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THE FIGHT MUST GO ON.
Edward Goldsmith.
Reprinted from The Ecologist,
August 2000, and Fourth World Review No. 103.
“Science and technology can only
serve to mask the symptoms of our much wider problems.”
When I founded The Ecologist in
1969, I did not believe that by the year 2000 we would still be
leading the ‘advanced’ lifestyles that we in the
industrialised world lead today.
We wrote in A Blueprint For
Survival in 1972 that:
“The principal defect of the
industrial way of life, with its ethos of expansion is that it is
not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of someone
born today is inevitable – unless it continues to be sustained a
while longer by an entrenched minority at the cost of imposing
great suffering on the rest of mankind.”
Nearly 30 years later, I stand by
this statement. I thought at the time that it was in fact
optimistic, but the modern industrial system was obviously more
resilient than I thought, and the natural world better capable of
absorbing its increasingly destructive impact. Perhaps we should,
at least, be grateful for that. Or should we? I ask this question
because the longer our industrial society lasts, and the more
‘developing’ countries are brought within its orbit, the
further we will have strayed from a sane, stable, and
‘sustainable’ world – which means that when the collapse
occurs, it will be all the more traumatic.
Predictions.
Predictions are always dangerous,
of course. Nevertheless, for me, the most striking feature of the
next 30 years will be the major and increasingly disruptive
discontinuities that will make life on this planet ever more
difficult and more precarious. I have learned over the years that
the usual reaction from others when I make such a statement is
that I am not taking into account human ingenuity and the
incredible advances being made today in every known area of
science and technology. But for me, they are all irrelevant.
Science and technology can achieve impressive technological feats
such as going to the moon – but the real problems we face today
are of a very different order. They are caused by the
disintegration and breakdown of natural systems, like biological
organisms, families, communities, ecosystems and the ecosphere, or
Gaia herself – the biosphere – together with its geological
substrate and atmospheric environment. Against such problems,
science and technology are largely impotent. What they can do
above all is serve to mask the symptoms, which means prolonging
the agony – for a while at most.
The discontinuities I refer to are
likely to occur in 3 areas:
1. Economic Collapse.
Firstly, and probably most
immediately, they will come in the global economic arena. The
global economy, whatever its blinkered proponents may say, is
inherently unstable. Back in 1979 and 1980, there was a terrible
financial crisis in South America which required massive
injections of cash by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to
prevent the Western banking system, which had grossly
over-invested in South American countries, from collapsing. Then
came the near-collapse of the Mexican economy in 1994, which
required further massive IMF cash injections. By this time, the
Japanese bubble economy had been pierced, and in 1997 came the
near collapse of the Thai economy and the devaluation of its
currency, which was largely responsible for the near collapse of
most South East Asian economies. In September 1998, Wall Street
itself was on the verge of a collapse, and was only saved in
extremis by Alan Greenspan’s timely intervention. In the
meantime, the Russian economy collapsed and has never recovered,
and there have been financial crises in Brazil, Venezuela and
elsewhere. Today the Japanese economy, which appeared to recover,
is heading for yet another slump, and the American economy is
still pretty shaky, its deficit on current account running at a
rate of nearly three hundred billion dollars a year and increasing
all the time. For how long can this last? At present, the
world’s economic system is held together by the American
consumer, who not only keeps the American economy going but also
that of the ‘Third World’ by sopping up a considerable
proportion of the latter’s exports. If the American consumer,
who accounts for 75% of the US gross national product (GNP),
decides to give up his seemingly endless shopping spree – which
he must do one day, just as the Japanese consumer has already done
– there will be little left to hold the world economy together.
And it could collapse for other
reasons. At some point, foreign investors may decide that the US
cannot go on spending money it does not have, and may panic and
sell its US shares and Treasury Bonds. A combination of these and
other similar events could give rise to a massive Stock Exchange
collapse. For many people who know very much more about it than I
do, it is but a question of time before this happens – and when
it does, it will cause far more unemployment, poverty and human
misery than did the famous crash of 1929. Even without a world
economic collapse, poverty and unemployment are the 2 most serious
social problems we face today. In ‘Third World’ countries, the
bulk of the population still lives off the land, on small farms.
As these countries are ‘developed’ in the context of the
global economy, so will these small farmers be forced to grow
increasingly expensive, commodified, patented and often
genetically engineered varieties of their major crops that they
never previously had to purchase. These new varieties require
costly off-farm inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation water)
which small farmers can ill afford.
Combined with the opening up of markets for cheap, subsidised
Western agricultural produce, which has already happened under the
North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), and now, under pressure
from the World Trade Organization (WTO), is occurring in India and
elsewhere, this means that vast numbers of small farmers will be
pushed off the land. With them will go the artisans, street
vendors and all the other components of a genuine local economy
– most of them being forced to seek refuge in the nearest
conurbation, where unemployment levels are already very high. We
will then have cities of 40, 50 or even 100 million people, with
the vast majority of the inhabitants living in indescribable
poverty and squalor in sordid slums. In the meantime, efforts to
reverse these trends will be strenuously opposed by the
increasingly powerful and uncontrollable transnational
corporations that control the WTO. And at the rate at which
these are merging with each other it is but a question of time
before only a few are left in each sector of the world’s economy.
As this happens, it is also but a question of time before the
survivors find it more profitable to co-operate rather than
compete with each other. Already they are undertaking joint
ventures and forming strategic alliances. Eventually they will
join forces, at which point we shall be entering a new era of
corporate central planning that will have much in common with the
state central planning of the ex-USSR – except that it will be
on a global scale, and that it will be even less accountable to
anyone or anything but itself.
2. Runaway Science &
Technology.
