©2007, UrbisMedia
The term “spaceship earth” was supposedly coined by the late economist Barbara Ward back around the time of the moon landings. It was, and is, an apt metaphor, especially if one is looking at a photo of our little blue marble of a planet from the vantage of the moon. It is a capsule with a thin, fragile atmosphere and, though the sun’s radiation comes in, everything else is pretty much contained (even those pesky greenhouse gases we have been making). Like a spaceship, a container that has to re-circulate its contents in order to sustain itself. Spaceship Earth has changed a lot over its six or so billion years of development (sorry you Genesis literalists) and only recently has been, in geological terms, a place with any biological life. But this the first time in a long history that the earth has produced a species with the capacity to influence its ecological course.
In the long run this raises a difficult question for a term that has come into greater usage in recent years— sustainability. Perhaps because of the spaceship earth metaphor there has been more talk of the notion that we must construct sustainable communities, sustainable cities, sustainable societies, and, ultimately a sustainable planet, if we are to “survive.” In the long run this may be delusional. I have always held with Heraclitus that “all things change, nothing remains the same.” We may just be the current arrangement of carbon atoms in the universe and, although we regard ourselves as the very purpose for creation itself, [1] we probably will not last as fraction of the time the dinosaurs were the species de jour.
This is not to gainsay the notion of sustainability. After all, trying to make the best of our tenure, however long it is to be, seems a worthy notion. The problem comes in when we begin to consider three interrelated dimensions of the life we have created for ourselves—our economic systems, our demography, and our relationship to our natural environment (spaceship earth). [2] I only want to consider the first one in this trilogy this time—our predominant, and all but worshipped economic system—capitalism. [3]
It seemed like capitalism uber alles time in the late 1980s; the USSR collapsed, the Berlin wall came down, Czechoslovakia had a “velvet revolution” and Deng Xiaoping already had China on its way to those 9% growth rates and making products for any global market that likes lead in the goods. Free enterprise, markets, profits, economic growth! It was capitalism time, almost everywhere; those godless socialistic systems were vanquished. The world was becoming one vast global emporium and the captains of the kapital of the new industry and their minions of investors and day traders would get gloriously rich along with them.
Republicans, who worship the canons of capitalism most fervently, set about tearing down every regulation of the freedom of the marketplace and the industries that supply it. Private enterprises who still felt fettered by rules, laws and snoopy bureaucrats were freer to just to pick up their marbles and move to Guatemala, Indonesia, India, or, of course, China, where capitalism was a new faith and children and women work for peanuts and lose fingers, breath bad air, and work in conditions that would be illegal in the good ole U.S. of A.
But the devilish little engine upon which this al runs is return on capital investment, and ultimately profit. So, in the end capitalism is a bit like an organism that must grow or wither and die. No growth means no return for those stockholders. Growth means bigger market share, innovation, new products, etc. Look at it this way (an over simplification) capitalism is rather like a line (imagine one on a graph, with a positive curve to it), and sustainability is rather like acircle , a container.
Do you ever ask yourself “Where in hell is this economic system ultimately going?” Then you say, “Nah, I really don’t want to think about pulling all of that oil and those minerals out of the earth, clearing rain forests, dumping god knows what in the rivers and oceans and air, you know, the stuff that drives Al Gore nuts and is melting the iced caps and killing the polar bears . . . I just don’t want to think about our economic system and spaceship earth.” That’s OK, you’re not alone. And you’re probably thinking, “ Yeah, and I don’t want to hear any more of it from the Chicken Little Commie bastard that wrote this piece. (Now that’s just plain unkind of you.)
You see, capitalist theory sees itself as a self-adjusting system, the magic of the market and the see-sawing to the whims of supply and demand. And it does do that. That’s the magic of the economic system. But that system interacts—indeed has its very raison d’etre in, and with—another system, the ecological system. The Ecological system operates by somewhat different dynamics, not those of continual growth and expansion, but by re-circulation; it is, for purposes of this discussion, [4] a closed system. That it has been, in relation to human activity, so large (and rather forgiving) a system for much of the period humans have been a variable within it, it has not shown much of the ill effects of that activity.
Until recently. Hence the talk of sustainability. More people are recognizing that this spaceship does not have a home to return to; it is home , and the only one we have. Screw it up and it is game over. A sustainable spaceship requires a lot of rules and regulations, precisely the sort of thing that the capitalists who are running it abhor. [5]
So, are the fundamental concepts of sustainability and those of capitalism inconsistent with one another? It would appear so. Some attributes of capitalism have been trumpeted as perhaps consistent with sustainability, that, for example, new fuels and methods of electrical power generation, or hybrid automobiles, will result from entrepreneurial opportunities. Even Google is looking into the prospects for fuel sources that are “cheaper than coal.” But, it may be countered that, as long as long as short term profits and return on investment remain central tenets of capitalism, these will have to be competitive against the cheaper strip mining of coal, pumping of crude oil and clearing of rain forests. As long as the “software” capitalism concerns itself foremost with the interests of the owners of capital, rather than the interests of the terranauts of spaceship earth, sustainability will remain no more than Al Gore’s elusive dream.
But the day may not be far off when even the owners of capital will have nowhere to run. Or, is that why there is all this interest is Mars?
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.2.2007)
[1] To provide The Creators with some companionship per saecula saeculorum ,
[2] I seriously tempted to include religious beliefs in this list, but I will leave it out for the times being.
[3] Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are all or mostly privately-owned and operated for profit , and in which investments, distribution,income , production and pricing of goods and services are determined through the operation of a market economy .
[4] Unless you are a Genesis literalist, you already know that the nature of the earth’s eco-system has changed considerably over some 4.5 billion years, and also that it’s system is not so closed that there have been variable periods of different levels of solar radiation as well as a few meters, comets and asteroids that have made their way to its surface.
[5] We can observe the consequences the abhorrence that conservatives and libertarians have government regulation most recently in the sub-prime interest rate debacle that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of foreclosures and threatens to plunge the country into recession. Ayn Rand freak Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman who controlled the money supply mostly for the benefit of corporations was more responsible than anyone for the credit meltdown because of his refusal to use the Fed’s authority to regulate loan-underwriting standards. The same anti-regulation mentality keeps George Bush from “fettering American industry” by signing on to the Kyoto Protocols. Never must any social or ecological concern or need get in the way of return on investment. Some people may regard America as a “Christian nation,” but the true religion of America is capitalism.