Feb/Mar 2003

If Only I Could Be Like My Cells
Deepak Chopra, MD

Why Spirituality is Essential to Progressive Politics
Ana Villa-Lobos

The Spiritual Art of Peacemaking
James Twyman

Finding Answers in Community Meetings
John Darling

Reclaiming Our Courage
Paul Rogat Loeb

The Rhinoceros In Our Living Room is Slip Covered
Jeannie Azzopardi

Iraq and the Economy
Dennis Kucinich

Letter to a Warrior
Elias Amidon

Democracy in Action
Letter to Members of MoveOn

Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil
America Vera-Zavala

American Revolt in Pennsylvania
Thom Hartmann

The Omega Point
Finn Honoré

We live in A World With Finite Resources
George Monbiot

Using Homeopathic Remedies
Doug Falkner, MD, M.Hom

The Healing Power of Touch
John Darling

A Somatic Contradiction
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Shamanism and Psychology Join Forces
Jeanette M. Gagan, PhD

Natural Building: A New Course of Action
Coenraad Rogmans

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

We Live In A World With Finite Resources

By George Monbiot

With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.

The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.

This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today—governments, business, the media—as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.

Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world’s resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.

The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.

Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75 billion tons of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming.

As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world’s food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.

One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that the religion of capitalism was founded upon the use of other people’s resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labor and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.

An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the “disappointing” volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing “the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000.” The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.

It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.

Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good—giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend’s wedding, even buying newspapers— turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.

George Monbiot writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper in the UK and is the author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, which reveals how big business has stolen power from the British government and seized control of hospitals, schools, and universities, of Britain’s economy and its legal systems. It is a devastating indictment of the corruption to which political leaders have succumbed. Visit www.monbiot.com.