Читать книгу Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World - Tony Juniper - Страница 17

Almost every week my attention is drawn to a new report highlighting our dependence on one of the ecosystem services I have been describing, and to our continuing abuse of them. The recent collapse in bee populations in different parts of the world is a good example. These insects are vital for agriculture because they pollinate many of the plants that feed us, including beans and fruit trees. It is not clear yet why such a catastrophic decline is occurring, but, alongside disease epidemics, it seems that chemical pollution and intensive farming have possibly played an important role. It is perhaps difficult for us to see a bee as an essential worker in the functioning of the economy, but that is exactly what these insects are: components of economic stability and well-being. They are as important as any bank in the functioning of the financial world. These creatures, and millions of others too, maintain relationships and conduct transactions that are essential for our continued prosperity. Remove the bees and we are much poorer, perhaps even ruined – although, of course, there will be those who will say that some clever technology will be developed to take their place.

I would say the same thing about the rapid depletion of marine fisheries, a trend that has long concerned me and a subject that I have worked hard to find solutions to. The colourful selections of fish laid out in supermarkets are the fruits of complex ecological processes that are now being severely disrupted by pollution and over-fishing. Soon they may also be victims of the increases in absorption of damaging concentrations of carbon dioxide from the air, as I have hinted. The result is less fish available for us to eat.

The world’s fisheries are worth $80–100 billion. They are the main or only source of animal protein for about one billion people and the process of catching them employs about 27 million people worldwide. In 2002 fish catches peaked and it is estimated that today around 70 per cent of fish stocks are being fished unsustainably. Industrial marine fishing has already reduced the total mass of large predatory fish, such as tuna and cod, to only 10 per cent of what it was forty or fifty years ago. And it is not only albatross populations that suffer as a consequence. Dolphins, sea turtles and habitats like coral reefs are all at risk from over-fishing. Sea beds across the world have been smashed up by bottom-trawling gear. Again, I have had the opportunity to speak with many experts on this subject, and they warn of impending disaster.

Even in the case of freshwater fisheries, which tend to be under better regulatory control, there is serious cause for concern. Pressures range from pollution to climate change and the way water is impounded using dams and diverted from rivers to irrigate farmland. And it is not only fisheries that are at risk from how we use and manage fresh water.

In 2006 I was struck by the findings of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report on the way water is managed. This highlighted the disturbing fact that ancient, local, traditional approaches to water-harvesting are being rapidly abandoned as countries attempt to centralize and industrialize water resources. It described how, in many countries where new technology and new ideas are embraced in the rush towards modernization, the personal responsibility that individuals and entire communities once felt for maintaining their own water supply is also disappearing. This is interesting. It follows the general trend in modern thinking where rights become more important than responsibility. In the light of the failure of many large-scale modern attempts to centralize water management the report urged countries to think more about encouraging people to recognize their responsibility and to reinvigorate traditional approaches.

There are plenty of other examples of what I see as flaws in our appreciation of our fundamental economic reliance on Nature, and I have seen how these are repeatedly highlighted by scientific bodies, as well as an increasing number of economists and governments. International treaties to protect species and ecosystems have been agreed. National laws have been passed and some companies have begun to look at their supply chains, so as to better understand their reliance on natural systems. All this is very positive, yet tangible benefits for ecosystems are in many cases yet to be seen, at least on the trend-reversing scale needed. Part of the challenge lies in how we have conceived our economic system and how so-called ‘market failures’ can lead to devastating impacts on Nature that in turn harm the economy.

In recent years researchers have begun to look at the scale of this economic flaw and have reached some quite amazing conclusions. One study that made a big impression on me was completed in 1997. It was an investigation which set out to estimate how much, in financial terms, Nature is worth to us by calculating the cost of replacing the services it provides – if we possibly could. The seminal paper in question was produced by a research team led by Robert Costanza and was published in the leading journal Nature. It was called ‘the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital’, and summarized research that set out to estimate the value of a wide range of ecosystem services, including wetlands and how they protect property from flooding, the insects that pollinate crops, the benefits provided by rain, and natural regeneration of soils – among a range of other services. The figure they arrived at suggested the annual value of Nature in bald, bottomline financial terms was then about $33 trillion. This, they said, was a minimum estimate.

