What is ecological economics? by Robert Costanza

Robert Costanza is one of the founders of the International Society for Ecological Economics. This interview is reprinted from Yale Insight (2010); see links to his recent writings and the online Encyclopedia of Earth. Also CASSE, Wikipedia on ecological economics and ecosystem services.

Robert Costanza

Q: What is ecological economics?
Ecological economics is a trans-disciplinary field. It's not trying to be a subdiscipline of economics or a subdiscipline of ecology, but really it's a bridge across not only ecology and economics but also psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and history. That's what’s necessary to get a more integrated picture of how humans have interacted with their environment in the past and how they might interact in the future. It’s an attempt to look at humans embedded in their ecological life-support system, not separate from the environment. It also has some design elements, in the sense of how do we design a sustainable future.? It’s not just analysis of the past but applies that analysis to create something new and better.

Q: How does it differ from environmental economics?
Environmental economics is a subdiscipline of economics, so it's applying standard economic thinking to the environment. Mainstream economics, I think, is focused largely on markets and while it recognizes that there are externalities, they are external—they're out there. Ecological economics tries to study everything outside the market as well as everything inside the market and bring the two together.

Conventional economics doesn't really recognize the importance of scale—the fact that we live on a finite planet, or that the economy, as a subsystem, cannot grow indefinitely into this larger, containing system. There are some biophysical limits there. The mainstream view doesn’t recognize those limits or thinks that technology can solve any resource constraint problems. It’s not that we can't continue to improve the human situation. But we have to recognize that the environment creates certain limits and constraints on that, and we can define a safe operating space within which we can do the best we can.

Q: You just mentioned scale. Elsewhere you have talked about distribution and allocation as key parts of ecological economics. Could you explain those as well?
The three interrelated goals of ecological economics are sustainable scale, fair distribution, and efficient allocation. All three of these contribute to human well-being and sustainability.

Distribution has many different impacts, not the least of which is its impact on social capital and on quality of life. We find that if the distribution of income is too big, that creates competing groups within society. You lose cooperation. There is actually research to show that more unequal societies are less productive in the end because they spend a lot of their energy trying to maintain that gap. So distribution has a lot of direct and indirect feedbacks on how the society is actually functioning that the conventional view tends to ignore. It just focuses on having more, the idea being that the more we have the more we can spread around. But I think we're getting into a time where we have to worry about distribution. We may not always have more to spread around.

Allocation is important within mainstream economics. But to think that the market is efficient at allocating resources requires a long list of assumptions that are seeming less and less realistic—not the least of which being that there has have to be no externalities. We're finding that the natural and social externalities are actually larger than the internalities of what's going on in the market. In that situation, you can't expect the market to efficiently allocate resources.

How do we fix that? Well, part of it is internalizing those externalities—pricing carbon, pricing impacts on other natural resources and ecosystem services. I'm involved with a company called Trucost that works on just that, quantifying the external environmental cost of a company and using that information to inform investors and the companies themselves about how they can reduce their external cost.

Q: You mentioned natural and social externalities. What is a social externality?
Maybe the simplest example would be the run- up of house sizes and house expenses that led to the housing bubble. Why do people think they need a bigger house? It's not because they really need a bigger house to satisfy their housing needs. It's only a status need. Other people in their peer group have a bigger house. It's really an arms race that drives this phenomenon. And arms races are not really socially productive. They just consume resources.

That's a social externality: someone getting a bigger house causes other people to think they need one. They buy houses that are outside their price range, for example, and over-extend themselves, and have to work harder in order to pay off the mortgage. And, actually, their quality of life suffers rather than improves by having this larger house.

Robert Frank, an economist from Cornell, offers a solution of changing the income tax rules so that we tax only consumption and not savings, and we tax consumptions at a very high, progressive rate. You could have as much income as you wanted, but if you chose to spend it on luxury goods, then you would be taxed at a very high rate. If you chose to invest it in things that are going to be socially more productive, then you wouldn't be taxed at all.

Q: With the current economic system, growth is …
The god.

Q: So how does it look different in ecological economics?
Standard economists don't seem to understand exponential growth. Ecological economics recognizes that the economy, like any other subsystem on the planet, cannot grow forever. And if you think of an organism as an analogy, organisms grow for a period and then they stop growing. They can still continue to improve and develop, but without physically growing, because if organisms did that you’d end up with nine-billion-ton hamsters. There is a great video on this.
[See the video on YouTube.]

So, in nature, things don't grow forever. If you want to tie economics back to nature, you have to recognize that the economy is going to stop growing at some point. That's not necessarily a bad thing. That's the way natural systems work. So what we need to do now is make the transition from the growth phase to the steady state; all natural systems do that. Think of a successional system in ecology. In an open field, all of the incentives in that system are to grow as fast as possible, to capture as much territory as you can as quickly as possible. And that's what we've been doing over the last several millennia. But once the field is filled up with early successional plants, they're more cooperation oriented, more steady-state. They're not going to keep growing.

What does that mean in terms of the economy? I think it means a shift away from sort of brute-force competition towards more cooperative, alliance-building, stable kinds of relationships. And if you want to translate that to the business community, it means that the cut-throat competition is probably going to come to an end, and we'll have more collaboration among the different parts of the system.

Q: For the companies and the countries that are currently benefiting from keeping externalities external, what's their motivation for going along with this?
One motivation is that they won't be able to continue along that path. I think the current recession is just one manifestation of that. We're hitting the limits of inputs like fossil fuels. When oil prices went to $140 a barrel, it partly burst the bubble in housing. If we get back on the growth path, I think that that will just lead to another increase in oil prices, which will then cut off that growth again. We'll sort of hit the ceiling.

I don't think it's going to be possible to continue growing indefinitely, certainly not on the output side, because of the impacts on climate. This growth produces CO2 that causes melting of the ice caps and sea level rise and disruption of the weather, which affects agriculture. All of that eventually will put a ceiling on the continuous growth of the economy. We'll be forced into it if we don't take charge and make a more rational kind of transition.

Q: I'm guessing carbon would be one of the key levers to internalize externalities. Are there others that people should be thinking about?
I think the mainstream has been pretty lax at even recognizing that those externalities exist, much less focusing on trying to find ways to internalize them. I don't think we can use the market to fix the market. We have to use the government and other institutions.

Elinor Ostrom’s work suggests other kinds of community institutions. Common asset trusts is one institution we might think of. Think of the atmosphere as an asset. Make it into a trust that's held so we can assign property rights to the atmosphere, but on behalf of the global community, not on behalf of private individuals. And then once we've assigned property rights, we can say anyone who damages our property is charged for that damage. And that's the legal justification for carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system. But then we can also use those revenues to pay a dividend to all of the beneficiaries, which is everyone on Earth. That helps solve the distribution issue. We can also use revenues to enhance the asset, so investing in renewable energy and other things that reduce carbon emissions, or paying for carbon sequestration services of ecosystems.

