Kirschenmann: How long will we continue to fiddle while Rome burns?

By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

... our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound – like climate change and peak oil – that trying to keep expanding the economy may not just be impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. — Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

In 1975, the distinguished National Academy of Sciences’ Panel on Climatic Variation reminded us that “the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the past century.” The panel further suggested that “our vulnerability to climatic change is seen to be all the more serious when we recognize that our present climate is in fact highly abnormal, and that we may already be producing climatic changes as a result of our own activities.”

For more than 30 years scientists, in other words, have known that the increased food production of the previous 60 years, which had “fed the world” and “saved the lives of millions of people,” was not only the result of new “green revolution” technologies but also sprang from unprecedented favorable global climate conditions of the past century. In addition, scientists have known for this same period of time that we are engaged in human activities (many related to green revolution technologies) which threaten to further destabilize our climate in the future. And the same panel of prominent scientists warned us that “this dependence of the nation’s welfare” on unusual climate stability “should serve as a warning signal that we simply cannot afford to be unprepared for either a natural or manmade climatic catastrophe.”

If that is not sobering enough, internationally renowned climatologist Tim Flannery, who has studied the history of climate in North America (see The Eternal Frontier), says that the continent will be particularly vulnerable to climate change. Due to our unique place on the planet, when the earth cools by 4 or 5 degrees Celsius, America’s heartland tends to chill by around 10 degrees Celsius.

Given these warnings, one would think we might take the lead in mitigating climate change and preparing for our uncertain future. Sadly, that has not been the case.

I suspect that one of the reasons we fail to take the overwhelming evidence in climate science seriously is that we continue to subscribe to an economic paradigm that makes us reluctant to take precautionary action. Our prevailing economic mythology prompts us to believe that growth forever is the only avenue to economic health and well being. But as economist Joseph Schumpeter has pointed out, such paradigms are based on a “preanalytic vision” that is an intellectual construct, not an eternal truth. Therefore we can – and often need to – change it!

Economist Herman Daly has argued for many years that we desperately need to alter our preanalytic vision. He points out that our human economy is not a bubble floating in space but a “subsystem of the global ecosystem” and our global ecosystem is limited. Consequently, continued growth is untenable.

Daly argues that we must shift now to a new “preanalytic vision” based on “ecological economics” that would always determine “when the benefits of continued growth in the economic subsystem are outweighed by the increasing opportunity costs of encroaching on the sustaining ecosystem.” In other words, when growth begins to undermine the health of the very system that makes economic growth possible, then we need to establish commercial rules that “keep the economy within its ‘optimal’ size range.”

The time for academic debate on these matters is now running out. We must act. Besides, as Bill McKibben points out, it is now in our own self interest to act.

We must reduce our ecological footprint if we are to preserve the “health of the land.” As Leopold observed, “health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.” Without that capacity there can be no economic growth, let alone sustainable agriculture. And we are seriously undermining that capacity.

While we face enormous challenges in redesigning our economies, including agriculture, there are things we can all do now. The April 9 issue of Time magazine listed 51 things that all of us can do to make a difference [www.time.com/time/specials/2007/environment]. National Public Radio has featured a series of programs with suggestions we can all adopt [www.npr.org]. The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment has developed a long list of steps that can be initiated on college and university campuses [www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org]. As of this writing, 239 presidents have accepted the challenge.

If self interest is not sufficiently compelling, perhaps the fact that the future of our children – as well as the future of the children of all of earth’s species – now is also at stake, can motivate us to make the necessary changes. Kathleen Moore, chair of the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University, has framed all of this as a poignant question: “What will our grandchildren say?” She then imagines a letter from her grandchild, written to her from the future, which says in part:

How could you not have known? What more evidence did you need that your lives, your comfortable lives, would do so much damage to ours? And if you knew, how could you not care? What could matter to you more than your children, and their babies? How could a parent destroy what is life-giving and astonishing in her child’s world? And if you knew, and if you cared, how could you not act? What excuses did you make? And now, what would you have us do?

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Kirschenmann: How long will we continue to fiddle while Rome burns?