SOME GUIDING PRINCIPLES -- WW III, PART 4
Here is our situation. We are all passengers (or crew) on a long
rickety train heading south at 40 miles per hour, not rushing
toward doom but steadily chugging southward toward general
environmental and social destruction. Many of us are alert to
the dangers and for several years we have been earnestly walking
north inside the train.
As we plod from train car to train car we stop to congratulate
ourselves on our progress. We slap each other on the back or we
hug, and we recount the many train-cars we have managed to pass
through, thanks to our stubborn persistence.
But if we would only pause to look out the window, we could all
plainly see that we are now further south than we were when we
last stopped to congratulate ourselves on our progress. Despite
our best efforts, we have been unable to reverse the direction of
travel. We are all being carried southward against our will,
deeply violating our sense of justice.
Maybe this is happening to us because we have spent our time
engaging the conductor in conversation. This seems like the
natural thing to do. After all, it is the conductor who sets and
enforces the rules inside the train --that's what conductors do.
Furthermore, the conductor seems pleasant and intelligent, and he
also seems genuinely interested in helping us make our way north
through the train. He keeps emphasizing how well we are doing,
and, when we become discouraged, he urges us on, reminding us
that walking northward is a noble journey, and that eventually we
will get to the promised place.
Unfortunately, it has been many years since we asked ourselves
the fundamental questions: what fuels the locomotive? Who is the
engineer with his hand on the throttle? And what will it take to
make him change direction?
The time is long overdue when we must ask ourselves what it would
take to change our trajectory, to permanently alter our direction
of travel. Even if the means for actually changing direction are
not visible at the moment, we know that change is needed and has
to come.
We also know that things can change quickly, unexpectedly. But
if, today, we were offered the opportunity to set civilization on
a new path, most of us would not have a clear idea what to do.
We need to think this through. We need a vision of a workable
alternative to the present, a clear set of goals (and benchmarks)
and some principles to guide us, if we are to make the shift
whenever the opportunity presents itself.
(We know of only one organization that is gearing up to tackle
this difficult, all-encompassing task, and to do it from the
ground up starting with economic redevelopment of local
communities: Sustainable America in New York City --telephone
Elaine Gross at (212) 239-4221 or E-mail: sustamer@sanetwork.org
or www.sanetwork.org.)
Some things we know. For example:
Define Big Technical Enterprises
Small IS beautiful, but in the coming world we will always
need some large aggregations of capital. We will always need
large technical enterprises like a telephone system, energy
systems, broadcast media, and large reuse/recycling parks to meet
our needs for materials, for example. How can we be sure that
those aggregations will remain responsive to the needs of humans
and communities and not merely to wealthy elites? How can large
enterprises be DEFINED so that they cannot become tyrants in the
communities they are set up to serve? This is perhaps our most
compelling problem and one we must think through and solve. (In
the U.S., our predecessors discussed these questions continuously
from at least 1770 to at least 1920 but found no workable,
lasting solutions --the large corporations decisively defeated
those who favored democratic controls in the election of 1896 and
our democracy has simply never recovered.[1])
Now that the survival of the human species (along with many
nonhuman species) is endangered by mountainous aggregations of
private wealth and power, it is essential that our democracy be
given a new life. As we contemplate the nature of the
transnational corporation, we must ask ourselves, if we could
replace it, what would we replace it with? How would we avoid
merely creating another Monsanto or another Union Carbide thus
replacing one set of deadly forms with another?
Learn to Measure Well-being
Many of our problems are worsening --wages are declining,
inequalities of income and wealth are rising, chronic disease is
increasing, our central cities are crumbling, vast numbers of our
children are poorly cared for, poorly educated, and
undisciplined. Yet the government insists that the economy and
American life have never been better. This can only happen
because our official measures of well-being are counting the
wrong things.
Nationally, our main measure of well-being is Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) --the amount of money spent by households to
purchase goods and services, plus the amount spent by businesses
on investment, plus the amount spent by federal, state and local
governments on goods and services.
GDP counts everything as positive growth. It works like a
calculator without a minus sign. The costs of emergency room
services, prisons, toxic waste cleanups, homeless shelters,
lawsuits, and cancer treatments are all counted as positive
additions to GDP. No wonder people feel disconnected and out of
touch --the President keeps telling us the economy has never
performed better (measured by GDP), but people know from their
own experience that something is not right.
As a result of this faulty accounting system, we take remedial
measures that aren't helpful --measures intended to increase GDP.
As economist Herman Daly has pointed out,[2] when we work to
maximize GDP, we are really working to maximize depletion of our
natural resources, and we are working to maximize pollution. (As
we saw in REHW #516 and #518, better measures of well-being are
available, and they indicate that the U.S. hasn't been making
progress for about 20 years.) Meanwhile, people feel the
powerful "bads" in their lives and know things aren't right.
As Herman Daly[2] and Paul Hawken[3] have pointed out, the reason
we need new indicators of well-being is that our situation has
changed drastically. Two hundred years ago, when the industrial
revolution was getting cranked up, natural resources were
abundant and humans were relatively scarce. Now the reverse
holds true --natural resources have been badly depleted and there
is no shortage of humans. Therefore, ancient policies aimed at
substituting energy and natural resources for human labor no
longer make sense. We need to count the depletion of natural
resources among the "bads" and we need to devise ways to use more
human labor (not less) to build a better world. This means --at
the very least --redefining the "productivity" of labor.
We can begin these changes at the local level, where we live.
Happily, smart people are developing "cookbooks" that can guide
us as we develop local measures of well-being. For example, the
organization called Redefining Progress in San Francisco has
published an excellent "how to" manual called THE COMMUNITY
INDICATORS HANDBOOK.[4] Such local measures can tell us where we
are, where we are going (including where we are going wrong), and
can focus our political attention and our public investments on
making real improvements.
If we don't measure where we've been and where we are, we can't
know where we are going. This seems fundamental --yet relatively
few communities today are taking such measurements. Jacksonville
(Florida), Seattle (Washington), and Pasadena (California) are
leading a new movement that has started measuring quality of life
and using the measurements to guide investment and effort.[4]
Tax Bads, Not Goods
Herman Daly[2] and Paul Hawken3 also agree that we should tax the
things we don't like --depletion, pollution, and waste --and we
should avoid taxing the things we DO like, such as investment and
labor. (We would still have to tax the highest incomes to reduce
inequalities of opportunity and power, for the purpose of
preserving democracy.)
As Paul Hawken says, the goal of the tax system should be to
close the gap between prices (which individuals pay) and costs
(which society pays). Individuals pay the price of gasoline, but
society pays the costs of hurricanes, droughts, and floods caused
by the global warming which results from gasoline-powered
automobiles. If taxes caused prices to reflect full costs, then
alternatives to gasoline-powered cars (such as light-weight
hybrid hydrogen-and-electric vehicles) could be competitive today
--good for the economy and good for the environment.
A tax on toxic dumping would discourage this antisocial practice.
Even better: a tax on toxic raw materials would induce users to
seek less-toxic alternatives, thus eliminating the possibility of
problems rather than merely reducing the likelihood of problems.
Search for Least-Damaging Alternatives
We must insist that all reasonable alternatives be examined
before decisions are made, and that the least-damaging
alternative be given greatest weight. We could certainly embed
this decision-making principle in our public institutions,
starting at the local level --and eventually we will have to
embed this guiding principle in private decision-making as well.
As biologist Mary O'Brien says, "Our society proceeds on the
assumption that toxic substances WILL be used and the only
question is how much. Under the current system, toxic chemicals
are used, discharged, incinerated, and buried without ever
requiring a finding that these activities are necessary."[6] We
need to institutionalize the search for least-damaging
alternatives and give priority to the least-damaging alternative
once it has been identified. (How do we measure least-damaging?
This goes back to measuring well-being, discussed above.)
Catalog What Works
We need an ongoing catalog of "what works." What innovations at
the local level are working? We need a place where we can all go
to find out. One effort in this direction is the magazine called
YES! A JOURNAL OF POSITIVE FUTURES7 but we also need a much more
ambitious, cumulative database of "what works" for sustainable
development.
[There are other principles that should guide us, but we will
suspend this series for a time and return to it later.]
--Peter Montague
(National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO) |