Q: Looking at some of the businesses that are coming out related to ecosystem services, with carbon, they're globally oriented, but with watersheds, those, obviously, will forever be local…
Or at least regional.

Q: Right, so how do we have institutions at these different scales that are giving the right incentives? Does the role of a national government change?
To some extent. I think the role of the national government might be to set up and maintain these quasi-government institutions like watershed trusts, global atmospheric trusts, or ocean trusts.

Q: And what do markets look like in this system?
Markets do well dealing with goods that are rival and excludable. So you still have private goods, but they're the things that really are easy to privatize. For other things that are not rival, not excludable—like information, where the more you share it, the better it is—you need different institutions. Privatizing information doesn't really help society. It may help individuals who can prevent others from using it, but that doesn't help society, so we need to move back to more publicly funded research and free access to information. [Ed. note: public goods are non-rival and non-excludable].

Q: How far can win-win solutions get us?
I don't really know, but I can't see any reason to not pursue win-win solutions when we find them. But a key element of that is going back to what it is that you're actually trying to win. If your goal is to increase GDP and maximize growth, then I think that's the wrong goal. That's not really going to win. Then we're just continuing down the wrong path.

Q: What are some of the alternative measures instead of GDP?
Things like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which is not perfect but does at least try to separate the costs of growth from the benefits. And if you keep those accounts separate, you'll see that in the recent past, since 1975, we haven't actually been improving at all. Our costs have equaled our benefits, and GPI has basically leveled off since 1975, even though GDP has more than doubled.

If we switched and said that what we really wanted to improve is GPI, then there are ways we can do that without increasing GDP. In fact, GDP could decrease, and GPI could go up. We get what we measure, and if we're not measuring the right things, we are going to be getting the wrong results, too.

Q: You have said it's not a sacrifice to make this transition. It's a sacrifice not to. Could you explain that?
We're not really improving our well-being with this pursuit of infinite growth. In fact, well-being, in many places, is going down. And we're increasing the gap in income, which is affecting our social capital. So staying on the track that we're on is going to make us worse off; it's a sacrifice to stay on that track.

[See also: the Green New Deal for the USA and for Canada]

Toward A True-Cost Economic Model: Cheater Economics vs Fair Play and Long-Term Survival -- by Randy Hayes

The author is a founder of the RainforestAction Network and consultant at the World Future Council founded by Jacob von Uexküll: 50 eminent global change-makers from governments, parliaments, civil society, academia, the arts and business. This position paper is re-posted with the author's permission from Foundation Earth, his new "ecological economy" thinktank.

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Over the next century communities worldwide will experience an unprecedented shift of weather instability. Extreme weather events are ecological spasms often driving economic spasms and regional collapses. Concerned citizens and opinion leaders need to prepare before these eco-spasms proliferate. Far from being prepared, most leaders and power brokers are not mindful of the rethinking that is required. This working paper and appendix offers a brief economic vision, a set of economic principles, and list of problematic trends to help respond to the challenges as we work for a better day. –Randy Hayes

If I had a lot of money, I couldn’t afford to live as well as I do. – Mike Roselle, grassroots organizer and a founder of Earth First

A True-Cost Economy serves
society and respects the environment

Foundation Earth’s Strategic Response

It would be foolhardy to think that restructuring the global economy for long-term deep sustainability is an easy task, but we aren’t the type of people to give up. We will make this meaningful shift or we will go down fighting. Foundation Earth will put forth its solutions as thoughtfully and powerfully as we can, given our humble resources. Together we can help ensure that nature’s life support systems are healthy and that biological diverse systems, particularly large wild areas, are protected. Such systems are key to humanity’s wellbeing and the entire web of life.

Cheater Economics

There is indeed an “invisible hand” which left to its own devises promotes general good. That hand turns out to be nature’s ways – nourishing all things. The industrial economic invisible hand could best be called “Cheater Economics” (externalizing pollution costs). We call for a “True Cost Economy” based on nature’s ways.

This campaign can be thought of a twenty-five year process to help foster such a shift... the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns present sizable difficulties. Nature has a non-linear way of being. Will the soft landing of a semi-elegant twenty-five year economic transition be possible? Certainly not if we are headed to a four degree world. It will more likely be mini-collapses and rebuilding. We will prepare for both scenarios as best we can.

Nature’s “invisible hand” left to its own devices may indeed promote general good, but our collective campaign for a better world will need an active and visible hand. Please let us know what else you think we should be looking at and how you might help to enact this vision. Additional information on the model and the context of this work is in Appendix I. 

The Vision Starts with an Integrated Set of Goals

In this “age of plenty” vast numbers experience a deep spiritual hunger. Our current global economic system is achieving insufficiently and desperately needs to be changed. The goals of a better society aren’t so hard to imagine. In a simple straightforward sense we want highly educated/ecologically astute people, high levels of political and spiritual freedom, low infant mortality, low impact/low throughput lifestyles, clean environment with wild beautiful natural places, and a small gap between the greater and least financially well off people. We want to live in a close and proper relationship to nature, our communities, and the institutions we create. Arguably this would mean a rapid transition to a smaller primarily regional economy with less production and consumption, while improving likelihood of dignified and happier lives. It starts with selecting where you want to grow (wisdom, art, culture…) and where you want to degrow (pollution, industrial workaholic lives, intolerance…).

Picturing the New Era

A smaller economy tingles with vitality while producing and consuming less. Businesses respect the laws of nature and integrate principles of ecology. Systems function well within the carrying capacity of regional and global ecosystems. People value the fundamental cycles of life, understanding that nature supports all life, now and in the future. No one exports problems to other societies or to future generations. Everyone faces the reality of a true cost economy and benefits from it. If anyone pollutes, they pay the true cost of the hazards and damages. Conserving stuff, along with the inclination to consume less, lightens the true cost. In the new era, everyone appreciates that natural resources cannot be owned. They cannot be exploited – not for very long. There are no “corporate socialists in free market clothing” receiving subsidies. Market capital gravitates to sustainable solutions.

Yes, all this boils down to economic details. We exercise financial discipline. We balance budgets. We maintain financial reserves. We leverage debt with caution. We interact with other economies as partners – actually, as family members. There are still markets, mostly local, and we still seek to profit, but we internalize ecological and social costs through a truly transparent balance sheet of assets and liabilities. Yes, we seek increased prosperity, but we don’t attach this sense of wellbeing to the growth of stuff. We tie our sense of wellbeing to infinite possibilities in a finite physical world.

