Critical Times

Ockham’s Razor: 27
November 2005 – What is our biggest
problem?

Robyn Williams: Well last week on this program we had
Jennifer Marohasy taking on what she called the celebrity
scientists, and their gloomy forecasts. She said that most
indicators of natural wellbeing show improvement, not decline. By
the way, she also accused Jared Diamond of asking Australia to give
up agriculture, something Professor Diamond tells me he did not
say, although his book ‘Collapse’ certainly gives that impression.

So this week, a contrasting point of view. Ted Trainer from the
University of New South Wales, with his assessment of our
prospects, as we come to the end of the year 2005.

Ted Trainer.

Ted Trainer: The fundamental cause of the big global
problems threatening us now is simply over-consumption. The rate at
which we in rich countries are using up resources is grossly
unsustainable. It’s far beyond levels that can
be kept up for long or that could be spread to all people. What is
not clearly understood is the magnitude of the over-shoot. The
reductions required are so big that they cannot be achieved within
a consumer-capitalist society. Huge and extremely radical change in
systems and culture are necessary.

Several lines of argument lead to this conclusion, but
I’ll note only three.

Some resources are already alarmingly scarce, including water,
land, fish and especially petroleum. Some geologists think oil
supply will peak within a decade. If all the
world’s people today were to consume resources
at the per capita rate we in rich countries do, annual supply would
have to be more than six times as great as at present, and if the 9
billion we will have on earth soon were to do so, it would have to
be about ten times as great.

Secondly, the per capita area of productive land needed to supply
one Australian with food, water, settlements and energy is about
seven to eight hectares. The US figure is close to 12 hectares. But
the average per capita area of productive land available on the
planet is only about 1.3 hectares. When the
world’s population reaches 9 billion the per
capita area of productive land available will be only .9 hectares.
In other words, in a world where resources were shared equally we
would have to get by on about 13% of the average Australian
footprint.

Third, the greenhouse problem is the most powerful and alarming
illustration of the overshoot. The atmospheric scientists are
telling us that if we are to stop the carbon dioxide content of the
atmosphere from reaching twice the pre-industrial level, we have to
cut global carbon emissions and thus fossil fuel use by 60% in the
short term, and more later. If we did that and shared the remaining
energy among 9 billion people, each Australian would have to get by
on about 5% of the fossil fuel now used. And that target, a
doubling of atmospheric CO2, is much too high.
We’re now 30% above pre-industrial levels and
already seeing disturbing climatic effects.

These lines of argument show we must face up to enormous reductions
in rich world resource use if we’re to solve the
big global problems. This is not possible in a society
that’s committed to the affluent lifestyles that
require high energy and resource use. We in countries like
Australia should reduce per capita resource use and environmental
impact, to something like one-tenth of their present levels.

Now all that only makes clear that the present situation is grossly
unsustainable. But that’s not the most important
problem. This society is fundamentally and fiercely obsessed with
raising levels of production and consumption all the time, as fast
as possible, and without any limit. In other words, our supreme,
sacred, never-questioned goal is economic growth.
We’re already at impossible levels of production
and consumption but our top priority is to go on increasing them
all the time.

If we in Australia average 3% growth to 2070 and by then the 9
billion people expected on earth have all risen to the living
standards we would have then, total world economic output each year
would be 60 times as great as it is now. Yet the present level is
grossly unsustainable.

Many respond here by saying that Yes, the problems are very serious
but No, we don’t have to think about moving from
consumer-capitalist society because more effort and better
technology could solve the problems. It only takes a few seconds to
show that this tech-fix position is wrong. The overshoot is far too
big.

Technical-fix optimists like Amory Lovins claim we could cut the
resource and ecological costs per unit of economic output to half
or one quarter. But if global output rose to 60 times what it is
now, even a Factor Four reduction by 2070 would leave global
resource and environmental costs 15 times as great as they are now,
and they are unsustainable now.

The foregoing comment has only been about sustainability and our
society is built on a second deeply flawed foundation. We have an
extremely unjust global economy. It’s a market
economy and that means scarce things go to those who can pay most
for them, that is, to the rich and not to the poor. So the rich
countries gobble up most of the world’s resource
production.

Even more important, in a market economy what’s
developed is what’s most profitable not
what’s most needed. So the development that
takes place in the Third World is development of what will maximise
the profits of corporations. Look at any Third World country and
you see a lot of development but most of it puts their resources
into producing to stock our rich world supermarkets and very little
goes into the industries that produce the basic necessities the
majority of poor people need. Conventional development is therefore
well described as a process of plunder.

Our living standards in countries like Australia could not be
anywhere near as high as they are if these unjust processes did not
occur and we had to get by on our fair share of the
world’s resources.

If one is to understand the nature of the problems facing us, one
must focus on these concepts of gross unsustainability and
injustice. For instance, they show that the conventional concept of
‘development’ for the Third
World is totally impossible; there are nowhere near enough
resources for all of them to rise to anything like our rich world
ways and standards. Yet that’s the
taken-for-granted goal of development.

Similarly few green people seem to recognise that the environment
problem cannot be solved without dramatic reduction in the level of
producing and consuming going on, and therefore without radical
social change to frugal living standards and a zero-growth economy.
Yet our peak environmental agencies do not focus on the absurdity
of the quest for economic growth.