Honey bee pollinating flowers. These insects are not only a vital component in complex ecosystems, but also a vital part of the human economy. One recent study suggests that the retail value of agricultural products produced in the UK with the help of honey bees pollinating flowers is about ®1 billion per year. In parts of China where honey bees have disappeared farmers must pollinate fruit tree flowers by hand with feather dusters.

What is perhaps more significant about this finding is how that figure was getting on for double global GDP at the time ($18 trillion). In other words, according to this calculation, the part of the economy that we measure, desperately try to grow and obsess about day after day in the Media is only about half as valuable financially as the part upon which we place almost no financial value at all andgive little attention to, and yet which is the ultimate source of all our wealth! The term ‘market failure’ hardly does justice to the scale and profundity of this oversight, but that is what it is: an economic failure of epic proportions.

Shanghai, China. A modern example of rapid economic growth. Following the historic pattern of development of many Western countries, China, India, Brazil and others are embarked on development programmes which demand vast supplies of energy, water, land and other natural resources.

Other studies only serve to clarify this state of affairs. One, begun in 2008 by the United Nations and called the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study, or TEEB, which continues to do its work, sought to highlight the growing cost in financial terms of the annual loss of biodiversity and the destruction of ecosystems around the world. They began by working out the value of the natural systems wiped out every year, be it wetlands or rainforest and so on. If you imagine this area as a factory, they estimated that this factory would be worth around $50 billion. But that is not the total loss. The figures are worse than that. Calculating the annual output lost from this $50 billion economic concern over a period of the next forty years and applying a low rate of interest to that output, their estimate was that, in financial terms, the world’s economy is incurring a loss of between $2 and $4.5 trillion every year because of our destruction – every single year. To put that figure into perspective, when the world’s banking system suffered its crash recently – described by the Media frenzy as ‘the worst financial crisis the world has seen since the 1930s’ – the estimated one-off loss of that crisis was put at just $2 trillion. We all witnessed the scale of that news story, but it is curious that the far bigger one has never yet received the same sort of panicked Media attention.

This leads me to suggest that the increasingly unbalanced relationships we forge with the world around us are of far more importance than is widely understood. Harmony between people and the rest of Nature is not simply a philosophical or ethical matter – it is a fundamental practical and economic priority. But it is not seen this way because of the way we have come to measure and consider economic progress.

During the twentieth century, and particularly in the period after the Second World War, countries began to measure something called Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. This is basically a proxy for how much economic activity is taking place in a country and is a measure of the output of goods and services. Once it became possible to measure GDP with some accuracy (and also Gross National Product, or GNP, the measure of income rather than output), it was a natural and short step to measuring ‘growth’ – the increase year on year of GDP or GNP. This proved a very convenient tool for assessing a country’s success, not least because it gave the impression of being a good benchmark for social welfare and national progress.

I grew up in this era and have seen the vast changes that have occurred in society as a result of what has become our obsession with endless economic expansion. I can see that measuring growth in this way is the logical outcome of two and a half centuries of industrial development in the West. It is, after all, a means of computing our continued and accelerating ability to improve human progress by harnessing technology and pushing the boundaries of science. What is perhaps less well known is that those who came up with the idea of measuring GDP growth cautioned against using it in this way, simply because this is not what it was designed for. Economists such as Simon Kuznets, who helped to establish ways of measuring GDP, warned that there was a lot more that it didn’t measure, compared to what it did. He wrote that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income". GDP nevertheless offered to begin with a broadly successful means of helping to create relatively orderly ways of expanding wealth and helping people gain access to more goods and services. One other outcome was that, as people got richer, so the flow of taxes to governments got bigger. As time has gone by, though, it has become increasingly worrying that the limitations of GDP growth are not being reflected in how economic development is pursued in many countries, although at least now the limitations are becoming much clearer.

One problem with GDP growth as a central measure of progress is that it only measures certain things. Others are left out of the equation. For example, much of the welfare enjoyed by societies derives from the quality of people’s relationships andthe pleasantness and security of their neighbourhoods. GDP does not measure change in these. Neither can it accommodate the financially unmeasured but very real benefits that derive from good parenting, or the care received by an elderly or infirm person from their families. It does not measure how happy we are, nor whether our lives are fulfilling.

