CHAPTER 11
AT HOME ON A LIVING EARTH
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society.
ADAM SMITH
There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.
ELINOR OSTROM, WINNER OF THE 2009 NOBEL MEMORIAL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Adam Smith believed that our mature human nature is to be caring and responsible and to serve the greater interest of the community. Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, and the first economist of either gender to win that prize for work on cooperation, notes that people engage in cooperative problem solving every day within their local communities.
We must now bring this caring and cooperative aspect of our nature to the fore, accept responsibility for our relationship with Earth’s biosphere, and restructure the institutions of the economy accordingly.
THE COOPERATION IMPERATIVE
Scientists are in nearly universal agreement that to avoid driving Earth’s system of climate regulation into irrevocable collapse, we must achieve at least an 80 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by no later than 2050, and possibly sooner. Given the disproportionate responsibility of the United States for the existing emissions, doing our share will require a reduction closer to 90 percent. Meeting these goals will require unprecedented human cooperation and a sharing of resources at all levels of society, from the local to the global.
BIOSPHERE
The term biosphere was coined by geologist Eduard Suess in 1875 to refer to “the place on Earth’s surface where life dwells.” It is Earth’s narrow zone of life, the global ecosystem comprising all of Earth’s regional and local ecosystems.
The idea that this zone of life is properly understood as a living, self-organizing superorganism traces back to a lecture in 1789 by James Hutton, considered the father of geology. This idea was more recently popularized as the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock.1
Even if we are able to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we face the prospect of significant, possibly permanent, disruptions of food production due to climate changes, collapsing fisheries, water shortages, and the loss of topsoil. Meeting this challenge will require unprecedented cooperation.
Meanwhile, even the most optimistic estimates project a growth in the human population of at least a billion people between now and 2050. If we do not act to voluntarily and responsibly reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us through the Malthusian solutions of plague, famine, and violence.
Neither phantom-wealth money nor any technology remotely within reach is going to change this grim equation. Nor can we look to Wall Street to figure out what will. Wall Street excels at increasing aggregate human demand, does even better at increasing inequality, prefers investment in phantom wealth to investment in real wealth, and loves population growth as a source of cheap labor and potential market expansion.
If you were a fan of the original Star Trek TV series, as I was, perhaps you can hear Captain Kirk calling Scotty in engineering in the aftermath of a narrow escape from a Klingon attack. “Kirk to Scotty, give me a quick status report on life support.” “Aye, Captain. It’s looking bad.” “Scotty, shut down all nonessential systems immediately and transfer all available resources to life support.” Need I note that Wall Street plays the role of the Klingons in this dramatization?
AWAKENING FROM AN ILLUSION
We humans have been living an illusion that our world is an open frontier of endless resources free for the taking and have organized our economies accordingly. Assuming ourselves separate from nature, we have too often attacked or sought to destroy or subdue her as though she were our enemy.
We are awakening to the reality that we inhabit a wondrous but finite living planet and that our lives are inseparably interlinked with all of Earth’s species. We must learn to live by the biosphere’s rules and restructure our economic systems accordingly, which presents an epic test of our human capacity for creative innovation, collective choice, and self-organization.
As we consider the transformation ahead, we must recognize that our individual choices are constrained by collective societal choices beyond our individual control. For example, when Fran and I lived in the heart of New York City, we had no need of a car and chose not to have one, because everything we needed was within easy walking distance or was readily accessible by efficient public transportation.
FROM MAXIMIZING FLOWS TO MAXIMIZING STOCKS
In his classic essay “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” Kenneth Boulding observed that the illusion that we live on an open frontier of limitless resources has led us to manage our economy to maximize GDP, a measure of the flow of materials and services through our economy.2
On an open frontier, resources are abundant. If such abundance is equally available to all, anyone who complains that another man’s fortune comes at the expense of his own is properly dismissed as too lazy or ignorant to take advantage of readily available opportunities. Anyone who applies this same logic on a spaceship is delusional.
Earth’s frontier closed for humans sometime during the 1970s, when our consumption of Earth’s natural regenerative resources exceeded the limits of what Earth could sustain and many natural systems began to collapse. Thus, our reality has changed and so too must our ways of thinking and doing business.
Astronauts hurtling through space understand that their well-being depends on secure and adequate stocks of oxygen, fuel, food, water, and other essentials. Minimizing flows and recycling everything is essential to their long-term well-being. Because nothing can be replaced, nothing can be wasted. Consuming faster than stocks regenerate is actively suicidal.
The frontier is no more. Now we must live by Earth’s rules or die.
In most U.S. cities, and certainly most suburban or rural locations, the layout of our built spaces combines with the lack of public transportation to create a powerful incentive for households to buy and maintain at least one car. This happens to be a lack of choice that works well for the Wall Street corporations that make and sell automobiles. The story of how General Motors successfully killed the streetcar as a once widely available public transportation option is well documented.3
Contrary to capitalism’s claim that unregulated markets maximize consumer choice, Wall Street corporations go to great lengths to limit our choices to those most profitable for themselves. One of the more telling examples is Wall Street’s drive to create an unregulated, borderless economy in which goods and money move freely at the discretion of global corporations that operate beyond the reach of accountability to any government.