Central to the new era we will see that exploding populations will have stabilized and in fact declined dramatically. Via our numbers and by our commitment to future generations, natural systems rejuvenate beneath our reduced footprint. Food and agricultural systems will be much more focused on bioregional economies. Picture continental networks of more self-reliant local economies. Most of what is traded at the global level is art, culture, and ideas.

Effective governing requires informed people and a commitment to a set of just and wise principles. That is not where we are starting from yet we must shoulder our responsibility to work for the continuance of all life. Some believe that an economic paradigm shift from unaccountable exploitation is not only necessary, but unavoidable. What set of principles might this be built from? Here is a starting point that needs your help to improve.

12 Key Principles Guiding a Holistic Economy include (no particular order):

Interdependence - Responsibility - Carrying Capacity - True Cost - Non-commodification of Nature - Precautionary Technology - Compassionate Local Self-Reliance - Prosperity for All - Ecological Literacy - Public Governance - Zero Waste - Self-Correcting Feedback

1. Interdependence

A societal recognition that nature nourishes all things is a higher value then human self-interest. The economic rules reward solving problems together over personal aggrandizement. Any market system is subservient to nature’s laws. Cooperation not competition is the social doctrine and basis for the new economic order. Industrial advance crushing nature’s ways for the sake of capital is a thing of the past.

2. Responsibility 

Each generation leaves less and less of an ecological footprint, despite the population size, consumption rates, or technology choices. Every human has the duty to protect diversity within the whole. Nature has an inalienable right to exist, flourish, and evolve. Hard work to personally get ahead would still have a place in the system, but beyond sustainable consumption levels, family education, and retirement security most of any economic proceeds would need to support broader values.

3. Carrying Capacity

(sometimes called Planetary Boundaries): Free markets are not free from ecological limits. The economy and society must work to keep population, rates of consumption, and technologies in synch with (below) global, continental, and bioregional carrying capacity limits. The carrying capacity of a biological region needs to rule its human economy. Institutions of educational research and public governance need to be set up to better understand, and communicate appropriate operating spaces.

4. True Cost

When pollution externalities are internalized into the price you pay for goods and services, the “ecologically cleanest is the cheapest”. Wind and solar would be cheaper than dirty coal. Organic tomatoes or cotton would be cheaper than toxic tomatoes or cotton. When that is achieved we have more of a “True Cost Economy” and a more level business “playing” field. In a True Cost Economy the search for a bargain works for us instead against us. Dumping pollution into the river or sky is a form of “Cheater Economics” and has to stop. The True Cost Principle is analogous to the Polluter Pays Principle or the Internalization by Design approach. While everyone likes a bargain, it needs to be an honest bargain.

5. Non-commodification of Nature

Non-renewable resources (soil, water, land, primary forests etc.) aren’t to be treated as a commodity. Of the three basic categories of economic relationship include ownership, stewardship, and partnership the third one is to be emphasized in the general economy. Stewardship still implies some patriarchy (ex: I will steward you…), while partnership shows a more authentic reciprocity.

6. Precautionary Technology

When the consequences are possibly cataclysmic (such as cancer death) employ a “when in doubt play it safe” approach. This is what a mother does when raising her child and what we should do regarding the planet we live upon. The “burden of proof” lies with the initiator. Problem shifting is unacceptable. There are times when policies and laws should buffer nature from the market. This should especially be employed with all new technologies (see quote at end of this section). Envision the precautionary principle as a major part of technology policy.

7. Compassionate Local Self-Reliance

Employing the “Small is Beautiful” approach. Community-based, local production for local markets; trading within and among communities; new-style bartering without the traditional growth concept inherent to today’s money; and trading values for values, satisfying real needs, while helping others, rather than inventing new ones will be the approach of this economy. Maximize local, regional, and continental self-reliance, while actively helping other adjacent regions or elsewhere on the planet maximize their self-reliance (foreign aid policy). This is the care economy not the personal profit economy. Adhere to the subsidiarity approach, while valuing place & community.

Subsidiarity is an organizing approach or principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.

8. Prosperity for All

The economic system is set up to help all (now and the future) earn and enjoy financial and food security, success, or good fortune. Greedy individual advance at the expense of others would not be tolerated.

9. Ecological Literacy

Wild nature, operating according to its own laws, is our principal teacher. Nature’s laws are immutable and a higher order then human laws. Members of public governance are responsible to understand the principles of biosphere ecology and to help all constituents to understand nature’s ways such that all can support the whole. There is no economic development or social justice on a dead planet.

10. Public Governance

Employing ecological literacy with other humanistic values, society must debate the legitimate functions of public governance and then fund it to fulfill those functions in a thoroughly competent manner. This includes deciding the level of the social safety net. Government regulation is not the enemy. Appropriate government regulation is key to protect the whole for this and future generations of the entire web of life. As E.F. Schumacher clarified, a sensible political economy fits nature and human nature.

11. Zero Waste

The economy needs to essentially be a zero waste, closed loop, sustainable production and consumption system. This is especially true for non-renewable resources.

12. Self-Correcting Feedback

Every living system must have accurate feedback to self-correct. Note the distorting effects of many current measures of progress and welfare such as the Dow Jones Index or GDP. Accurate and holistic measures need to be employed such that people see what they need in a timely manner (i.e. some items weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, by decade, by century, etc.) to make mid-course corrections. The new parameters will measure levels of public health and education, standards of nutrition, housing, gender equality, use of renewable resources, use of non-renewable resources, the degree of local self-reliance, and the success a closed-loop, zero-waste sustainable production and consumption system. There will be indicators of preventative health, ecological restoration, society’s capacity to resolve conflicts, and more.

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced. – Jared Diamond

Problematic Trends

As we ponder an economic transition, what trends should we be cognizant of?

- The Age of Irresponsibility: the last sixty years of the industrial revolution (late 1700s to now) ...fostered a misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms along with adding billions of people. This has shredded much of the planet’s web of life and weakened our life support systems.

- There is strong evidence that the IPCC, with its thousand scientists, significantly underestimated the speed and momentum of greenhouse gas-driven ocean heating and biospheric stresses. We are faced with the need to make rapid and dramatic changes in the way we do nearly everything.

- It may be necessary to reduce GHGs by 80% by 2020 (8 years from 2012) to stay below 2 degree centigrade average temperature rise even though a two-degree rise is risky to life, as we have known it. Solutions commensurate with the scale and timing of the biospheric problems are not in popular dialog. 

