For those who may believe in capitalism as a sort of vessel through which freedom is exercised, the notion that there may be a natural constraint to continued growth represents a particular challenge to that belief. That capitalism must grow in order to continue as a functioning system seems almost a moot point, but it may be worthwhile to revisit this feature of a system that has thrived in the western countries for the better part of two centuries. It is quite clear as we survey these past two centuries that capitalism has coincided with great advances in all aspects of society, if not been a direct agent in these advances. It has fed the idea of progress, the actuality of progress, and finally, the myth of progress as a cultural foundation, so that now it is simply axiomatic that the future will be bigger, better, and faster in ways we can only now imagine. Capitalism is indeed a profoundly powerful tool.
The success of capitalism has certainly given people a sense that the world is our oyster. And the oyster seems limitless in it's dimensions. The assumption is that whenever we run out of something, the signal to the market will dictate that more will be discovered somewhere else in the world. For the most part this has been the case. We have always found new sources of trees, metals, land, and what have you up to the present. But what if the assumption of limitless resources is not correct? What if we can't find new cheap replacements for what we have relied on to supply our needs? This is where the assumption of capitalism runs into the understanding science has of the natural world.
When pressed, most people I believe would accept intuitively the fact that the world is a finite space. Still, the space we inhabit seems vast as we experience it. As tiny individuals living for a brief time on the surface of a planet, it is easy to believe that humans couldn't hope to exhaust the natural wealth we find here. But the habitable Earth is really just a very narrow range on the surface that might be best illustrated as the mossy cover of a large boulder. But even this illustration doesn't tell the whole story. If the moss is the productive part of the land area, then it would cover perhaps ten percent of the surface of the boulder. You might wonder about the oceans. Where are the oceans? You're forgetting about those. Actually, in terms of food, the oceans provide less than five percent of human food calories. All the rest is derived from the working of the land. Of that, most of the worlds food comes from less than a third of the total land area. We are working with much smaller spaces than we might have thought.
What capitalism has enabled us to do, among other things, is to dramatically increase the rate we find, extract, and use the natural wealth of the Earth. As the capitalist industrial economies have grown, the amount of materials used each year has likewise grown almost without interruption. This is true of both renewable resources such as fresh water and arable soil and non-renewables such as oil and copper. In the case of renewables, we are using them faster than the rate at which they are naturally replenished. We might ask ourselves how a system which has been so good at procuring materials for human use in increasing amounts will function when those materials will begin to decline as they inevitably become scarce. Can a system which must grow function on a planet which cannot grow indefinitely? This is the most fundamental question we can ask about the nature of our economic activities.
One of the most dangerous myths of capitalism is that the market, using the price signal, will solve problems of resource depletion. What serves as a myth has manifested as a cultural delusion. The trust in the market has become something resembling a bad religion. The evidence of a depleted Earth unable to support the human race as it lives now, and in such numbers, for very much longer is mounting. Are we going to claim that the entitlement to accrue wealth without limit trumps the habitability of the planet? In the next post I will talk about overshooting the planet's capacity to support our present civilization and the role of oil in all of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment