Book Review

Introduction

In Part 5 of A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, Clive Ponting tells us that “The 18^th century was marked by a wave of optimism about the future and the inevitability of progress in every field.” “The Reverend Thomas Malthus took a much darker view of human history. His Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, argued that there was a permanent cycle in history.” “The Indian tradition, exemplified in writings such as the Upinshads and religions such as Jainism and Buddhism, is built on a radically different view of the world from the Judaeo-Christian perspective (that also dominates in Islam).” “Eastern religions, developed centuries before the emergence of Christianity, emphasise a less aggressive approach by humans to the world they find around them. Humans are a small part of a greater whole.” “The beliefs of gathering and hunting groups is best expressed by Chief Seattle who wrote to the president of the United States in 1854 to protest the way the white settlers were treating the native peoples and the environment of North America: ‘What is man without the beast? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. Teach your children what we have taught our children: that the earth is their mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.’ It is difficult to imagine a statement more at odds with the prevailing Western view about the relationship between humans and the world around them.” “The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the late 1980s and early 1990s ended the world’s brief and limited flirtation with state-controlled socialism. Unrestrained free-market capitalism became the only acceptable ideology.” “All these developments had significant implications for the environment. To the outsider it was clear that the system was on autopilot and that there was no aim other than to continue growth as far into the future as possible.” “The policies of international institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO were often extremely environmentally damaging by reducing environmental standards to the minimum.”

 

A NEW GREEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD

THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE COLLAPSE OF GREAT CIVILISATIONS

CLIVE PONTING

VINTAGE BOOKS              2007

PART V

 

Chapter 7: Ways of Thought

• The driving force behind human actions shaping the environment has been the need to feed, clothe and house the increasing population.
• The way of thinking about the world that has become dominant in the last few centuries originated in Europe. Other traditions, particularly those of eastern religions, have provided radically different interpretations, but they have been less influential.
• One of the fundamental issues addressed by all traditions is the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Are humans an integral part of nature or are they separate from it and in some way superior to it?
• The answer to this question is crucial in determining how different thinkers and religions decide which human actions are legitimate or morally justified. From these flow other related questions.
• In the last 200 years these religious and philosophical questions have been overtaken by questions of economics – how scarce resources should be used and distributed.

 

Classical thought

• The strong conviction running through both classical and Christian traditions has been that human beings have been put in a position of dominance over the rest of subordinate nature.
• The idea that humans have a responsibility to preserve a natural world of which they are merely guardians has remained a minority view.

 

Christian thought

The rise of Secular thought

• One of the major themes of 17^th century writings was the emphasis placed on human domination over nature and the role of humans in completing God’s work.
• The idea that the application of science is a powerful aid to progress and a vital tool to enable humans to dominate the world – lost with the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – is strongly expounded in the works of Francis Bacon.
• Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species undermined the orthodox view of divine creation and put forward the idea of the natural selection of characteristics that helped survival in a highly competitive world.

 

The idea of progress

• The idea of progress is such a fundamental constituent of modern thought that it is very difficult to appreciate just how recent it is or how other societies viewed the world before the idea took hold.
• The 18^th century was marked by a wave of optimism about the future and the inevitability of progress in every field.
• The Reverend Thomas Malthus took a much darker view of human history. His Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, argued that there was a permanent cycle in history.
• Human numbers increased until they were too great for the available food supply to support, at which point famine and disease would reduce the population until it was again in balance with the amount of food that could be produced.
• Malthus could see no way out of this terrible cycle, but during the 19^th century he was largely ignored as the idea of progress became almost universally accepted as the natural, unspoken assumption in Western thought, justified by the huge material progress, the ability to feed an ever larger population, the unprecedented growth of cities, the development of industry, the steady emergence of new inventions and the ever rising standard of living.
• Although severely battered by the events of the 20^th century, it remains the dominant view about the nature of human history and the prospects facing contemporary societies.

 

Other traditions

• Although men like Francis of Assissi emphasised the stewardship of man over God’s creation, he still retained the idea that humans were placed above creation.
• Other religions did not put humans in such a position. Chinese Taoist thought emphasised the idea of a balance of forces, within both the individual and society.
• The Indian tradition, exemplified in writings such as the Upinshads and religions such as Jainism and Buddhism, is built on a radically different view of the world from the Judaeo-Christian perspective (that also dominates in Islam).
• All creatures, including humans, are seen as part of a world characterised by suffering in which all need release from a continuing cycle of existence in which, through karma and reincarnation, actions in one life affects the next.
• Overwhelming importance is attached to the need for compassion for all creatures trapped in this cycle of existence.
• Humans are in a privileged position but not because they are rulers of the world on behalf of a god. Rather they are the only creatures capable of achieving enlightenment and therefore they should take the rare opportunity they have to escape from the cycle of suffering.
• Eastern religions, developed centuries before the emergence of Christianity, emphasise a less aggressive approach by humans to the world they find around them. Humans are a small part of a greater whole.
• They are set apart by greater intellectual and spiritual capabilities but this should be directed towards the goal of enlightenment and as part of the path to achieving this they should not take life unnecessarily.
• The ideas of suffering and universal compassion are far more important than dominion over the natural world.
• The beliefs of gathering and hunting groups is best expressed by Chief Seattle who wrote to the president of the United States in 1854 to protest the way the white settlers were treating the native peoples and the environment of North America:

“What is man without the beast? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. Teach your children what we have taught our children: that the earth is their mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

• It is difficult to imagine a statement more at odds with the prevailing Western view about the relationship between humans and the world around them.