- A sense of what to do in the short, medium, and long-term isn’t broadly understood. Structural solutions leading to a new economic model won’t likely be popularized in time to lead to any semi-soft landing.

- The earth’s capacity to support life will decrease. Extreme weather events will increase. The biosphere will spasm. Declining natural systems re linked to greater social inequity.

- The Living Planet Index reports that 1/3 of the natural world has been obliterated. The rate of destruction is increasing in most sectors. Our home planet is fast becoming uninhabitable.

Industrial agriculture is degrading or destroying the soil of one third of all land. Resource abuse of those life support systems may be a bigger problem than climate change.

- Floods and droughts from extreme weather events will disrupt food production such that the planetary population in 2100 could be less than at the beginning of the century.

- Disease will be more prevalent when antibiotics quit working.

- Eighty percent of the people in industrialized countries currently live in big cities. By 2050 the 80% megalopolis will be worldwide. There are about a ¼ million more people a day to feed and a ~¼ billion women who want to plan their families, but lack access to such planning services.

- The current economic problem was not brought on by Wall Street financial excesses, though there were many. Nor is it because of the commitment to growth, though that exacerbates problems. At its core the crisis is brought on by an ongoing lack of understanding and respect of the ecological principles that effectively are the operating system for the planet.

- Most elected officials and key agencies are subservient to big business; hence we don’t have “public governance”. For instance, US Treasury Dept. is too much of an arm of Wall Street. A few decades of incremental efforts to fix problems have little to show for the effort.

- Virtually all social change movements in the US are not involved in electing wiser, committed people. [Exceptions in environmental movement, at the national level, include Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of Wildlife.]

- Americans, left largely uneducated about ecological/economic realities and unorganized, are relatively helpless and will do little but watch the decline until that changes.

- Regarding the current global economic malaise, a return to... a flourishing economy with strong growth is not at all a likely option. One may see slow growth for a while with high unemployment, but it cannot get back (at least not for long) to “business as usual”

Author's note: Additional information on the model and the context of this work is included in Appendix I.

Murray Bookchin and social ecology

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) developed a unique philosophy of American non-violent anarchism (or libertarianism, according to some). After a revolutionary youth as a Communist, Trotskyist, union organizer, and anti-racist, he urged a “post-scarcity” utopia founded on ecology and local democracy. In the 1960s he wrote ground-breaking studies of chemical pollution, racism -- and ecology as a revolutionary paradigm. At his Institute for Social Ecology and as a professor at New Jersey’s Ramapo College, he explored anarchist and libertarian thought, denouncing Soviet Marxism and US nuclearism alike socially-constructed nightmares.(2) In the 1970s he moved to Vermont, founding ISE and putting his philosophy into practice (3).

Cooperation and interdependence, in his view, were the basis of cultural evolution and ecology. The so-called “law of the jungle” was neither natural in origin nor inevitable in history. The ideal society would be free from drudgery, human exploitation and class domination. See his classic 1993 summary What is social ecology? -- whose core principle is “dialectical naturalism”. (4)

“Social ecology advocates a reconstructive and transformative outlook on social and environmental issues, and promotes a directly democratic, confederal politics. As a body of ideas, social ecology envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward a world that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom. Historically, the Institute for Social Ecology has been a pioneer in the exploration of ecological approaches to food production, alternative technologies, and urban design, and has played an essential, catalytic role in movements to challenge nuclear power, global injustices and unsustainable biotechnologies, while building participatory, community-based alternatives. The Institute strives to be an agent of social transformation, demonstrating the skills, ideas and relationships that can nurture vibrant, self-governed, healthy communities.” 

-- from the website of the ISE, Marshfield VT. Current director is Brian Tokar (2^nd row R)

The ISE has links with U of Vermont, Prescott College AZ, SEEDS in Vashon Is. WA, the bilingual Centre d'Écologie Urbaine / Urban Ecology Centre in Montreal, Democratic Alternative and New Compass Press in Norway, Ecologie Sociale in Switzerland; and centers (5) in Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Latin America and Australia. It both influenced and critiqued the Occupy movement. (6)

Notes

1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_naturalism
2. Bookchin's Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982) greatly influenced the German Green party's four pillars: ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence.
3. His libertarian municipalism combined the tradition of New England-style town meetings with the rising Green movement.
4. For his other major publications see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin
5. more weblinks at http://www.social-ecology.org/global-allies-links/ , http://www.social-ecology.org/category/social-ecology-journals/ and http://www.social-ecology.org/projects/
6. See Ursula Le Guin's thoughtful comments “On the Future of the Left“ 4 Feb 2015; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement

The 59th minute -- by David Suzuki

In his 2009 Legacy lecture, "An elder's vision for our sustainable future", David Suzuki points out that the Earth’s water, food and air are finite. If the Earth were a basketball, the biosphere — our only home -- would be thinner than a layer of varnish on its surface. What orthodox economics and our leaders assume, unlimited growth on a limited planet, is suicide.

Human population doubles every 42 years

Test Tube: this NFB animation asks what you would do "if you could find an extra minute". Just type one word and watch the 3 1/2 m video. Here's a note on how it was made using live Twitter data, constantly growing, as an analogue to the bacteria. And an app for your iPhone.

Suzuki proposes a thought experiment. Suppose we are bacteria in a test tube full of food. It’s huge compared to our tiny size, but still finite. Like humans, our population increases exponentially. 

“At time zero you have one cell; one minute you have two; two minutes you have four; three minutes you have eight; four minutes you have 16. That is exponential growth and at 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left, a sixty minute cycle. When is the test tube only half full? Well the answer of course is at 59 minutes; but a minute later it is filled. So at 58 minutes it is 25% full; 57 minutes 12½ % full. At 55 minutes of the 60 minute cycle it is only 3% full. 

So, if at 55 minutes one of the bacteria said to its companions that they had a population problem, the other bacteria would be incredulous because 97% of the test tube would be empty and they had been around for 55 minutes. 

Yet they would have only 5 minutes left. At the 58th minute it would only be a quarter full. At the 59th minute, half full, And if just before the hour bacteria scientists invented 3 more test tubes, they would only buy 2 minutes of life: the 60th minute, one test tube full; 61st, two full, 62nd, all four. With no food left, the population crashes. Their technology quadrupled the supply (three more Earths), and bought just TWO MINUTES.

In real life can we add even a fraction of 1% more of air, water, soil or biodiversity? We cannot. The biosphere is fixed and finite -- we are past the 59th minute -- and every biologist I have talked to agrees with me, ”

Back on Earth, right now, we see no shortage. In our air conditioned supermarkets the food is stacked to the ceiling, tap water flows in our kitchens, oxygen supplied by the trees. We are in the 59th minute. Time to change. But rightwing deniers (like this one) insist the scientists must be wrong.

