Fighting Climate Change: the invisible enemy -- by Hugh Robertson

16th in a series on ecologyeconomicsethics by an Ottawa Friend. With the author's permission, we have printed many of the previous reflections in this blog.

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As weather records topple like ten pins and climate instability escalates, we seem to sink ever
deeper into apathy, denial and paralysis. The gloom grows with every new announcement.

In the US, the number of people doubting the existence of anthropogenic climate change has
been steadily increasing. However, a poll just published in the NY Times indicates that the
recent erratic weather has persuaded more Americans that there is some credence to the
concerns of climate scientists. The poll was still not enough to persuade President Obama to
mention “climate change” in his Earth Day message for fear of a right wing reaction. Politics not
only interferes with science, it also intensifies the risks of social confrontation.

In Canada, public opinion on climate change is more closely correlated with the economy
than with weather developments. When the level of economic activity drops, so does our
concern for the environment. We do not experience the same extreme weather events that
the Americans do, except in the Arctic; sadly that area has slipped off our radar screens. Not
even warnings about the possible disappearance of two of our iconic symbols – polar bears and
shinny rinks – can jolt us out of passivity.

Now David Suzuki, another of our symbols – though far from disappearing – has acknowledged
that the environmental movement has hit a dead end. Partly, he believes that it is because
environmentalists have failed to sell the right message. The real question is whether any
message would have been heard.

As a sentient species we are remarkably deaf to scientific evidence. Perhaps it is because
science is so dispassionately rational that it does not possess the same power to move us as, in
the past, the call to arms has inspired us to resist those foes who have threatened our freedom.
Our need to mitigate the destructive effects of climate change has to be expressed with the
same inspirational energy which gave our predecessors the determination and courage to
defend themselves against a more visible and tangible threat.

Confronting the climate crisis is an undertaking that may not have any historical precedents but
it certainly has prescient parallels. Unlike previous conflicts, we are facing an invisible enemy
and, moreover, an enemy of our own creation. To complicate the battle scene further, we are
not only fighting ourselves, both in our attitudes and in our actions, but we are also fighting
among ourselves. In Pogo’s immortal words: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Our fight must be aimed primarily at anthropogenic greenhouse gases (ghgs) – a foe as
insidious as it is invisible. The main culprits are carbon dioxide and methane, both colourless
and odourless gases that circulate in the upper atmosphere where they trap the heat that is
inexorably warming the planet.

Global climate and weather aberrations clearly indicate that a war is already underway. Nature
has struck first, provoked by constant abuse into launching an offensive. From the outset we
are on the defensive, divided and unprepared with no clear tactical or strategic objectives.

Unlike World War II, when, except for a lone dissenter, the House of Commons was unanimous
in its declaration of war on Nazi Germany, we are hopelessly divided. The battle lines are
blurred because there is no common enemy, nor can we even agree on the enemy. We are
shell shocked because we are caught in both the crossfire and friendly fire and we cannot
distinguish one from the other. We are confused and demoralized.

The external threats, in the form of weird weather and changing climate, are not yet urgent
enough to create a sense of national emergency. In 1939 the fear of German aggression in
Europe was palpable and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in late 1941 transformed the
US into a belligerent overnight. Future generations may well apply President Roosevelt’s
famous phrase, “a day of infamy,” to our timid response to combat the serious threats to the
environment upon which we are so dependent for life itself.

The economies of the allied powers were immediately converted to war-time production;
within days tanks replaced cars on the assembly lines. Ironically, we cannot summon that will
today and force manufacturers to scale down the size of the peacetime descendants of those
military vehicles, such as jeeps, hummers, trucks, land cruisers and suvs to compact hybrids in
order to wage war on ghgs.

Why have we failed to designate the automobile as “a weapon of mass destruction?” We
declared war on tobacco but we refuse to launch a war against one of the major contributors
to ghgs. Is it because of the power of consumers, voters, unions, executives, shareholders,
the advertising industry or politicians? Perhaps we have to investigate more ethereal enemies
in the form of ideologies that hold us captive, such as free market capitalism or unfettered
economic growth, in an effort to isolate and understand the enemies of nature.

World War II entered a period known as the “phony war” from September, 1939 to April, 1940
when there was little military activity in Western Europe. We are well into our phony war –
a “war” characterized by phony ghg targets, phony policies such as cap and trade, and phony
political rhetoric. Even the platitudes ring phony. As the planet heats up and the weather
gyrates, there is a surreal phoniness to our efforts to combat climate change. “Fighting for the
future” had meaning in Europe in 1939. Today it is an eerily empty phrase.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in December, 1997 is part of a tradition of multilateral diplomatic
conferences aimed at maintaining international peace and security. Kyoto is different because
it targets environmental peace and security by laying out a strategy to mitigate the growth of

global ghgs. Kyoto can also be viewed as a declaration of war on behalf of the environment.
But in an endless series of rancorous UN sponsored conferences over the past 14 years, the
signatories have failed to agree to any binding international commitments on ghg targets.

The parties made progress at the Copenhagen Conference in 2009 by drawing a line in the sand
and agreeing that anything in excess of a 2 degree C increase in global temperatures in this
century would catapult the planet into runaway climate chaos. Scientists now estimate that we
are on our way to reaching this critical threshold by 2050. Unmoved by the warnings, countries,
both developed and developing, are stampeding across that crucial line in a frenetic race to the
bottom as they pursue the dream, or rather the nightmare, of perpetual economic growth.

The scourge of nationalism, precursor of so many wars, still haunts us today. As resources
become increasingly scarce, it will be economic nationalism this time pitting country against
country in ruinous conflicts. The failure of international cooperation will initiate a free-for-all as
conventions and protocols break down. Next on the feeding list will be the melting Arctic as its
oil, minerals and fish become more easily accessible. The major players are already lining up at
the starting line in the north as the last frontier opens up for exploitation.

“Truth” is invariably the first casualty in war. Despite warnings, such as the thawing Arctic and
the increased frequency of weather blitzes and the virtually unanimous scientific consensus
that global warming heralds major climate changes, the denial camp is undeterred. Their
propaganda machine, bankrolled by corporate money, has been in combat mode for years.
Their storm troopers are actively promoting climate heresies in a compliant media that is
always anxious for controversy. By creating doubt in the public mind, the climate contrarians
are thwarting the formation of a common front in the battle against global warming.

In the words uttered by Abraham Lincoln shortly before the Civil War, are we in danger of
becoming “a house divided against itself”? At the very time we should be uniting against an
overwhelming threat to our survival, we risk unleashing a fratricidal civil war. Society could
fragment in multiple ways. We could split into climate believers and non-believers, reminiscent
of earlier religious wars. Alternatively, because high income earners create a disproportionate
percentage of ghgs, society could fracture along socio-economic lines igniting a class war.

Earlier this year, some politicians suggested that environmental groups with “a radical
ideological agenda,” acting as proxies for foreign organizations, are undermining our national
economic interests by “hijacking” regulatory processes. Our environment minister, who is
charged with protecting our natural endowment, accused foreign environmental groups
of “laundering” money through Canadian charities, while a Conservative senator suggested that
the environmental movement was engaging in “influence peddling.”

According to the news media, the government is even considering changing the definition of
domestic terrorism to include environmentalism. Instead of declaring and promoting a united
war on ghgs, the government has declared war on free speech, intimidating and vilifying its
citizens in the process. Implying that those committed to the cause of global survival are a
foreign financed fifth column sounds like George Orwell in modern guise. It also smacks of the
repugnant McCarthyism of the Cold War era. Witch hunts do little to forge national unity.

In the midst of these accusations, Postmedia reported that the government had been quietly
working with the oil and gas lobby to gild its climate change policies to avoid punitive European
Union fuel sanctions on tarsands bitumen. Government documents allude to environmental
organizations as “adversaries” while fossil fuel companies are regarded as “allies.” Does
government collusion with the oil industry portend the emergence of a new triangular version
of the “military-industrial complex” in President Eisenhower’s memorable phrase?

Decisive leadership, so crucial in prosecuting a successful military campaign, is lacking in the
climate confrontation. We are leaderless at a time of crisis. The government is consorting with
the enemy. The brass have gone AWOL and deserted the troops. Our armchair generals are
busy concocting technofixes, such as carbon sequestration and storage rather than focusing
on the real enemy – consumption and lifestyle. Other “weapons,” such as buying offsets for
our “carbon sins” are more closely linked to the medieval religious practice of selling papal
indulgences than modern warfare.

