April 26, 2009


"You ain't seen nothin' yet" (Bachman Turner Overdrive)

If you think things can't get much worse, you are in for a
big surprise says George Monbiot, columnist for the British
newspaper The Guardian.

"The credit crunch is pretty compared to the Nature crunch,"
warns Monbiot.

While leaders are preoccupied with saving the economy, the
biggest extinction of species in millions of years is taking
place. We are running out of clean air and water and the
earth's climate is perilously warming.

They run around like chickens with their heads cut off while
the source of economic wealth, our planet earth, slides into
ruin.

Ecosystems are the real currency of economies. They have
measurable value. The cost of deforestation alone is about
$5 trillion annually says an economist for Europe's Deutche
Bank when you consider the cost of replacing them or living
without them. Forests serve the economy in a number of ways
by locking up carbon and contributing to fresh water, for
instance.

The crisis in both the economy and ecology have the same
cause. Those who exploit the resource have demanded
impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never
be repaid.

Societies ignore the economic consequences of the misuse of
their environments at their peril.

Jared Diamond provides a good example in his book Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. At first glance,
the loss of civilization on Easter Island seems a mystery.
The treeless island is famous for its huge statues of faces.

But study of that civilization reveals a society that
collapsed shortly after reaching the highest population.
Competition for natural resources led Island chiefs to build
bigger monuments in tribute to themselves. Eventually the
soil was depleted, the trees cut down, the population
crashed and the survivors turned to cannibalism.

Diamond wonders what the last Easter islander might have
thought as he cut down the last palm tree. Did he shout
"Jobs, not trees?" Or: "Technology will solve our problems.
Never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood." Maybe he
said: "We don't have proof that there aren't any palms
somewhere else on the island."

Economic collapse historically follows ecological collapse.
The Maya of Central America were among the most advanced and
successful people of their time. But a combination of
population growth, extravagant construction projects and
poor land management wiped out more than 90 per cent of
their population.

Collapse was accelerated by "the competition among kings for
and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and
erecting monuments rather than solving underlying problems,"
explains Diamond.

Sometimes it's the other way around. Iceland's financial
collapse is leading them to thoughts of joining the European
Union. If Iceland joins, they will have to surrender their
fishing grounds to the common fishing policy. Financial
ruin will likely lead to ecological ruin.

Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows. Ecology
and economy are derived from the same Greek word oikos - - a
house or dwelling. "Our survival depends on the rational
management of this home: the space in which life can be
sustained," says Monbiot.

Denial has been the primary response to economical and
ecological collapse. World leaders denied the
inconvenient truth about climate change. And as in the
months leading up to Great Depression of the 1930s,
financial experts and politicians were in denial about the
current recession until the ground beneath their feet began
to crumble.

History teaches those who will learn. It's all so
predictable. Humans fail to prevent ecological collapse
because resources at first appear to be inexhaustible.
Mankind seems tiny in the scale of the world and nature
appears immeasurably vast. Short-term fluctuations in
resources hide the long-term trend of depletion. Small
groups of powerful people advance their interests by
damaging the interests of everyone else.

No one likes a recession but this one may give us pause for
thought. Maybe, just maybe, we will realize that economies
built on over-consumption of resources and leaders who need
to prop up their egos with military adventures in faraway
places are the cause of the problem.

Maybe then, we will rein in our natural impulses of
self-destruction and live within the boundaries of real
economics which understand that the values that sustain the
house also sustain the home.

Our leaders blithely lurch from bailout to bust with barely
a backward glance at the looming environmental disaster.

When will they ever learn?
 

David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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