Transcript ppt, 5182 K - Green Economist

Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Happiness
Reconnecting Through a Bioregional Economy
Molly Scott Cato
Professor of Strategy and Sustainability
University of Roehampton
Where are we going?
• What is driving the
proposal?
• Why a bioregional
economy:
– Work
– Consumption
– Provisioning
Ecological Crisis
85% of the world’s fish stocks either fully exploited or
over-exploited1
By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or
Water
regions with absolute water scarcity
Forest loss
Expanded by 25% between 1990 and 2005
Species loss
The current extinction rate is between 1,000 and 10,000
times higher than the natural rate
Topsoil
285m. of total 1500m ha. lost between 1985 and 2000
Nitrogen Cycle Human activities now contribute more (210m. tonnes)
to the global supply of fixed nitrogen each year than
natural processes do (140m. tonnes)
Coral reefs
75% of the world’s reefs are threatened7
Climate Change Likelihood of significant warming already occurring at
the continental scale in North America, Europe, and
Australia—IPCC
Fisheries
Parameters for the Proposal
• We need to reduce CO2 emissions by around 90% by
2050 (Zero Carbon Britain Report and Tyndale
Centre)
• There is no evidence that we can decouple economic
growth from energy and materials use in anything
like the necessary time-scale (Jackson, 2009)
• To live in the hope of a techno-fix is irresponsible
• We need to address lifestyles (given global equity)
• We need to change the structure of the economy
Objective for the Proposal
• To achieve the best possible
level of well-being for the
least possible use of
materials and energy
• To take steps through
participation and
engagement before the crisis
provokes more authoritarian
responses
• To focus the economy on
quality rather than quantity
Extract I: Karl Polanyi: My Defunct
Economist
What is a bioregion?
• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than
political) boundaries’
• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘lifeplace’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and
ecological character capable of supporting unique
human and non-human living communities. Bioregions
can be variously defined by the geography of
watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and
related identifiable landforms and by the unique
human cultures that grow from natural limits and
potentials of the region
An economic bioregion
• A bioregional economy would be embedded
within its bioregion and would acknowledge
ecological limits.
• Bioregions as natural social units determined
by ecology rather than economics
• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic
resources such as water, food, products and
services.
• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity
Problems with Bioregionalism
• Balkanisation: The Power
of the Soil
• Parochialism: Drudgery
and Slippers
• Stagnation or ‘Dynamic
Equilibrium’
• The parable of the false
teeth
Extract II: Defining the Bioregion
Work as Craft
• Capitalist work
relations are
dominated by the
division of labour
• We are divided one
from another
• We are divided from
the natural world
Auto-ethnography?
The Wealth of Nations
• Published in 1776, on the cusp
of the industrial revolution and
before its technological
advance had had the chance
to impact significantly on
social and economic
structures.
• David Ricardo’s Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation
(1817) set the parameters for
the world of laissez-faire
capitalism and export-led
growth that we inhabit today.
The Famous Pin Factory
• Archetype for the division of labour that was
used to minutely subdivide tasks within
workplaces to achieve efficiency
• Increased profits but no consideration of
social and ecological ‘externalities’
Toil and Trouble?
• Fourier was critical of Smith’s
depiction of work as a
‘unversal bad’, a myth that
undercut attempts to
improve the quality of work.
• Factory work crushed the
God-given passion ‘the
Butterly’
• Workers should enjoy good rewards, variety and
autonomy and were properly rewarded; work could be
‘a servant of the passions and thus a route to selfexpression and self-realisation’
Loss of Identity
• ‘to give man a chance to
utilise and develop his
faculties; to enable him to
overcome his egocentredness by joining with
other people in a common
task; and to bring forth the
goods and services needed
for a becoming existence.’
• E. F. Schumacher
Adam Smith or Adam Bede?
• The novel explores the frustrations
and satisfactions of productive and
spiritual life through the experiences
of its central character
• The eponymous hero of her novel is
a journeyman carpenter in rural
England some two centuries ago.
• A more rounded and humanist view
of the nature of work, and one quite
at odds with the economistic
conception of Smith and Ricardo.
Consumption for Satisfaction
• Confusion of needs,
satisfiers and goods:
Max-Neef
• The problem of
‘cathexis’, as exploited
by Steve Jobs
• The need to stimulate
desires rather than
satisfy them
‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’
Wordsworth
• ‘As a nation we are already so rich that consumers
are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy
a very large share – perhaps as much as 40 per cent –
of what is produce, and the pressure will get
progressively less in the years ahead. But if
consumers exercise their option not to buy a large
share of what is produced, a great depression is not
far behind.’
• A McGraw-Hill executive writing in Advertising Age in
1955
• ‘They wander through the shopping-mall winding passages,
guided by a semi-conscious hope of finding an identity badge or
token that will bring their selves up to date – and also by a semiconscious apprehension that they might not notice the crucial
point at which what were badges of pride become transformed
into badges of shame. . . If identity jigsaw-puzzles are available
solely in the commodity form, and cannot be found outside
shopping malls, the future of the market is assured.’
• ‘In contrast, the mass-produced artifacts of civilization,
from milk cartons to washing machines to computers,
draw our senses into a dance that endless reiterates
itself without variation. To the sensing body these
artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and even
alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the
specific “functions” for which they were built. Once our
bodies masters these functions, the machine-made
objects commonly teach our sense nothing further; they
are unable to surprise us, and so we must continually
acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest
model of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves.
• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Production for Provisioning
• Enclosure deprived the
population of the means
of subsistence.
• Loss of connection with
the land
• Links to our colonial
history: extracting
resources from the land
of others
Extract III: The Provisioning Potential of
Woodlands
Life is relational not rational
• ‘Our ideas about our place in the world
pervade all our thought, along with the
imagery that expresses them, constantly
determining what questions we ask and what
answers can seem possible.’ Mary Midgley
• Rationalist, capitalist models of economic life
have lead to the ‘disenchantment of the
world’
Conclusions
• We need to take action urgently to address
the ecological crisis
• The bioregional proposal offers the possibility
of greater accountability: protect your own
backyard
• A globally local proposal
• Diverse proposals are welcome, so long as
they meet the parameters
Find out more
www.greeneconomist.org
gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
www.greenhousethinktank.org
Green Economics (Earthscan,
2009)
Environment and Economy
(Routledge, 2011)
The Bioregional Economy
(Earthscan, 2012)