WHY WALL STREET GLOBALIZED THE ECONOMY
The elimination of national borders as barriers to the expansion of corporate control of world markets and resources didn’t happen as a result of some inexorable law of nature. It came about over a period of some thirty years through the relentless effort of Wall Street interests using every political tool at their disposal to remove legal barriers to their expansion.
Wall Street did not expend all this effort to improve the health of people and the biosphere. It figured out that its ability to generate profits would be best served by a system that maximized each locality’s dependence on distant resources and markets.
Create Dependence
Take the system by which we produce, process, transport, and market our food. A farmers’ market where local producers and consumers gather to engage in direct exchange offers many benefits from a community perspective. The food is fresh, the energy costs of transport are minimal, the personal exchanges enhance community ties, farmers can adapt rapidly to changing local preferences and conditions, and the local economy is cushioned from food shocks elsewhere in the world.
Wall Street has a different perspective. It observes this scene and says in effect:
What’s the profit here? We need a global food system in which producers in Chile depend on customers in New York and vice versa. Then both are dependent on us to serve as middleman. We can monopolize global markets, set prices for both producers and consumers, and force producers either to buy our seeds, fertilizers, and insecticides at whatever price we choose or to lose their market access. The greater our success in convincing local producers that they will have higher profits, and local consumers that they will have greater selection at low prices when everything is traded globally, the more they will depend on us as intermediaries, the greater will be our hold on people’s lives everywhere, and the more profit we can extract.
When the world’s agricultural land is organized on the model of industrial monocropping, both producers and consumers depend on the global agricultural conglomerates for their survival. Until a crisis strikes, few notice that the resulting increase in global food interdependence increases the real costs of food production and reduces food security for everyone. This in turn creates lucrative opportunities for Wall Street speculators who profit from volatile commodity prices as a weather disruption on one side of the world creates food shortages on the other.
If the United States decides to convert its corn crop to ethanol, the price of tortillas in Mexico shoots through the roof. One nation may decide that it is more profitable to pave over its farmland and import food from a place where labor and land are cheaper. A nation may see the folly of this choice only when the supplying country decides to do the same or faces a bad harvest and shuts off its exports in favor of feeding its own people. Corporations that control global markets then profit from the frantic bidding up of prices by countries desperate to avoid the rebellion of a hungry population.
Such a system is also folly from a biological standpoint. The resilience of economic and biological systems is a function of local diversity and self-reliance. The less diverse and self-reliant the local system, the greater is its dependence on resources and decisions over which the people affected have no influence. In the case of the economy, this works to the benefit of global corporations, not the local communities that depend on choices made by those corporations without consideration for community interests or preferences.
Furthermore, shipping massive quantities of food around the world breaches natural ecosystem barriers and introduces alien predators against which ecosystems on the receiving end have no defense. In addition, monoculture cropping is particularly vulnerable to invasive pests or a change in weather conditions.
Eliminate Local Options
A thriving Main Street economy comprising locally owned, community-oriented enterprises is essential to the creation of a sense of community and place. Wall Street, however, has political clout, which it uses shamelessly to promote public policies that favor its corporations and investors at the expense of local enterprises and ownership.
Local stores that have served their communities for generations are driven out of business by subsidized corporate box stores. Local manufacturers find themselves competing with foreign producers that pay their workers pennies an hour and freely discharge toxic pollutants into the air and water.
As local businesses close their doors, wages fall, once-thriving Main Streets that served as centers of community life are abandoned, and ugly, auto-dependent strip malls, box stores, and shopping centers dominate the countryside. The disruption of community life and the loss of natural beauty and biologically productive open space come at an enormous but largely unacknowledged cost in lost social and environmental capital and increased physical and mental stress.
We must now seize this pivotal moment in our collective history to recognize that we are in fact part of Earth’s biosphere and transform our economies accordingly.
LIFE AS TEACHER AND PARTNER
Earth’s biosphere is segmented into countless self-organizing ecosystems, each exquisitely adapted to its particular place on Earth to optimize the sustainable use of locally available resources in service to life. It involves a highly sophisticated and complex fractal structure of nested, self-reliant, progressively smaller ecosystems.4
Our task is to reorganize our human economies to function as locally self-reliant subsystems of our local ecosystems. This requires segmenting the borderless global economy into a planetary system of interlinked, self-reliant regional economies, each rooted in a community of place and organized to optimize the lives of all who live within its borders.
These economies will trade their surplus with their neighbors in return for that which they cannot reasonably produce for themselves. Most needs, however, will be met by local production using local resources in the manner of local ecosystems. As each local economy limits its population growth and eliminates wasteful and destructive resource use to bring itself into balance with its place on Earth, global GDP will shrink, overall human well-being will increase, and we humans will come into balance with Earth’s biosphere.