The possibility of a common front in the climate campaign has just suffered another major
setback. The government has launched a preemptive strike on the environment by using the
budget bill as a Trojan Horse to conceal numerous measures attacking nature. We are faced
with a crisis of conscience: do we fight for the future or do we capitulate to political bullying?

The war for planetary and national security is not only a just and a moral war, it is also a
revolutionary war because we have to change basic societal values regarding consumption, self-
interest and waste. The war can never be won unless there is a fundamental transformation of
our lifestyles which, at present, far exceed the sustainable capacity of the planet. Above all, it is
a war of principle because we are fighting for the rights of unborn generations who have played
no part in the desecration of nature. There can be no conscientious objectors in this war, no
passive resistance, no surrender to political threats and corporate propaganda.

Individually, we are responsible for taking action; we can no longer rely on the state. We
have to answer the call to arms by waging a personal war, in the peaceful tradition of Gandhi
and Martin Luther King, against pollution, fossil fuels and environmental degradation. It will
undeniably require sacrifices in lifestyle but our commitment and dedication to the cause will
surely be reinforced by the troubling questions our grandchildren will soon be asking: Which
side were you on Grandma and Granddad? Did you fight for my future?

Growthbusters - the trailer

The 98 minute doc GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth examines cultural assumptions that prevent us from reacting rationally to over-population and over-consumption. Details at growthbusters.org.

Why is it so difficult to talk about? Why is "economics" more important than clean air, water, and the earth of our children and grandchildren? Why do we vote in leaders to subsidize dirty growth at any cost, destroying quality of life and increasing taxes?

We worship at the Church of Growth Everlasting. Undeterred by the facts, we’re on a collision course powered by denial and the myth that growth brings prosperity.

In fact, our dominant economic model provides neither happiness or prosperity for the 99%. But that’s good news; it means a shift to a sustainable model will be good for us. We’ll be happier and more prosperous!

Before we can tranform ourselves to true sustainability, we must become self-aware, recognize the source of our growth addiction. In GrowthBusters we hear from leading thinkers of our time – scientists, sociologists, economists – who separate fact from superstition.

The steady-state economy -- Herman Daly

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse." For 30 years eco-economist Herman Daly has been asking how we can avoid unlimited "growth" with all its environmental impacts on a limited earth. How can we produce less stuff, and have a better quality of life? He founded CASSE: Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy with other eco-economists such as David Orr, Robert Costanza, Josh Farley, Lisa Krall, and Peter Victor. His books include Steady-State Economics, For the Common Good (with theologian John Cobb), Valuing the Earth, Beyond Growth, Ecological Economics (with Josh Farley), Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development.  Here are some key ideas from the CASSE website:

• What is economic growth?
• Why is economic growth a threat to the environment?
• Why is economic growth a threat to economic sustainability, national security, and international stability?
• Can’t technology alleviate the threat of economic growth?
• Can’t the economy continue growing for quite a while without bumping up against ecological limits?
• Can’t “green growth” allow the economy to continue growing without causing harm?
• Can’t we continue growing the economy indefinitely as we transition to an information economy?
• Why should we emphasize the phrase “economic growth” in discussions on the environment and national security?
• What would a steady state economy look like?
• Would we have to give up individual freedoms in a steady state economy? 

See also CASSE's impressive list of advisers, board and international staff; its blog newsletter; Daly's biography and publications. He has taught economics in the US and Brazil, founded the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE), now a discipline in its own right -- an alternative to the "market fundamentalism" of the Chicago School, and the "growth at any cost" of neoliberalism, which he calls the spreading of Western over-consumption worldwide. In 1996 he won the Right Livelihood Award.

Towards a New Economy and a New Politics -- by Gus Speth

Gus Speth, retired dean of environmental studies at Yale, is a founder of the Natural Resources Defence Council, World Resources Institute, and author including the recent Bridge at the End of the World (2008). His article is reprinted from Robert Costanza's Solutions Journal 28 May 2010; it was originally a 2010 lecture (recorded on video) to the The New Green Economy conference of the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE).

Dawn of a new era -- by Richard Morin

If America’s present system of political economy were performing well, there would be little need to question it or seek fundamental change. But that is not the case. Asked what the key goals of economic life should be, many would reply, “to enhance social well-being while sustaining democratic prospects and environmental quality.” Judged by this standard, today’s political economy is failing. It is a failure that reaches many spheres of national life—economic, social, political, and environmental. Indeed, America can be said to be in crisis in each of these four areas.^{1, 2}

The economic crisis of the Great Recession brought on by Wall Street financial excesses has stripped tens of millions of middle class Americans of their jobs, homes, and retirement assets and plunged many into poverty and despair.

A social crisis of extreme and growing inequality has been unraveling America’s social fabric for several decades. A tiny minority has experienced soaring incomes and accumulated grand fortunes, while wages for working people have stagnated despite rising productivity gains and poverty has risen to a near 30-year high. Social mobility has declined, record numbers of people lack health insurance, schools are failing, prison populations are swelling, employment security is a thing of the past, and American workers put in more hours than workers in other high-income countries.³

An environmental crisis, driven by excessive human consumption and waste and a spate of terrible technologies, is disrupting Earth’s climate, reducing Earth’s capacity to support life, and creating large-scale human displacement that further fuels social breakdown.
And a political crisis is reflected in governmental paralysis and a democracy that is weak, shallow, and corrupted—the best democracy that money can buy.^4-7

The case for fundamental change is underscored especially by the urgency of environmental conditions.¹ Here is one measure of that problem: All that human societies have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to future generations is to keep doing exactly what is being done today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating dramatically. It took all of history to build the $7 trillion world economy of 1950; recently, economic activity has grown by that amount every decade. At typical rates of growth, the world economy will now double in size in less than 20 years. We are thus facing the possibility of an enormous increase in environmental deterioration, just when we need to move strongly in the opposite direction.

Accelerating environmental deterioration is most starkly revealed in the global trends—trends in which the U.S. economy and U.S. politics are deeply complicit. About half the world’s wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predatory fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Half the world’s temperate and tropical forests are gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about one acre per second. Species are disappearing at rates about 1,000 times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in 65 million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us.

Human impacts are now large relative to natural systems. The Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was discovered. Most importantly, human activities have pushed up atmospheric carbon dioxide by more than a third and increased other greenhouse gases as well, with the result that we have started, in earnest, the dangerous process of warming the planet and disrupting the climate. Everywhere, Earth’s ice fields are melting. Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen, making it biologically active, at the same rate that nature is; one consequence is the development of hundreds of dead zones in the oceans due to over-fertilization. Each year, human actions already consume or destroy about 40 percent of nature’s photosynthetic output, leaving too little for other species.

Freshwater withdrawals doubled globally between 1960 and 2000 and now represent over half of accessible runoff. The Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile Rivers, among others, no longer reach the oceans in the dry season.

planetary boundaries: Tällberg Foundation

To seek something new and better, a good place to begin is to ask why today’s system of political economy is failing so broadly. Environmentally, the answer is that key features of the system work together to produce a reality that is highly destructive. An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at almost any cost; powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they create and from replicating technologies designed with little regard for the environment; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by an addiction to novelty and by sophisticated advertising; economic activity now so large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical operations of the planet—all combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the ability of the planet to sustain life.¹

This environmental reality is linked powerfully with growing social inequality and the erosion of democratic governance and popular control. Only a powerful democratic reality can guide and regulate the economy for environmental and social ends, and only a society that is cohesive and fair is likely to rise fully to shared challenges like the environment. Unfortunately, Americans today live and work in a system of political economy that cares profoundly about profits and growth and that cares about society and the natural world mainly to the extent it is required to do so. It is thus up to us as citizens to inject values of fairness, solidarity, and sustainability into this system, and government is the primary vehicle we have for accomplishing this. But typically, we fail at this assignment because our politics is too enfeebled and government is excessively under the thumb of powerful corporations and concentrations of great wealth. Consider the similarity between the recent financial collapse and the ongoing environmental deterioration. Both result from a system in which those with economic power are propelled, and not restrained by government, to take dangerous risks for the sake of great profit.

