If we win the
war against nature, we will have crushed the very life support systems on which
we depend. This will be our ultimate
“Pyrrhic victory”.
So, what is
driving us towards our own self destruction?
“There is no
wealth but life” is the second in the Sussex Wildlife Trust’s series “Ending
the war on nature”. In this we will be
looking at our value systems, our idea of wealth and the problem of infinite
material gain in a finite world.
Our current
concept of economic growth requires a continual and increasing consumption of
materials, emission of waste products and conversion of land. All of this is finite, yet our society is
built on the premise of exponential expansion.
This cannot end well! And our
current race towards climate breakdown is perhaps its worst symptom.
Flaws in our
valuing systems confer value on useless things, like plastic trinkets, but
confers very little value at all on essential things like nature. Even worse, our current measure – Gross
Domestic Product – counts all economic activity as positive (whether producing
things, using things, creating pollution or clearing up the mess
afterwards). Yet nature is always
counted as a “cost” against the economy.
The dice could not be more heavily loaded!
At the very
least the huge flaws in our economic system must be rectified. Nature provides us with huge, almost
infinite, benefits and these must be considered in our economics and decision
making. Economic activity, on the other
hand, has huge devastating costs (often ignored as externalities) that must
also be fully recognised in any measure of our “wealth”.
We must not,
however, make nature subordinate to the economy. This is a reversal of logic and is what got
us into the problem in the first place!
It is the other way around – the economy must be recognised as a subset
of (not superior to) the environment. We
should not “monetise” nature - on the contrary we should “naturalise” the economy.
