I pick up a free newspaper every morning and take it to work. It takes about ten minutes to extract all that is worth extracting. Sometimes I see a picture in it that I want to scan, but not very often. It is my newspaper. At work I leave my newspaper on the table and go and do my shift. The people I work with think I am a really sad bastard when I object to them messing up my newspaper and doodling on the pictures. They cannot associate something that is free with something that is owned or cared about. It's free, get a life, don't worry about it.
AtheismPoliticsMemesMindMattersStringRandomInteractFeedbackLinksDebateHome |
That misses the point. It might have cost nothing but that does not mean it is not mine, not valued and not capable of being stolen. Rather like the planet on which we live. The environment we share is not unvalued just because we did not pay for it. It is possible to steal it. When my newspaper is defaced the fact that I did not pay for it when I got it has no bearing on whether or not I feel wronged, inconvenienced or can replace it hours later. The environment is just like that newspaper. Free, valuable, ephemeral, irreplaceable. People have a curious tendency to confuse everybody with nobody. When it is everybody's property nobody objects when somebody abuses it. Apart from the environmentalists and they don't count, they object to everything. Environmentalists all too often object to everything and have no positive suggestions to make. They object to burning coal and oil, they object to nuclear power stations, they object to burning refuse, or burying it, they object to dams in pretty valleys (that is valleys on the planet Earth, they are all apparently unique and each more beautiful than any others) they object to dams across estuaries and they object to windmills (unless they are old and broken). If you added up the total power output of the electricity generating apparatus that the environmentalists do not have problems with you would have barely enough to illuminate their argument. This planet is all we have. We cannot get another one when we have spent this one. We have not paid anything for it but that has no bearing on anything. We are still in possession of something of enormous value. We will not be held to account for our use of the planet by any god but we will have to face the judgement of posterity, if there is one. The reason we should do the right thing is because it is the right thing, we know it, and by doing it we gain the satisfaction of achieving something worth achieving. The people who are threatening our environment are not cackling evil cartoon villains or hard hearted capitalists. They are ordinary people in ordinary situations, the people you meet everyday. The people you drink with, your friends and family. It does no good to try to point to the enemy of the environment as them, scapegoats like “big oil” or even the capitalist system. We must recognize that they are us. It is very easy for young people to start demonstrations in the streets demanding that they do something to cure a problem, but nobody listens to such demonstrations, especially them. The environment is not a them issue, it is an us issue. It cannot have a them solution. There are no evil villains cackling with glee as the rainforests are grubbed up or carbon dioxide levels rise. The problem is systemic. The whole economy of the planet is too parasitic on the planet it infests. The current system is leading to headlong growth at an ever faster pace. Too few people are aware of the obvious reality that such growth cannot continue on a finite planet and no mechanism exists to magically conjure up more resources just because it would be convenient and profitable for them to be found and finding them would allow the graph of growth to continue its upward trend. The past is no guide to the future. Even if we have survived several doomsday scenarios up to the present that proves nothing. Only if some kind of mechanism could be demonstrated that matches requirements to impending catastrophe would I feel safe to assert that progress will find a way. The past is littered with catastrophes that were not averted by human ingenuity or the magic of the price mechanism. Cities, nations, empires and civilizations do sometimes collapse into barbarism. It does no good to expect somebody else to pay the price of a safer and more sustainable world, you cannot expect them to stop making obscene profits and at the same time go on expecting that your life will go on as before. The environment-population-consumption time-bomb will not go away. People have demonstrated that the price of raw materials continues to go down across time and magically they seem to be available in whatever quantities are required. Men prove this with graphs, but they cannot explain how the demand for basic raw materials affects the quantity of those materials that exist. There cannot be such a mechanism. Ultimately the time must come when the economy demands more resources than the planet has. It is a simple stark fundamental reality. At that point the price will rise, but supply cannot be increased just because there is money to be made if there is nothing to sell. The world will one day run out of fossil fuel energy, and unless we do something to address the problems it will happen in a world with more people, more needs, more demands, more weapons. Postponing handling the problem is not in the long term interests of our society, culture or species. The sooner we address the issues the smaller and less catastrophic they will be. We can't expect them to solve our problems. The longer we leave it the bigger the problems of adjusting will become. Stop deluding yourself and others that the world's problems are caused by evil people. They are not. They are not even caused by particularly greedy people. A large number of moderately greedy people is more than up to the job. Each trying to appear ever so slightly less greedy than the others while actually taking ever so slightly more than they appear to. This greed driven problem happens very subtly. When motor cars were first invented they had performance figures comparable with the horse carriages they replaced. It took a couple of generations for the idea that everybody needed a motor car and they needed one that went four times faster than a horse. Make no mistake, it was greed and envy that drove that process not need, but always the greed and envy was small, easily justified to all the selves concerned. I am not being greedy, I am just staying one small step ahead of the game. They hardly knew it was happening. The standards just rose imperceptibly. Nobody is seen to be greedy when it is everybody being greedy. Two hundred years ago a poor family would not expect to own a horse, now they feel aggrieved if they only have the one car, the two televisions, the video recorder and a cellular 'phone each. Sixty years ago children were lucky to get an orange in their stocking on Christmas morning now they want Nike shoes, a Nokia 'phone (not that one, it's a brick!) and the latest PS2 games. This greed drives our economies onward, but onward does not mean the same as forward. Do we really need quite as many toys as this? Do we really need quite such a fast and thirsty car? Aren't we missing other more important goals? There are other things that are important aren't there? The world's problems are our problems, if there are solutions they are our solutions and the sooner we start finding them the less pain for everybody. |
© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett. |
mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited |