It Never Was Just A Cliff. It's A Mesa
By Ellen LaConte
15 January, 2013
Ellenlaconte.com
Bankrupting our largest economy, which isn't even accounted for on economists' or CBO spreadsheets, puts us between a rock and a hard place
So we didn't really avoid a potential financial disaster on January 1st, we only evaded it. And already the debt ceiling and automatic spending cuts issues have raised their Medusan heads. By some similar feat of fiscal prestidigitation in due course they too will seem to be lopped off. Seem. The political and economic costs of these evasions will rise and the honey-dipped sops the Congress and President throw the American people will sour as the new year progresses. But the fundamental cause of this whack-a-mole of financial crises remains: we persist in an astounding and willful economic ignorance, or, in the more felicitous phrasing of The Old Ways author [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/10/old-ways-robert-macfarlane-review ], Robert Macfarlane, “a strong disorder of perception.” To whit:
We are accustomed to thinking that the largest economy on Earth is the global capitalist industrial economy — I.e., the human monetary or fiscal economy. The amount of more-or-less-funny money floating around in the econosphere, who manages it, who's managed, who has it, who should, who needs it, who cares, is what comes immediately to mind when we hear or read the word “economy.” Consequently most pundits, pollsters and analysts focus on the effects on that money-driven economy of variables like consumer spending, tax rates, home sales, unemployment, entitlement programs, bank health, currency valuations, stock market fluctuations, GDP , deficit and debt, trade imbalances and so forth. They are sold on systems theorist George Land's description of the behavior of successful complex systems: grow or die [ http://www.amazon.com/Grow-Die-Unifying-Principle-Transformation/dp/0962660515 ].
We are also accustomed to thinking that while the American economy is part of that ostensibly largest economy, it can nonetheless operate independently within it. Though they know better, our leaders talk as if they actually could make unilateral decisions to protect our national economy from fundamental weaknesses in the global economic system and from its trespasses on us, and could also manage it primarily for the sake of their chief constituents — Americans. At least a few of us.
Both thoughts are wrong.
What we're really looking at for the foreseeable is not merely a fiscal cliff (or two), it's something more like a mesa, one of those needles of red rock in the southwestern deserts that drops precipitously away in every direction and, for the purposes of this analogy, will leave human economies little ground to stand on and the human future in question.*
Let's take the second erroneous thought first. The American economy is subsidiary to the global economy of which it is a part much in the way the heart is subsidiary to the body in which it beats. Its state of either health or dis-ease has a significant impact on the global economy, as do the status of other large economies like the EU, China and Japan . But, contrary to what we like to believe about American exceptionalism and independence, the American economy is also now abjectly dependent on the continued success — that is, the stability, growth and expansion — of the global economy.
This is because in the decades since World War II nearly every decision made by the world's economic leaders has tended to invite or drag nations into the Global Economic Order (GEO) and to shift the most important economic planning and decision-making from sovereign governments to global agencies and institutions that are not accountable to any single member nation. Agencies like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The consequence of this economic homogenization and integration is that if the GEO frails or fails, every national economy that participates in it and relies on it for resources, goods, services, jobs and income (and that's every national economy now) frails and fails. Put plain, there is no recognizable, functioning American economy without a recognizable, functioning global economy.
Because it is the first time in human history that the economies of every people on Earth have been integrated into one economy, it is the first time they can all be and in fact all are at risk of recession, depression or even collapse at the same time . Why is the GEO at risk? Why are we looking at something more like a mesa than a cliff? Not only or even primarily for the reasons most analysts offer.
The global capitalist industrial economy is at risk because, after all, it is not the largest economy on Earth. The biosphere — Life itself — is the largest converter of raw materials and natural resources into the provisions — the goods and services — we actually need. Life manages, for example,
• the production of oxygen,
• the nitrogen cycle that supports plant evolution and growth,
• the capture and storage of atmospheric CO2, methane and ammonia,
• the planet's acid/alkaline balance,
• the manufacture and maintenance, when we're not depleting them, of fertile soils,
• water purification and recycling,
• sustainable fisheries, and
• the food chain, the distribution throughout the biosphere of usable forms of solar energy.
We are about to learn, the hard way, that every kind and size of human economy is subsidiary to and ultimately depends on the continuing success of these and others of Life's global economic activities. Put plain, if we bankrupt Life's economy, we bankrupt ourselves. Conventional economists and the leaders they (mis)inform missed George Land's salient point. “Grow or die” is a mandate for systems in the second stage of their evolution, the stage in which they shift from discovering how to succeed to replicating what has succeeded in the past. In this second stage a “system enjoys tremendous growth, limited only by the environment that provides resources for that growth .”
Economists didn't read or didn't heed the second half of that sentence.