The prioritization of economic growth and economic values is at the root of the systemic failures and resulting crises America is now experiencing. Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, wages, profits, the stock market, employment, and consumption must all go up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It can undermine families, jobs, communities, the environment, and a sense of place and continuity because it is confidently asserted and widely believed that growth is worth the price that must be paid for it. Growth is measured by tallying GDP at the national level and sales and profits at the company level, and pursuit of GDP and profit is the overwhelming priority of national economic and political life.

But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again.^8-18 Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines communities and the environment. It fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.^1,19,20

Writing in Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, psychologist David Myers sees this pattern of soaring wealth and shrinking spirit as “the American paradox.” He observes that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Americans found themselves “with big houses and broken homes, high incomes and low morale, secured rights and diminished civility. We were excelling at making a living but too often failing at making a life. We celebrated our prosperity but yearned for purpose. We cherished our freedoms but longed for connection. In an age of plenty, we were feeling spiritual hunger. These facts of life lead us to a startling conclusion: Our becoming better off materially has not made us better off psychologically.”^21,22

Before it is too late, America should begin to move to a post-growth society where working life, the natural environment, our communities, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of continuous growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with compelling social needs; and where citizen democracy is no longer held hostage to the growth imperative.

For the most part, advocates for change have worked within the current system of political economy, but in the end, this approach will not succeed when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself. The case for immediate action on issues like health care and climate change is compelling, but the social and environmental challenges just reviewed will not yield to problem-solving incrementalism. Environmentalists and other progressives have gone down the path of incremental reform for decades, and the results of that experiment are in. The roots of our environmental and social problems are deeply systemic and thus require transformational change—the shift to a new, sustaining economy ushered in by a new politics. George Bernard Shaw famously said that all progress depends on not being reasonable. It’s time for a large amount of civic unreasonableness.

What circumstances might make transformational change and the birth of a sustaining economy possible? A decline in legitimacy as the system fails to deliver social and environmental well-being, together with a mounting sense of crisis and loss—both occurring at a time of wise leadership and accompanied by the articulation of a new American narrative or story and by the appearance across the landscape of new and appropriate models—were all these to come together, real change would be possible. Most of all, what is needed is a new politics and a new social movement, powerful and inclusive. The best hope for such a new political dynamic is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force. They all have a shared fate because they face the same reality: a political economy that does not prioritize sustaining human and natural communities.
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Policies for a New Economy.

Americans are told routinely that the priority must be a strong economy. Yet many now appreciate that of equal or higher importance are a strong society, strong nature, and a strong democracy. Today’s economy offers little help in these regards. We must move beyond it. We need to reinvent the economy, not merely restore it.

Americans now face a great imperative to build a new economy—a sustaining economy. Sustaining people, communities, and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped-for byproducts of market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation. The watchword of the sustaining economy is caring: caring for each other, for the natural world, and for the future.^23-25

America’s open-ended commitment to aggregate economic growth is consuming environmental and social capital, both now severely diminished. That said, it is also clear that even in a post-growth America, many things do indeed need to grow: growth in good jobs and in the incomes of the poor; growth in the availability of health care and the efficiency of its delivery; growth in education, research, and training; growth in security against the risks of illness, job displacement, old age, and disability; growth in investment in public infrastructure and in environmental protection and amenity; growth in the deployment of climate-friendly and other green technologies; growth in the restoration of both ecosystems and local communities; growth in non-military government spending at the expense of military; and growth in international assistance for sustainable, people-centered development for the half of humanity that lives in poverty, to mention some prominent needs.

Jobs and meaningful work top this list because they are so important and unemployment is so devastating. Likely future rates of economic growth, even with further federal stimulus, are only mildly associated with declining unemployment. The availability of jobs, the well-being of people, and the health of communities should not be forced to await the day when overall economic growth might deliver them. It is time to shed the view that government mainly provides safety nets and occasional Keynesian stimuli. Instead, government should have an affirmative responsibility to ensure that those seeking decent jobs find them. And the surest and most cost-effective way to that end is direct government spending, investments and incentives targeted at creating jobs in areas where there is high social benefit. Creating new jobs in areas of democratically determined priority is certainly better than trying to create jobs by pump priming aggregate economic growth, especially in an era when the macho thing to do in much of business is to shed jobs, not create them.

Of particular importance for the new economy are government policies that will temper growth while simultaneously improving social and environmental well-being, policies such as shorter work weeks and longer vacations, with more time for children and families; greater labor protections, job security, and benefits, including generous parental leaves; guarantees to part-time workers; restrictions on advertising; a new design for the twenty-first-century corporation, one that embraces re-chartering, new ownership patterns, and stakeholder, rather than shareholder, primacy; incentives for local production and consumption; strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements; rigorous environmental, health, and consumer protection, including full incorporation of environmental and social costs in prices; greater economic and social equality, with genuinely progressive taxation of the rich and greater income support for the poor; heavy spending on public services; and initiatives to address population growth at home and abroad. Taken together, these policies would undoubtedly slow GDP growth, but our well-being and quality of life would improve.

If the market is going to work for the betterment of society, environmental and social costs should be incorporated into prices, and wrong-headed government subsidies, a vast empire today, should be eliminated. Honest prices will ensure that people take into account the environmental and social impacts of their purchases, whether they are environmentally conscious or just minding their pocketbooks. High prices are a problem not so much because they are high but because people don’t have the money to pay them and alternatives (such as truly fuel-efficient vehicles) are not readily available. Honest prices would be higher prices for many things, but that does not mean Exxon should pocket the difference or that equity issues should remain unaddressed.

Responsibly high energy prices—driven, for example, by a declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions—will help protect the Earth’s climate, increase demand for efficient vehicles and public transportation, spur new renewable energy industries, decrease the supply vulnerabilities and international entanglements of imported oil, strengthen local communities, and encourage localization rather than globalization. But honest energy prices must be accompanied by measures that make them affordable for those on whom they would otherwise impose a serious hardship. Challenging America’s growth fetish and consumerism will not go far when so many barely get by and are desperate for jobs and greater income security.²⁶ Clearly, addressing social and environmental needs must go hand in hand.

Conventional wisdom on the clash of economy and environment is that we can have it both ways, thanks to new technology and innovation. We do indeed need a revolution in energy, transportation, construction, and agriculture technologies. This ecological modernization can be driven by quantitative restrictions that ensure extractions from the environment do not exceed its regenerative capacities and discharges to the environment do not exceed its assimilative capacities. But the rate of technological change required to deal with environmental challenges in the face of rapid economic growth is extremely high and rarely achieved. If pollution from an industrial facility is cut in half but growth spawns another, similar plant, there is no net gain. Housing, appliances, and transportation can become more energy efficient, but the improvements will be overwhelmed if there are more cars, larger houses, and more new appliances – and there are. There’s a limit to how fast and far new technology can take us; technological change alone is not enough.

Americans are struggling today with the combined impacts of lost financial assets, underwater mortgages, and layoffs. These problems are associated with a slowdown in GDP growth, but they were not caused by a failure of growth, and they will not necessarily be cured by more growth. We have had jobless growth before. As is now appreciated, the current Great Recession and its consequences are the result of government failing to intervene appropriately in the marketplace—in financial markets, in housing markets, in labor markets, and elsewhere. Today we are feeling the effects of misguided policies, including massive deregulation, that have led to deep structural maladies. One lesson is clear: Today’s markets do not function well without strong and effective government intervention.

The economic crisis should also teach us to live more simply and focus more locally. It is time to move beyond consumerism and hyperventilating lifestyles. There has been too little focus on consumption and the mounting environmental and social costs of American “affluenza,” extravagance, and wastefulness. Being less focused on getting and spending (initially, in part, because there is less to spend) can help society rediscover that the truly important things in life are not at the mall nor, indeed, for sale anywhere.

