The following brief article is by Donella Meadows, adjunct professor of
environmental studies at Dartmouth University. This is from her web page at
http://iisd.ca/pcd/meadows, where you can find a number of other short
articles by her. Meadows has also written books ("Beyond the Limits") and
is published in numerous journals.

 


The Laws of the Earth and the Laws of Economics

The first commandment of economics is: grow. Grow forever. Companies must
get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year.
People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more, ever more.

The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more.
Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything
born of the earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops. The planet
does not get bigger, it gets better. Its creatures learn, mature,
diversify, evolve, create amazing beauty and novelty and complexity, but
live within absolute limits.

Now, when there's an inconsistency between human economics and the laws of
planet Earth, which do you think is going to win?

Economics says: compete. Only by pitting yourself against a worthy opponent
will you perform efficiently. The reward for successful competition will be
growth. You will eat up your opponents, one by one, and as you do, you will
gain the resources to do it some more.

The Earth says: compete, yes, but keep your competition in bounds. Don't
annihilate. Take only what you need. Leave your competitor enough to live.
Wherever possible, don't compete, cooperate. Pollinate each other, create
shelter for each other, build firm structures that lift smaller species up
to the light. Pass around the nutrients, share the territory. Some kinds of
excellence rise out of competition; other kinds rise out of cooperation.

You're not in a war, you're in a community.

Which of those mandates makes a world worth living in?

Economics says: use it up fast. Don't bother with repair; the sooner
something wears out, the sooner you'll buy another. That makes the gross
national product go round. Throw things out when you get tired of them.
Throw them to a place where they become useless. Grab materials and energy
to make more. Shave the forests every 30 years. Get the oil out of the
ground and burn it now. Make jobs so people can earn money, so they can buy
more stuff and throw it out.

The Earth says what's the hurry? Take your time building soils, forests,
coral reefs, mountains. Take centuries or millennia. When any part wears
out, don't discard it, turn it into food for something else. If it takes
hundreds of years to grow a forest, millions of years to compress oil,
maybe that's the rate at which they ought to be used.

Economics discounts the future. Two dollars ten years from now is worth only
one dollar now, because you could invest that dollar at seven percent and
double it in ten years. So a resource ten years from now is worth only half
of what it's worth now. Take it now. Turn it into dollars.

The Earth says: nonsense. Those invested dollars grow in value only if
something worth buying grows too. The earth and its treasures will not
double in ten years. What will you spend your doubled dollars on, if there
is less soil, less oil, dirtier water, fewer creatures, less beauty? The
earth's rule is: give to the future. Lay up a fraction of an inch of
topsoil each year. Give your all to nurture the young.

Never take more in your generation than you give back to the next.

The economic rule is: do whatever makes sense in money terms.

The Earth says money measures nothing more than the relative power of some
humans over other humans, and that power is puny, compared with the powers
of the climate, the oceans, the uncounted multitudes of one-celled organisms
that created the atmosphere, that recycle the waste, that have lasted for
three billion years. The fact that the economy, which has lasted for maybe
200 years, puts zero value on these things means only that the economy
knows nothing about value -- or about lasting.

Economics says: worry, struggle, be dissatisfied. The permanent condition of
humankind is scarcity. The only way out of scarcity is to accumulate and
hoard, though that means, regrettably, that others will have less. Too
bad, but there is not enough to go around.

The Earth says: rejoice! You have been born into a world of self-maintaining
abundance and incredible beauty. Feel it, taste it, be amazed by it. If you
stop your struggle and lift your eyes long enough to see Earth's wonders,
to play and dance with the glories around you, you will discover what you
really need. It isn't that much. There is enough. As long as you control
your numbers, there will be enough for everyone and for as long as you can
imagine.

We don't get to choose which laws, those of the economy or those of the
Earth, will ultimately prevail. We can choose which ones we will personally
live under -- and whether to make our economic laws consistent with
planetary ones or to find out what happens if we don't.


        



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