Our blog in 2008 posted a 8 min animation that tells the same story: “Are humans smarter than yeast?” Read the two previous posts on this blog, The line cuts through the heart, and Letting go of honest hope. Listen to all of Suzuki's inspiring Legacy lecture, and read Bill McKibben’s Eaarth to understand what has happened to the biosphere in the last two generations, and what we must do about it.

Population mind map by Jane Genovese

Eco-economics deals with the human impact on the biosphere in the anthropocene era.
The Kaya formula  is


Some what better-known is the Commoner, Ehrlich and Holdren formula:
I=PAT
Human Impact (I) on the environment equals P= Population multiplied by A= Affluence and T= Technology. The Quaker book Right Relationship (p.76+) includes E for ethics, I=PATE, to argue that we must both for scientific and moral reasons adjust our impact, making major changes in PAT to reach a sustainable whole earth economy. “Change the system not the climate,” as the protesters chanted at the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen and later. Humanity is still far from E action. We are robbing our grandchildren of their future.

Update - Suzuki Leap Manifesto in 2015, its signatories, and recent news of the movement.

Letting Go of Honest Hope - by Bob McGahey

Bob McGahey is a Quaker deep ecologist, who trained with Joanna Macy, member of North Carolina Interfaith Power and Light,  and the ecojustice committee of the North Carolina Council of Churches. This post from his blog Ecospirit is republished with his permission

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Honest hope. I have insisted upon it for several years now, ever since reading Dianne Dumanoski, who finishes The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth with a short chapter by that title. “In times of danger, bitter truths serve us better than sweet lies.” Blind hope kills, whereas honest hope accepts the immense uncertainty of the survival of civilization, even higher life, in an era beset by accelerating climate disequilibrium, which is offset by the tremendous capacity for adaptation and resilience shown by human evolutionary history.

Georges de la Tour, St Joseph the carpenter (1642)

Honest hope is like tough love, continually tested by the realization that the only certainty is immense uncertainty. Nature has always been uncertain. But since we've flourished during a long calm, the 10,000-year Holocene Epoch, we have become lazy. We take it for granted that farmers will continue to feed 7 to 9 billion people and that we will be able to suck out all the fossil fuels the Earth has sequestered to replace animal power. We are used to easy street. The Big Easy – New Orleans before Katrina. Though humanity has made it through some very tough times, especially repeated eras of glaciation, we have never faced rapid warming and all that sets in motion in the biosphere. As one climate scientist recently said, “They have no idea of what's coming.” The scale of climate disruption we face is unprecedented.

Instead of honest hope, hydra-headed denial fuels a flight from uncertainty into Providence. Dumanoski outlines three forms of providential salvation: faith in the technological fixes that have gotten us through every bottleneck until now; deliverance by the invisible hand of the market; and the clincher – deliverance through Apocalypse and the end of human history. Though these may all sound like the overconfidence of the political right, these fantasies lurk in us all to some degree.

Grimly clinging to my last thread of honest hope, I recently led a retreat entitled “Collapsing Consciously.” Readers of this blog might recognize the title from my review of Carolyn Baker's book Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times (March 31). Though the very structure of my retreats, which are based upon Joanna Macy's work in moving through despair to an awakened level of coping, insures residual or renewed hope, my dogged reading of the latest climate science made my statement about honest hope the most tenuous ever. I told the group that honest hope remained, but that it was tied to the thinnest of moorings.

I was completely honest with the group, outlining the latest IPCC report (as well as its glaring omission of the Arctic methane emergency), the tenuousness of the world economic order, and the continuing geopolitical impasse over an international treaty on climate. The latter was leavened by my joining the People's Climate March the preceding week, but we don't know yet if that remarkable event will lead to the necessary shift from protective nationalism to an awakened last-hour accord. And in the central exercise, the Truth Mandala, I once again confessed my fear that we would not survive imminent climate apocalypse.

But the process was resilient enough to allow the group to leaven my darkness and fear, as participants shared their openness to the movement of the Spirit in the midst of dire uncertainty. One person, who had spoken twice of her despair, anger, and deep sadness over the earth crisis came forward, placed both hands on the floor, and testified to the hope that upheld everything. This brought me to a place of wonderment, for shortly before I had pointed out that the very ground of this ritual confession of our deepest feelings was hope. But I had not experienced hope as I spoke. Her eloquent act brought the Buddha's mudra, touch the earth, to bear on our ritual.

As I reviewed the retreat afterwards, rereading Dumanoski's chapter on honest hope. I was startled to realize that my utilization of her concept had subtly morphed over time into a desire that, with some tweaking, the established order would survive. Despite years of wrestling with the central moral dilemma of anthropogenic global ecocrisis, I am still seized by our cultural myth, fearing a break with comforts and the tenuous security of the established order. Thus when I experience myself as cooly rational, I am still provisionally open to techno-fixes like geoengineering, nuclear power, or GMO's as inevitable in the brave new Anthropocene. But this is not honest hope. Honest hope means accepting the challenge of devolving from a complex extractive civilization to a cultural order that is resilient in the face of warming.

“We don't know.” So often my audience says this when I point fatalistically to our impending end. Too often this simply covers a deep-rooted denial of the gravity of our situation. Sometimes it is the simple child-like faith that “God wouldn't let us perish.” But it can also be a genuine openness to the possibility for something new and unforeseen hidden in the nucleus of our uncertain moment in history.

Towards the end of that retreat, I actually found myself saying we don't know for the first time. A sense of wonder and possibility was moving through the room; one man named it the Holy Spirit. The place from which that sentence surprisingly emerged was different from honest hope. And since I later realized that what I was calling honest hope was really a rationalization for a last-ditch confidence that our way of life could be salvaged in some way, then the statement was a tentative doorway to something deeper, even scarier, and more real.

There is a people's climate movement building, with many laudable efforts such as fossil folly divestment, Transition Towns, rapid renewable ramp-ups, shifts in agricultural practices, and a growing call for replacing capitalism with an economic system that is responsive to the earth's stability as well as a chastened but sustainable human presence. But it appears as if we simply don't have time to make changes; we have squandered too many chances. The days of honest hope are coming to an end.

So if we relinquish honest hope, what are we left with? We are in a chiasm strongly reminiscent of the Hebrew community after the fall of the First Temple. It is time for a prophetic response that acknowledges the deep sadness and regret of our seemingly impossible dilemma. Such a response would acknowledge that You have broken God's covenant and will suffer for your ecological sins – but be nevertheless grounded in a deep place of hope. The Hebrew word is batah: confidence, security, without care. It is redoubled in the New Testament with the Greek elpis (“whence cometh our help”) - for elpis is the root of “help.” Neither of these terms can be modified by a downside, as we do with “hope” in everyday speech. Biblical hope is complete, total. It is an unshakable reality, not a feeling.