Psychological studies show that materialism is toxic to happiness and that more income and more possessions do not lead to a lasting sense of well-being or satisfaction with life. What makes people happy is warm personal relationships and giving rather than getting, things that are possible at a human scale.^1,27-29

The good news is that more and more people sense that there’s a great misdirection of life’s energy. In one survey, 83 percent of Americans said society is not focused on the right priorities, 81 percent said America is too focused on shopping and spending, 88 percent said American society is too materialistic, and 84 percent want to spend more time with family and friends.³⁰

These numbers, even if half right, suggest that there is a powerful base on which we can build. Indeed, new signposts are emerging: Confront consumption. Practice sufficiency. Create social environments where overconsumption is viewed as silly, wasteful, ostentatious. Establish commercial-free zones. Buy local. Revitalize local economies. Eat slow food. Downshift. Public policy should support these directions, and it should also devise new measures to track improvements in social welfare, a purpose for which GDP is a miserable failure.^31,32

Beyond policy change, another hopeful path into a sustainable and just future is to seed the landscape with innovative models. One of the most remarkable and yet under-noticed things going on in the United States today is the proliferation of innovative models of “local living” economies, sustainable communities and transition towns, and for-benefit businesses that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth. The community-owned Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland is a wonderful case in point. An impressive array of new-economy businesses has been brought together in the American Sustainable Business Council and the B-Corporation program, and a new Fourth Sector is emerging, bringing together the best of the private sector, the not-for-profit NGOs, and government.^33-41
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A New Politics

The transformation of today’s economy requires far-reaching and effective government action. How else can the market be made to work for the environment rather than against it? How else can corporate behavior be altered or programs built to meet real human and social needs? Government is the principal means available to citizens to collectively exercise their stewardship responsibility to leave the world a better place. Inevitably, then, the drive for transformative change leads to the political arena, where a vital, muscular democracy, steered by an informed and engaged citizenry, is needed.

Yet, merely to state the matter this way suggests the enormity of the challenge. The ascendancy of market fundamentalism and anti-regulation, anti-government ideology has been particularly frightening, but even the passing of these extreme ideas would leave deeper, more long-term deficiencies. It is unimaginable that today’s American politics will deliver the transformative changes needed.

There are many reasons why government in Washington today is too often more problem than solution. It is hooked on GDP growth—for its revenues, for its constituencies, and for its influence abroad. Government has been captured by the very corporations and concentration of wealth it should be seeking to regulate and revamp. And it is hobbled by an array of dysfunctional institutional arrangements, beginning with the way presidents are elected.

Building the strength needed for change requires, first of all, a unified agenda among progressives. As mentioned, the best hope for a new political dynamic is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force. A unified agenda would embrace a profound commitment to social justice and environmental protection, a sustained challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy skepticism of growth-mania and a new look at what society should be striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a redefinition of the corporation and its goals, and a commitment to an array of major pro-democracy reforms.

The new agenda should also incorporate advocacy of human rights as a central concern. For example, though environmental justice has gained a foothold in American environmentalism, it is not yet the priority it should be. Many established environmental issues should be seen as human rights issues—the right to water and sanitation, the right to sustainable development, the right to cultural survival, freedom from climatic disruption and ruin, freedom to live in a non-toxic environment, and the rights of future generations.

The new politics must turn major attention to the urgent need for political reforms in campaign finance, elections, the regulation of lobbying, and much more. In their book Off Center, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have developed an important and innovative agenda for political reform, including the revitalization of large-scale membership organizations that give citizens more leverage in the political process and measures that could increase voter turnout, open primaries, pursue nonpartisan redistricting, guarantee a minimum free TV and radio time for all federal candidates meeting basic requirements, reduce the perks of incumbency, and bring back the Fairness Doctrine requiring equal air time for competing political views.⁴² Meanwhile, Common Cause, Americans for Campaign Reform, and others have developed a powerful case for clean and fair elections through public financing, a case now even stronger due to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.^43-45

Successful political reform will also depend on addressing issues of social justice. In his book On Political Equality, America’s senior political scientist Robert Dahl concludes it is “highly plausible” that “powerful international and domestic forces [could] push us toward an irreversible level of political inequality that so greatly impairs our present democratic institutions as to render the ideals of democracy and political equality virtually irrelevant.”⁴⁶ The authors brought together by political analysts Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol in Inequality and American Democracy document the emergence of a vicious cycle: Income disparities shift political access and influence to wealthy constituencies and businesses, which further imperils the potential of the democratic process to correct the growing income disparities.⁴⁷

If the first watchword of the new politics is “broaden the agenda,” the second is “get political.” Lawyering and lobbying are important, but what the new politics must build now is a mighty force in electoral politics. Building the necessary muscle will require major efforts at grassroots organizing; strengthening groups working at the state and community levels; and developing messages, appeals, and stories that inspire and motivate because they speak in a language people can understand, resonating with what is best in both the American tradition and the public’s values and presenting compelling visions of a future worth having for families and children.

Our environmental discourse has been dominated thus far by lawyers, scientists, and economists. It has been too wonkish, out of touch with Main Street. Now, we need to hear a lot more from the poets, preachers, philosophers, and psychologists. And indeed, we are. The world’s religions are coming alive to their environmental roles—entering their ecological phase, in the words of religious leader Mary Evelyn Tucker. And just last year, the American Psychological Association devoted its annual gathering to environmental issues. The Earth Charter text and movement are providing a powerful base for a revitalization of the ethical and spiritual grounds of environmental efforts.

The final watchword of the new politics is “build the movement.” Efforts to build strength in America’s electoral process and to bring together a wider array of constituencies embracing a broader agenda should contribute to the emergence of a powerful citizens’ movement for change. The new politics must be broadly inclusive, reaching out to embrace union members and working families, minorities and people of color, religious organizations, environmentalists, the women’s movement, and other communities of complementary interest and shared fate. It is unfortunate, but true, that stronger alliances are still needed to overcome the “silo effect” that separates progressive communities, including those working on environment, domestic political reforms, the liberal social agenda, human rights, international peace, consumer issues, world health and population concerns, and world poverty and underdevelopment.
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An Agenda for Analysis and Action

Building a new economy and a new politics must be an ecumenical endeavor open to many progressive perspectives and ideas. Progress requires concerted efforts from many communities in at least three areas: challenging the current order of things, envisioning a new order and identifying the initiatives needed to realize it, and building capacity to promote change.

Challenging the current order. A great many Americans remain enthralled by a reigning mythology now deeply embedded in the national consciousness: GDP growth is an unalloyed good. Government regulation and other interference in the economy must meet the test of economic benefit. America is a land of economic opportunity and consumer sovereignty. The poor are poor because they deserve to be. We are well on our way to solving our environmental problems. America is the most democratic nation on Earth, and also the most generous, with the best health care.
The reality, of course, is far from these propositions. It is important that this mythology be dethroned and that accurate information about actual conditions and trends be brought to an ever wider audience. Real life in America too often sharply conflicts with the country’s best values and highest aspirations.

Envisioning a new order. Envisioning the new economy and a new politics involves three linked projects:

1. The Values Project. What are the core values to be prioritized and harmonized?
2. The Transformations Project. What transformations are needed in order to realize core values? What measures would best characterize and carry forward these transitions? It is not difficult to identify areas where transformative change is essential:
• The market: from laissez-faire to regulation and governance in the public interest;
• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to many;
• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness;
• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities;
• Indicators: from GDP to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life;
• Consumerism: from consumerism and “affluenza” to sufficiency and mindful consumption;
• Communities: from ruthless runaway enterprise to vital local economies, from rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity;
• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from now to forever;
• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from corporatocracy to true popular sovereignty;
• Global vision: from economic globalization to planetary civilization worthy of the name, from invidious division to global citizenship;
• Foreign policy and the military: from exceptionalism to interdependence, from hard power to soft, from war economy to peace economy.
3. The Synthesis Project. Presenting a positive, integrated vision of life in a world transformed is a powerful motivator of change. Narrative is important—telling a new American story and forging a new American dream.

Building capacity to promote change. Much needs to be done to strengthen capacities for transformative change. Areas needing attention include:

• “Progressive fusion” in politics: overcoming silos, forging a common progressive agenda, and uniting unexpected allies with shared values;
• Social movements: building a powerful movement for transformative change;
• Community actions: seeding the landscape with innovative “new economy” models;
• Key institutions: engaging religions, local governments, youth, colleges and universities, and others;
• International solidarity: building ties to those abroad with common concerns;
• Crisis anticipation: getting ready for crises that will surely come;
• Ideas, research, and writing: building think-tank capacities and linking ideas to action.