Neither does GDP reflect the huge costs that come with clearing ancient forests, depleting fisheries, or loading carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere. Worse still, all these are the result of activities that at the moment increase economic growth. The clear-up of a major pollution incident contributes to growth; so does the sale of the complex drugs needed to treat our twenty–first–century health problems like cancer, heart disease and widespread allergies. While all of these things count positively towards GDP growth, they are at the same time either signs of diminished natural capacity or reduced human welfare. This is why I think there is now a very strong case to conclude that we are measuring the wrong things. The picture is incomplete.

We have inadvertently created economic signals and measures that regard many natural forms of capital as valueless, not least the stability of the climate. This seems to me to be a fundamental and pretty remarkable oversight, considering how the connections between the continuing degradation of Nature and its economic impact now stare us in the face. For example, some 75 per cent of the electricity produced in Brazil comes from large hydro-power dams. They are clearly totally reliant upon rain which, in the main, is produced by the rainforests of the Amazon basin. Yet as the forests have been cleared in pursuit of economic growth, and the ‘benefits’ of deforestation increasingly judged from this perspective, the cost of clearance, for example, has not been factored into the future price of producing electricity. In other words, the shortterm value of deforestation is not set against the slightly longer-term rises in the price of power that it will cause, never mind the myriad other benefits that are being lost.

Unfortunately, the blunt truth of the situation at the moment is that in order for people to contribute most to national success – that is, success measured by the growth in GDP – they might drive everywhere in a huge, energy-wasting car and then buy a new one every year. They might also buy vast quantities of unnecessary consumer goods, waste much of their food rather than eat it, and, after retirement, die a lingering death preceded by years of dependence on expensive, life-extending drugs; all of which would contribute positively to GDP growth. It may sound a pretty miserable approach, but these are the kinds of things that maximize our principal measure of economic success. With this as the dominant mindset it is perhaps little wonder that such grave imbalances occur.

The largest power station on Earth — Itaipu hydroelectric facility, on the River Parana between Brazil and Paraguay. Each one of the massive pipes seen in this picture is 30 feet wide. Much of the rain that flows in the river which powers this huge dam is generated by the Amazonian rainforest

More recent studies confirm that this economic contradiction not only continues but deepens. For example, the 2006 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment demonstrated how it will be impossible to meet our long-term aim of reducing poverty if we continue to deplete and destroy the Earth’s natural ecosystem services. Later that year the Stern Review on climate change was published. It set out how, if we do not act very soon, the ongoing pollution of the atmosphere can be expected to cause damage to the economy in the coming few decades that would be equivalent to the cost of both world wars and the Great Depression combined. To compound the urgency of the situation, since the publication of his report in 2006 the author has suggested that his original projections were based on an underestimate of the speed and severity of climate change and its likely costs.

When GDP was first adopted as the main measure of economic success the assumption was that growth would make us happier because it would provide the resources needed to make us more comfortable and that would offer us more options and greater freedom. Up to a point this has been the case. But even this logic is now under attack. It seems that beyond a certain stage the relationship between increased growth and happiness starts to break down – and that point now appears to have been reached in many parts of the world, especially the richer ones. Academic research has found that consumerism with its emphasis on the acquisition of more and more material goods does not for many people lead to increased happiness. It seems it does not nurture increased well-being once a certain level of comfort and security has been attained. As we shall see in the last chapter, this is all part of the design of consumerism, which again is a more structured ideology than you might imagine. Built into it is both a means of stimulating a desire for happiness by having, and an assurance that this desire will never be completely satisfied.

Professor Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey has called the challenge we face the ‘dilemma of growth’ and recently put his name to an open letter to Her Majesty the Queen that described the underlying cause of the recent economic meltdown as ‘a multi-generational debt–binge, inextricably linked to a concomitant multi-generational energy–binge’. He is not the only one to point out that bingeing does not lead to happiness. The Nuffield Centre in the UK has been conducting ground-breaking research on adolescence with a meticulous ‘time-trend’ study that began in 1974 and now spans three decades. It reports that the country’s young people now have ‘significantly higher levels of emotional and behavioural problems than 16-year-olds who lived through the 1970s and ‘80s’. Clearly, as we continue to liquidate the world’s natural assets in pursuit of what we call ‘progress’, the many social challenges that we hoped economic growth would solve – poverty, stress and ill health – for example seem reluctant to respond to the cure of yet more consumption.

