A quick recap: What matters to the health of the earth system is the real physical impact imposed upon it by the human economy. The physical attributes ultimately count — the co2 in the atmosphere; the forest cover left; the topsoil intact; the species surviving; the ecosystems preserved; the plastics floating in the ocean; the chemicals in our waters. The earth doesn’t check whether we count our wealth as gross domestic product or gross wellness indicator. There are no bonus points if our economies are twice as efficient as few decades back. The bottom-line is the physical attributes. Its upto us, politically, to choose to direct our economies to be within ecologically safe range of physical attributes.
It is an open debate on what is to be considered “ecologically safe”, where we should draw a line on our ever increasing economic footprint and how we should go about drawing the line. From cornucopian to deep ecologist, there is a wide spectrum of opinion. Following is a “sustainability spectrum” which captures the differing views and some of their implications. (From “Blueprint 3: Measuring sustainable development” by David Pearce). Obviously there is lot of gray area in between these choices, but they capture a trend.
Ultimately, the choices a society makes on where it positions its economy within the spectrum is driven by “value judgments” the society makes. The value we associate to a particular thing drives our behavior with respect to it. The cornucopian and the deep ecologist associate a differing value to nature at large. The cornucopian sees nature in terms of a utilitarian value. “What can it do to me ? How much is it worth to human interests ?” — an anthropocentric position. The deep ecologist sees nature in terms of intrinsic value. “Its valuable and beautiful on its own. Lets not disturb it unless there is a very strong reason” — an ecocentric position. Obviously there is a large spectrum in between and most people take position somewhere in between the two extremes.
A small personal anecdote — The apartment complex where i live has a huge tree, which is perhaps a few decades old. The tree provides shade to surroundings, houses some bird nests, and invites bees to its flowers. Unfortunately, a small portion of the compound wall on which the tree leans, has developed a few cracks. The apartment management has seen this as a threat, and arranged for the tree to be cut. I argued that iff a portion of the wall actually falls in the future, we could rebuild it around the tree — a small price i thought, for keeping the tree alive. So we debated for a while and then the management lady finally said “You see Chaitanya, the wall is more important than the tree” !! Is there a way to argue around that ? The management’s view is that the value of rebuilding a small portion of the wall (plus the money they could get by selling the timber), is more than the value of keeping the tree alive. The surviving base of the tree trunk now serves me as a daily reminder of the power of value choices.
Our society runs a similar script on a much larger scale. Granted, the equations are much more complex and difficult to solve, but ultimately, consciously or subconsciously, our society makes value choices. As i discussed in the post on scale of the economy, a global economy ensures that these choices are made by very few people, by separating key players such as the consumers from the resource base which is actually affected by economic activity. Ofcourse, that doesn’t absolve us — the consumers — from the blame, as we mostly give silent acquiescence to our current economic paradigm.
The sustainability spectrum presents the range of options available to us on the kind of economy we could choose, by associating different values to the environment around. The current economy allocates an extremely low value — much less than what the environment deserves from a practical systemic-health point of view and ethical point of view. We are almost at the left end of the spectrum. We need to start moving towards the right of the spectrum. Where is the balancing point between viable human civilization and nature ? We don’t know for sure. The biggest challenge of this century will be to move to an appropriate sustainability point on the spectrum.
(To be continued. This is part-4 of a series)