An important initial step is to identify and elaborate on early initiatives and objectives that are plausible and not seemingly utopian, but that create momentum towards long-term goals and shape future paths.
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Conclusion

Historian Richard Hofstadter made the following interesting observation in The American Political Tradition:⁴⁸
“Although it has been said repeatedly that we need a new conception of the world to replace the ideology of self-help, free enterprise, competition, and beneficent cupidity upon which Americans have been nourished since the foundation of the Republic, no new conceptions of comparable strength have taken root and no statesman with a great mass following has arisen to propound them...."
"Almost the entire span of American history under the present Constitution has coincided with the rise and spread of modern industrial capitalism. In material power and productivity the United States has been a flourishing success. Societies that are in such good working order have a kind of mute organic consistency. They do not foster ideas that are hostile to their fundamental working arrangements. Such ideas may appear, but they are slowly and persistently insulated, as an oyster deposits nacre around an irritant. They are confined to small groups of dissenters and alienated intellectuals, and except in revolutionary times they do not circulate among practical politicians.”

Times change. It is now clear that American society is no longer in “good working order.” It is time to foster ideas that challenge the “fundamental working arrangements.”

See also Speth's vision part II
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References

1. Speth, JG. The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability 1–78, 126–164 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009).
2. New Economy Working Group [online]. www.neweconomyworkinggroup.org [4].
3. Wilkinson, R & Pickett, K. The Spirit Level (Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2009).
4. Greider, W. The Soul of Capitalism (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2003).
5. Barnes, P. Capitalism 3.0. (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2006).
6. Wolin, S. Democracy Inc. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008).
7. Kaiser, R. So Damn Much Money (Alfred Knopf, New York, 2009).
8. Jackson, T. Prosperity Without Growth (Earthscan, London, 2009).
9. Victor, P. Managing Without Growth (Edward Elgar, Northampton, MA, 2008).
10. Spratt, S et al. The Great Transition (New Economics Foundation, London, 2009).
11. Brown, P & Garver, G. Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2009).
12. Daly, HE. Beyond Growth (Beacon Press, Boston, 1996).
13. Hamilton, C. Growth Fetish (Pluto Press, London, 2004).
14. Korten, D. Agenda for a New Economy (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2009).
15. Simms, A et al. Growth Isn’t Possible: Why We Need a New Economic Direction (New Economics Foundation, London, 2010).
16. Costanza, R. Stewardship for a “full” world. Current History 107, 30–35 (2008).
17. Beddoe, R et al. Overcoming systemic roadblocks to sustainability: the evolutionary redesign of worldviews, institutions and technologies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 2483–2489 (2009).
18. de Graaf, J & Batker, D. What’s the Economy for, Anyway? [online]. www.bullfrogfilms.com [5].
19. Barber, BR. Consumed (W.W. Norton, New York, 2007).
20. The Worldwatch Institute. State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures, From Consumerism to Sustainability (W.W. Norton, New York, 2010).
21. Myers, DG. What is the good life? Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures 15 (2004).
22. Myers, DG. The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000).
23. New Economy Network [online]. www.neweconomynetwork.org [6]
24. New Economics Institute [online]. www.neweconomicsinstitute.org [7]
25. Eisler, R. The Real Wealth of Nations (Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2007).
26. Ehrenreich, B. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Henry Holt, New York, 2001).
27. Kasser, T & Kanner, AD, eds. Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World (American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, 2004).
28. Diener, E & Seligman, MEP. Beyond money: toward an economy of well-being. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5 (2004).
29. Layard, R. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, New York, 2005).
30. Center for a New American Dream. New American Dream: A Public Opinion Poll [online]. (2004). www.newdream.org/about/PollResults.pdf [8].
31. Costanza, R et al. Beyond GDP: The Need for New Measures of Progress (Pardee Center, Boston University, Boston, 2009).
32. Schor, JB. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Harper Collins, New York, 1998).
33. American Sustainable Business Council [online]. www.asbcouncil.org [9]
34. B Corporation [online]. www.bcorporation.net [10]
35. FourthSector [online].www.fourthsector.net
36. Evergreen Cooperatives [online]. www.evergreencoop.com [11]
37. The E.F. Schumacher Society [online]. www.smallisbeautiful.org [12]
38. Transition Colorado [online]. www.bouldercountygoinglocal.com [13]
39. Transition Santa Cruz [online]. transitionsc.org
40. Transition Network. Transition Initiatives Directory [online]. transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/TransitionCommunities
41. McKibben, B. Deep Economy (Henry Holt, New York, 2007).
42. Hacker, JS & Pierson, P. Off Center 185–223 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005).
43. Dworkin, R. The ‘devastating’ decision. New York Review of Books (2010).
44. Kirkpatrick, DD. Democrats try to rebuild campaign-spending barriers. New York Times (2010).
45. Americans for Campaign Reform. You Street [online]. www.youstreet.org [14]
46. Dahl, RA. On Political Equality (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006).
47. Jacobs, LR & Skocpol, T, eds. Inequality and American Democracy (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2005).
48. Hofstadter, R. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It vii–ix (Vintage Books, New York, 1948).

Tikkun olam is environmental sanity –- by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Excerpted from The Network of Spiritual Progressives. See also his magazine Tikkun.

For the last thirty-five years ecologists have been warning about the impending environmental crisis, apologists for the large corporations that are despoiling the earth have been sponsoring corrupt scientists to say that the crisis is exaggerated, conservative politicians have warned that taking environmental reforms seriously could drive corporations to relocate in other places around the world with the consequence that we’d be out of jobs and still have an unclean global environment, and the bulk of the population has felt powerless to do anything. It’s not that people don’t care about the earth. They care powerfully. This earth is our only home, and our own lives are tied to its well-being....

But few people have seen a path that could connect their caring about the earth to actual life choices that would enable them to have much of an impact in saving the planet from destruction. Many were happy to recycle when it was made convenient by city services offering to pick up recycled goods. A growing number of upper middle class people bought organic foods and products with less poisonous additives — a luxury that most working class people could not afford on a regular basis. When there was an opportunity to stop a local polluter, many voters sided with regulation, though those whose income would be threatened should the venture move out of town often found themselves deeply conflicted — caring about the long-term fate of the planet but also worried about how to feed their families.

Meanwhile, the predicted dangers are already happening. As the demand for food grows, increases in land cultivation cannot keep up, though in the attempt to expand agriculture into the Amazon Basin, major parts of a precious bio-system are at risk, and other parts of the world will soon face water shortages of catastrophic proportions.

CO2 emissions per person

Carbon emissions and global warming are accelerating... Wetlands and coral reefs are damaged... In the last three decades, according to Christopher Flavin of Worldwatch Institute, 13,500 square kilometers of Antarctic ice shelves have already disappeared and two of the largest ice sheets have begun to weaken, threatening to raise the sea level and produce massive flooding.

The impact on the health of the global environment is more severe from advanced industrial societies than from developing countries. The U.S., for example, releases 15.7 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year as compared with India (with 4 times the population), which releases 4.9 million tons.

The world’s population has grown to 6.3 billion, approximately twice as many people as were alive on the planet just 45 years ago. Simultaneously, fewer people are living in the same household in the past thirty-five years (down from 5.1 to 4.4 in developing countries and from 3.2 to 2.5 in industrial countries), and since each new household requires land and material, the decline in extended families or living units takes a significant toll on the environment. Birth rates have declined in parts of Europe so that there is an actual decline in population in some countries, while the explosion of births in third world countries continues, in large part because lack of adequate birth control and reproductive health services make it harder for many to engage in planning their family size. The opposition from the Vatican and from the U.S. Religious Right to providing this kind of information if it contains information on abortion or birth control devices has contributed significantly to the inadequate funding for the dissemination of this information, thereby increasing the actual rate of abortions and the number of women who die in childbirth.

Environmental activists have been woefully unsuccessful in convincing government to play a decisive role in reversing this process and healing the earth from the destructive consequences of 150 years of environmental irresponsibility. These activists have been up against seemingly overwhelming odds. The power of corporations to threaten whole regions with economic devastation should they dare to challenge environmental pollutants, media that are slavishly subordinate to the interests of corporate owners and hence unwilling to dramatize the level of catastrophe facing the human race, the irresponsibility of political leaders in both major parties who refuse to acknowledge and seriously contend with the realities (cf. Clinton’s failure to aggressively back the Kyoto Accords which in any event would have been only a weak substitute for serious global action or the plans of the Bush Administration to drill for oil in the Arctic), and the depth of denial among ordinary citizens that leads us to imagine that a little recycling and a few more hybrid cars and fluorescent lights and all will be well.

