Whirling and swirling conversations with David Haenke in the heart of the Ozarks have lead me to begin a series of posts of his seminal, and as yet, unpublished works on the leading edge of the planetary evolution towards cultures, and ecologies of regeneration.
The next 8 posts will focus on Bioregionalism and Ecological Economics
Part one:
Gaia, Economics, Money, and Wealthby David Haenke
According to scientist James Lovelock's Gaia Theory, the
earth is a single living organism, one vast self-regulating,
self-organizing, self-healing ecological body. This understand-
ing underlies the necessary reconfiguration of all human systems,
particularly economics. More than "Gaia Theory", I submit that
this is "Gaia Reality", Earth reality.
Earth reality mandates this: All human systems -- towns and
cities, transport, technologies, agriculture, manufacture,
energy, housing, production, distribution, consumption -- must be
designed to be ecologically resonant and responsible. The
best place to find the necessary design principles and patterns is
in close observation of the function of intact natural ecosys-
tems, i.e., nature's economy. The ecological designs of nature's
economy are perfected over billions of years, unmatched in intri-
cacy and efficiency by anything we have yet created. Earth's
proven ecological designs run systems which are powered entirely
by renewable energy, recycle materials at a 100% level and there-
by waste nothing, produce no debilitating levels of pollution or
toxics, self-regulate, and are phenomenally abundant. Given our
present terminal situation, is this not something to emulate?
The true source and measure of value and wealth is not money
or any kind of human currency. Rather, it is the resources and
ecological integrity of the Earth. At the same time, whatever
(derivative) value and measure of wealth that money carries is
backed solely by earth's ecological integrity, and comes fully
and directly from the earth and the resources of its ecosystems.
This is the most radical and universally ignored economic truth.
Money, and all of economics, has no function, no reality outside
of ecological reality.
Ecology and economics come from the same root word. Hope-
fully before it's too late, humanity will see that good economics
must be also good ecology: ECO-ECONOMICS. This is the "unified
field theory" and practice for economics.
After 250 years, an answer to the central question
Two hundred-fifty years ago the industrial revolution - along with
the acceleration of the enclosure of the commons and the rising
of the power of the nation state - began to tear apart the fabric
of all human societies and the natural world, a process that
continues to this day.
The result was social upheaval, forcible eviction from the
land of the peasant populations to be driven to the cities and
towns to work in wage slavery in the mills, horrific working
conditions, child labor exploitation, the swelling of foul slums
in the cities... This list is long and familiar. At the same
time, dominant new classes endowed with previously unheard of
material wealth and power were created. The combined political-
economic power of capitalism, technology, and the state became a
monster running rampant. The great question: how to control it.
Powerful new ideas and movements rose to address and combat
these forces. Chief among them was Marxism. Marx, and those who
followed him, for all their brilliant analysis, and for all the
revolutionary upheaval they caused, provided the wrong answers.
For one thing, their alternatives encompassed too many of the
evils of the systems they opposed. They embraced industrialism,
and centralization, combined with of the political-economic power
of the state. Their main quarrel was with who owned and con-
trolled these forces and institutions, and less by what principles they were
run. They did not question the basic nature of the forces
themselves. They also failed to discern the most important factor
of all, the mandates of nature, of ecology. Of course hardly anyone
prominent in the industrializing West -- capitalist or otherwise -- was
paying much attention to nature in Marx's time, except to come up with
ways to conquer and overcome the natural world.
On the other side of the great question, Adam Smith proposed
that the "invisible hand" of the market system would serve to
perfect it and bring land, labor, and capital into a functional
equilibrium. Unfortunately he was unable to identify the true
"invisible hand", just as all classical and neo-classical econo-
mists have failed to do since. Smith and his descendants predi-
cated the successful functioning of the market mechanism on an
unlimited store of goods and services from nature's cornucopic
warehouses. Again, the root of all, nature's finite economy, the
true "invisible hand" was ignored.
For two hundred-fifty years, the economists of the left, right,
and center, and all those in the positions of power who listen to
them have presided over a world on fire. They have failed to
answer the central burning question: how to regulate and control
the forces created by the interlinking of capitalism, industrial-
ism, technology, and the nation state.
In ecological economics we finally have the answer. Ecology
regulates capitalism. Indeed, it is the ultimate regulator of
all economic enterprises and systems in any world (and as
economics is the real root of politics), whether they refer to
themselves as “left,” “right,” or “center.”
