D6

David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

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Have you noticed that we describe the market and economy as if they were living entities? The market is showing stress. The economy is healthy. It's on life support.

Sometimes, we act as if the economy is larger than life. Once people trembled in fear of dragons, demons, gods, and monsters, sacrificing anything to appease them. We know now that those fears were superstitious imaginings, but we have replaced them with a new behemoth: the economy.

Even stranger, economists believe the behemoth can grow forever. Indeed, the measure of how well a government or corporation is doing is its record of economic growth. But our home -- the zone of air, water, and land where all life exists -- is finite and fixed. It can't grow. And nothing within such a world can grow indefinitely.

In focusing on constant growth, we fail to ask the important questions. What is an economy for? Am I happier? How much is enough?

A timely new book by York University environmental economist Peter Victor, Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster, addresses the absurdity of an economic system based on endless growth. He also shows that the concept of growth as an indispensable feature of economics is a recent phenomenon.

The economy is not a force of nature, some kind of immutable, infallible entity. We created it. When cracks appear, it makes no sense to simply shovel on more money to keep it going. Because it's a human invention, an economy is something we should be able to fix -- but if we can't, we should replace it with something better. The current economic crisis provides an opportunity to re-examine our priorities. For decades, scientists and environmentalists have been alarmed at global environmental degradation. Today, the oceans are depleted of fish while "dead zones" and acidification from dissolving carbon dioxide are having untold effects. We have altered our atmosphere with our emissions, causing the planet to heat up, and have cleared land of forests, along with hundreds of thousands of species. Using air, water, and soil as dumps, we have poisoned ourselves.

For the first time in four billion years of life on Earth, one species has become so powerful and plentiful that it is altering the physical, chemical, and biological features of the planet on a geological scale. We have to ask, "What is the collective impact of everyone in the world?" We've never had to do that before, and it's difficult. Even when we do contemplate our global effects, we have no mechanism to respond as one.

Driving much of this destructive activity is the economy. Years ago, a forest-company CEO yelled at me, "Listen, Suzuki: Are tree huggers like you willing to pay to protect those trees? Because if you're not, they don't have any value until someone cuts them down!" I was dumbstruck with the realization that in our economic system, he was correct.

As long as that forest is intact, the plants photosynthesize and remove carbon dioxide from the air while putting oxygen back -- not a bad service for animals that depend on clean air. But economists dismiss this as an "externality." Photosynthesis is not relevant to the economic system they've created!

All the many things an intact ecosystem does to keep the planet vibrant and healthy for animals like us are simply ignored in our economy. They're "externalities."

No wonder futurist Hazel Henderson describes conventional economics as "a form of brain damage."

Nature's services keep the planet habitable for animals like us and must become an integral component of a new economic structure. We must get off this suicidal focus on endless, mindless growth.

* David Suzuki is a Canadian scientist and environmentalist. Dr. Faisal Moola is the Director of Science at the David Suzuki Foundation. Their column appears Mondays in the Times & Transcript. Take the Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org