The second area in which these
discontinuities will occur will be the problems caused by runaway
scientific and technological innovation. Science and technology
today have largely merged. Funding is available for scientific
research insofar as it gives rise to new products of commercial
value. For this purpose, holistic science is valueless. The
contemplation of totality does not lead to the development of
anti-biotics, pesticides, genetically modified crops, or new
hydrogen bombs. Yet the reductionist science required for these
purposes does not, in turn, enable scientists to understand the
possible effects of these innovations on society and the natural
world. We could probably get round this problem is such activities
were under the control of serious and public-spirited regulatory
bodies, but these no longer exist. Those that we still have are
now controlled by the very industries whose activities they are
supposed to regulate. This is true throughout the world and, as a
result, whole industries with a great potential for social and
environmental destruction are simply out of control. The nuclear
industry is a case in point, and we are likely to be faced with
several more Chernobyls in the next decades. The chemical industry
has pushed 70,000 or so chemicals into the environment, and the
1,000 or so new ones that it introduces every year have rarely
been studied even in the most summary manner. Hence the cancer
epidemic that now affects one man in two and one woman in three,
hence the massive reduction in the human sperm-count, hence too
the ever-worsening erosion of the ozone layer which protects us
from potentially lethal ultra-violet radiation. Another
potentially devastating initiative which, it appears, is now
fortunately being brought under control as a result of massive
public pressure, is genetic engineering – in particular its
agricultural application. In the words of Nobel Laureate David
Baltimore, “the biotech industry has grown up in an era of
almost complete permissiveness”. As for the new field of
transgenic transplantation, the implications are too horrible to
contemplate. Organs, tissues and body fluid, transplanted from one
form of life to another, will carry with them viruses and other
micro-organisms peculiar to the species from which they are
deprived, with potentially lethal effects on the host organism,
and that can trigger off an epidemic that can devastate the
species to which it belongs. It is more than likely, for example,
that the present AIDS pandemic arose when serum was extracted from
green monkeys in central Africa and used for the production of
vaccines against polio or smallpox. This hypothesis fits in with
the established fact that practically every major epidemic to have
affected the human species has been caused by micro-organisms that
previously inhabited other forms of life and with which, for
various reasons, we have entered into closer relationships.
3. Climate Change.
The most serious technology-related
disaster of all time is likely to be global climate change. Even
if we phased out emissions of all greenhouse gases tomorrow, we
would still be committed to climate change for some 150 years
because of the residence time of the gases that have already been
introduced into the atmosphere. Governments and international
agencies have done almost nothing about this. The problem is
simply too big for them, and would require action which would
force them to abandon their overriding goal of maximising economic
growth. Cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases proposed at Kyoto
(Japan) are still barely on the agenda, especially in the USA
where Congress - under pressure from the big transnational
corporations, and in particular from the oil industry – still
refuses to ratify this incredibly weak agreement. This means that
our lives will be increasingly disrupted by the growing incidence
of hurricanes, floods, droughts and sea-level rises, and in
northern Europe, a possible freeze-up (ironically caused by global
warming) as the Gulf Stream progressively weakens with the reduced
salinity of the seas caused by the rapid melting of the Arctic ice
cap. We could of course slow down this process and hope that the
climate will eventually stabilize and leave us with a world that
is still largely habitable, but if we do not take rapid and
serious action we shall be faced with possibly the greatest
catastrophe in human history, and so far – as already noted –
there is little sign of any such action being taken. Nor is it
likely to be taken, so long as the international corporates which
the WTO has freed from all obligations to society and the natural
world, are allowed to maintain their almost total control over
international agencies and national governments.
What must be done. Mobilizing
the people. That is why, if we are to survive on this planet for
very long, our first priority must be to fight these
corporations, and the only effective tool at our disposal for
doing so is to inform the public of what is really going on.
Hopefully it will react more and more strenuously, and in this
way, the necessary public pressure can be applied on governments
to come to their senses, as it has been in the last year or so
against their plans to impose genetically modified on the
world’s population. The good news is that the public is at last
beginning to wake up and that public pressure is proving
increasingly effective, as it was against Monsanto. The large
demonstrations that are beginning to occur wherever the WTO, the
World Bank, the IMF and the biotech industry now choose to convene,
are symptoms of the growing feeling by the public, that there is a
serious gulf between the interests of these monster corporations
and those of humanity and the natural world. In this respect,
Seattle last year, was a watershed, and so was Washington a few
months later. If the public becomes sufficiently informed and
continues to react as it has been doing this last year against the
sordid agenda of its political and industrial leaders, it is just
possible that we might be faced with a very much rosier future.
Edward Goldsmith, Adjunct Associate
Professor, Michigan University and Viscount Professor, Sangamon
State University, is co-founder and editor of The Ecologist
Magazine, established in 1969 and now published in English, French
and Spanish.
He is a lecturer, campaigner,
scholar, and author of 17 books The Case Against The Global
Economy (1998) which received the Best Book of the Year award for
Ecological and Transformational Politics from the American
Political Science Association, The Way (1996), The Future Of
Progress (1995), Whose Common Future? (1993), The Earth Report
(1992), The Imperiled Planet/5000 Days To Save The Planet (1990),
Gaia & Evolution (1989), Gaia (1988), The Great U-Turn (1988),
La Medecine a La Question (1981), The Stable Society (1978), A
Blueprint For Survival (1972) which sold half a million copies and
was translated into over 17 different languages and Can Britain
Survive? (1971). He received the Honorary Right Livelihood Award,
also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize in Stockholm (1991) and
was made Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1991.
Another extended article, “Gaia
& The Global Corporations: Can The Environment Survive?” on
how environmental destruction will be brought to a halt, was
published in Issues 42 and 43 of Caduceus Magazine, 38 Russell
Terrace, Leamington Spa, CV31 1HE, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1926 451 897.
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