Planet Index, a measure of people’s well-being and satisfaction over their ecological footprint, also ranked Costa Rica at number 1, and the USA at 114, in 2009.
So Suzuki is bang on. When our economic system does not make us any happier, something’s gotta change!
We in the western world are sacrificing future generations’ livelihoods to create more and more and more unneeded luxuries in our own lives, luxuries that do not even make us happier.
This philosophy is not only intuitively obtuse and morally corrupt, it’s also evolutionary suicide for us Homo sapiens.
I won’t attempt to present a comprehensive solution here – that would take pages and pages. But I’ll just talk about a few principles that I think should guide any changes we do make.
First, government and the economy need to redefine and re-prioritize the “long-term”. It shouldn’t just refer to the 4-5 year election cycles in the USA and Canada, and it shouldn’t even be defined as the 10+ years during which businesses can alter their fixed factors of production. The long-term should be an indefinite amount of time in the future, and its importance should be just as high on the priority list as the short-term. This way, society can avoid what Thomas Friedman calls the “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” mindset: irresponsibility for the future, which in large part caused both the great recession and the environmental crisis.
Second, instead of trying to protect nature by putting a price on it, perhaps we should use our own morals and scientific guidance as measures to determine how much we can sustainably take from the Earth. Why not put a price on nature? The first reason is that a price on nature will simply offer poachers (and the like) the incentive to destroy nature even further. The second reason is because we will never get the price “right”. As David Suzuki says in his movie: “our economics system prices the things that are most valuable to us as worthless”. He’s right - look at the classic microeconomics example of the “Paradox of Value”: a kilogram of diamonds is priced far greater than a kilo of water! Also, in the global ecological context, the role of any one species is extremely multidimensional. If one species became hunted to extinction, the consequences to the ecosystem could range from nothing all the way up to ecosystem collapse. Despite the best ecological science, there’s no way for humans to know exactly how valuable any one species is at any time, and thus the price per orangutan or some other species is practically impossible to deduce. It’s a lot easier, and a lot better, to just minimize our impacts on nature based on our societal morals and the Golden Rule, rather than to calculate in detail how much each part of nature is worth. As Suzuki says, prices are imaginary; morals and science are real.
Third, the developing world should leapfrog the unsustainable practices of the western world. Just like how almost everyone in China now has a mobile instead of a landline phone, developing countries could go straight to renewable sources of power instead of burning fossil fuels. Why would this be beneficial, given the high cost of renewables over fossil fuels? Well, the cost of renewable energy sources is steadily declining. And, once the up-front costs are paid off, renewables will be able to provide a steady supply of essentially free electricity. No need to make weekly payments of coal, or to waste time transporting it to where it is used. For a real-life example of the benefits of distributed renewable energy, check out this excellent NY Times article about rural households in Africa benefiting from their first taste of electricity, produced from individual solar panels.
Last but not least, we as a society need to regain our sense of sacrifice and value of delayed gratification. The market economy and the status-quo cannot be changed instantaneously, and changing it will entail tough compromises such as possibly higher taxes, temporarily increased energy prices (as fossil fuel energy sources transition to renewables), and declining industries (which must retrain workers and retool their factories for a low/zero-carbon economy). So overall, we need to be willing to do not just what is easy, but what is right, regardless of how hard it may be.
There you go. Definitely a thought-provoking documentary. I highly recommend you watch it.
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