Mahatma Gandhi made a crucial observation when he said that humanity has a natural tendency to consume. The crucial element that he felt was missing from much of the Western approach to life was that of limit. If there are no limits on that tendency, he explained, we can become obsessed with satisfying our desires, consuming ever more as we chase what little satisfaction we achieve. Gandhi was also very clear about the danger of this tendency if it is legitimized by a view of the world that puts humanity at the centre of things, operating under the assumption of an absolute right over Nature. He predicted that such a combination would prove explosive. It would be, he declared, a very destructive world view indeed.

I think the evidence suggests that Gandhi was right, and not just from an ecological point of view. Many developed countries have reported long-term increases in mental health problems. The combination of the stress of trying to keep pace with rampant consumerism and the impact of people living more isolated lives has led to many millions becoming victims rather than the beneficiaries of how we have chosen to achieve and measure progress. Our physical health has also suffered. Many millions of people are now classified as clinically obese because of their much more sedentary lifestyles and their fatridden diets. It is a depressing portrait of our age that we recently reached the point where the number of obese people in the world surpassed the 800 million who are estimated to be malnourished. This is but one awful example of how we are now living in a world of widening extremes. Carrying on as we are, ignoring the need for balance and a more integrative form of economics, is only going to force that gap to grow wider.

As we continue to liquidate the world’s natural

assets in pursuit of what we call ‘progress’, the

many social challenges that we hoped economic

growth would solve – poverty, stress and ill health

for example seem reluctant to respond to the cure.

I am only too aware of the argument from developing countries that they should not be denied the benefits that the developed world has enjoyed, albeit to such an overblown degree, but we must all recognize what will happen if we do not think again and think constructively about how to build a better economic system for the future, one that understands the limitations and dangers inherent in our present industrial mindset. We have to find ways of ending poverty, but we also need to look at the way societies have developed in the richer parts of the world. We need to question the unbridled encouragement of consumerism and, I am afraid to say, we also have to address that issue that so often is side-stepped as being just too hot to handle, the question of population increase. Not only because of what will happen to the very lifesupport systems of our planet if we do not do so, but also the consequences this will have on the welfare of people. As the biologist Paul Ehrlich has pointed out, ‘there is no technological fix that will allow perpetual population and economic growth.’ At some point we will need to recognize that there are very important limits to what Nature can withstand, and that these limits must determine what we can demand of the stressed systems we rely upon. I am absolutely sure that this question of population growth has to be part of the debate about developing a different philosophy for living.

LEFT: Aerial view of crowded favela housing contrasts with modern apartment buildings in São Paulo, Brazil. Scenes like this remind us that rapid economic growth does not automatically solve pressing social challenges. Despite decades of growth many countries remain socially divided at the same time as environmental damage has accelerated.

After all, the simple fact that I have tried to demonstrate so far is that pursuing ever more conventional economic development, based on growing the economy by promoting more consumption of goods and services, and doing so for billions more people in the next forty years, will place an impossible strain on the finite resources and inherent capacity of the Earth to renew and replenish herself. The simple arithmetic says that we cannot expect to succeed.

If, as some economists have done, we consider the services we derive from Nature as if they amounted to an annual income, then, as an example, in 2008 we had used up our entire yearly budget by mid-September. That was a few days earlier than the one in 2007. In both cases, from then until New Year’s Day we were living by liquidating our capital assets: the forests, soil, fresh water, fisheries and biodiversity. So we are already operating on a diminished return, and that is with 6.8 billion people. If the world’s population continues to balloon as every prediction says it will, and if economic development continues at the pace we are forcing it to, then this ‘credit overdraft’ is set to get a lot bigger and its effects a lot worse. By mid-century the idea of making it to September will be a pipedream. We will have used up the Earth’s depleted services by April and by then the degradation of our capital assets will have put Nature close to going bust.