Our quality of life peaked in 1974. It's
all downhill now
We will pay the price for believing the
world has infinite resources?
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 31, 2002
The Guardian
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 UK in 1974 and in the
US 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 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 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 AD 0 would, by 1990,
have reaped a volume of gold 134bn 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 75bn
tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a
result of unsustainable
farming, which equates to the loss of around
9m 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 emphasized.
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.