Below is published Article, titled: Kdo bo plačal zadolževanje Naravi? / Who will pay the borrowing to the Nature? By Author Nara Petrovič. Published in online newspaper Delo, August 9. 2013 .
Nara Petrovič, member of the founding board of the Slovenian Ecovillage network, about economics with characteristic immediacy and brutal reality:
“Just as you once had to know Latin to even start a discussion with the ruling church power, today we need to know the language of finance to even start a conversation with the ruling financial forces, were the opening words of Jakob von Uexkull at the Global Ecovillage Network conference.
Jakob von Uexkull is the founder of the alternative Nobel Prize, called The Right Livelihood Award, which is awarded every year in the Swedish Parliament. At the July2013 conference of the Global Ecovillage Network, he gave one of the opening speeches and an inspiring long lecture that touches the very heart of the problems of the modern economy. What follows is a mix of Uexkull’s words and my thoughts alongside them.
“The Righteous Life Award seeks to help the North find wisdom consistent with its science and to help the South find science consistent with its ancient wisdom.” Jakob von Uexkull
The essence of the dialogue has not changed, he noted. Just as ancient scholars many centuries ago debated in all seriousness how many angels can be fitted onto the tip of a sewing needle, today’s economic experts debate how to fit as much economic activity as possible onto the fragile tip of environmental reality – as if it had no limits!
When I listened to him talk about the dogmas of economists, I realized that the belief in economic prosperity through blind faith in exponential growth is actually no different from the dogma of spiritual salvation through blind faith in God’s grace. You can only communicate with dogmatists if you speak their language, especially if their power inflates their arrogance. But don’t expect success! As Sydney Smith says: “Never try to reason a prejudice out of a person’s head. They didn’t drive it into his head rationally, and it can’t be knocked out rationally either.”
Von Uexkull was pessimistic; he said that those who now run the world are literally mad. (He served as a member of the European Parliament, so he speaks from experience.) They really think that money can be eaten, he added. Research shows that agriculture in the UK only accounts for 3 per cent of GDP, which they say means we don’t lose very much if agricultural output falls by, say, 60 per cent, as most of the GDP is elsewhere. What does this mean other than that we will eat money when the food runs out? was a cynical Uexkull.
Leading economists are writing serious studies on how ecology (environment, natural resources) is dependent on and subordinate to economics, not the other way around. They try to decouple resource use and growth, but this is not possible. This madness simply has to be stopped!
All economic growth in the last century is based on an enormous externalization of costs: on borrowing from past and future generations – not only from grandmothers and grandchildren, but also from entire ecosystems. We don’t realize that everything we have achieved so far comes with a heavy tax that we will have to pay one day or fail.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” David Brower
It is about trillions of euros, which so far no one has accounted for in economic cost accounts. In fact, we went through uneconomic “economic” growth. We didn’t ask ourselves what was actually growing. This is how the virtual, monetary economy grew, mainly at the expense of the mindless exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the unsustainable use of renewable ones.
The biggest problem in all of this is the far-reaching consequences of the environmental bankruptcy we are heading towards. In this bankruptcy, we cannot play forced settlements, bankruptcies, fictitious recapitalizations. The recovery of nature, even if we stop destroying it now, will take thousands of years. In the worst case scenario, conditions on Earth will be so extreme that it will no longer be able to support life.
Financial debts to banks are a trifle compared to the debts of melting glaciers and growing deserts. How will we settle these debts and all the resulting damage and prevent future disaster? Who to even ask this question? Who should be held accountable?
The need for local protectionism
You can already hear talks about the need to internalize costs, but despite the talks, things still go on as before. Simultaneously with every good idea and solution that those who care about the world come up with, dozens of harmful ideas and solutions are created.
One of the key levers of much-needed change are laws. The website www.futurepolicy.org offers examples of legal solutions based on deep social ethics and a sustainable attitude towards the environment. But it is not enough to offer positive laws, it is also necessary to achieve acceptance of these laws. Lobbyists in the centers of political power in 80 percent of cases fight against the adoption of new laws that are against the interests of their tenants, and in only 20 percent of cases they lobby for the adoption of new laws.
