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The Real Problem

It seemed appropriate, with this celebratory issue of Progress, to put the geoist approach to the resolution of humanity's economic problems, into a truly global context. This article is not just another 'doom' warning but poses a serious question, looked at from the geoist viewpoint, of whether humanity has reached that critical point at which it is going to be very difficult for it to pull back from a behavioural pattern that is leading to a major global disaster, if not the end of society as we know it?

Is this being over dramatic and exaggerating the situation that humanity has got itself into? Maybe, but it depends upon the perspective through which you look at it.

Looked at from this global perspective the simple truth is that something has to change -- and this article is seeking to find out what.

This global perspective was clearly and powerfully voiced by economist Kenneth E Boulding in a speech Earth as a Spaceship, given in 1965 at a time when the first reports and pictures from space were coming back of the 'blue planet':

"It is not only that man's image of the earth has changed; the reality of the world social system has changed. As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a spaceship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological and physical system in which man is enmeshed. … Man is finally going to have to face the fact that he is a biological system living in an ecological system, and that his survival power is going to depend on his developing symbiotic relationships of a closed-cycle character with all the other elements and populations of the world of ecological systems…[1]

The real problem is that the economic dangers that are facing mankind, because they have been created out of our cultural tradition and mores, are not apparent when viewed from our usual cultural standpoint. As Einstein is reputed to have said you can't resolve a problem with the same mind that created it.

Thorn Hartmann, in his seminal book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight[2] highlights this in his introduction:

"Despite the impact of modern technology, the present world's dilemmas and dangers are not accidents caused by recent changes. They are the predictable result of the way humanity has been living since the first city/states of the Sumerians were established around 8000 years ago. Furthermore they echo repeated cycles that such city/states have gone through since some humans decided to move from living in tribes to living in city/states."

(Note: For a presentation of my own view of a similar ancient root to our present economic dilemmas, see my article 'Why?' in May/June 2003 Progress.)

Thorn Hartmann continues:

"Our problems derive not from our technology, our diet, violence in the media, or any other one thing we do. They arise out of our culture -- our world view. The reason most solutions offered to the world's crises are impractical is because they arise from the same world-view that caused the problem .... recycling won't save the world, birth control won't save the world, and saving what little is left of the rain forests won't save the world. (To which I would add, for the same reason, the widespread introduction of LVT wont change the world.) Even if all these things were fully implemented, our fundamental problem would still remain, and will inevitably be repeated ...... No other thing but changing the way of seeing and understanding the world can produce real, meaningful and lasting change ... and that change in perspective will then naturally lead us to begin to control our populations, save our forests, re-create community and reduce our wasteful consumption… (To which might be added the introduction of sensible geoist solutions in relation to land and natural resources).

I recall attending a conference in London a few years ago entitled The Crisis in the Global Economy, arranged by the Times Newspaper and the London School of Economics, which was addressed by a distinguished panel of economists and financial specialists including the billionaire financier George Soros: in spite of the fact that this was at the time of the economic problems in Japan and the Far East, the general mood of the event, which was attended by an audience largely drawn from the financial sector, was "Crisis? What Crisis?". Somehow, if the situation could be explained away in purely financial terms, then there was not a crisis -- it could not be seen.

The actual fragility and superficiality of the economic world in which we live is beautifully presented by David C. Korten in his When Corporations Rule the World:

"Individual savings have become consolidated in vast investment pools managed by professionals under enormous competitive pressure to yield yearly instant financial gains. The time frames involved are far too short for a productive investment to mature, the amount of money to be 'invested' far exceeds the number of productive investment opportunities available, and the returns the market come to expect exceed what most productive investments are able to yield over a period of years. Consequently, the financial markets have largely abandoned productive investment in favour of extractive investment and are operating on autopilot without regard to human consequences.

"The financial system increasingly functions as a world apart at a scale that dwarfs by orders of magnitude the productive sector of the global economy, which itself functions increasingly at the mercy of the massive waves of money that the money game players move around the world with split-second abandon. This money is un-associated with any real value....[3]

As we see every day, the economic authorities have developed numerous devises to pump prime a sluggish economy, throttle an overheated economy, and slow down a runaway economy without getting to the real problem -- that which is being suggested here as being our cultural mind-set, or, as Thom Hartmann puts it above "no other thing but changing the way of seeing and understanding the world can produce real, meaningful and lasting change.

