The challenge of the 21st century: setting the real bottom line - part 2

By the year 2000 the population of the world quadrupled to 6 billion, but now there were more than 400 cities with more than a million people and 80-85 per cent of us live in large cities. We have been transformed from farmers into urban dwellers. We are city animals and live in a human-created environment where it seems we do not need nature.

It becomes easy to assume and accept that the economy is the real bottom line. If we have a good economy we have good garbage collection and sewage treatment. It is what fills our stores with goods, it gives us electricity. The economy becomes the highest priority for urban dwellers.

Economics and ecology are words built on the same root - “eco” - from the Greek word “oikos” meaning home. Ecology is the study of home. Economics is the management of home. What ecologists try to do is to determine the conditions and principles that govern life’s ability to flourish and survive. But not economists. We have elevated the economy above everything else and this, I think, is the crisis we face.

The economic system foisted on people around the world is fundamentally flawed and inevitably destructive. We must put the “eco” back into economics and realise what the conditions and principles are for true sustainable living. Here is why economics is out of sync.

First of all, nature performs all kinds of services. Nature pollinates the flowering plants, it is nature that decays material, returns it to the earth. It creates soil, participates in the nitrogen, carbon and water cycles. All of these are economically valuable services performed by nature but economists called them “externalities”, by which they mean that they are not in the economic equation. Economists externalise the real world that keeps us alive.

I confronted this when we were fighting to prevent logging in a valley where my government had granted permission to a forest company. The native community said they did not want the trees cut so I went to help them fight for their forest and I encountered an executive of the forest company. He asked me whether “tree huggers” like me would be willing to pay for the trees in the valley, because if we were not, those trees would not have any value until someone cut them down. Of course, he was absolutely right!

You see, as long as those trees are alive, they are taking carbon dioxide out of the air and putting oxygen back. Not a bad service for an animal like us who depend on it, you might think. But to an economist that is an externality. Those trees are clinging to the soil so when it rains the soil does not erode into and destroy the salmon spawning beds. That is an externality. Those trees pump hundreds of gallons of water out of the soil, transpire it into the air to affect weather and climate. That is an externality. That tree provides habitat to countless bacteria, fungi, insects, mammals and birds. That is an externality. So in our crazy system the forest, as long as it is standing, performing all of those functions, has no economic value.

Economists believe the economy can and must grow forever. Since World War II they have equated economic growth with progress. If economic growth is what we define as progress, who is ever going to ask what an economy is for? How much is enough? We have fallen into the trap of believing that economic growth forever is possible and necessary.

I am going to show you why this is absolutely suicidal. Anything growing steadily over time is called exponential growth and whatever is growing exponentially has a predictable doubling time, whether it is the amount of garbage you make, the amount of water you use, or the human population. So, if the population is growing at 1 per cent a year it will double in 70 years; 2 per cent a year it will double in 35 years; 3 per cent - 23 years; 4 per cent in 17.5 years. Anything growing exponentially will double predictably.

I am going to show you why it is suicidal to think we can keep growing forever. Let me give you a test tube full of food for bacteria; this represents our world. I am going to put one bacterial cell into that test tube (representing us), and it is going to divide every minute; that is exponential growth. So at time zero you have one cell; one minute you have two; two minutes you have four; three minutes you have eight; four minutes you have 16. That is exponential growth and at 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left, a 60-minute cycle.

When is the test tube only half full? Well the answer of course is at 59 minutes; but a minute later it is filled. So at 58 minutes it is 25 per cent full; 57 minutes 12½ per cent full. At 55 minutes of the 60-minute cycle it is only 3 per cent full. So, if at 55 minutes one of the bacteria said to its companions that they have a population problem, the other bacteria would be incredulous because 97 per cent of the test tube would be empty and they had been around for 55 minutes. Yet they would have only 5 minutes left.

So bacteria are no smarter than humans and at 59 minutes they realise they only have a minute left. So they give massive amounts of money to scientists, and in less than a minute those bacterial scientists invent three test tubes full of food. That would be like adding three more planets for our use. So it would seem that they (and we) would be saved.