Earth's means are finite. Bankruptable. What this planet offers materially and physically to us and other living things is all that's on offer. Whether or not we choose to accept this fact and quite despite our technical prowess, there are limits to the growth, expansion and consumption of any and all species on a finite planet. Life — the whole-Earth community of other-than-human beings and the natural economies (ecosystems) they create — has learned to work with those limits, to optimize what's on offer rather than maxing out on it as we are on credit. Life has been in the black for almost four billion years. It has bounced back, though with new species and ecosystems, after achingly long asteroid, volcanic and climate-induced Great Depressions (a.k.a., Great Extinctions). It has done this by creatively and conserve-atively managing a non-monetary economy that, allowing for unavoidable events like asteroid collisions, has provided adequately and sometimes abundantly for an inconceivably wide range of life forms, including us, without exceeding Earth's means . Until now.
Under the auspices of our global monetary economy we are pushing Life's complex economic systems along with our own into the red and to the brink of another potential Great Depression or Extinction. Why? Because like a dirty window, money in all its increasingly funny forms has gotten between us and an accurate picture of the status of the resources, both nonrenewables — like minerals, metals, rare earths and fossil fuels — on which our present industrial economy depends and renewables — like the forests, wetlands, marine nurseries, soils, aquifers and other freshwater systems on which Life as we know it, our lives and the human future as well as our industrial economy depend.
We've burned through and spent down the former, which cannot be replaced. It is widely understood that while we have not come to the end of fossil fuels, we have come to the end of the cheap-easy ones. But fossil fuels are not the only buried treasure we've dug and sucked up and burned through. In Scarcity: Humanity's Final Chapter? [ http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Humanitys-Chapter-Christopher-Clugston/dp/1621412504 ], an extensive analysis of non-renewables, Chris Clugston reports that two-thirds of the raw materials our global industrial economy runs on — like aluminum, coal, iron/steel, manganese, natural gas, oil, phosphate rock, potash, rare earth minerals, uranium and zinc are already scarce worldwide relative to the quantities of them it requires to hold steady let alone grow.
There have been and will other kinds and sizes of economies. We can live without this one. However, we cannot live — literally cannot survive — without the renewables. And we are degrading, despoiling and destroying those at a rate greater than Life can restore, replace or replenish them. For example:
• Jay Griffiths reports in Orion magazine [ http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7145 ] that “Two-thirds of the species we have fished since the 1950s have collapsed. Some species are down 99 percent” and hover at the edge of extinction. Because each species is part of and plays a role in its freshwater or marine ecosystem, taking any of them or clusters of them out of the system weakens and can collapse the whole system.
• Many of the ecosystems that provide Life-support services — water purification, food production, oxygen production, carbon sequestration, etc — to all living things have been seriously weakened or strained by human population growth and economic activity. For example, if a critical mass of phytoplankton die because excess CO2 acidifies ocean water and destroys their shells and the capacity of larvae to make shells, the whole marine food chain and multiple marine ecosystems could collapse and, in addition, one of the planet's major producers of oxygen won't be around to deliver that vital Life-support service any longer.
• The World Health Organization predicts that worldwide demand for fresh water — a demand dominated by industrial and large-scale agricultural users — will exceed supply by 50 percent as soon as 2025. Every kind of human activity and human life itself is water dependent.
• Resource analyst Michael T. Klare posits that, while potential resource conflicts over fossil fuels make the news, we've hit “peak soil” as well as peak oil. In The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources [ http://us.macmillan.com/theraceforwhatsleft/MichaelKlare ], he predicts “the fiercest resource struggle in the coming decades will involve food and the land it's grown on.”
About that mesa and the rock and the hard place. The world's leaders are, with our encouragement, determined to grow the global economy and as many of its participating economies as much as possible for as long as possible. But no matter how much funny money they can print or otherwise “quantitatively ease” into availability, we can't purchase resources and services that no longer exist. That's the rock.
The hard place? If they succeed in growing that economy, even just for a few decades, they will simultaneously succeed in bankrupting the planet's largest economy: the biosphere. Life will last. Life as we know it and few if any of us will.
It's a case of grow and die. In George Land's own terms: “Nothing fails like success.”
* While I was writing this, Columbus Dispatch editorial cartoonist Nate Beeler published a cartoon in which a car carrying a donkey and an elephant totters on the edge of just such a mesa. Three signs pointing to the ground: debt ceiling, sequestration and tax rates. In my analogy, his mesa would sit atop a yet taller mesa, the fall from which would be fatal.
If anything disrupts Life's capacity to manage the natural economies humans have evolved in, then all bets are off. Die-back and extinction are the consequence of dramatic changes in the biosphere.
Life manages two active economies and oneits accounts through three tightly integrated subsidiary economic systems
Let's take up that
Ellen LaConte is a memoirist, former homesteader and editor of Farmstead and ForeFacts magazines, and publisher
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