Can we get to a sustainable economy by adapting the economy as we know it? Or does something much deeper have to happen?
That question surfaced at a recent public consultation process I was invited to, leading up to next year’s “Rio+20” UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The event highlighted the gap between two pathways to change: a measured transition based on increased investment and pursuit of green opportunity, or a transformative leap based on grappling with human nature and its potential for self-destruction. Epic? Quite.
First, the presenter from United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Amy Fraenkel, did a tidy job of offering key findings from the agency’s recent report, Towards a Green Economy (available online at unep.org/greeneconomy).
It’s good news if you harbour lingering worries that going green could be bad for business. The report concludes that “the greening of economies is … a new engine of growth … a net generator of decent jobs and … a vital strategy for the elimination of persistent poverty.” Greening the economy requires upfront investment, then leads to both higher GDP and improved environmental outcomes.
Fraenkel did note that the report was written to catch the attention of economists, using accepted frameworks of economic analysis and practice. The challenge that rose from the floor was whether such framing does us any good or dooms us to continued failure. It came from Bill Rees, the designated respondent. A professor at UBC, a specialist in population ecology and a founding member of One Earth Initiative (one of the event’s conveners), Rees is the author of the concept of ecological footprint, and a respected advocate for sustainability change.
Rees put a plain point on his message: the scale of human enterprise on the planet is simply too big. We are destabilizing the climate, fishing at a pace that will empty the oceans, destroying soil reserves and other natural resources – and no amount of growth, no matter how smart, green or “sustainable,” can save us.
“A green economy is a smaller economy,” said Rees. “I tell you right now, there will never be 11 billion people on this planet.”
Rees says any species, introduced to an unused environment, will go through a “plague phase” where it pollutes and uses up resources until the population crashes.
“Humans are doing that right now,” he said. “But this will take us down, as it has taken down other previous human cultures. So my challenge is for us to rise to our capacity as human beings.” To do this, he says, there are a few fundamentals to be recognized:
- recognize we must have a smaller economy;
- achieve more justice in the way proceeds are distributed between populations; and
- achieve population stability.
Rees believes that rather than growth, we need redistribution.
“It’s obscene for 20% of the world’s people to earn 80% of world’s income and 20% to be living on 1% of the income. It is unsustainable – and it cannot be solved by growth.” Would change be painful? Not for those who already have enough. At that level, Rees said, “There is no correlation anymore between income and indicators of population health or felt well-being. People are driven by a model that says more money will make you happy – but that is patently false.” Redistributing income would benefit those who are impoverished. For those of us who already have sufficiency, the benefit would be more time.
“Shifting out of the carbon economy doesn’t mean a damn thing if we don’t make significant change,” said Rees. “What’s the single most important thing we can do to advance the green economy? My answer is ‘know ourselves’ – we don’t understand ourselves as a species.”
Rees says human beings are inherently discounters: “We prefer the here and now; we don’t give a damn about the future, or other species. If you left fruit on the tree for someone else, you didn’t get to eat them,” he said. (This makes us the same as most other animals.) We’re also hierarchical. “We put a great deal of prestige in wealth and political power. Those who have wealth and political power will defend it to the hilt.”
Those two traits lead to our capacity for “deep denial,” said Rees. “We will deny the problems that will take us down.” Which has spawned, he pointed out, a huge industry dedicated to misinformation about our current environmental state of affairs.
There’s good news, however. Rees said we humans have four capabilities that are uniquely our own. These, if we harness them, might save us:
- we are highly intelligent, with the ability to reason logically, consider facts, and plan a course of action;
- we have the capacity for forward planning;
- we have the capacity for moral judgment, to differentiate between right and wrong; and
- we have compassion, the ability to understand the needs of others and extend care.
These capabilities could make the difference to our outcome on the planet, if we use them. But Rees argues that, by planning for a green economy using standard concepts such as growth, we’re not.
“We’re acting like the most primitive species in the planet, focused on the short term, as if there is no future to think about,” he said. “We’re missing out on being truly human.
“Here is my challenge,” said Rees. “Become intelligent. Plan sensibly using that intelligence. Exercise your capacity for moral judgment and compassion for other humans and other species. Because continuing to act like an animal in plague phase simply guarantees our demise.”
I don’t know if UNEP was listening, but I hope anyone toiling for more growth without visioning much deeper solutions takes a moment, and hears.