Depleting Resources

Peter Barnes: Capitalism 3.0 — Chapter 1: Time to Upgrade (pages 3-14)

And it’s not just other species we’re endangering. As anthropologists Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright recently reminded us, past human civilizations (Sumer, Rome, the Maya, Easter Island) did on a smaller scale what our own economic system seems bent on doing planet-wide: they destroyed their resource bases and crashed. The pattern is hauntingly familiar. First, the civilization finds a formula — agriculture, irrigation, fishing, capitalism — for extracting value from ecosystems. Because the formula works so well, the civilization’s leaders become blindly attached to it. Eventually, the key resources on which the formula depends become depleted and the inflexible civilization collapses like a house of cards. ... read the whole chapter

Peter Barnes: Capitalism 3.0 — Chapter 2: A Short History of Capitalism (pages 15-32)

DESTRUCTION OF NATURE

Humans began ravaging nature long before capitalism was a gleam in Adam Smith’s eye. Surplus capitalism, however, has exponentially enlarged the scale of that ravaging.

I promised no grim numbers, but I’ll cite just one. In 2005, a United Nations–sponsored research team reported that roughly 60 percent of the ecosystems that support life on earth are being used unsustainably. Such overuse, reported the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, increases the likelihood that abrupt, nonlinear changes will seriously affect human well-being. The potential consequences include floods, droughts, heat waves, fishery collapse, dead zones along coasts, sea level rises, and new diseases.

Thoughtful people can debate whether population or technology is more responsible than capitalism for our loss of ecosystems and biodiversity. No doubt all play a role. But most of the damage isn’t done by the numerous poor; it’s done by the far fewer rich. The United States, for example, with 5 percent of the world’s people, has dumped nearly 30 percent of our species’ cumulative carbon dioxide wastes into the atmosphere. It’s our excess consumption, rather than the poor’s meager gleanings, that’s the larger problem, and surplus capitalism is the handmaiden of that excess.

Technology, of course, greatly magnifies our impact on the planet, but technology by itself is mere know-how. It’s the choice of technologies, and the scale at which they’re deployed, that affects the planet. Electricity, for example, can be generated in many ways. When corporations choose among them, however, their choice is driven not by “least harm to nature,” but by “most bang for the buck.” And, in doing their calculations, they count the cost of nature as zero. Hence we have lots of fossil-fuel burning and little use of solar, wind, and tidal energy.

The same calculus drives corporations’ approach to agriculture, logging, and many other activities. The result is at once humbling and chilling: capitalism as we know it is devouring creation. It’s living off nature’s capital and calling it growth. ... read the whole chapter

Peter Barnes: Capitalism 3.0 — Chapter 6: Trusteeship of Creation (pages 79-100)

Gifts of creation were produced only once and are irreplaceable. By contrast, products traded in markets tend to be mass-produced and highly disposable. It’s hard to imagine a deity who’d view such temporal goods as equivalent to his or her enduring handiwork. The question is whether creation’s irreplaceable gifts are different enough to merit different treatment by our economic operating system. A strong case can be made that they are.

The case is moral as well as economic. The moral argument is that we have a duty to preserve irreplaceable gifts of creation, whereas we have no comparable duty toward transient commercial goods. The economic argument is that any society that depletes its natural capital is bound to become impoverished over time. I find both lines of argument convincing.

But what’s the reality today? Here we encounter two disconcerting facts. The first is that there are very few property rights protecting nature’s gifts. With the exception of a few set-asides such as parks and wilderness areas, we subject creation’s gifts to the same rules as Wal-Mart’s merchandise. The second is that the right of corporations to profit dominates all other rights.

It’s time to treat creation’s gifts differently, to put different “tags” on them so markets will recognize them and apply different rules to them. This chapter shows how we can do that. ...

It seems to me that, if anything is divine, it should be gifts of creation. Morally, they’re gifts we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. Economically, they’re irreplaceable and invaluable capital. Protection of these shared assets should trump transient private gain. Broad benefit should trump narrow benefit. The commons should trump capital. This should be written into our economic operating system and enforced by the courts. ... read the whole chapter