How to bypass the games of unscrupulous fools in protect yourself from their powerful influence? How to change the rules of the game? Jakob von Uexkull proposes local protectionism.
The word “protectionism” has a negative connotation, but with the current dimensions of the pressures of the global economy on regional ecosystems, local communities can only ensure their long-term survival by protecting themselves from harmful products, constructions, investments, buyouts, takeovers, privatizations, etc., which are hiding under the guise of a “free market”.
The free market is nothing more than a mechanism to protect the privileges of the big players, precisely defined in 7,000 pages of ghostly documentation. If it was really about the freedom of the market with transparency, ethics, responsibility towards life and orientation towards the common welfare of people, seven pages would be enough.
It is pointless to talk about a free market as long as there are more than a hundred dollars in subsidies for every ton of fossil fuels. In comparison, subsidies to green technologies are a pittance and it is impossible to achieve competitiveness. According to Matthias Kroll’s calculations, the cost of losing fossil fuels by burning them instead of using them for more useful purposes is nine billion dollars a day.
We need a big shift in thinking and a twist on the question How much does it cost to use renewable resources compared to non-renewable ones? v How much does it cost us to not use renewable resources and rely mainly on non-renewable ones? Let’s ask ourselves what is the price of irreversibly burning in a short time! absolutely all available fossil fuels that have been formed for millions of years. How to evaluate such a dramatic loss as the empty “tank” of the entire planet?
Proponents of the transition to a low-carbon society encourage us to use the remaining fossil fuels on the planet strategically: To develop and establish energy systems that do not require fossil fuels; to build natural, sustainable, simple housing units with a zero carbon footprint; for the transformation of a monoculture society into an edible landscape, wisely arranged according to the principles of permaculture; to optimize the infrastructure, etc. But the maddened leaders clearly do not understand the scale of the problem; they are unwilling to give up their inflated privileges and possessive mentality.
Whose are the stars?
[When the Little Prince meets the businessman, he asks him:] “How can you own the stars?”
“Whose are they?” asked the businessman irritably.
“I do not know. They don’t belong to anyone.”
“In this case, they’re mine because I’m the first one to think of it.”
“Is that enough?”
“Of course. When you find a diamond that doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s yours. When you discover an island that doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s yours. When you first have an idea, you patent it: it’s yours. And I own the stars because no one else before me thought of owning them.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A colorful spectrum of causes led to the destruction of local communities, one of the most important of which is privatization. When you come into the world as a citizen, you do not have any fundamental rights in practice, because everything around you is privatized. You have to buy or, if you’re lucky, inherit the rights to basic subsistence goods, i.e. privatize them in your own name.
Proponents of privatization refer to the argument that people do not treat common property conscientiously. But experience shows the opposite: every connected community that uses common property for important social functions carefully regulates this use with strict (albeit informal) rules.
“No social system can survive without a common land.” Christopher Alexander
In a privatized society, on the other hand, the owner is alienated from the property – especially among the richest, who do not use the property, but use it exclusively to create capital. The actual users of the “property” are not its owners, they are merely tenants! They treat other people’s property much less conscientiously than they would with functional common property – this is where capitalism has run into the same dead end as socialism. The most derelict apartments are found in tenement blocks with absentee owners. In vital housing communities, on the contrary, we can observe an extraordinary sense and care for the common property.
In today’s society, real estate legislation is subordinated to the philosophy of neoliberal capitalism, which is based on speculation and profiteering. It does not allow the space as such to be a value in itself. It must bring in money and thus janissary Mr. Capital in the interest-bearing debt system. Just agreeing to such rules of the game is a crime.
Reasonable people are increasingly calling on society to be responsible, to common sense and to liberate the earth from the yoke of speculative capital. They encourage the establishment of legal levers of local protectionism, for which the revival of healthy, strong local communities living on the land, of the land and for the land is essential. Such communities embrace responsibilities and duties towards the land, they feel reciprocity towards their home – they are not in a one-way relationship of ownership with it, but in a two-way relationship of belonging.
Jakob von Uexkull shared with us a beautiful story from the Mexican slums. The people who live there vijo, they are forced to share a lot and help each other due to difficult conditions. Their community is tight-knit and strong. The downside is, of course, poverty, which made many people use the first opportunity to leave and find a job, money, or apartment in the city. Some even got rich. Finally, something you wouldn’t expect happened: many returned to the slum! They missed the community, the relationships, the sharing that money can’t buy.
The lesson of the story is that boundaries – whether they are imposed from the outside or set by people themselves because they are aware of their responsibility to their living environment – strengthen the identity of a community and provide more fulfillment than the limitlessness of material possessions. Money in itself is not a value, it does not bring even an iota of security compared to the wealth of social ties. A banker once said, “Invest in friends, for the bank of heaven never fails.”
Towards the new rules
The system we live in is a megalomaniacal wheel. He has already accumulated such a mountain of crimes for us until the future that no politician dares to speak about them without a fig in his pocket. They prefer to remain silent and elegantly postpone the payment of the bill to the indefinite future – in short, they stress the consequences on future generations (and hope that no one would notice it for as long as possible). With such an evasive political attitude, the bill is rising steeply by the minute. It hangs above us like a storm cloud, from which a thick hail can be released at any moment, and we do nothing because we do not feel dependent on agricultural products for survival. The dream is summed up by the belief that we can live on money.
My grandfather used to say that you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a preacher once in your life, but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer. Brenda Schoepp
The fact is that the economic mammoth will rather die than change. The mammoth is already very old and sick, too fat to move. But we put wheels on it, an engine, add train drivers and repairmen, put it on rails so it can run on even dead. What else is saving the current economy (banks) than prolonging the life of a dying mammoth or even raising a mammoth from the dead? That’s why it’s so outrageously expensive and at odds with common sense.
It was well said by Jakob von Uexkull that those who rule the world are mad. Even now, when the dogma of constant growth, the foundation of the current economy, has been proven wrong, when we are forced to admit that growth has limits, world leaders are asking the dead mammoth and forcing it to continue growing and lumbering to an unknown destination … by example The USA, so beautifully described by Laurence J. Peter: “America is a country that doesn’t know where it’s going, but is determined to set a speed record on the way there.”
The rules of the game are completely messed up in today’s society, but simply raising awareness is not enough. It is necessary to establish new rules that will protect us from all the madmen who do not deviate from the grind.
To survive as vital communities, as custodians of life, as a planetary ecosystem, we must overlook our own madness, admit it, and change the rules of the game. We must not give up if we cannot achieve this at the national level. The rules of the game can first be changed in families, in the local community, in the municipality. These are necessary small steps that pave the way for the maturation of human civilization as a whole, a civilization that finally trusts that we can do it differently!
Kurt Vonnegut beautifully said: “I didn’t learn about other cultures until college, but I should have in first grade.” The first grader should understand: that his culture is not a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures that are doing quite well; that all cultures operate on the basis of faith and not on the basis of truth; that there are many alternatives to our society. Cultural relativity is justifiable and attractive. It is also a source of hope. It means that we don’t have to continue on this path if we don’t want to.”
If we restore power to local communities, make them agriculturally self-sufficient, politically (self-)aware, economically capable, socially connected, culturally diverse, physically healthy, we can stop the headlong race to growth and create conditions for social maturity and responsibility.
Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of dedicated citizens can change the world. In fact, that’s the only thing that does.”
Sources and Reference:
- Kdo bo plačal zadolževanje Naravi? / Who will pay the borrowing to the Nature? By Author Nara Petrovič. Published in online newspaper Delo, August 9. 2013
PLEASE, NOTE :
In Majda Ortan’s texts, I only state my personal reflections and my personal views. Dear readers, please take this into account! Thank you!
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