Even spiritually-minded moderns do not often show this kind of hope. Usually when I hear folks testify to it, I doubt them; surely their faith has not been sufficiently tested. Well we are being tested, and “honest hope” is not going to answer the test.

No matter how bad things get, we need to continue to act as if our actions mattered, honest hope or no, cultivating batah/elpis by something like Paul's continual prayer. When asked the reason for our hope as the world as we know it crumbles around us, answer as Paul did in I Peter 3:15 – Be prepared to give the defense that the Light (Christ) is in your Heart... The experience of hope gives grounds for faith, what I call cosmological faith. This is not collapsing into the arms of Apocalypse, confident of a place in heaven, but seeding the hope of the new Phoenix, whose form we know not. Cosmological faith, rooted in biblical hope, is my anchor when honest hope has become thin to the point of vanishing.

Beyond Sustainability: The Road to Regenerative Capitalism -- by John Fullerton

John Fullerton 

Thanks to John Fullerton and Capital Institute for permission to cross-post this article. 

Thomas Berry tells us, “It’s all a question of story.  We are in trouble now because we don’t have a good story.  We are in between stories.  The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective.”

For better or worse, economy, from the local to the global, is now a central component of the human story.  In our search for a new story, Capital Institute, together with our Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy project partners and our collaborators – practitioners and trans-disciplinary academics alike – is offering up a vision of what we are calling “Regenerative Capitalism.”

As part of that effort, we recently convened a small gathering of sustainability experts from diverse backgrounds to discuss the Field Guide project as well as a draft white paper entitled “Regenerative Capitalism,” which draws on business models studied in the Field Guide, integrating them into a theoretical framework.  (You can the read a summary of the draft paper here.) 

Rockstrom's planetary boundaries
from Stockholm Resilience

The new story, we believe, must be grounded in the physical reality of a planet whose natural resources and waste sinks are not unlimited, and the ethical reality that unbounded inequity is intolerable.  The modern expansionist material economy story, despite its magnificent achievements in the past two centuries when its scale was far smaller, fails on both grounds.

The new story must also be relevant to a growing global population of seven billion people, half of which is currently living in urban environments, with the trend of continued urbanization appearing to be locked in.  China alone anticipates building cities for 250 million new inhabitants in just the next five years.  That’s thirty New York Cities.

The new story must also grapple with the reality of global corporations whose scale and span of influence exceed that of all but a few nation states and whose capital investment decisions will lock in much of the underlying infrastructure and technology choices that will define the quality and scale of the “global economy” of the future.  This reality exists despite the fact that these global actors employ only a small minority of the world’s population, even after three decades of “globalization.”

Regenerative Capitalism has two components: first, a shift to a “regenerative paradigm,” and second, an evolution to a more complex understanding of what we need to understand as “capital” if the economy is to be ecologically sustainable and also promote shared well-being.

 The regenerative paradigm is adapted from the leading edge of the design field.  It demands a profound shift from the mechanistic and reductionist worldview of the industrial age, to a holistic, living systems or ecological worldview, consistent with our latest understanding of how the universe (including life on this planet) actually works.  It understands the economy as embedded in – not separate from – culture, and embedded in the healthy working of the biosphere.  In this worldview, social ills and the environment are not “special interests,” separable from the whole, anymore than a healthy circulatory system is separable from a healthy person.

Leading systems thinker and corporate consultant Carol Sanford presented the conceptual framework for a regenerative paradigm at our June convening.  Carol says this new paradigm requires a new kind of thinking, allowing us to reconnect with essence at the level of the individual, at the level of institution, and even at the systems level.  View her talk here.

I then presented ideas within my “Regenerative Capitalism” white paper, including the eight elements of a regenerative economy and the eight elements of regenerative finance.  See the video:

Attendees also had an opportunity to engage with the entrepreneurial leaders of our Field Guide project, and to see elements of the regenerative economy manifesting in their transformational and scalable models.  Our discussion thus integrated theory with practice, as these visionaries described how they have infused theory into their everyday operations.  At the same time, their practice has informed the theoretical framework developed in the white paper.

A premise of Capital Institute is that the transformation of finance is a necessary enabler for the transition to a regenerative economy.  Participants of our convening began to explore what this transformation might entail, particularly focusing on the important role of investment in economic transition.

The convening provided a rich deepening of understanding, some heated debate, many new or under-represented perspectives, and a realization of how difficult and unknowable a paradigm shift of the magnitude contemplated is likely be.  We will be revising our white paper over the summer based on the invaluable input from the convening and other generous and thoughtful readers of the white paper.  A second draft will be posted on the website for public comment prior to final publication. 

Like the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall, or the seemingly unimaginable end of Apartheid, the emergence of a new economic story that will succeed our present unsustainable “Finance Capitalism,” whether it’s Regenerative Capitalism or something quite different, is likely to seem inevitable only in hindsight.  But the work of its emergence is well underway, as the subjects of our Field Guide and many other regenerative projects make clear. 

In the face of overwhelming distraction from powerful, entrenched interests of the old story, our challenge at this time is simply to see what is emerging before our eyes.

Additional references (clickable links): John Fullerton's blog at CapitalInstitute.org; the circular economy.

Man, Conqueror of Nature, Dead at 408

John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer of the Ancient Order of Druids of America wrote this gentle satire, published 4 Dec 2014 in his blog. Cross-posted with his permission. Thanks to Phil Emmi for the reference.

Man, the conqueror of Nature, died Monday night of a petroleum overdose, the medical examiner’s office confirmed this morning. The abstract representation of the human race was 408 years old. The official announcement has done nothing to quell the rumors of suicide and substance abuse that have swirled around the death scene since the first announcement yesterday morning, adding new legal wrinkles to the struggle already under way over Man’s inheritance.

Man’s closest associates disagree about what happened. His longtime friend and confidant Technology thinks it was suicide. “Sure, Man liked to have a good time,” he said at a press conference Tuesday evening, “and he was a pretty heavy user, but it wasn’t like he was out of control or anything. No, I’m sure he did it on purpose. Just a couple of weeks ago we were hanging out at his place, looking up at the moon and talking about the trips we made out there, and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, Tech, that was a good time—a really good time. I wonder if I’ll ever do anything like that again.’ He got into moods like that more and more often in the last few years. I tried to cheer him up, talking about going to Mars or what have you, and he’d go along with it but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it.”