The environmental movement itself has often channeled the outrage and energy of ordinary citizens in paths that have proven extremely unproductive. Instead of building a mass base for a movement demanding fundamental restructuring of the global economy in ways that would guarantee a dramatic decrease in global warming and in saving the earth for future generations, the environmental movements have often downplayed the seriousness of the challenge on the advice that they would be called “chicken little” and that fundraising does better with a positive message. Instead of working the beltway, the environmentalists need to be mobilizing the American public with a broad vision of what is needed.

As Peter Teague, the environmental program director at Nathan Cummings Foundation, put it, “So long as the siren call of denial is met with the drone of policy expertise — and the fantasy of technical fixes is left unchallenged — the public is not just being misled, it’s also being misread. Until we address Americans honestly, and with the respect they deserve, they can be expected to remain largely disengaged from the global transformation we need them to be a part of.”

Michael Shellenberger, in the introduction to his “Death of Environmentalism,” puts it equally starkly. “In their public campaigns, not one of America’s environmental leaders is articulating a vision for the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Instead, they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards….” What Shellenberger and other critics of the current trends in environmentalism have understood is that what is critical to save the planet is not only correct scientific data and technical ideas for how to improve things, but a new set of core values that must predominate in the public sphere and a new way of understanding that reality.

In Boiling Point, Ross Gelbspan accuses environmental leaders of “being too timid to raise alarms about so nightmarish a climate threat” and for settling for too little... “The major national environmental groups focusing on climate – groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Federation – have agreed to accept what they see as a politically feasible target of 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide... [That] may be politically realistic, it would likely be environmentally catastrophic.” What is needed is to cut emissions 70 or 80 percent. Gelbspan advocates the “WEMP” proposal – the World Energy Modernization Plan — to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent worldwide in three ways: 1) shifting subsidies from polluting industries to clean industries; 2) creating a fund to transfer clean technology to the developing world; and 3) ratcheting up a “Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard” by five percent per year.

I’ve mentioned here the most pressing environmental crisis, but it would be a mistake to limit environmental concerns to the immediate survival emergencies. There are longer term concerns about the way that the human race is growing so rapidly that we may soon consume many of the resources of this planet, leaving little for future generations. A huge amount of resources are poured into the creation of “goods” that have no redeeming social value except as ways for corporations to make profits, and hence also ways to ensure high levels of employment. It might be useful to think of the human race as involved in a kind of strip-mining of the world’s resources, leaving devastation and waste for the future. And talking about waste, we have no place to store it and so more and more of the planet gets filled with waste dumps that send off potentially carcinogenic poisons.

Of course, the corporations have an answer to all this. “We only produce what people will buy. We are in business to make profits, and our products respond to market demands. If people don’t want these products, we’ll know soon enough and produce what they do want.”

There’s a fundamental dishonesty here... the marketplace responds not on the principle of one person one vote, but on the principle of one dollar one vote, so that the more money you have, the more market power to shape what is being produced. So the market will respond way more to the rich than to the poor.

Still, there is an important point being raised by the response of the corporations: reduced consumption of the earth’s resources, and cutbacks in fuels that are destructive, require the backing (active or passive) of the vast majority of the people of the world. “Well, you’ll never get that,” the voice of cynical realism rushes in to warn us. “People want to get as many toys for themselves as possible, and they will never voluntarily adopt cutbacks in their level of consumption. Run on the ticket of lowering the material level of consumption and you’ll be as dead as the Kyoto Treaty.”

The cynical realist has a point, but only within a certain context — the context of a society in which the bottom line is money and power and the common sense is to “look out for number one.” In such a society, most people will reason this way: “If I cut back on my consumption, it won’t really save the earth. I know how selfish everyone else is, how deeply materialistic, so I am sure that they won’t cut back on their consumption. So what I do won’t really make that much of a difference because most other people will just be taking care of their own material needs. So I end up being part of a small idealistic group that stops purchasing the ecologically destructive stuff but meanwhile everyone else gets what they want. I become the one jerk on the block, while the rest of my neighbors are binging on consumption. Well, why should I do that to myself? I won’t!! And I’m not going to vote for some candidate who wants to do that for our society, when I see that the selfishness is global, so while we stop polluting, those third world countries like China and India, which are now rapidly industrializing and modernizing, will increase the level of global destruction so that our own country’s reduction in consumption won’t have that much of an impact.” Even if we explained to this person that the U.S. footprint is much greater because of levels of consumption than that of other countries, we are unlikely to convince enough people to dramatically reduce their level of consumption unless we can do it globally. “That will never happen,” the voice of cynical realism responds, “so why should I worry about the future, which is going to be a mess anyway — I might as well get what I can right now for myself while I’m still alive.”

A spiritual movement

The only way to counter this cynical realism is to recast the environmental movement as a spiritual movement aimed at building a New Bottom Line and a new consciousness of who we are as human beings. Only a spiritual movement has the capacity to ask how to nurture an awareness of ourselves that transcends ego and begins to see ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being. It is precisely by being able to recognize our interdependence and oneness with all other human beings, all other life forms, and with all of being, that we begin to see a way toward answering the narrow materialist self-interest consciousness that is leading to the destruction of the planet. It is true that some religious and spiritual traditions have talked of human beings exercising dominion or rule over the earth. But what that means in practice is being recontextualized by many of the religious and spiritual traditions, so that it translates into having the responsibility to protect the earth from the environmental threats a section of the human race has caused by its past and present insensitivity to the needs of the earth. Still, dominion or “rule over” language seems more like the language of the Right Hand of God, and so today many religious and spiritual communities are affirming a new relationship to the planet, one which eschews domination and seeks instead to cooperate with the rest of the life-sphere, and which recontextualizes human beings as one member of the earth family, affirming the worth and value of every life form, supporting biological diversity and cultural diversity. To see ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being, made in the image of the ONE, is a religious starting point for this new consciousness.

But you don’t have to believe in a Supreme Being or use religious language to get this spiritual insight. Other spiritual traditions talk of Gaia as a living entity of which we are part. The various animate and inanimate parts of the planet constitute a swirling dynamic that makes life possible. Or we can think of it as a constantly changing open ecosystem with intricate, interdependent parts. The key is to recognize that the earth includes the more-than-human. As Paul Wapner puts it (Tikkun, Sept/Oct 2003), “The earth is not the backdrop for our lives, but is part and parcel with them…. Rather than efficiency, system failure and the like, a tikkun sense of things prods us to talk in terms of care, awe appreciation, sacredness and love. The earth is not something we use but something we share our lives with — something we nurture, have fun with, are stunned by, respond to, empathize with, find nourishment from, and in turn, nourish.”

And this leads to another deep teaching of the spiritual tradition: the insistence that there is enough, that we do not essentially need endless goods, that we are enough as we are, that the earth’s produce can be shared and we can survive without endless production of new things. The consciousness of abundance is a major teaching of many spiritual traditions and practices, and stands in sharp contrast to the teachings of scarcity that underlie much of the fear that drives capitalist consumption.

The Torah commandment/practice of a sabbatical year once every seven, mandating all people to take one year off together (the same year), was a practice of developing trust that there would be enough (in a society where “enough” was far less than what is available to most people on this planet today). The ongoing practice of Sabbath-observance, taking one day off and not using money or buying or selling, not doing any work-related activity, not engaging in any domination or control over nature, is a contemporary spiritual practice that could help foster and strengthen our sense of the abundance that already is there, so that we don’t have to constantly be driven by the fantasy that we need more. Spiritual practice and consciousness may be the indispensable link for helping to develop the consciousness that could respond to the narrow materialistic self-interested consciousness that seeks to benefit in the global marketplace even at the expense of future planetary survival.

If environmentalists wish to win their own very rational program, they are going to have to move beyond environmental concerns and begin to address the need for a whole new way of being in the world., and to build on the spiritual consciousness that helps us see our connection to all other humans, to all life forms, to all of being. It’s a hard transition for the hardcore scientists and legislative technicians who have become the center of currently constituted environmentalism, but unless that shift takes place, we will get nothing better than what we have now: an “agreement in principle” by most Americans that environmentalism is very important, but an unwillingness to actually give it a high priority among their various concerns because of a (sometimes articulated, sometimes unconscious) suspicion that going this route is going to force them to reduce consumption without any corresponding benefit.

