Towards a new economy

If you're not yet a subscriber or reader of "Solutions" then you probably should be. It's a new journal dedicated to highlighting different solutions to the problems facing us today. It does this, most importantly, from not just from an environmental perspective, but from an integrated perspective, recognizing that all of our ills are interconnected and cannot be addressed piecemeal. It is of course, the right approach.

One of the latest articles is entitled Towards a New Economy and a New Politics by Gus Speth. It is long, but it is well worth a read. Get a cup of tea, and curl up with your laptop or (for those lucky few) your iPad. In the article, Speth discusses the depth of our current predicament as well as how he believes we can climb out of the hole we have dug for ourselves (revolution!) It may indeed be the only way, for as Speth highlights, we are in a horribly bad place today:

"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."

How the world is not MORE concerned about environmental degradation will eventually be seen as one of the most inexplicable non-reactions in human history. Yet it is also understandable that given what we've been told for generations now - it's the economy stupid - that we are missing all of the obvious signs of impending unpleasantness (I was going to use doom, but we environmentalists are always labeled fear-mongers, so I thought I'd choose a world less gloomy.) This is a fact that Speth also highlights:

"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."

He goes on to talk about changes necessary to change the economic and political systems to create a sustaining economy, governance structure, and society as a whole. He proposes big thought exercises, large collaborative projects that identify new American values and a new American vision. It is all good - but it still smells faintly of the typical environmentalist/academic/liberal/fake-America disconnectedness that we are all so often accused of.

At the beginning of the article, Speth states:

"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."

Would many actually reply that? I'm not sure about you, but most of the people I know would not have that as their first reply. Instead, they would probably say - to make money, buy things, and travel. This then is really our key problem, and it is firmly entrenched in the minds of the populace. Speth is right to hint that our values have been perverted through the spectacular period of industrialization and material wealth generation that has occurred in the past century and a half. Yet to expect all of us to come together and reach past what is (and has been since our birth) the very foundation of our lives, is incredibly idealistic. (This idealism, I would posit, is actually what makes liberals liberal - but I digress.) Perhaps Speth himself puts it best when he says:

"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."

There is only so much that can be done from within the system. The truth is, the entire system must change - but before it, our collective thinking must change. The catch-22 is that in order to arrive at the conclusion that we've been walking on the wrong path all these years, we must already have stepped off that path. Some of us have done this, but the vast vast majority have not; many do not want to, more simply will not. Nor can anyone be blamed for resisting - after all, how difficult would it be for all of us to collectively agree that all these years, the sky has actually been red?

Finally, it cannot be overlooked that we Americans are a fiercely resilient people, capable of enduring much hardship and plodding onwards in the face of great obstacles. I fear that what makes us so strong as a nation will eventually be our downfall - will we be able to stop for long enough to recognize that change needs to occur now, or will we continue pressing forward until some out-sized catastrophe stops us dead in our tracks? Let's hope we can manage the former, for no one wants to see the latter.