The 'Commodification' of Nature

It is as a result of this mind-set, this apparent blindness to reality, that is causing the financial world to divorce itself from production and the 'real value'. From the same cause has humanity, over time, divorced itself from nature by making it into a commodity to be owned and bought and sold. This is pointed out in his book A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, but he adds a significant rider -- "we abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

That we treat land, and indeed all of natures bounty, as a commodity comes as no great insight to readers of Progress, but the second half of Aldo Leopold's statement is the crucial one "...when we see land as a community to which we belong...", which is his way of suggesting that until Western Society changes its millennia old attitude to land and the bounty of nature, then there is little hope for change.

This appears to have started, as Thorn Hartmann suggests above, when humanity moved away from living in tribes to the formation of city/states, but which I believe in fact commenced more significantly when humanity made the change from wandering hunter/gather, to settled farmer, which brought about not just a completely new view of the world in which it lived but fundamentally changed the manner in which the human being 'engages reality'. This is why there appears to be no common ground of understanding with the many confrontations that have taken place between 'mankind the farmer' -- the modern property owning western culture and 'aboriginal hunter gatherer peoples', for whom property, particularly of land or the gifts of nature, was anathema -- each is living in a completely different psychological world, as is starkly illustrated in the statement in 1620 from the American Indian Massasoit of the Wampanaog:

"What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of us all. How can one man say it belongs to him?.

This extraordinary mind-set of the western cultures gives rise to conduct that has been described by a Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California by the use of the Native American word, wetiko, which literally means "cannibal": in his book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann argues that this description is perfectly justified because we literally eat (consume) other humans by destroying them, destroying (and stealing) their lands, and by consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically.

As we look around the world today, in whatever culture, does not this description of human conduct appear to be dominant? In Western Society, in spite of the great wealth and productivity that modern technology has made possible, as well in developing economies, does not that description of cannibalism seem appropriate? When you have commodified nature, it is all there to be consumed -- land, natural resources and fellow human beings. Is this not also an insight to the conditions that have given rise to the current terrorist atrocities -- and indeed to the response to them?

AT THIS ELEVENTH HOUR, WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

Do geoists have the answer? Well most of us would say that we do, but clearly, as illustrated above, for the geoist view to take hold, governments must have a geoist mandate: with the vested interest that prevails in western society, that is dependent upon the economic world in which geoist principles are not implemented, is there ever likely to be such a thing in the foreseeable future without a fundamental change of mind? Let's face it, although there are notable exceptions and a few important current 'straws in the wind', the geoist viewpoint does not seem to be one that western society is ready to embrace. Somehow a way of changing this cultural perspective must be found -- for instance could enshrining geoist principles in a new charter of human rights be the answer?

Human rights is an idea that the world has accept over recent years which has an emotional appeal across national boundaries, and James A Swann in his book Human Rights and the Ecologic Imperative argues for a redefinition of basic human rights which would incorporate the fundamental economic dimension of 'use-rights' to the vital access to the resources of the natural world -- a totally geoist concept:

"All over the world men and women are awakening to demand their rights, to demand a place under the sun and an end to tyranny. They are relying, however, on existing archaic dogmas and slogans of these rights, the battle may be lost and the contestants disillusioned.

"It ought to be clearly understood that there is no way to disentangle human rights from economic rights that there can never be a true understanding of rights which fails to take note of each of us an organic being, -- child, adolescent, adult, elder; and that the one thing indeed which allows us our experiments in government is our inalienable right and responsibility to conduct our own affairs and enhance our own rights. Rights must also be linked to specie survival which, in turn, must be linked to our ability to understand both biological and ecological man/woman and to act in concert to protect them ... what is called for is nothing less that a redefinition of basic human rights, a general theory if you will, keyed to the concept of the "total man/woman" in a finite world … all productive activity, as here-to-for noted, should be conceived in terms of services requiring the 'use' of ' but not 'ownership of some segments of our inherited man-modified environment. …"[4]

Whether or not the idea of a redefinition of human rights is the way forward, this article suggests that humanity is at the eleventh hour to change its ways, if disaster is to be avoided and all those holding to the geoist viewpoint should be motivate by this thought, be open to new ways and new opportunities of presenting the geoist world-view, thus to bring about the necessary change of humanity's mind-set that has created, yet cannot resolve, the current critical global crisis.

Bibliography

1. Kenneth E. Boulding, The Earth as a Spaceship, speech to Washington State University Committee on Space Sciences. 1965.

2. Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001

3. David E Korten, When Corporations Rule the World. Kumarian Press Inc. and Berrett-Koehler Publishers 1995.

4. James A Swann, Human Rights and the Ecological Imperative. Printed in the USA 1999. ISBN 0-9700864-0-7