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September 15 - October 28, 2024
If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself.’
it is widely held that everybody is born good; if one turns into a criminal or an exploiter, this is the fault of ‘the system’.
Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.
The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production.
One reason for overlooking this vital fact is that we are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves.
Let us take a closer look at this ‘natural capital’. First of all, and most obviously, there are the fossil fuels. No-one, I am sure, will deny that we are treating them as income items although they are undeniably capital items. If we treated them as capital items, we should be concerned with conservation; we should do everything in our power to try and minimise their current rate of use; we might be saying, for instance, that the money obtained from the realisation of these assets – these irreplaceable assets – must be placed into a special fund to be devoted exclusively to the evolution of
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All these questions and answers are seen to be absurd the moment we realise that we are dealing with capital and not with income: fossil fuels are not made by men; they cannot be recycled. Once they are gone they are gone for ever.
If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself.
we should use at least some of the fruits of our ever-increasing productivity to improve ‘the quality of life’ and not merely to increase the quantity of consumption.
Our scientists and technologists have learned to compound substances unknown to nature. Against many of them, nature is virtually defenceless. There are no natural agents to attack and break them down.
the changes of the last twenty-five years, both in the quantity and in the quality of man’s industrial processes, have produced an entirely new situation – a situation resulting not from our failures but from what we thought were our greatest successes.
we hardly noticed the fact that we were very rapidly using up a certain kind of irreplaceable capital asset, namely the tolerance margins which benign nature always provides.
The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income. I specified three categories of such capital: fossil fuels, the tolerance margins of nature, and the human substance.
To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.
Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: ‘Halt! We have enough’? There is none.
If the ‘rich’ populations grow at the rate of 1¼ per cent and the ‘poor’ at the rate of 2½ per cent a year, world population will grow to about 6,900 million by 2000 AD – a
Enough uranium will be found; it will be gathered together from the remotest corners of the earth, brought into the main centres of populations, and made highly radioactive. It is hard to imagine a greater biological threat, not to mention the political danger that someone might use a tiny bit of this terrible substance for purposes not altogether peaceful.
I have taken fuel merely as an example to illustrate a very simple thesis: that economic growth, which viewed from the point of view of economics, physics, chemistry and technology, has no discernible limit, must necessarily run into decisive bottlenecks when viewed from the point of view of the environmental sciences.
An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
the new problems are not the consequences of incidental failure but of technological success.
the idea of unlimited economic growth, more and more until everybody is saturated with wealth, needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and, alternatively or additionally, the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied.
If human vices such as greed or envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence.
If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.
I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.
No-one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence.
There can be ‘growth’ towards a limited objective, but there cannot be unlimited, generalised growth.
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace.
Scientific or technological ‘solutions’ which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.
Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-viole...
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Every machine that helps every individual has a place,’ he said, ‘but there should be no place for machines that concentrate power in a few hands and turn the masses into mere machine minders, if indeed they do not make them unemployed’.
Small-scale operations, no matter how numerous, are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature.
Although even small communities are sometimes guilty of causing serious erosion, generally as a result of ignorance, this is trifling in comparison with the devastations caused by gigantic groups motivated by greed, envy, and the lust for power.
Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If the foundations are unsound, how could society be sound?
what is wisdom? Where can it be found? Here we come to the crux of the matter: it can be read about in numerous publications but it can be found only inside oneself. To be able to find it, one has first to liberate oneself from such masters as greed and envy.
The stillness following liberation – even if only momentary – produces the insights of wisdom which are obtainable in no other way.
infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.
without wisdom, he is driven to build up a monster economy, which destroys the world, and to seek fantastic satisfactions, like landing a man on the moon.
It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.
An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.
Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools.
something is uneconomic when it fails to earn an adequate profit in terms of money.
It is a great error to assume, for instance, that the methodology of economics is normally applied to determine whether an activity carried on by a group within society yields a profit to society as a whole. Even nationalised industries are not considered from this more comprehensive point of view. Every one of them is given a financial target – which is, in fact, an obligation – and is expected to pursue this target without regard to any damage it might be inflicting on other parts of the economy.
This means that an activity can be economic although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment, will be uneconomic.
Economics, moreover, deals with goods in accordance with their market value and not in accordance with what they really are.
Another way of stating this is to say that economics deals with goods and services from the point of view of the market, where willing buyer meets willing seller. The buyer is essentially a bargain hunter; he is not concerned with the origin of the goods or the conditions under which they have been produced.
In a sense, the market is the institutionalisation of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.