Other witnesses told a different story. “It was terrifying,” said a housekeeper who requested that her name not be given. “He was using more and more of the stuff every day, shooting it up morning, noon and night, and when his connections couldn’t get him as much as he wanted, he’d go nuts. You’d hear him screaming at the top of his lungs and pounding his fists on the walls. Everybody on the staff would hide whenever that happened, and it happened more and more often—the amount he was using was just unbelievable. Some of his friends tried to talk him into getting help, or even just cutting back a little on his petroleum habit, but he wouldn’t listen.”

The medical examiner’s office and the police are investigating Man’s death right now. Until their report comes out, the tragic end of humanity’s late self-image remains shrouded in mystery and speculation.

A Tumultuous Family Saga

“He was always a rebel,” said Clio, the muse of history, in an exclusive interview in her office on Parnassus this morning. “That was partly his early environment, of course.  He was born in the household of Sir Francis Bacon, remember, and brought up by some of the best minds of seventeenth-century Europe; an abstract image of humanity raised by people like that wasn’t likely to sit back and leave things as they were, you know. Still, I think there were strong family influences too. His father was quite the original figure himself, back in the day.”

Though almost forgotten nowadays, Man’s father Everyman, the abstract representation of medieval humanity, was as mediagenic in his own time as his son became later on.  The star of a wildly popular morality play and the subject of countless biographies, Everyman was born in extreme poverty in a hovel in post-Roman Europe, worked his way up to become a wealthy and influential figure in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, then stepped aside from his financial and political affairs to devote his last years to religious concerns. Savage quarrels between father and son kept the broadsheet and pamphlet press fed with juicy stories all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and eventually led to their final breach over Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1859.

By that time Man was already having problems with substance abuse. “He was just using coal at first,” Technology reminisced. “Well, let’s be fair, we both were.  That was the hot new drug in those days.  It was cheap, you could get it without too much hassle, and everybody on the cutting edge was using it. I remember one trip we took together—it was on one of the early railroads, at thirty miles an hour. We thought that was really fast.  Were we innocent back then, or what?”

Clio agreed with that assessment. “I don’t think Man had any idea what he was getting into, when he started abusing coal,” she said. “It was an easy habit to fall into, very popular in avant-garde circles just then, and nobody yet knew much about the long term consequences of fossil fuel abuse. Then, of course, he started his campaign to conquer Nature, and he found out very quickly that he couldn’t keep up the pace he’d set for himself without artificial help. That was when the real tragedy began.”

The Conquest of Nature

It’s an open question when Man first decided to conquer Nature. “The biographers all have their own opinions on that,” Clio explained, gesturing at a shelf loaded with books on Man’s dramatic and controversial career.  “Some trace it back to the influence of his foster-father Francis Bacon, or the other mentors and teachers he had in his early days. 

Others say that the inspiration came from the crowd he ran with when he was coming of age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He used to tell interviewers that it was a family thing, that everyone in his family all the way back to the Stone Age had been trying to conquer Nature and he was just the one who finally succeeded, but that won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. Examine the career of Everyman, for example, and you’ll find that he wasn’t interested in conquering Nature; he wanted to conquer himself.”

“The business about conquering Nature?” Technology said. “He got into that back when we were running around being young and crazy. I think he got the idea originally from his foster-father or one of the other old guys who taught him when he was a kid, but as far as I know it wasn’t a big deal to him until later. Now I could be wrong, you know. I didn’t know him that well in those days; I was mostly just doing my thing then, digging mines, building water mills, stuff like that. We didn’t get really close until we both got involved in this complicated coal deal; we were both using, but I was dealing, too, and I could get it cheaper than anybody else—I was using steam, and none of the other dealers knew how to do that. So we got to be friends and we had some really wild times together, and now and then when we were good and ripped, he’d get to talking about how Nature ought to belong to him and one of these days he was going to hire some soldiers and just take it.

“Me, I couldn’t have cared less, except that Man kept on bringing me these great technical problems, really sweet little puzzles, and I’ve always been a sucker for those. He figured out how I was getting the coal for him so cheap, you see, and guessed that I could take those same tricks and use them for his war against Nature. For me, it was just a game, for Nature, against Nature, I couldn’t care less.  Just give me a problem and let me get to work on it, and I’m happy.

“But it wasn’t just a game for him. I think it was 1774 when he really put me to work on it.  He’d hired some mercenaries by then, and was raising money and getting all kind of stuff ready for the war.  He wanted steam engines so, like the man said, it was steam engine time—I got working on factories, railroads, steamships, all the rest. He already had some of his people crossing the border into Nature to seize bits of territory before then, but the eighteenth century, that’s when the invasion started for real. I used to stand next to him at the big rallies he liked to hold in those days, with all the soldiers standing in long lines, and he’d go into these wild rants about the glorious future we were going to see once Nature was conquered. The soldiers loved it; they’d cheer and grab their scientific instruments and lab coats and go conquer another province of Nature.”

The Triumphant Years

It was in 1859, Technology recalled, that Man first started using petroleum. “He’d just had the big spat with his dad over this Darwin dude: the worst fight they ever had, and in fact Man never spoke to the old man again. Man was still steaming about the fight for days afterwards, and then we heard that this guy named Edwin Drake over in Pennsylvania could get you something that was an even bigger rush than coal. Of course Man had to have some, and I said to myself, hey, I’ll give it a try—and that was all she wrote, baby. Oh, we kept using coal, and a fair bit of it, but there’s nothing like petroleum.

“What’s more, Man figured out that that’s what he needed to finish his conquest of Nature. His mercs had a good chunk of Nature by then, but not all of it, not even half, and Man was having trouble holding some of the territory he’d taken—there were guerrillas behind his lines, that sort of thing. He’d pace around at headquarters, snapping at his staff, trying to figure out how to get the edge he needed to beat Nature once and for all. ‘I’ve gotta have it all, Tech,’ he’d say sometimes, when we were flopped on the couch in his private quarters with a couple of needles and a barrel of petroleum, getting really buzzed. ‘I’ve conquered distance, the land, the surface of the sea—it’s not enough. I want it all.’ And you know, he got pretty close.”

Petroleum was the key, Clio explained. “It wasn’t just that Man used petroleum, all his soldiers and his support staff were using it too, and over the short term it’s an incredibly powerful drug; it gives users a rush of energy that has to be seen to be believed. Whole provinces of Nature that resisted every attack in the first part of the war were overrun once Man started shipping petroleum to his forces. By the 1950s, as a result, the conquest of Nature was all but complete. Nature still had a few divisions holed up in isolated corners where they couldn’t be gotten at by Man’s forces, and partisan units were all over the conquered zone, but those were minor irritations at that point. It was easy enough for Man and his followers to convince themselves that in a little while the last holdouts would be defeated and Nature would be conquered once and for all.

