OB 'Zine: Tender vittles for the wanderers.

ghettomanifesto:

grodyspork:

Seventy One. Throwback.

Ecological Realism

We know that for a hundred and fifty years industrial society has developed through the accelerated looting of reserves whose creation required tens of millions of years and we know that until very recently all economists, whether classical or Marxist, have rejected as irrelevant or “reactionary” all questions concerning the longer-term future – that of the planet, that of the biosphere, that of civilizations. “In the long run we shall all be dead,” said Keynes, wryly asserting that the temporal horizon of the economist should not exceed the next 10 or 20 years. “Science,” we were assured, would find new paths; engineering would discover new processes undreamed of today.

But science and technology have ended up making this central discovery: All productive activity depends on borrowing from the finite resources of the planet and on organizing a set of exchanges within a fragile system of multiple equilibriums.

The point is not to deify nature or to “go back” to it, but to take account of a simple fact: Human activity finds in the natural world its external limits. Disregarding these limits sets off a backlash whose effects we are already experiencing in specific though still widely misunderstood ways: new diseases and new forms of dis-ease, maladjusted children (but maladjusted to what?), decreasing life expectancy, decreasing physical yields and economic pay-offs and a decreasing quality of life despite increasing levels of material consumption.

The response of economists up to now has essentially consisted of dismissing as “utopian” or “irresponsible” those who have focused attention on these symptoms of a crisis in our fundamental relation to the natural world, a relation in which all economic activity is grounded. The boldest concept which modern political economy dared envisage was that of “zero growth” in physical consumption. Only one economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, has had the common sense to point out that, even at zero growth, the continued consumption of scarce resources will inevitably result in exhausting them completely. The point is not to refrain from consuming more and more, but to consume less and less – there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future generations.

This is what ecological realism is about.