We're still acting as if the economy is the thing that's real, the thing with physical weight and force. We're acting as if the natural world is the abstraction, the intellectual concept that we can adjust to better suit our needs. That confusion will be the root of more disasters.
Jonathan Hiskes, "Worst Week Ever, brought to you by the fossil fuel insustry" - Grist.org
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
-Cree proverb (or ostensibly so)
Cause I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love
-Paul McCartney
I graduated from University of King's College in May of 2009, right about the heart of the financial crisis. During the convocation ceremony, president Bill Barker, in his speech to the graduating class, mused about the usual assumption that what happens in university liberal arts programs has nothing to do with the "real world." He called on us to question just how real the "real world" is, given that it seemed to be driven by quantities of wealth and value that vanished almost overnight. Where did they go? How did hundreds of thousands of houses get half-built on the momentum of financing that dried up like so many of the world's current rivers? The dreams of the homeowners were real, but their resources dried up. And yet we don't seem to learn.
If you want to know about the real world, you have to talk to an ecosystem ecologist, who meticulously studies the Earth's biota as systems, drawing originally from the engineering methods of systems thinking. Ecosystem ecologists note every input, transformation, and output from ecosystems, measuring the essential nutrient cycles and energy flows - they are the accountants of the biological world. They, more than any other branch of study, are aware of one of the most important contributions that ecology has made to human thought: "'Life'" is an ecological property; it is only an individual property for a brief flash of time." (Clair Folsome, 1979) Life, in effect, is just a very, very complex way of doing a simple thing: turning the sun’s energy into heat. Until roughly 500,000 years ago, when hominids began to deliberately use fire, the only way for an organism to procure energy for its own use was to either get it directly from the sun (autotrophy) or indirectly through eating autotrophs (heterotrophy). This system forms a tight nutrient and energy cycle in which every living thing is dependent on every other. It has to be remembered that, aside from the energy stored in the atom (nuclear energy), the ONLY way for energy to enter the earth's system is from the sun. All that fossil fuel being burned right now is old sunlight, captured and stored for over 300 million years by the Earth's former living systems.
One time I was riding with my mom in her car, talking about these things, and she mused "We're so damn smart, it's amazing to me why we haven't solved the energy issue yet." And so I used an economic metaphor. For the past 300 million years or so, the Earth's ecosystems have been putting a little bit of the energy allowance they received into their savings (fossil fuel deposits). They haven't ever gotten a raise in the allowance, but even still, every day, month, year, century, they have put a little bit away for the future. Every generation of plant, animal, microbe, and fungus has faithfully passed on this savings to the next generation, adding a tiny bit themselves. This goes on for 300 million years. Then comes Homo sapiens. We still haven't gotten a raise in our original allowance, but we've discovered the password to that savings account! We haven't changed our INCOME, but we've found a lot of SAVINGS. The economics systems we invented, however, don't make any distinction between that energy input that comes from our savings and that which comes from our income - it treats it all like income! We're spending our capital as if it is cash-flow! It doesn't matter how "smart" we are if the basic fact of our energy allowance has not changed, and we seem to be blind to that. The only "smart" thing to do would be to start recognizing this, tightening our energy belts, focusing on how to get the most out of our meagre income, and maybe investing those last savings into improving our ability to do so rather than destroying the last of that ability.
Clean rivers can be exploited to run industry, generate power, and thus make money. Forests can be cut down and their lumber sold as wood or pulp in exchange for money. Soils can be exploited to the point of desertification to produce cash crops to sell for money. But, as the law of entropy will tell you (used loosely), these processes are much easier to perform one way than the other. In the same way that you can't turn an omelet back into a whole egg, you can't turn numbers in a bank account back into healthy rivers, healthy soils, and bio-diverse forests. When a species is gone, it's GONE. When groundwater is polluted, it takes immense resources to remediate it. When the climate is forced to new energy levels by greenhouse gasses, the energy momentum of the system is a real bitch to bring under control. And the real tragedy is that once we really figure out how much energy and resources we'll need to correct our problems, we'll have spent most of our savings, and wished we'd actually spent it on something worthwhile.
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