“That’s when reality intervened, though, because all those years of abusing coal, petroleum, and other substances started to catch up with Man. He was in bad shape, and didn’t know it—and then he started having problems feeding his addiction.”

On and Off the Wagon

“I forget exactly how it happened,” Technology recounted. “It was some kind of disagreement with his suppliers—he was getting a lot of his stuff from some Arab guys at that point, and he got into a fight with them over something, and they said, ‘Screw you, man, if you’re going to be like that we’re just not going to do business with you any more.’ So he tried to get the stuff from somebody else, and it turned out the guy from Pennsylvania was out of the business, and the connections he had in Texas and California couldn’t get enough. The Arab guys had a pretty fair corner on the market. So Man went into withdrawal, big time. We got him to the hospital, and the doctor took one look at him and said, ‘You gotta get into rehab, now.’ So me and some of his other friends talked him into it.”

“The records of his stays in rehab are heartbreaking,” Clio said, pulling down a tell-all biography from her shelf. “He’d start getting the drug out of his system, convince himself that he was fine, check himself out, and start using again almost immediately. Then, after a little while, he’d have problems getting a fix, end up in withdrawal, and find his way back into rehab. Meanwhile the war against Nature was going badly as the other side learned how to fight back effectively. There were rumors of ceasefire negotiations, even a peace treaty between him and Nature.”

“I went to see him in rehab one day,” said Technology. “He looked awful. He looked old—like his old man Everyman. He was depressed, too, talking all the time about this malaise thing. The thing is, I think if he’d stuck with it then he could have gotten off the stuff and straightened his life out. I really think he could have done it, and I tried to help. I brought him some solar panels, earth-sheltered housing, neat stuff like that, to try to get him interested in something besides the war on Nature and his petroleum habit. That seemed to cheer him up, and I think all his friends had high hopes for a while.

“Then the next thing I heard, he was out of rehab. He just couldn’t hack it any longer. I went to his place, and there he was, laughing and slapping everybody’s back and full of big ideas and bigger plans, just like before. That’s what it looked like at first, but the magic was gone. He tried to do a comeback career, but he just couldn’t get it back together, and things went downhill from there.”

The Final Years

The last years of Man’s career as representation of the human race were troubled. “The war against Nature wasn’t going well by then,” Clio explained. “Man’s forces were holding onto the most important provinces and cities, but insurgencies were springing up all over—drug-resistant microbes here, herbicide-tolerant weeds there. Morale was faltering, and a growing fraction of Man’s forces in the struggle against Nature no longer believed in what they were doing. They were in it for the money, nothing more, and the money was running out. Between the costs of the war, the costs of Man’s lavish lifestyle, and the rising burden of his substance abuse problem, Man was in deep financial trouble; there’s reason to believe that he may have been engaged in outright fraud to pay his bills during the last few years of his life.”

Meanwhile, Man was becoming increasingly isolated. “He’d turned his back on most of his friends,” said the anonymous housekeeper quoted earlier. “Art, Literature, Philosophy—he stopped talking to any of them, because they kept telling him to get off the stuff and straighten out his life. I remember the last time Science came to visit—she wanted to talk to Man about the state of the atmosphere, and Man literally threw her out of the house and slammed the door in her face.  I was working downstairs in the laundry, where you usually can’t hear much, but I could hear Man screaming, ‘I own the atmosphere! I own the planet! I own the solar system! I own the goddam stars! They’re mine, mine, mine—how dare you tell me what to do with my property?’ He went on like that for a while, then collapsed right there in the entry. A couple of us went up, carried him into his bedroom, and got him cleaned up and put to bed. We had to do that pretty often, the last year or so.”

His longtime friend Technology was apparently the last person to see Man alive. “I went over to his place Monday afternoon,” Technology recalled. “I went there pretty often, and we’d do some stuff and hang out, and I’d start rapping about all kinds of crazy stuff, omniscient supercomputers, immortal robot bodies, stuff like that. I told him, ‘Look, Man, if you want to get into stuff like omniscience and immortality, go talk to Religion.  That’s her bag, not mine.’ But he didn’t want to do that; he had some kind of falling out with her a while back, you know, and he wanted to hear it from me, so I talked it up. It got him to mellow out and unwind, and that’s what mattered to me.

“Monday, though, we get to talking, and it turns out that the petroleum he had was from this really dirty underground source in North Dakota. I said to him, ‘Man, what the frack were you thinking?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘I’ve gotta have the stuff, Tech. I’ve gotta have the stuff.’ Then he started blubbering, and I reached out to, like, pat his shoulder—and he just blew up at me. He started yelling about how it was my fault he was hooked on petroleum, my fault the war against Nature wasn’t going well, my fault this and that and blah blah blah. Then he got up and stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him. I should have gone after him, I know I should have, but instead I just shook my head and left. Maybe if I’d gone and tried to talk him down, he wouldn’t have done it.”

“Everything was quiet,” the housekeeper said. “Too quiet. Usually we’d hear Man walking around, or he’d put some music on or something, but Monday night, the place might as well have been empty. Around ten o’ clock, we were really starting to wonder if something was wrong, and two of us from the housekeeping staff decided that we really had to go check on Man and make sure he was all right. We found him in the bathroom, lying on the floor. It was horrible—the room stank of crude oil, and there was the needle and all his other gear scattered around him on the floor. We tried to find a pulse, but he was already cold and stiff; I went and called for an ambulance anyway, and—well, you know the rest.”

The Troubled Aftermath

Man’s death leaves a great many questions unanswered. “By the time Everyman died,” Clio explained, “everyone knew who his heir would be.  Man had already taken over his father’s role as humanity’s idealized self-image. That hasn’t happened this time, as you know. Man didn’t leave a will, and his estate is a mess—it may be years before the lawyers and the accountants finish going through his affairs and figure out whether there’s going to be anything at all for potential heirs to claim. Meanwhile there are at least half a dozen contenders for the role of abstract representation of the human race, and none of them is a clear favorite. It may be a long time before all the consequences are sorted out.”

Meanwhile, one of the most important voices in the debate has already registered an opinion. Following her invariable habit, Gaia refused to grant any personal interviews, but a written statement to the media was delivered by a spokesrabbit on Tuesday evening. “Please accept My sympathy for the tragic demise of Man, the would-be conqueror of Nature,” it read. “I hope it will not be out of place, though, to suggest that whomever My human children select as their new self-image might consider being a little less self-centered—not to mention a little less self-destructive.”