 

The emergence of modern economic thought

• A new force has emerged in the last 2 centuries – the ideas of economics, a relative newcomer among academic disciplines and ridden with controversy among its many practitioners.
• It has come to exercise a profound influence over the way in which the world is seen and analysed and it is central to the way in which the environment is valued and treated.
• Not only the professed economic system of a society, but the hidden assumptions of economics and the value systems that it enshrines, are central to understanding the modern view of the relationship between humans and the natural world.
• Only in the last few centuries have societies developed that were controlled by the free operation of markets for land, labour and capital with other considerations relegated to a subordinate position.
• Gathering and hunting groups normally had few possessions, the idea of land ownership was completely alien to them and goods vital to the group as a whole were regarded as available to all and shared if necessary.
• Until the early 19^th century most people lived in small units, self-contained for many purposes, engaged in semi-subsistence farming and using the small surplus they produced to buy or barter for items produced by local craftsmen. They had little or no contact with a money economy.
• By the 18^th century, in the richer areas of western Europe, a relatively free market in land, labour and capital was becoming predominant.
• Adam Smith in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, shared the common 18^th century belief in the inevitability of progress and saw society as engaged in a process of continual improvement through investment, greater productivity and the accumulation of individual wealth.
• The assumptions of classical economics have, over the last 2 centuries, become deeply ingrained into modern industrialised societies. However, markets rarely operated in the manner described by Smith and others.
• In some sectors markets might operate reasonably efficiently. In others, such as agriculture where there was a major time lag between supply and demand, they did not.
• More important, it was far from clear that when aggregated together the sum of individual markets did produce the optimal solution for society as a whole.
• The Great Depression of the 1930s led to a new type of economics named after John Maynard Keynes. The success of an economy is now judged by the rate at which the GDP is increasing every year and is still widely regarded as the best measure of economic and social progress.

 

Marxist economics

• The most radical dissent from classical and liberal economics came from Marx and Engels in the mid-19^th century, carried further by Lenin and the revolutionaries who took power in the Soviet Union after 1917.
• Marx adopted the common view that nature only had meaning in terms of human requirements.

 

The critique of economics

• There is a fundamental flaw in classical economics and all the modern systems derived from it. The resources of the earth are treated as capital – a set of assets to be turned into a source of profit.
• Trees, wildlife, minerals, water and soil are simply commodities to be sold or developed whose price is simply the cost of extraction and turning them into marketable commodities, ignoring the fact that they are not just scarce, they are finite.
• Both the producer and consumer are encouraged to use up resources at whatever current rate current market conditions dictate. Since the most rational action for individuals and hence societies is to pursue immediate self-interest there is no need to take account of posterity.
• Markets and prices do not reflect true costs. Air never enters the market mechanism and is treated as a free good available to all. Levels of pollution rise rapidly because firms do not have to pay a price for the smoke and gases they put into the air or for the waste products and effluent that they tip into rivers.
• The rest of society bears the cost of such activities – water not fit for drinking, air not fit to breathe. These externalities can only be controlled through government regulation.
• GDP does not measure housework done without wages, subsistence agriculture, voluntary community work, and the black economy.
• The shorter life of cars and the more frequently they break down, the greater the GDP, ignoring the fact that individuals would be better off if they had more reliable, longer-lasting cars.
• GDP also takes no account of higher levels of pollution and greater traffic congestions and delays. Poor housing and health care are also not included.
• Social problems lead to a rise in GDP. In the US as levels of crime rise one of the major growth industries has been in crime prevention and security, but it is doubtful whether this measures an overall benefit to society.
• Over-eating, obesity and an obsession with weight and the stresses of modern life increase GDP.
• The Genuine Progress Indicator or GPI reflects a very different picture from GDP. In the second half of the 20^th century GDP in the US nearly tripled while the GPI increased by only 8%.
• E. F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful, published in the early 1970s, argued for an approach to economics ‘as if people mattered’ or ‘Buddhist economics.’
• Hazel Henderson in her book Creating Alternative Futures, published in 1978 criticised the fragmentation of economic thought, its failure to take into account humanity’s dependence on the natural world and its even greater failure to recognise the values and unspoken assumptions that lie deeply embedded within it.

 

Modern liberal economics

• From the mid-1970s there has been a strong reaction against Keynesian economics and a return to ultra-liberal economic thinking.
• In the 1970s governments lost control over the exchange rate for their currencies and gradually gave up the attempt to manipulate and regulate economic activity.
• The one tool that could be used to influence the level of economic activity – interest rates – was handed over to central banks to determine. Increasingly governments became competitors and suitors for the favours of transnational corporations offering favours in return for investment.
• The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the late 1980s and early 199os ended the world’s brief and limited flirtation with state-controlled socialism. Unrestrained free-market capitalism became the only acceptable ideology.
• All these developments had significant implications for the environment. To the outsider it was clear that the system was on autopilot and that there was no aim other than to continue growth as far into the future as possible.
• The policies of international institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO were often extremely environmentally damaging by reducing environmental standards to the minimum.
• Proposals put forward at the 2005 WTO meeting to end what was seen as environmental discrimination included removal of the recyclable logo from cans and bottles; no labelling to identify GMOs; an end to testing for toxins in shellfish; and the imposition of efficiency standards for hot-water boilers and air-conditioning units.
• By the early 21^st century the pressures of free-market capitalism, enshrined as the dominant ideology of the world, took little account of environmental constraints and possible future problems.

 

Chapter 8: The Rape of the World