One of the major reasons that socialism fails is that it is
unable to determine and allocate real costs. Market economics
and capitalism as presently functioning have been better at
determining prices at the gross monetary level, but their time of
reckoning has arrived as they fail to assess and pay true
ecological costs, which are the real costs.
When we make ecological principles, practices, and values
central to the market system, and we have the new economics of
Earth: eco-economics, the true prerequisite for sustainability.
Ecological economics gives business and the market
the tools for internal self-evaluation and self-regulation.
Based on true cost accounting, what is best for both the
social and the ecosystemic community is best for the long term
viability of any given economic enterprise. The need for
governmental and other external control is diminished. The
market system can operate as it was meant to. The primary tool
for internal self-evaluation and regulation is the ecological
audit (described later).
The economics of cancer / the cancer of economics
The Earth is sick -- suffering from accelerated entropy --
from the activities of human beings living out of ecological
balance. The primary agent of the sickness is conventional human
economics. The biological roots of ecological economics give us
potent ways to understand the forces that afflict us and our
planet. Cancer in metastasis is the best way that we can ade-
quately describe what our interest and speculative investment-
driven industrial economic systems are now doing to life on
Earth. Both cancer and our economic systems grow primarily for
the sake of growing, while they busily disorder, toxify, and
finally destroy their host body. It is startling and incredible
that virtually every nation and corporation on Earth continues to
hysterically promote unlimited and undifferentiated economic
growth at any cost in the face of its clearly cancerous conse-
quences.
Everywhere we look we can see the living fabric of life,
prairies, forests, savannas, estuaries and swamps - the healthy
tissue of the Earth's body - being replaced by trash development,
buildings, stores, parking lots, factories, the power lines,
sewer lines, and roads. These systemic extensions of the economic
cancer grow into the afflicted ecosystem, sucking nutrients
and spewing poison like the mal-formed vascular and other tissue
networks created by cancers in the human body.
When you watch a road being built you are literally watching
the Earth cancer at work, growing an extension of its deadly
vascular system, a new pathway for its metastasizing, entropy-
spewing killer cells, the automobiles.
The bare cultivated fields are, as described by Wes Jackson,
"lesions", as are the mange-like sore spots of clear-cut forests,
as seen from the air. From space or high altitude the cities
look like tumors, as often described by astronauts, and they see
the vast fires of the rainforests burning. On the highways of
the United States, 200 to 500 million animals are run over and
killed each years, dwarfing in number the tens of thousands of
humans killed. These animals are literally the diminishing
healthy cells and tissues of GAIA, as are the lung-like forests,
devastated and diminished. From the bare fields of cancer agri-
culture the eroded soil runs like blood. The affliction reaches
out to afflict the ozone. The air is poisoned. Each industrial
factory is a concentrated, potent tumor, as are the largest
cities. Each industrial accident, explosion, fire, leakage of
toxic chemicals, is part of the pandemic toxification, and the
poison-spewing death process of the cancer tumors themselves.
This will increase radically as time passes and nothing is seri-
ously done to bring our economic systems into a condition of
ecological responsibility.
The simultaneous ethnocide and ecocide of indigenous peoples
and the lands where they live is an action of the mega-cancer to
kill another crucial part of the fabric and spirit of the Earth.
Within the indigenous peoples and the land they are woven into is
the living spirit and reflective intelligence of nature, the last
people on Earth who really know how to live sustainably and can
by their example tell the rest of us.
Holistic ways to prevent and deal with cancer in the human
body can be extrapolated to economic cancer and the Earth.
Ecological economics is such a healing strategy.
The ecological dysfunctions of interestIncome from interest and all money realized from speculatively
playing stock and futures markets is ecologically and thermo-
dynamically indefensible, a major factor in the of the Earth's
disease. This kind of "income" constitutes a demand that the
Earth yield up whatever energy and resource-related goods and
services the bearer asks for when this illusory money is present-
ed for redemption. Such money is at work ransacking the planet,
fueling the unrestrained growth demanded by governments and
corporations, in order to create more illusory money and
"wealth". This shell game is directed from the stock markets,
boardrooms, and capitols of the world, where the money flows to
and from. Demand becomes insatiable, as interest/speculation
money increasingly self-creates, demanding more fruits of the
Earth, which must be further exploited to produce them. The
interest and inflation rates, the Dow Jones, the Nikke, and the
other industrial stock market averages are the fever charts of
the Earth.
Using
eco-auditing as its prime evaluative tool, ecological
economics regulates interest, and speculative stock and futures
market income, and works to phase out all aspects of economic
growth economy which are ecologically- and socially-undifferentiated.
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