So what would be the benefit if they found environmentalism rooted in a spiritual movement? The benefit of having a multi-dimensional movement that was also speaking to their own immediate spiritual needs.... If people can get convinced that there is a real movement for a New Bottom Line, that selfishness and materialism are not rooted in the nature of reality in ways that will never be altered, then they will be open to environmentalism in a way that could produce real tangible results. Thus, the struggle for the Social Responsibility Amendment becomes an important element in any campaign for environmental sanity.

Let's consider a few other steps.

Protecting the Victims

One of the ironies of global warming is that the environmental damage done by industrialized and industrializing countries will play out first in the form of huge flooding of underdeveloped countries that did not make any serious contribution to the problem. Millions of flood refugees will desperately need a new place to live and work, and most of their own countries will be submerged under water. One way that we can begin to foster a sense of global unity in facing these problems is to adopt a formula which requires the industrial countries to welcome in refugees in direct proportion to the extent to which that country contributed global emissions that caused the problem. So, for example, the U.S. would take in somewhere between 20-22% of the refugees because we had that percentage of the world’s greenhouse gases. China and India would also have major responsibility, as would other polluters. Recognizing that our actions have global consequences, and that we will have to take care of the victims, could be an important step in developing a global ecological consciousness.

A Campaign for Ethical Consumption

Judaism has developed notion of foods that are kosher (acceptable for eating) and those that are not (treyf). Looking back on the system that emerged, I argued in my book Jewish Renewal that this was a system based on moving toward vegetarianism and emphasizing the need for attention to decreasing and eventually eliminating the suffering of the animals who would be killed. But while we will never know the full motivation that led to inclusion of some animals as edible (most were excluded as treyf), we do know that other parts of the system were explicitly based on ethical concerns. For example, it was not kosher to eat food from the corners of your fields, since the Torah mandates that those corners must be left for the poor who get to enter your fields and take their allocation (for them it is not treyf, but for the owners it is). Similarly, the notion of kosher wine was developed as the first grape boycott against the power and depravities of Roman society. Today, the Jewish Renewal movement is an advocate of extending that notion to eco-kashrut, so that foods that are environmentally destructive or produced in an unjust way are “treyf”.

Spiritual progressives need to take this same concept and extend it beyond food to all products.

The notion of ethical consumption already has a powerful foothold in the important movements that have developed around “fair trade” coffee, teas, and chocolates. By encouraging people to buy only those products which could be certified as having been produced in ways that were both ecologically sound and fair to the workers who picked the crop and brought in to market, these movements have already made an important contribution to improving the quality of life of those workers in the countries in which the food was grown.

Imagine extending that consciousness now to all products available on the marketplace. Imagine if all the religious and spiritual communities of the world, working in close cooperation with environmentalists, toxic experts, and labor movement organizers, were to coordinate an effort to develop criteria for a very wide array of products so that they could certify that some goods had been produced in environmentally sensitive ways and were developed, grown, picked, or manufactured in ways that were respectful to the needs of the working people involved. Governments could participate in this process by providing funding to support frequent surprise visits at the workplaces by teams of ethicists charged with determining what was really happening at a given worksite, and could also participate by requiring that products sold in stores that received goods in interstate commerce label the products with a few obvious codes that identified which products were produced in ways that were ethically and environmentally acceptable. Government could also help by mandating ads in media reminding people of the importance of consulting this kind of labeling, in the way that it today mandates ads informing people about the risks of smoking for cancer and heart disease.

While this campaign would have to be energized primarily through free-market choices, it probably should have some stricter punishments for those who produce goods that are overtly linkable to cancer or environmental pollution. For example, criminal liability would accrue for the top management and members of the board of directors of firms that have not taken adequate steps to protect the public and the planet from environmental pollutants, toxic chemicals, and carcinogenic agents. If the punishments were strict enough, this could add a powerful incentive for those who had not yet fully developed an ethical awareness of the interrelationship between all peoples.

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See also Wikipedia on tikkun olam, Jill Jacobs' on the current debate within Judaism, videos from other members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

Whither or Wither the Planet -- by Hugh Robertson

The author is a member of Ottawa Monthly Meeting. This article, 12th of a series, is online at his site Ecology Economics Ethics.

If we live as if there is no tomorrow, there really won’t be one.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

2010 is turning out to be the hottest year worldwide since temperature details were first documented in the 1850s, while the past decade has been the warmest ever recorded.

Russian wildfires by Jotman

Wildfires scorched Russia and Israel and parts of the interior of British Columbia were once again on the burn.

Pakistan flood damage: whatisthetrend

We have notoriously short memories but surely we have not forgotten the floods and landslides that ravaged Pakistan and China, the oil spill that will permanently cripple the Gulf of Mexico, or the toxic red sludge that engulfed the Danube.

The World Meteorological Organization has just announced that global concentrations of the main greenhouse gases reached their highest level in 2010 in almost one million years.

Is it any wonder that, with increased planetary warming, a massive chunk of the Greenland ice shelf broke off and slid into the ocean this summer or that species extinction is escalating?

One of the most reputable international think tanks, the New Economics Foundation, recently reported that the world went into ecological debt on 21st August this year. Earth Overshoot Day occurred a whole month earlier than last year. On that day we exhausted our annual environmental budget and we are now eating into our natural capital by extracting more from the planet than it is capable of reproducing.
Our shrinking earth -- ha. per capita 1950 to present: GRID-Arendal

Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, explains the problem in economic jargon to make it clearer: “We are liquidating earth’s natural assets to fuel our consumption.” No amount of Federal Reserve stimulus funding or bailouts can rescue us from this meltdown.

Enough doom and gloom? Read on.

One of the most frightening studies ever published appeared in July earlier this year but it sailed right under the radar screen of public awareness. It was reported in Nature that the concentrations of phytoplankton or plant plankton in the top layers of the oceans had declined by about 40 percent since 1950.

phytoplankton: Wikipedia

Plummeting levels seem to be linked to rising ocean temperatures triggered by global warming and to widespread contamination, such as oil spills and plastic pollutants. Increased acidification of the oceans, another consequence of global warming, is also suspected in the disturbing decline of the plankton.

Phytoplankton form part of a complex photosynthesis process that produces oxygen. It is estimated that half the world’s oxygen is created by marine photosynthesis – every second breath we take is dependent on the health of the oceans. In addition, phytoplankton help cool the planet by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The microscopic plankton also perform another vital role as the base of the ocean food chain.

The other half of the world’s oxygen supply is produced through photosynthesis on land by trees, grasses and plants. North America has been operating at an oxygen deficit for the last 40 years as we clearcut forests, ploughed under grasslands and burned fossil fuels in increasing volumes.

photo: Wisconsin Children & Families

To deprive our unborn offspring of life-sustaining oxygen would be a crime of epic proportions. And just because, as the late Carl Sagan put it, we were too lazy to change our destructive lifestyles. We have no moral right to download the costs, both economic and ecologic, on the backs of future generations or to squander their birthright.

We have probably one decade at most to dramatically control our greenhouse gas emissions, reduce pollution and learn to live within the natural limits of the planet. If we remain so resolute in our refusal to modify our lifestyles and our consumption habits, ecological tipping points will kick in with consequences far beyond human control. No technofixes will ever rescue us once we pass the point of no return.

The environmental crisis in its different manifestations is the defining crisis of the 21st century – not terrorism, not unemployment, not nuclear weapons or socialism vs capitalism. Environmentalism is not simply another –ism or ideology. It is our life support system.

We are better informed than any generation in history about the dangers threatening the environment and yet we appear immobilized by the magnitude of the problems. We have to frame, and face, the critical questions that will help provide us with a sense of direction
to combat the impending crisis.

• Why do we recoil from using language such as "morality, ethics, values, principles, emotions, feelings, compassion, justice, empathy and spirituality" when discussing environmental issues?
• What are the relative roles of the individual and institutions, such as the media, corporations, churches and government, in confronting environmental problems?
• How do we shape an environmental conscience among the corporate, political and moneyed elites?
• Why do we promote infinite progress and prosperity on a planet with finite resources?
• How do we persuade individuals to reduce their ecological footprint?
• Since advertising is aimed solely at expanding consumption, should marketing programs in colleges and universities be converted into departments of ecological economics and sustainable business?
• Should we consider draconian measures, such as restricting the size of houses, limiting the number of cars per family and rationing airline flights?
• How can we hold governments to account on environmental policies if the electorate is not engaged or is ill-informed?
• Do we have the right to protest government environmental policies until we have set an example and curbed our own consumption?
• How do we depoliticize so important an issue as climate change in our partisan political system?
• Are the wealthy developed countries, with their over-sized ecological footprints, creating “climate apartheid” in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu?
• Is the climate crisis not more of a consumption problem in the developed countries than a problem of over-population in the developing world?
• If Canada is already overpopulated in terms of its biocapacity, should we discourage immigration and devote funds to improving the lives of people in other countries?

We will never solve the environmental crisis until we see it as a moral problem. Some years ago, Wendell Berry, the renowned writer and ecologist, wrote that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of character; it still is. Dr James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, describes the ecological crisis as both a legal and a moral problem because it is an issue of intergenerational justice. To modify a Marshall McLuhan metaphor: the moral is the message.

countries with food riots, 2008: coathangrrr
It is a moral issue because our conscious decisions and lifestyle choices affect others, not only the unborn but also the disadvantaged struggling to survive in societies shattered by climate change and pollution. If we are not personally aware of the dangers of unrestrained consumption, we have the responsibility to inform ourselves of the impact of our lifestyle decisions on the less fortunate. We are, after all, a sentient species governed by conscious free will, not by programmed determinism.

The environmental crisis is also a crisis of ideology. How sustainable, both ecologically and socially, are the values embedded in our market economy, that focus on self-interest, competition, consumption and growth? Does an adversarial political system that frequently appeals to our baser instincts, best serve our long term ecological and social interests?

melting ice sheet, Antarctica: Getty Images

Furthermore, it is a crisis of emotions. Somehow, we have to develop and demonstrate the empathy to feel and sense the anguish of the environmentally dispossessed: the submerged Pacific islanders and the victims of floods, fires and droughts. Dare we forget our own northern people as the melting ice and the thawing tundra destroys their age-old lifestyles. How can we even imagine and envision the plight of future generations on a ravaged planet, if we are alienated and estranged from our own emotions?

family, Cape Dorset: Wikipedia
Above all, the environmental crisis is a spiritual crisis. It is not spiritual in a “new age” or narrow religious sense. What we desperately need is an all-embracing, ecumenical spirituality built around a reverence for the divine in nature and focused on the perpetuation of life on a vibrant planet – a “reverential ecology” in the words of Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine.

Sacrifice is central to spirituality. Our individual Canadian carbon and ecological footprints are among the highest in the world, far exceeding nature’s regenerative capacity. Our level of spiritual commitment must be measured by the sacrifices that we personally are prepared to make in our material lifestyles that will allow us to live within the sustainable limits of the planet.

The eminent ecologist E.O.Wilson’s blunt assessment of the anthropogenic causes of global environmental degradation is that we live in an era of Stone Age emotions, mediaeval institutions and, in our arrogance, we attempt to play God with our technology.

Canada's carbon footprint: The Tyee 2008

Judging by a recent vote in the Canadian Senate, that institution is still mired in a mediaeval mindset. A procedural problem enabled a majority of Conservative-appointed senators to defeat Bill C-311, The Climate Accountability Act. The bill had twice won majority support in the elected House of Commons but it was overturned by an unelected Senate without any discussion. It has been decades since the Senate attempted to defeat a Commons bill without discussion.

Intense lobbying, especially by the fossil fuel industry, reinforced the resolve of the Conservatives to defeat the climate initiative. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce even circulated a request to its members encouraging them to pressure the senators to kill the legislation. Their message could not be more blunt: “Bill C-311 must die in the Senate.”

The Canadian Climate Act simply laid out targets for our greenhouse gases: 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. These emission caps, according to the vast majority of climate scientists, are the only way we will limit the earth’s temperature to a 2 degree increase by 2050. Lest we forget, the 2 degree temperature increase was the target that the majority of countries, including Canada, accepted at the Copenhagen climate conference a year ago and then reaffirmed at Cancún this month.

Government spin claimed that the climate bill, if enacted, would shut down the economy and create mass unemployment. One does not have to be a statistician to estimate the unemployment rate in 2050 on a plundered planet. Future Canadians will weep at our self-indulgent narcissism that allowed a minority government to derail a climate protection plan by exploiting a tactic as inane as a procedural matter.

It is crystal clear that we cannot rely on our governments for ethical and enlightened environmental leadership. Partly it is because of the constant pressure exerted on our politicians by corporate lobbyists and partly because of our own fickle voting nature. The lack of political will largely reflects a lack of public will.

Sadly, there is no critical mass of voters to drive public policy on the environment. Many governments, including Canada, have sensed this lack of domestic electoral commitment to climate issues and, consequently, they are cooling on their emission pledges. We need look no further than the results of the recent mid-term elections in the US as a possible portent for progress on climate change initiatives. How tragically ironic it would be if it was democracy that dashed international attempts to save the planet.

The latest polling numbers indicate that Canadians rate climate change as only the eighth most important global issue. Canada’s role as a co-conspirator in the slow death of the Kyoto Protocol, with the execution date set for December 2012, was inspired largely by a careful reading of the electorate. Kyoto will be viewed by future historians as our “Climate Munich” where politicians abandoned principle to appease the party faithful, and then capitulated to voter whims.
from Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip
Although we need national governments to develop progressive environmental policies and to seek international cooperation on ecological issues, we must never rely on them to legislate our attitudes and to restrain our consumption. Joel Salatin, the hero of Food Inc puts it succinctly: There is no salvation through legislation. Furthermore, government decrees merely absolve us from the moral responsibility of regulating our own behaviour.

The onus is on us as individuals to initiate and to ignite the changes that will revolutionize political and public attitudes and action. We can only lead through personal example, not through preaching or through protesting, and the revolution must start in our own homes and in our hearts. Just as Gandhi reminds us that our priorities are best expressed in actions, so must we also anchor our aspirations in actions.

If, as the psychologists suggest, reducing our consumption and moderating our lifestyles, is largely a matter of behavioural change, what is delaying us? We are the arbiters of our own behaviour. Surely we don’t lack the courage or the conscience to change our behaviour for the benefit of our offspring.

Appeals to circumscribe our consumption are not new. The prescient English poet of the late 18th century, William Blake, was ahead of his time when he asked: How do we know what is too much, when we don’t even know what is enough? Jeffrey Sachs, the respected humanitarian, in his address to the graduating students at Carleton University recently acknowledged that “our consumerism has too often overtaken our common humanity.”

The first step in an action-based crusade is to quantify our consumption and establish our personal ecological footprints. We have to measure and monitor the full sweep of our lifestyles from waste disposal and personal shopping to fossil fuel use and vacations. Earlier articles in this series suggested ways of both reducing and measuring our footprints.

Conservation is really no more difficult than consumption, partly because we already waste so much food and energy in North America. Conserving a litre of gasoline or a kilowatt of electricity not only reduces carbon emissions and pollution, it also preserves scarce resources for future generations. The cheapest, cleanest fuel is that which we leave in the ground or the electricity we do not use. Furthermore, modifying our lifestyles and reducing our use of fossil fuels will eliminate the need for government regulations to "price carbon” in the form of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade policies.

We must examine all our lifestyle decisions through the lens of ecological precaution and strive to live within the biocapacity of the planet. Mother Earth is, after all, our one and only home.

Once you have set your house in order, take the crusade into your neighbourhood. Major societal change invariably comes from below – it is seldom top down and it is seldom achieved without a protracted struggle. But the struggle for ecological balance, unlike any major change in history, has an overriding urgency.

Communities inspired by an overarching moral purpose and energized by collective action will coalesce into larger movements creating a grassroots groundswell that will drive changes throughout all levels of society. Many municipalities and cities, for example, are undertaking major environmental initiatives and provinces and states are stepping into the vacuum left by our national governments.

For inspiration, read about living simply and what other communities are doing.

• Simplicity and Stepping Lightly by Mark Burch.
• 51 Ways to spark a commons revolution by Jay Walljasper in Yes! Magazine.
• Cowichan Valley Environment Commission, 12 Big ideas for a strong, resilient community.
• Transition towns.
• Local Governments for Sustainability.
• carbon Cities Climate Registry.

By transforming your lifestyle and inspiring others, you will have left an imprint on your community and perhaps the wider world. It may not always be possible to measure the broader impact our personal efforts. Ultimately, at the end of life’s journey, however, it is our conscience that is our most trusty companion, especially when it is reinforced by the conviction that we have done our best.