And how many within the Peace movement realise that if we refuse to
dramatically cut rich world demand for resources, and everyone
strives to rise to our living standards, then there will inevitably
be increasingly fierce competition for the dwindling resources. If
we insist on remaining affluent, then we had better remain heavily
armed. We can’t expect to go on getting far more
than our fair share of the world’s resources
unless we’re prepared to use force to invade oil
fields and prop up compliant dictators.

What then is the answer? If the question is how can we run a
sustainable and just consumer-capitalist society, the point is that
there isn’t any answer. We cannot achieve a
sustainable and just society unless we face up to huge and radical
transition to what some identify as The Simpler Way, that is to a
society based on non-affluent but adequate living standards, high
levels of self-sufficiency, in small scale localised economies with
little trade and no growth, to basically co-operative and
participatory communities, to an economy that’s
not driven by market forces and profit, and most difficult of all,
a society that’s not motivated by competition,
individualism, and acquisitiveness. Many have argued that this
general vision is the only way out of the mess
we’re in.

So which of these problems is our biggest one? None of them. The
most disturbing problem of all is our failure, our refusal to even
recognise that the pursuit of affluence and growth is a terrible
mistake.

Despite our vast educational systems, information technologies and
media networks, despite having hordes of academics and experts,
there is almost no official or public recognition that the quest
for affluence and growth is the basic cause of our alarming global
predicament. There is no recognition of any need to move to The
Simpler Way. These themes are almost never mentioned in the media,
educational curricula, or government pronouncements.

We are dealing here with a fascinating and powerful ideological
phenomenon, a failure, indeed a refusal, to even think about the
possibility that we are sitting on the railway tracks and there is
a train fast approaching. It would be difficult to imagine a more
profound case of denial and delusion. Some of the forces at work
are understandable, such as the fact that profit driven media are
not going to raise such issues but will work hard to seduce people
into preoccupation with trivia, sport, celebrities and mindless
consuming. But how do you explain why so very few academics and
intellectuals concern themselves with these themes while many of
them work at providing the economy with the technocrats, the
managers, and the mentality that it needs.

Obviously the corporate class is most culpable. Their very
existence depends on maintaining the conviction that we need not
even think about reducing consumption. The economists are high on
the list too, teaching and practising an ideology, which casts the
consumer capitalist way as the only conceivable way. But why do the
educators so diligently teach that worldview. Why do the curriculum
makers, and the ABC program makers, and journalists and the
intellectual ranks so studiously avoid any reference to limits or
the possibility that affluence and growth are suicidal goals or the
possibility that survival requires urgent transition to some kind
of Simpler Way? How can it be that almost all of our most
intelligent and educated people devote themselves to pursuits which
never challenge over-consumption and have nothing to do with the
sustainability crisis now threatening the survival of all of
us.

Toynbee analysed the fate of civilisations in terms of their
capacity to respond to challenges. What then are our prospects,
given that we cannot even recognise that we are committed to
fatally mistaken goals.

If the thing threatening our survival was a comet headed for earth,
or a global flu epidemic, or another Hitler, there would instantly
be focused attention and energetic and massive effort to deal with
it. But what’s threatening us is the very thing
that is cherished in consumer society above all else, greater
material wealth. We suffer from the blinding curse of affluence.
The situation was summed up elegantly by that insightful analyst,
George W. Bush, when he said recently ‘The
American way of life is not negotiable’.

The greatest tragedy is that we could quickly and easily move to
sustainable and just ways, if we wanted to. Essentially that would
involve people in suburbs and towns getting together to organise
local economies with small farms and firms using local resources
and labour, to produce to meet local needs. There would be many
voluntary working bees and committees and town meetings. Some
things would be free, such as fruit from trees planted on the
commons. For the detail see The Simpler Way website.

This could be a far more satisfying way of life. Consider being
able to live well on two days work for money a week, without any
threat of unemployment, or insecurity in old age, in a supportive
community. These are the kinds of conditions that thousands of
people enjoy in eco-villages around the world. Many of these
communities are trying to demonstrate the alternative ways to which
the mainstream can move.

I believe we are now entering a time of rapidly intensifying
problems which will impact heavily on the complacency within the
rich countries. The coming peak of petroleum supply might
concentrate minds wonderfully, but I think the probability of us
achieving the transition is very low.

Your chances in the next few decades will depend very much on
whether your region manages to build local economies, and whether
the people living there are willing to shift to frugal,
co-operative and self-sufficient ways.

Robyn Williams: And those self-sufficient ways are on that
Simpler Way website, which you can look up by going to
abc.net.au/rn and following the prompts to
Ockham’s Razor.



Ted Trainer is from the school of Social Work at the University of
New South Wales and by contrast, Bob Carr, former Premier of New
South Wales, on his return from China a couple of weeks ago,
insisted that the only way that that great nation can handle its
environmental future is via the creation of wealth through the
market economy.

We shall see.

I’m Robyn Williams.

Guests on this program:

Ted Trainer

School of Social Work

University of New South Wales

Sydney

Further information:

The Simpler Way

Presenter: Robyn Williams

Producer: Brigitte Seega