Organizing ourselves to partner with the biosphere properly begins with identifying the biosphere’s underlying organizing principles. These principles are a product of an extraordinary 3.5-billion-year evolutionary experience through which life has learned to optimize its potential on a varied and finite Earth. This experience has much to teach us about what we must do to prosper in balanced relationship with the whole of Earth’s web of life.
FRACTALS IN NATURE
A fractal is a geometric figure in which each part has the same statistical character as the whole, which means that similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales. Fractal structures are ubiquitous in nature. I sense that they have much to teach us about organizing human economies that will function in balanced, creative relationship to nature at all system levels, from the household to the bioregion to the global biosphere. A Web search on fractals in nature yields a wealth of photos and videos that illustrate the concept and stir the imagination.
ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES OF HEALTHY LIVING SYSTEMS
1. Self-organize into dynamic, inclusive, self-reliant communities of place.
2. Balance individual and community needs and interest.
3. Practice frugality and reciprocity.
4. Reward cooperation.
5. Optimize the sustainable capture and use of energy and matter by adapting to the specific details of the microenvironment.
6. Form and manage permeable boundaries.
7. Cultivate diversity and share knowledge.
Cooperative Self-Organization
Since our early turn to dominator systems of organization, we humans have been inclined to see life as a brutal competitive struggle for food, sex, and survival, perhaps to justify our imperial brutality to one another. Although life’s competitive elements contribute to its dynamism, competition is only a subtext to the larger story of life’s extraordinary capacity for cooperative self-organization.
The secret to life’s success is found in the trillions upon trillions of cells, organisms, and communities of organisms engaged in an exquisite dance of continuous exchange with their living neighbors. Each maintains its own identity and health while contributing to the life of the whole. Each balances its own needs with the needs of the larger community. Biologists at the cutting edge of their field now tell us that the species that prosper over the longer term are not the most brutal and competitive, but rather are those that find a niche in which they meet their own needs in ways that simultaneously serve the needs of others and contribute to the life of the whole.
In its continuous exchange, life is both frugal and reciprocal. The waste of one species is the food of another in constant and pervasive processes of recycling and reuse.
Because life thrives on diversity and depends on continuous exchange, living beings can exist only in community. An individual organism cannot survive in isolation from other organisms or in a monoculture exclusive to its own species. The greater the diversity of the bio-community and the greater the cooperation among its diverse species, the greater the community’s resilience in times of crisis, its potential for creativity in the pursuit of new possibilities, and its capacity to adapt to diverse and changing local conditions.
Self-Reliant Local Adaptation
This capacity for self-organization supports a constant process of adaptation to the intricate features of Earth’s distinctive physical microenvironments, using nature’s fractal structure of nested subsystems. Each subsystem is able to optimize the capture, sharing, use, and storage of available energy and material resources, both for itself and as its contribution to the needs of the larger system of which it is a part, all the way down to the microscopic level. Because of this fractal structure, each ecosystem level up to and including the biosphere is local everywhere within its boundaries, which is the key to the ability of all system levels to be both adaptive and resilient.
Local self-reliance in each microsystem’s food and energy capture and production maximizes security and stability both locally and globally. A disturbance in one part of the system is readily absorbed and contained locally, instead of disrupting the whole system. Local self-reliance also forces each local system to balance its consumption and reproduction with local resource availability, thus maintaining balance in the system as a whole.
Managed Boundaries
Living systems have learned to form permeable membranes at every level of organization — the cell, the organ, the multicelled organism, and the multispecies ecosystem. At each of these levels, from the individual cell to the ecosystem, the living entity must capture energy from its environment and then maintain it in an active state of continuous flows within itself and with its neighbors. The membrane is also the entity’s defense against parasitic predators that would sup on its energies while offering no compensating service in return.
If the membrane is breached, the continuously flowing embodied energy that sustains the organism’s internal structures mixes with the energy of its environment, and it dies. It also dies, however, if the membrane becomes impermeable, thus isolating the entity and cutting off its needed energy exchange with its neighbors. Managed boundaries are not only essential to life’s good health but are essential to its very existence.
We must learn to apply these principles of cooperative self-organization, self-reliant local adaptation, and managed boundaries to our own economic systems as our planetary crises force us to recognize that we must play by Earth’s rules.
A community that organizes its economy around locally rooted businesses that rely primary on local resources to meet its needs is unlikely to find its economy devastated because a large corporation decides to outsource its production and close the local factory on which the town depends. It is less likely to suffer a loss of its markets because of some sudden shift in the global terms of trade. And it faces less risk from invasive species.
We humans are awakening to the reality that we are living beings who inhabit a finite living Earth to whose ways we must now adapt by creating economies that mimic the biosphere’s fractal structure and capacity for self-reliant local adaptation through cooperative self-organization.
The transition to an economy suited to the realities of life on a living Earth poses a significant creative challenge. It also presents an epic opportunity to get our priorities right, express our human capacity for creative innovation, and actualize humanity’s long-shared dream of a world of universal peace and prosperity.