Preface I was motivated to write this book by a profound sense of frustration at the global community’s continuing inability to slow the pace at which human actions are eroding the viability of the ecosystems on which all human welfare depends. In the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970’s, I had been intensely involved in the international development effort and the beginnings in Canada of the debate over growth and the environment. When I re-entered the world of international discussion surrounding these issues in the early 1990’s, I was overwhelmed with a sense of déja vue. This was not a reaction to the tedious processes of debate that are a necessary part of international diplomacy in our complex world of economically linked nation states and cultures. Nor was it a reflection of the ennui I felt when again I found myself having to wade through the mounds of unwieldy documents laboriously assembled by expert wordsmiths among the legions of professional, international meeting attendees that haunt United Nations venues. Rather, it was a gut reaction to the fact that little real progress had been made in combating the core issue of ecological decline. The discussion still focused on the same “population, growth, resources and environment” paradigm that had triggered earlier environmental protection efforts; however, the challenges had broadened and grown more severe. Major new environmental issues had been added to the agenda - notably, climate change, the erosion of the ozone layer, the consequences of rapid urbanization, growing stress on ocean and forest resources and the accelerating pace of biodiversity loss. The context of the debate over ecological decline was also more complex, with new social and political issues competing for attention. In little over a decade, another billion people had been added to the global population. The end of the Cold War and rapid technological advance had dramatically accelerated the processes of global economic integration, and attention was again focussed on the widening gulf between the world’s leading economies and those still mired in poverty. As a result, discussions of the old paradigm were taking place under the new, integrating umbrella and language of the concept of sustainable development - the concept that formed the basis for Agenda 21, the action plan coming out of the Rio Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. Yet all the while, perhaps hidden to some extent by other dramatic changes taking place and by the clamour of competing agendas, human demands were continuing to erode global ecological systems faster than solutions were being found and implemented. This situation continues today. The outer edges of the environmental envelopes that sustain human populations are beginning to collapse as human societies push more and more relentlessly to exploit essential sources of ecological goods and services. And this process continues even after more than a decade of remarkable dialogue over how to achieve sustainable development - a dialogue that culminated, as this book was being completed, in the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg between 26 August and 4 September 2002. The WSSD’s agenda was itself a bit of a mishmash of issues. As the solution to poverty and environmental degradation, it baldly promoted growth as well as mechanisms for integrating all nations into the global economy. The 2002 summit also addressed a broad range of social policy issues and made specific (albeit confusing) calls for greater commitment to the accelerated development of lagging African nations; in addition, it offered some tepid proposals for tinkering with the international institutional arrangements for promoting sustainable development. As a whole, the WSSD added to an already serious imbalance in the international “sustainable development” agenda between the push for global economic growth and the enormous challenge of halting ecological decline. Although environmental issues received heavy media coverage, it was continued growth - growth that was already rumbling along quite nicely - that got another boost. The portions of the WSSD agenda dealing specifically with ecological sustainability were pretty much defined by the WEHAB papers - the five framework documents prepared by the UN regarding the big issues: Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and Biodiversity.1 The grounds for pessimism about the pace of progress in these critical areas is that most of the summit’s “achievements” were rehashed recommendations from earlier international meetings. For example, in the case of the recommendations regarding the global water crisis, there is little in the summit’s final Report that was not called for in the report of a water conference held in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1977 - a conference that led, through several other international meetings, to the recommendations coming out of the Rio Conference and, more recently, the global water conference held in the Hague in 2000. Indeed, the WEHAB framework paper on water and sanitation issues lists fifty-three “major agreements” coming out of earlier international gatherings. In a similar fashion, the framework paper for action on agriculture lists twenty-two agreements, the paper on energy lists eighteen, the paper on health and the environment twenty-three and the paper on biodiversity twenty. The papers themselves are well written and replete with expert analysis and opinion. They define the issues very well and provide comprehensive recommendations for possible actions to address these diverse challenges. The international meetings may also be necessary to help inch the global community towards a common understanding of these big issues. However, in the progression from meeting to meeting, new data are factored in, new dimensions to the specific challenges are added and the eventual “action plans” become calls to do everything. The individual papers and sets of recommendations cover off such a broad diversity of subjects that they lose coherence along with any sense that they can ever be converted into practical, on the ground initiatives. Based on past experience, there is little reason to think that the implementation of this high principled rhetoric will be adequate to forestall the impending acceleration in the demands made by human societies on already faltering ecological systems. In the end, the WSSD is likely to become merely the prelude to the next international meeting, which will have to be called because implementation targets are not being met. Clearly, the global response to ecological decline is inadequate, given the scale of the challenge and the all too short time frame for taking decisive action. At some point, we have to stop stepping back to look at the big picture in order to make it even bigger and, instead, define with clear focus the essential things we must do to make a difference in time frames that matter. The intricacies of the problems are already well documented. Taking more time to polish the words simply defers action, thus accelerating the approach of the economic and social chaos that is going to be the end product of ecological collapse. The following question should haunt all of us: Why does this situation persist? If growth is leading us towards ecological collapse - or, turning this around so that the threat to human ambition is clear, if ecological decline and social conflict over access to increasingly scarce natural capital are going to derail the growth process - and if we are all truly interconnected and must now learn to live within the sustaining limits of global eco-systems that are at risk of collapsing, then why don’t we change? I think most people in the world know intuitively how much environmental harm human activity has already done. I think we are all aware of the vast potential for the unrelenting pursuit of present patterns of growth to precipitate a succession of ecological disruptions that will challenge human ingenuity, compassion and fellowship. And I think most of us know that we are running out of time. We know all this. Deep down inside, we also know that we have to somehow reorganize our national and global societies if we are to avoid the worst social and economic consequences of ecological decline. So why don’t we? Is it because of the siren call of some delusion that economic growth will solve the problem? Do we think, with some kind of circular logic, that a continuation of the present patterns of randomly generated growth will provide us with the wealth and technological capacity to deal with an underlying problem caused by aimless growth in the first place, and that it can do this in the less than twenty-five years available to us for finding and implementing solutions? Is it that we are motivated by good intentions and perhaps so blinded by the urgent requirement to meet the needs of the impoverished half of the world’s people that we ignore the enabling role of ecological capacity? More critically, do we not understand that the world’s less fortunate cannot ever hope to replicate the present consumption patterns of leading economies? Or have we been lulled into false expectations by the mantra of sustainable development? Have we come to believe that such development is possible, that the knowledgeable people who are working hard to make it happen will be successful, and that we can thus leave it up to them to solve the problem? Perhaps our lack of action arises from the fact that we feel disenfranchised - that we feel helpless to do anything about it and so have just given up. Or are our diverse societies, with their cultural and religious precepts and social preoccupations, simply too resistant to change? In the case of the rich and powerful nations of the world, do we feel it is someone else’s problem because we can out-compete others for access to scarce resources? Do we actually believe, when faced with conditions of global ecological scarcity, that others may become embroiled in famine, deprivation, human suffering and conflict but we will be exempted? Or is it simply that in conditions of global competition for growth opportunities, individual nations are reluctant to jeopardize their competitive position by taking independent action? Is it a situation where all nations must act in concert or none will act? In my view, all of these perceptions contribute to the lack of political will to change, with the competitive dimensions of participation in the global economy weighing heavily. But there are more profound causes for the blockage that I am going to try to address in this book: we lack a clear understanding of the scale of the threat that ecological decline presents for our societies and of the short time available for taking decisive action. Furthermore, and, of paramount importance, we lack a clear sense of what we can do about it. We know how to promote economic growth and are getting very good at it. We do not know how to move our economies and the global community toward conditions of ecological sustainability or how to rebalance the international agenda to achieve this. In this book I will be explaining in detail how this can be done (basically by placing at the centre of political decision-making in all nations of the world the binding requirement to provision societies with the natural capital that makes growth and social equity possible). To set the stage, there are several terms and concepts I will be using that readers should be familiar with before proceeding. Natural Capital The term “natural capital” has been around for some time.2 It is used here as a synonym for “ecological goods and services”, “environmental services” or “the human draw on natural systems” and it embraces everything that humans rely on or extract from nature. It consists of both “in-bound flows” and “absorptive capacities”.
Some might take exception at the depiction of ecological systems as providing “services” since this implies that the natural world is somehow proactively arranged to support the operation of human societies. This, of course, is not the case. On the other hand, in the same way that an individual can draw money from a bank account, human societies can draw on natural systems in a great variety of ways to meet their needs, within limits. It is in this sense that I use the term “service”. The Provisioning of Societies I use the term “provisioning” to refer to the processes through which human societies organize to access natural capital in all its forms, including both in-bound flows and the draws made on the waste absorption services of natural systems. In this book I will argue that human societies have gone through five, overlapping “rounds” in the organization of social provisioning arrangements from early hunter-gatherer tribes to the present global economy, which relies on international business networks. I will also argue that relative wealth depends in which of the residuals of these organizational modes different societies or groups within societies now fit. Regardless, all must now make the transition to a new organizational pattern built around the technologies of the Sixth Round, the Age of Global Provisioning. The Enemy is Ecological Decline I begin the book by talking about the fact that ecological decline is the enemy of all peoples - in fact, it is the only enemy that is common to all peoples. Some may argue that this depiction has it backwards: that it is human actions which are the enemy of ecological systems, since these are the cause of ecological decline. Thus some believe that we should make “us” the enemy and that our approach to altering human behaviour respecting interactions with natural systems should be based on ethical or moral grounds and processes of cultural change and adaptation.3 In the long run, and if we had the luxury of time, this would be a defensible position. However, making “us” or human behaviour the enemy tends to convert environmentalism into a type of religion or a political movement whose goal is to protect nature. When this happens the movement must then compete, like the Green Party, with all other religions or parties for people’s allegiance. On the other hand, even if ecological decline is an enemy we have created, it is still an enemy. It is an enemy that threatens all of human ambition: it can stifle growth, preclude the reduction of poverty and constrain the human prospect. Defining ecological decline in this way and making the provisioning of human societies the goal turns the equation around. Defining ecological decline as the enemy rather than human consumption is a straightforward appeal to human self-interest. It leads to a call to organize to directly meet human needs. It is an attempt to force people to think differently about the nature of their dependence on ecological systems and how they must go about the task of reorganizing to meet their provisioning requirements. Waging “War” Against Ecological Decline The book is a call to engage all societies in waging war against global ecological decline. Admittedly, this is not a great metaphor. The war analogy immediately conjures up images of bloodshed, death and sacrifice arising from a struggle against an enemy that is consciously mobilized to destroy our society. Clearly, ecological systems are not like this. Ecological decline is not arrayed in battle against human societies. Indeed, if anything, nature is supremely indifferent to the fate of humans: nature simply exists and will continue to do so whether ecological systems decline or strengthen and regardless of whether humanity survives. Nor is it possible to conceive of a war against ecological decline in traditional terms. This is obviously not an enemy against which we are going to lob hand grenades or launch rockets. I accept that all of these perceptions have validity. However, I also believe that in its own way nature does draw lines in the sand that human societies dare not cross without incurring great suffering. We cross these lines when our actions precipitate ecological collapse and attendant human deprivation and when competition between societies for access to the same ecological goods and services escalates into open warfare. The book documents the extent to which these lines in the sand are now being drawn and the short time available to us to find ways of provisioning societies without crossing them. We have less than twenty-five years to find alternative ways of meeting our rapidly growing requirements for natural capital. In light of these considerations, it would be naive and misleading to think that anything less than mobilizing with the same intensity and commitment that we bring to fighting all-out war will produce the kind of effort required. It is equally misleading to think that protesting against growth through “active non-violence” or trying to adopt an environmental ethic as a guiding force for change will precipitate the aggressive response at the national level and the coordinated international effort required in the time available for taking decisive action. The world needs a clear strategy for dealing with ecological decline and is going to have to resort to weapons and tactics appropriate to the scale of the challenge. To change the interface with natural systems, societies must find and use new technologies that will enable them to meet provisioning needs from increasingly scarce sources of natural capital. If these technologies can be found, the ethical and cultural dimensions of the war effort will coalesce behind their use. To a large extent, technology determines patterns of culture and social organization. Thus to change our core provisioning technologies will have to adapt both culturally and socially. In the same way that consumerism and the love affair with the car emerged in response to new technologies, a global environmental ethic will appear when new technology allows us to live in harmony with nature. Given the scale of the innovation challenge involved in developing these technologies and disseminating them around the world, mobilizing global effort as if for war is the only approach that offers a workable game plan for equitably provisioning the world’s people. Provisioning vs. Sustainable Development Finally, I think you should have a clear idea right up front how an approach based on provisioning differs from the pursuit of sustainable development. Simply put, rather than striking a balance between environmental, economic and social concerns - the three stools of sustainable development - securing access to the ecological goods and services on which social peace and economic progress depend must be made the overarching priority.
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